When setting (and trying to achieve) a goal for yourself, it’s always the first step that’s always the hardest to take. For instance, when I enrolled in college to get my undergraduate degree, it seemed like 4 years was a lifetime away. I soon found out that once you get started, things start to fall into place and time starts to fly. There’s no doubt that there are some ups and downs along the way, but for the most part the steps start to get easier and easier the longer you go. For me, my undergraduate degree was the first real goal that I set and accomplished for myself. Little did I know that those 5 years (oops) would turn out to be a microcosm of my post graduate life as a whole.
When I started out after college, I wasn’t even able to get a job in my career field right off the bat. I took a data entry job making less than $10/hr and struggled for a while. I did well at the job (it wasn’t really all that hard), but I obviously was wasting my degree. When I finally got offered a programming job at a small manufacturing company, I was excited. They didn’t offer me a lot of money, but at least I would get to do the things I went to school for. Plus, it was my break to get some real world experience, so I took it. I stayed there for almost a year to the day. I had been doing some really great work for them, above and beyond what they hired me for. I was told countless times by my boss and the head of our department that they were really pleased with my work and that they planned to give me a big raise to align my salary more with the level of work that I had put in. Well, about a week later, I was laid off instead. Just goes to show that you really never know what’s going to happen.
At that point in my life I was struggling both financially and in my personal life, so I decided that a change in scenery would probably do me some good. I used my severance money to move myself and started collecting unemployment. It was a little harder than I thought to get a good job in my new city, and I stayed on unemployment for the maximum 6 months that I was allowed. I finally received a job offer literally two days after I received my last unemployment check. Talk about luck. The only bad part was that my new job was going to actually pay me less than my old job that laid me off. At that time in my life I was disappointed and basically pretty close to rock bottom in terms of morale and money. What I didn’t know was that it was about to get a whole lot better, but only because of the confidence I had in myself to take a chance.
For the next part of the story, make sure to read part two of “Success breeds success” tomorrow!
