| Career ยท Mindset |
| By Feras Asakrieh ยท 4 min read ยท Issue #43 |
| Read on my website |
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| Saturday morning. I called my cable company. |
| A recording told me my call was important to them. Then the music started. |
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| Seven minutes in, I thought about hanging up. Then I told myself seven minutes is nothing. I'll give it a few more. |
| At ten I was annoyed, but now I had ten minutes in it. Hanging up meant losing them. |
| Fifteen. Twenty. Twenty five. |
| Every minute made it harder to put the phone down. Not easier. Harder. Because every minute added to the pile I would be walking away from. |
| At thirty minutes I dropped the phone. |
| No answer. No fix. Thirty minutes of my Saturday gone, and I never even got to talk to a person. |
| I Was Counting The Wrong Number |
| Every time I looked at that clock, I counted what I had already spent. Seven. Ten. Twenty five. |
| Not once did I ask the only question that mattered. What is the next ten minutes going to cost me? |
| Those thirty minutes were gone either way. Gone if I stayed. Gone if I hung up. That money was already spent. The only thing I still owned was what came next, and I kept handing it over to protect something I could never get back. |
| Some of you are doing this at work right now. You just don't call it hold music. |
| Why This One Is So Hard To See |
| Time you already gave feels like money sitting in an account. It isn't. It is spent. But your brain files it as an investment, so leaving feels like losing it and staying feels like protecting it. |
| Which is why it always comes out sounding so reasonable. |
| "I've been here four years. I can't start over now." |
| "New manager just started. Let me give it two quarters." |
| "If I leave now, the four years were for nothing." |
| "I'm too senior to be the new person again." |
| "Nobody out there is going to pay me what I make here." |
| Every one of those sentences is about the past. Not one of them is about the next twelve months. |
| And here is the part nobody says out loud. Waiting does not make the decision clearer. It makes it heavier. Year four is harder to leave than year two. Year seven is harder than year four. The pile behind you keeps growing, and you keep paying to protect it. |
| Here Is How To Count It Properly |
| 1. Price the next year, not the last four. |
| Stop asking what you have put in. Ask what the next twelve months costs you if nothing changes. Be specific and write it down. "Another year at the same title." "Another year of skills I am not building." "Another year of my kids seeing me like this on Sunday nights." The four years behind you is not a number you can use for anything. The year in front of you is. |
| 2. Set a date, not a feeling. |
| "I'll see how it goes" is not a plan. It is hold music in your own voice. Pick a real date about ninety days out and write down what has to be true by then. Something like, "By December 15 I either have the scope I asked for in writing, or I start looking." Now the clock is working for you instead of running against you. |
| 3. Test the door before you decide anything. |
| This is the part that surprised me. Every single time I have been in this spot, I had options I thought I did not have. I just never checked. So check. Take three calls. Ask one recruiter what your profile pays right now. Ask one person who left your company how it actually went. You are not quitting. You are collecting the information you have been missing this whole time. |
| 4. Name the one thing that would make staying worth it. |
| Not five things. One. The scope, the title, the manager, the money. Pick it and say it out loud to the person who can actually give it to you. If the answer is no, you have your answer and you did not have to guess at it. If the answer is yes, then you stayed on purpose instead of by default, and those are two completely different lives. |
| Final Thoughts |
| That call cost me thirty minutes and gave me nothing back. Not even a person on the line. |
| The work version of that call does not run thirty minutes. It runs years. And it spends your best ones, the years when you still had the energy to start something. |
| You are not waiting for an answer. Nobody is picking up. |
| You are waiting for permission to hang up. Give it to yourself. |
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| Before You Go |
| You Are Allowed To Hang Up |
| Thirty minutes on hold cost me a Saturday morning. The work version costs people their best years. If you are somewhere around year four of the same call, the Midlife Career Reset System is how I help people decide on purpose instead of by default. |
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