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Playing It Safe



I run into far too many people who get up every morning and go to a job they don’t care about while living a life that’s completely unfulfilling because they think it’s “safe.” My first reaction is that slowly dying is certainly not living; allowing your soul to be eroded a day at a time is certainly not safe. But I want to take that one step further.

Now, there are a lot of areas of life we could talk about, but let’s look just at the workplace for the moment. Our society is filled with plenty of people justifying their career choice with, “Yeah, it’s just a job, but at least it’s a steady paycheck.” Which is true … until it’s not. 

We are almost four weeks into a government shutdown that has hundreds of thousands of government workers nervously out of work. Sure, many of those folks will be paid for that time when this all gets resolved, but they are still trying to pay bills and make ends meet without a paycheck.   

IBM laid off 60k employees in 1993 alone and cut their staffing by 180k employees between 1985 and 1995. In 2008, Citigroup axed 50k workers in just one month. It was November, by the way, just in time for Christmas. General Motors followed suit and eliminated 47k positions in February of 2009. All of these companies offered competitive salaries, good retirement options and plenty of benefits. They were all safe places to work, until they weren’t. 

Just to be clear, I am not bashing any of these corporations. There are many more examples I could give of other companies who took a similar path. My point is that nothing in life is “safe,” and you can fail and fall flat on your face while following a course you don’t believe in, so you might as well pursue the future that makes your soul come alive. You can get hurt building someone else’s dreams, so why not risk getting a little beat up building your own? If you are going to strike out – and each of us will at various times – you had better be at least wearing a uniform you are proud of.

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