"Don't leave before you leave"

 Sheryl Sandberg's manifesto for white middle-class feminists, Lean In, is a guilty pleasure of mine. I've read it a few times and honestly find it really useful because, um, I'm a white middle-class feminist.

My favourite chapter of the book is titled "Don't leave before you leave". It tells the story of a young woman who approached Sheryl and asked a series of panicked questions about how to balance work and family life. As the conversations progressed, it eventually came out that this young woman wasn't expecting a baby and didn't even have a boyfriend yet, she just wanted to be prepared. And what preparation looked like to this young woman was potentially working at a certain kind of company in a certain kind of role, even though she could still be 5 or 10 years away from having children!

Thinking about the future balance of work and children may be the most common reason for opting out of roles, but I'm sure it's not the only one. People who plan to retire early and travel might be happy to put up with the job they're currently in rather than go for a promotion or a role at a competing firm because "it's just a few more years." Or I can imagine someone planning to take their side hustle full time might not look at promotion opportunities because they're planning to quit their job in a couple of years anyways.

There are upsides to this kind of thinking. Sometimes you really do want to be focusing your time and mental energy on your family or your future travel plans or your side hustle. It can take energy to take on a new role!

But "leaving before you leave" has a lot of costs too. You may find yourself unfulfilled at work, reporting to someone less qualified than yourself, in a job that you're honestly starting to hate. I'm sure when the baby/retirement/side hustle arrives, you'll be glad to leave that terrible situation behind!

The alternative is to continue to be ambitious and invested in your primary career right until the time you decide to leave it. Interview for promotions or new roles at other companies and take the opportunities that seem right for you, even if you might be leaving in a couple years! This approach has the added benefit that it gives you options. If you discover that you don't like working on your side hustle full time or that travelling all the time leaves you feeling disconnected and unfulfilled or that looking after a baby bores you to tears, having a fulfilling career you can return to could be a welcome lifeline. And if you don't need it, that shows just how good the option you were working towards was!

The ideal scenario, in my view, is that you have a career so fulfilling and interesting and richly complex that it would be a genuinely difficult decision for you to quit your job. So until it's time to leave - stay, and keep trying to craft your career into something better.

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