Month: January 2025

Re-Prioritization

It all started with a question in a job interview.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

I froze in my chair at the conference room table, unsure how to respond.

I didn’t have the luxury of thinking five years down the road. I’d recently gotten laid off, less than a year into my marketing career. I was still new in town and devoid of a support network.

I needed this job, now. I needed the income to pay the bills. And I needed the legitimacy of a stable assignment to prove my professional worth.

So, I came up with a boilerplate answer. And I ultimately landed the job.

I was set, but far from settled.

For even as I sat in my cubicle – with a full list of clients to support and a steady salary – I thought about the question from the interview.

I was still in my mid-twenties, but I’d bounced around a bit already. And I’d seen the costs of such transience.

I needed a five-year plan badly.

So, I gave my future some thought. I put a plan together. And I strove to make it a reality.

My journey to better started quietly.

I was doing well enough in my job, but I knew more mastery was on the horizon. So, I earned some Digital Marketing certifications, proudly displaying the badges in my cubicle and on my social media profiles.

Still, I knew that a certification badge could only get me so far. I resolved to think bigger.

So, I took the GMAT and applied to business schools. Then I enrolled in a Masters’ of Business Administration (MBA) program that held classes in the evenings. This allowed me to obtain full marketing training in the classroom and earn a prestigious degree – all without requiring me to quit my job.

I earned my MBA roughly five years after I had hashed out my five-year plan. Now, there was just one more step to fully attain it.

I started looking at other jobs, hoping to land a prestigious role with a prominent company. My post-MBA job, as it were.

I set a hard deadline for myself. By the time the new year arrived, I’d be in a new place professionally. Since the upcoming year was 2020, I dubbed this plan 2.0 in 2020.

But despite my best efforts, I didn’t land that job by the dawn of the new decade. And a few months after New Year’s Day, a global pandemic turned the world upside down.

My five-year plan was now in limbo. I hung on to my existing job for dear life. And my grip tightened further after my employer was acquired by a larger company – leading to job redundancy fears.

Everything I had hoped for was hopelessly off-course.

What on earth was I going to do?

Plans be damned. Seize opportunities.

That’s what I told myself as 2020 faded into the rearview.

The most restrictive portion of the pandemic had passed. My job had not been made redundant. And the holding pattern hanging over my life had started to lift.

So, I jumped on an opportunity to move over to my new employer’s corporate marketing team. I dove headfirst into the new role – making connections, drafting materials, and traveling coast to coast to evangelize the business segment I was now supporting.

Off the clock, I seized the opportunity to exercise more frequently. I joined running clubs, entered in races of longer and longer distances, and started taking home hardware from them.

None of this had been in my prior plans. All of it seemed like a happy accident.

But I wasn’t complaining about the result. I was just hoping the good times would continue.

They didn’t.

Economic headwinds led my employer to reorganize itself several times, with the shifts changing the nature of my role. Meanwhile, a series of injuries stopped my running exploits in their tracks.

Once again, I was trapped. The five-year plan had already stalled out. And now, the Carpe Diem approach had also run aground.

What on earth was I going to do?

What are you chasing?

This question was at the heart of the inquiry into my five-year plan, whether the job interviewer knew it or not.

And even after drafting that plan, I struggled to adequately address the core premise.

I found myself oscillating between prestige and stability over the intervening years, striving for one and falling back on the other when the rug inevitably got yanked from below my feet.

This process left some scars. But as those scars accumulated, my determination only deepened.

I would get this right. I would uncover the answer.

But recently, something has changed. I’ve started to wonder whether I’ve been asking the right question.

You see, I’ve been blessed with a great support network throughout. Family, friends, and peers have been there for me on every step of my winding odyssey through life.

But I’m not so sure the inverse has been true.

Sure, I’ve supported my supporters through the years. But only to a point.

For as I worked on my five-year plan – and the carpe diem era that replaced it – I mostly lost track of what was going on with my friends and family. Sometimes, I lost touch with them entirely for months on end.

It was easy to overlook this development. After all, with every twist and turn in my journey, I grew my social circle.

There were new people to connect with and new sources of support to rely on. So, I missed the obvious signs that things had gone awry with the others in my orbit.

But my eyes are wide open now.

I realize how much what I missed matters, and how little what I was chasing really meant.

Sure, it’s nice to have objectives, and the trappings of a profession can help maintain a lifestyle.

But the connections with our community are the ties that bind. Being there for those who support us — in the good times and the tough ones — is nothing short of essential. It can sustain us — enriching our experience on this rock and enhancing our legacy after we leave it.

So, consider this my re-prioritization.

I might continue to demand more of myself professionally and recreationally. But I will no longer act as this venture is Item 1A, or even 1B.

Where I’ll be in five years is hardly the point. Who will be in my orbit means far more.

What We’re Fighting For

How bad do you want it?

The twangy tones of Tim McGraw were living rent-free in my head as I sat on the training table, staring at my compromised ankle.

A surgeon’s scope had methodically made its way through that ankle’s interior about a month prior, while I was sedated with anesthesia.

Now the stitches were out, and the swelling had mostly receded. I could walk in a straight line without any noticeable limp. And if not for my bulky walking boot, most passersby wouldn’t even know I was at less than 100%.

But I knew.

I realized how limited my ankle rotation had become. How tough it was to take the stairs or get into the shower. How tentative I was when getting out of bed in the morning.

If I ever wanted to run again, I needed to fix this.

It was all up to me.

Running is what had got me to this spot on the training table. The thread tying this lightweight Greek tragedy together.

It had become a hobby of mine in adulthood. First on the treadmill, then out on the streets and sidewalks.

I never went all that far, and I never expected all that much of it. Much like Forrest Gump, I was just…running.

But eventually I got bored of this routine, and I signed up for some local races. That led me to local running groups, who talked me into training more and entering longer races.

Suddenly, everything started to click. I was putting up faster times than I ever imagined I could and collecting a ton of hardware along the way.

I set loftier goals and began to picture attaining them.

But then I got hurt.

A stress fracture in my left leg brought running to an abrupt halt. I was forced to withdraw from the marathon I was training for, deferring my entry to the following year. As my leg healed, I clung to the silver lining. With a full year to prepare for this race, the sky was the limit.

But once I got clearance to run again, I realized how tall a task this would be.

My stamina was poor, and I got winded easily. But beyond that, my right ankle was starting to bother me.

Whenever I made a left turn on the street or the track, it felt like someone was whacking my ankle bone with a wooden mallet. Sometimes, this dull pain would slow me down. Other times, it would cause me to shift my running gait.

Eventually, I found my way to an orthopedist, who recommended surgery. And after some thought, I agreed.

So now, here I was on the training table. My deferred marathon entry was still waiting for me 10 months in the future. But I had to get there.

It was all up to me.

The physical therapist started with some light exercises. I turned my ankle in a circle a few times. Then I flexed it back and forth while a resistance band applied tension.

It wasn’t much, but I attacked it all with vigor.

As the weeks went on, the exercises got more challenging. But my determination never waned. If anything, it got stronger.

I would power through my reps, re-doing any that seemed off. Rather than dawdling between assignments, I’d add in old exercises the physical therapist had dropped from my routine.

There was a fire in my eyes through it all. This was more than a doctor’s prescription or an insurance requirement to me. It was my Normandy, my Gettysburg, my Saratoga.

If my future as a runner was what I was fighting for, this was the battle I had to win.

How bad did I want it?

Day by day, session by session, I was providing the answer to Tim McGraw’s question.

It was all up to me. And I was up to the challenge.

After four months of physical therapy, I found a semblance of victory.

My ankle had regained its strength. My range of motion had returned. And I was even doing some light jogging as my physical therapist looked on.

I was elated when I got the clearance to graduate from the biweekly physical therapy sessions. I started running again. And I reacquainted myself with the local running groups.

The tide was turning. My goal seemed attainable.

But a couple months later, I sustained yet another bone injury. And follow-up testing uncovered a degenerative condition.

My racing days were done — for good. Even recreational running seemed dicey.

I was devastated.

I felt waylaid by the diagnosis, and I was furious at my own body for betraying me. I withdrew from everyone and everything for a time, finding sanctuary in solitude and silence. As the holidays approached, I glumly referred to that year as the worst of my life.

It was all up to me. And I’d failed.

Quite a bit of time has passed since those dark days. And I’m picking up what I’d missed back then.

Namely, my four-month crusade to get my ankle right again.

It might not have led me to the starting line of my marathon. But it still amounted to something.

I’d set my sights on a goal. And I’d fought like heck to attain it.

That was a noble undertaking. And looking back now, I am proud of what I did.

But it needn’t be a one-off.

While I have no designs on reprising my post-surgery rehab, there are still things in life that I can prioritize. There’s still plenty I can fight for.

Much of that has come into focus for me in recent months. And as we embark on a new year, I’m eager to thrust myself into the battle.

Perhaps this is a better way to approach the calendar change. Rather than rewriting our core narrative or checking off items on a self-improvement list, we can reacquaint ourselves with what we’re fighting for.

In doing so, we can give ourselves the spark to go after it. Not for the calendar’s sake. But rather for us.

How bad do you want it?

It’s more than a Tim McGraw song. It’s an invitation.

Take it.