The first 17 years after college, I followed a traditional career path for a person graduating with a Finance major. I worked for large corporations, came to work early, stayed out late several times a month entertaining clients, dropped everything for last minute out-of-town work trips, picked up an MBA along the way, made enough to live comfortably doing fun things in big cities, and then I hit a wall. On the eve of turning 40, I was exactly where I should have been on my master career plan. I was coloring inside the lines. I took every promotion that was offered without regard to where I’d have to move (e.g., opening a map of New Jersey to\u00a0search for my new “home town”), what the job entailed, or distance from family and friends. And, I was miserable.<\/p>\n
Thankfully, with the support of my\u00a0amazing\u00a0husband, I was at a point where I could step back, recalibrate, and switch directions. Aside from the fact that I still live in a big city, my life today reflects nothing of what I described above. Maybe because of that old life, I resist nearly every offer to color inside the lines. While not following a structured path is liberating, there\u00a0are trade-offs that mostly have to do with money and a nice job title.\u00a0Also, it makes my answer to “What do you do?” much longer than the person expected for a bit of small talk. However, I wouldn’t switch places with my old self for all the money in the world.<\/p>\n
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The first 17 years after college, I followed a traditional career path for a person graduating with a Finance major. I worked for large corporations, came to work early, stayed out late several times a month entertaining clients, dropped everything for last minute out-of-town work trips, picked up an MBA along the way, made enough…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1659,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[194,270],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design","category-inspiration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1661"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1662,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1661\/revisions\/1662"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}