5 reasons you should quit your job today!

(I wrote this article some years ago in Italian so I had a self restricted maximum audience of 56mln readers. I got a lot of feedback so I thought it may worth giving it a shot in English)

You're thinking that working sucks.

And it often does not depend on the kind of job itself.

Maybe you like your job indeed, confess!

The problem is everything around it. And so, if you are happy with the salary, the problem is how much time you spend in the office; if you get out early, is the distance from home that bothers you; if you are close to home you complain about the salary.

Oh, don't forget the coffee machines, the meetings at 6pm on Fridays, the lunch at your desk, Social medias blocked during office hours (ok the original post has benne written a while ago, when smartphones were not so smart).

Then, whatever work you do and in whatever company you are, the invariant is always the same: your boss. Maybe not your line manager, maybe your boss's boss. The fact is that there is always an emeritus and gigantic head of clay not to say of mud, a frustrated loser with no life outside the company and who does not understand a great nuclear **** of his work, let alone yours.

One who as a young man was a mediocre amateur cyclist and made his way being a slave and the spy of the powerful (Quote from the Italian Movie “Fantozzi”).

In short, this is something that can make your life in the company like hell.

Ok, it may not be always like that but it may have happened that you quit because of your boss and not because of your job.

Also, being a smart guy is often as useful in becoming a boss, as it is being honest in politics, and just as a white terry sock with stripes it to being sexually successful.

The fact is that the company, the firm, the factory are usually not a nice place. Unless they're yours but at this point the risk that you are a boss is high and you've probably already stopped reading.

In short, you too, like many others, have been meditating about quitting or at least evaluating alternatives for years, probably sitting on the throne in the bathroom at 2nd floor.

Maybe you haven't made up your mind yet.

But there is this little voice inside you, which tells you that maybe you should choose the red pill and see how deep the white rabbit hole is.

 LEAVE YOUR JOB?

Tibor Fisher in his "The thought gang" argues that everyone has thought at least once in their life to do a bank robbery, write a book, open a restaurant. Fortunately, he continues, not everyone is unbalanced enough to throw himself into one of these initiatives. Let’s add to the list being a photographer or a wedding planner. (I told you it was long ago)

For me it was a bit like that, I wanted to see if there was something different from what I had been programmed to do for years of school, university, family, catechism, television, adults magazines like Caballero, Cando, Il tromba, Boiling flesh.

For many, leaving their job is a gesture of courage: it was not for me. Colleagues came to me to tell me I was a badass, whit steel balls and blabla. It was quite the opposite: I gave up as a true coward, I couldn't take it anymore and I gave in. The real heroes are in the open space. To fight every day to support the family.

To them all my esteem.

Having said that, let's be clear: with this post I don't want to encourage anyone to quit or to keep a job they hate. I would just like to give the point of view of one who jumped and (twist) came back.

The day I quit a strange thing happened.

Actually two.

The first very little interesting thing is that, although I expected sleepless nights to meditate on an uncertain future, foretelling nights in the wild or under a bridge, in a carton box singing gospel and burning diesel in a bin, the first night as unemployed (or as an entrepreneur) I slept like a baby, which hasn't happened for years. It made me understand a lot about what I was like.

The other strangest and most interesting thing is that all inside I realized that as the Jarabe de Palo say, it all depends on what point you look at the world it all depends on (it's not that I would like to sing it now...). Follow me.

On one of the thousands of useless books that I happened to read in recent years, I read that the map and the territory are two different things. Everyone maps reality, based on their experiences, their education, the society in which they live. So, the same situation can be seen in diametrically opposite ways.

Benjamin Zander, director of the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra (watch his Ted Talk) tells this anecdote: There are two shoe sellers who travel to a remote region of Africa. They both call home, the first says, "Hopeless situation, they don't use shoes." The second: "Glorious opportunity, they don’t have any shoes". It depends.

Stephen Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People tells this other: People are on the subway waiting to get home after a day of work. Someone reads, someone listens to music, someone sits quietly. This man arrives with two children who scream and shout, snatch newspapers from people's hands and yell and so on. The feeling of anger grows strong in the author who, when they turn a whisk, bursts out and tells the man why he doesn’t do anything about them and so on.

The man looks at him distracted and says: “Yes I'm sorry we are just back from the hospital where their mother passed away half an hour ago.” Suddenly, anger turns into solidarity, the need to help.

It's called a paradigm shift.

A radical change in the way of seeing reality, something that is sometimes complicated to achieve mainly due to years of conditioning. Often only important events are able to open our eyes to what we really live. A son, a new love. The prospect of losing something as important as life. It is very often people who have nothing more to lose who find the strength to face and achieve things they never thought they would be able to achieve. Terminally ill who go around the world, people who lose the use of their legs and win the Paralympics. People who saw things differently. Lester Burnham who quits after being the publishing whore for 15 years.

It depends.

Coming to the point, here are 5 valid reasons why I think you need to quit today.

1) The future does not exist.

When I was 24 I was playing in a band.

A real cool band!

My fellow adventurers were amazing, real rockers.

People with long hair and square balls playing and on stage. I don't know why they kept me but with them I was the master of the world, major of the universe. I had long hair and I played dressed in kilt and combat boots. I was paying the college myself so to speak, on Saturday nights I always knew where to go.

Beer was free.

At some point they decided to take the leap and try harder the way to be professional musicians. I was graduating and I didn't feel it. I gave up, especially thinking: "But when I'm forty then what do I do?" 40 years at the time seemed to me like +infinite and over. They have passed the 40s. In the meantime they made a living from music. They are happy and live in concrete and brick houses. They drive cars, shop at the supermarket.

They are musicians.

And this is another of the mistakes you make when you are young: you think that a certain age will never come and you think that then there is the precipice, the abyss, the darkness.

Young boy, I must disappoint you: time passes quickly (and inexorably). The good thing you don't know is that, thankfully, it's never too late for anything.

This is one of the things that keeps us most attached to what we have: uncertainty about the future. If you think about it, however, nothing is more uncertain than the future.

Depriving oneself of the present for a future that YOU CANNOT HAVE THE BENEFICIAL idea of what it will be like is at least risky. Think about people who started working 20 years ago with the prospect of working in the same place for 40 years, getting a good payout, a gold watch and enjoying their retirement.

Pure science fiction today.

They did their math homework.

And they got it wrong.

Think about what life was like 30 years ago. Are you at least 30 years old, you who are you reading? I am, 20 more and I can tell you that my parents had very different expectations from what I have now. Living for the day is stupid (but it risks not being too bad).

Being pragmatic at the right point already makes more sense.

2) Life is a journey not a destination

Boom, I'm not mentioning anyone here because it's so banal that I can think of at least three songs that bring it back to this phrase.

Pay attention, I’m entering nostalgia mode: My poor mom always said that she wanted to study languages, and she would have liked to travel. But she was the eldest of the three and she was female, and she couldn't.

And when she was able, she didn't feel it and she sacrificed everything for the family. Let's cry together, come on.

Well in short, the sad page is to say that you do not have to wait until it is time to take stock to take stock, every day is good.

Did you spend all the time you wanted with your children? Did you get that flower you wanted for your wife? Did you buy that Canadian luthier bass with a flamed maple top to your husband (but even that 35mm f / 1.4 could make him happy, don't you think?)

Did you take the photos you wanted, are you trying to follow the path you feel like following and not Bob Dylan, stand aside.

So enjoy the ride because as good as you are at following the map, you don't know where you are going.

3) If you don't do different things, different things don't happen.

Marta and I are going to the mountains with the little demons. We've been on the highway for hours, mountainous landscape, soft curves, little traffic, all quiet except that my Chick Corea Elektric Band shift is over and I have to put up with Pitbull feat. JLo. At a certain point, as with the timing that distinguishes me, I realize that we have, like, 2 km of autonomy, we are forced to take the first exit.

And here we are, as if by magic, in a wonderful valley. All green, roe deer on the street, children running around the meadows, naked women serving in bars, free beer and no one has ever heard of Nickelback. 

If you stay on the same road, you go calm, no hitches, no holes. If you have to, you can end up in Big Fish Village as well as Hell. The choice is yours. Recent history, however, teaches us that lately even on the straightest and quietest highway a Tsunami can strike.

The bottom line is that if you keep doing the same things, the same things keep happening. Good or bad as they are. And it's when you act, when you change, when you make choices that things happen. Good or bad things.

4) You can adapt!

My global consultant (?) Has been following me for millennia, offering me phantom supplementary pensions. It is essential for me to support it, otherwise when I stop working, I will not be able to maintain my standard of living.

Standard of living?

Having a spirit of adaptation is something that can guarantee you a series of advantages, in a tropical jungle as well as in that of welfare.

When I was a clean-shaven young man, freshly graduated, living with my mom and with six-figure salary, I could certainly afford a few more packs of stickers. Now that I am the father of two little kids who see me as an ATM with legs, that I have a thirty-year mortgage on the hunchback, that my wife often works part-time and, above all that I am a photographer, I have to adapt.

The bottom line is that you CAN ADAPT. Yes I know, here I am going to be unpleasant to some. Someone is about to post an insult. Here, just don't do that from a $ 1.200 smartphone. There is an interesting theory. Hedonic Treadmill, hedonistic adaptation. It argues, I say it very simplistically, that it is not necessarily the absolute level of things that produces satisfaction.

For example, talking about (guess what) money, it is not the absolute level of wealth that makes happiness. Boom, another Monday banality (or when you are reading this): Money does not bring happiness.

Happiness and unhappiness appear to be evenly distributed between rich and poor. Indeed, it seems that the countries in which people say they are happy on average are not at all those in which there is less money available. Here you can believe it or not. You can read or not. You can read and don’t believe; it always depends on how you perceive your reality once again. It also depends on the fact that too often, but really too much if you think about it, we use money as the only parameter to evaluate our happiness.

I personally believe there are some things that cannot be monetized. The time I spent with my little ones I would not be willing to exchange for any sum.

Given a guaranteed minimum, the perception of this minimum in the end is what makes the difference. If you don't have any sandwiches, you're in a bad way. If you have one you just feed yourself. If you have ten, you have some left over. If you have a hundred are you really happier than when you were ten?

What was the price to get to one hundred?

Here, how hungry you are makes a difference. Everyone has a stable level of happiness that he strives for. A man's wealth is measured by the number of things he is able to give up. I don't know where I read it, but it seems like it’s working well in this context.

If you settle for a FIAT Panda you've just become € 28,000 richer than someone with a € 40,000 BMW. (or maybe not? Who knows…)

5) Life is made up of choices, you cannot know which one is best.

On January 4, 1999 I started working. Seriously. First job, first permanent contract. After a mail merge from Word and 141 CVs sent (practically half the Carrier Book, I still have the original file) and about 30 interviews, I have about ten offers on my plate. I decline a fixed term of 6 months as a Windows NT 5 beta tester at Microsoft, because I am targeting HP. I don't sleep a week thinking I've had the biggest shit of my life. After a week they call me back for an indefinite period and six months in England to get the full Microsoft certification course. Sliding doors.

At the seventh interview, I get an offer from HP. The same day comes that of Computer Associates. I refuse the latter and take the liberty of pointing out a college friend of mine who accepts and becomes EMEA Vice President over time. Doors that open and doors that close.

I do a group interview for Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). They make us slaughter like beasts that still today I wonder about mankind. I do another 4 interviews, the last one with a partner. He is seated in the infamous human leather armchair. He's on the phone, a Nokia 8800 gold, like a 1k $ cell phone. He beckons me to sit down and meanwhile says: "Leave the SAP down, users come in just to do enquiry". I must admit that I am fascinated by things I don't understand and by the authority with which he says them. Unfortunately, at that moment the phone rings and the story ends. He puts it away, he looks at me and after a moment's hesitation he yells at me: "If you were an animal, what animal would you be?" Taken aback, I reply. "An elephant". And so, I inelegantly leave the magical world of consulting.

In the end, I accept UUNET, an American startup that has, for me without any work experience, the great advantage of offering more money than others.

After a year I download a resignation form, fill it in and in 5 minutes I am unemployed. I tell my mom and dad respectively that I haven't been to church since 1975 and that I'm a Juventus fan. So, when I tell them the truth they feel relieved. I don't have time to despair or even pass the notice that I already have another job with 30% salary increase.

But it lasts just another year, the same cinema as the resignation and, lucky chance, another job and another 30%.

I last for 4 years this time before almost finally breaking out. Now times have changed, and I move with caution. I accept less paid work, further away from home, with less responsibility. But I change while others remain to complain. To those who remain after a couple of years, the company offers 48 months, two years of minimum salary, an outplacement program, the return trip in the sleeping cabin, two whores (Quote from the same movie above.) Doors that open and doors that close.

After another 4 years I can’t stand it anymore once again, but the times are profoundly different this time. Folding companies, the Greek crisis, Argentine bonds, subprime mortgages, the spread, planets alignment.

And I decide to change anyway. I speak with the company, we reach an agreement for a consensual contract resolution. 12 months salary to leave. To the delight of Mr. Bank and its voracious mortgage, I don't even see the money passing through. I celebrate with a crazy expense: a pair of purple Converse Star Player.

Well, in the meantime, however, an British startup is calling me. They need someone with my skills. But how? They’re leaving everyone home, I want to fire myself and they call me to offer me a job? Destiny does not lack a sense of humor.

The fact is that I do a first telephone interview, they come down from London for two more interviews and I have an offer in hand. I don't want to accept but I don't want to say no, so I raise: I make them a proposal that they cannot accept.

They accept.

Like the Rag. Ugo Fantozzi when, at home sick he receives free tickets for the circus. It is the first time someone have given him free tickets in his life. He spends the night sitting in bed with tickets in hand. Here, imagine my outstretched arm holding the offer in my hand and I wake up Marta and tell her: "I accept". 

It lasts 4 months. On December 19th I am on the top floor of my hotel in Waterloo station. Outside I see the London Eye on the Thames and on the PC screen Marta, Andrea who is about to turn one and the Christmas tree lights in the background. When I close the laptop I know what to do.

I go to the office the next day and tell him: “I’m going back to Italy”.

"Ok, merry Christmas"

"And happy easter too ..." I add.

And here I am, supporting a family of 4. In a difficult period for the economy. In a sector that is not exactly flourishing like that of photography. To take care of an institution such as that of marriage that does not seem to be among the most celebrated, regardless of the situation.

NOVEMBER 2014 UPDATE: All this happened 4 years ago. In the meantime, it was a roller coaster of emotions, experiences, feelings, places, things that I would never have done if I hadn't left the company. A period yes, sometimes difficult, but fantastic and unforgettable.

Experiences that I will carry within my whole life.

In January of this year, tired of working only on weekends rather than staying with my parents, I decided to accept a three-year project contract for a consulting company.

I lasted 10 months: in October I signed a permanent contract for an IT consulting multinational.

Nice, I'm happy, I have all weekends (ok, part of the) for mines, my desk is next to my wife's and, yes, I'm very happy!

I've been lucky? ABSOLUTELY!

However, someone says (perhaps Seneca but I remind you of my studies as an industrial expert): "Luck is that thing that happens when opportunity meets preparation"

If you are not ready, in all possible ways, technically, mentally, physically, to seize opportunities, or simply to realize you have them, you will never seize them.

Having said that, I would add that personally, what gives me fuel every day, that gasses me, is the same thing that terrified me at first: not knowing what will happen tomorrow.

Will it always be okay? CLEARLY NOT! And then we'll think about it, with the aforementioned spirit of adaptation and all the rest.

And precisely because I now know that making long-term programs has a completely relative sense, it is in a relative way that I approach it.

I have a thousand other things to say but I've been writing this post for three months and I guess you've been standing on this page for too long, in a while your boss will catch you.

Well, you thought the story was over but it is not.

While I was happy and making a career, after becoming a manager I suddenly got a call from a recuiter.

I changed again.

At 47.

You've been warned, it's up to you now.

Back to regular transmission now's on Fantozzi strikes again...