The dream job

I had a dream last night.

I was presenting to a group of people at Forrester, the company where I worked for 20 years — and then left to go freelance for the last ten years.

The presentation went really well. I couldn’t tell you now what I was presenting on — dreams are like that — but I recall that they were very impressed.

“We need you back here,” they said. And they offered me a position managing their whole research group for marketers, which was about one-fourth of the whole research department.

This was a big deal and I knew I was supposed to be excited. After all, while I was working there, this would have been a major promotion putting me on the path to senior management. I did feel excited.

But I also started to feel dread.

I felt imposter syndrome, because while I advised marketers for much of my research career, I was never really comfortable calling myself a marketing expert. I had no formal training in marketing and there were lots of holes in my knowledge.

Worse yet, every time in my career when I have managed groups of people, it has not gone well. I am strongest as an individual contributor. I am a micromanager and at the same time, not capable of distancing myself from the needs of my staff enough to make rational business decisions. I’m not the guy you want in charge of a bunch of people.

In the dream, I was getting everything I was supposed to want, and I was sick about it.

I couldn’t figure out how I was going to back out of this “successful” corner I’d gotten myself into. Then I woke up and felt relief.

Is this you?

Luckily, in real life, I paid close attention to what I enjoyed most at work, rather than what people told me I should want.

I found ways to succeed as an individual contributor (and to Forrester’s credit, they recognized that this was the best way to keep me productive). I wrote a book because I wanted to write a book. And when the time came to do what I loved full-time, I ditched the whole corporate grind and did exactly that.

Many of us are told what we are supposed to want — and swallow it because it seems “normal.”

But you need to pay attention to the parts of the job that are making you happy, and find ways to get compensated for those. Those are nearly always the things you are best at, too, and in the right companies — or freelance gigs — you can find ways to get compensated for them.

If you find you’re living somebody else’s dream, you need to wake up. It’s harder to wake up than it was for me last night, but don’t let your career pass you by on somebody else’s dream track.