Generic Career and Financial Advice with No Evident Lead

It might be emotionally difficult, but you won’t starve. Park your car in the garage and cancel insurance for a few months. Carpool or take the bus until you find the next gig. Rack up some more credit card debt and cook instead of eating out. Sell all the crap that you spent hundreds or thousands on and never use. Take a full inventory of your assets, cash reserves, debts, and monthly expenses. How long could you survive with your current resources or if you sold some assets? Go through all expenses and ask yourself, If I had to eliminate this because I needed an extra kidney, how would I do it? Don’t be melodramatic when there is no need—few things are fatal, particularly for smart people. If you’ve made it this far in life, losing or dropping a job will often be little more than a few weeks of vacation (unless you want more) prior to something better. 3. Health insurance and retirement accounts disappear if I quit. Untrue. I was scared of both when I was eliminated from TrueSAN. I had visions of rotting teeth and working at Wal-Mart to survive. Upon looking at the facts and exploring options, I realized that I could have identical medical and dental coverage—the same provider and network—for $300-500 per month. To transfer my 401(k) to another company (I chose Fidelity Investments) was even easier: It took less than 30 minutes via phone and cost nothing. Covering both of these bases takes less time than getting a customer service rep on the phone to fix your electric bill. 4. It will ruin my resume. I love creative nonfiction. It is not at all difficult to sweep gaps under the rug and make uncommon items the very things that get job interviews. How? Do something interesting and make them jealous. If you quit and then sit on your ass, I wouldn’t hire you either. On the other hand, if you have a one-to-two-year world circumnavigation on your resume or training with professional soccer teams in Europe to your credit, two interesting things happen upon returning to the working world. First, you will get more interviews because you will stand out. Second, interviewers bored in their own jobs will spend the entire meeting asking how you did it! If there is any question of why you took a break or left your previous job, there is one answer that cannot be countered: “I had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do [exotic and envy-producing experience] and couldn’t turn it down. I figured that, with [20-40] years of work to go, what’s the rush?” The Cheesecake Factor Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. —THOMAS J. WATSON, founder of IBM SUMMER 1999 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013951