Lately I’ve been having dreams- nightmares really – that I have to return to work as a Sales Manager. I think my failed root canal throbbing all night might be the source of these nightmares, so hopefully they will go away once I can finally see the endodontist to redo it.
None of these “back to work” dreams are pleasant. In them, I am returning to work at one of my last three jobs. One of these was managing a sales region for a huge corporation, one was for running a fast paced, high growth startup division, and the last was for a VC-funded tech company with a highly specialized product that served a very small niche market.
All of the dreams have 3 common themes:
- Attending dreaded weekly meetings.
- Going back to long work hours and losing the schedule freedom I have today.
- I am constantly running from meeting to meeting, to make flights and/or I’m impossibly late.
When I actually worked for these companies during my last 10 years of employment, there were some great rewards – a decent income, many of my coworkers and employees, some of my managers, the challenges we were able to meet, and varying degrees autonomy, respect, privilege, etc.
There were other aspects of each job that were not so rewarding – mismanagement, absurd quotas, bureaucracy, product instability, workaholic management, politics, culture, business travel, stress, etc.
I traded my time and life primarily for the money. I put up with the bad parts and tried to enjoy the good parts because I needed these jobs to take care of my family.
It’s somewhat bizarre that after a lifetime good and bad work experiences – what my subconscious hangs onto and dreads are meetings, schedules and long days.
Had I known this 30 years ago, I would have pursued a different career path that didn’t serve these up on a regular basis.
(Feel free to play the world’s saddest song for me anytime.)