“There are certainly times when staying too long costs us opportunities. But I was beginning to wonder if leaving too soon could do the same.”
I arrived home from Europe on October 4.
For eleven days, I’d managed to leave my worries about work behind.
But the moment I returned, they were waiting.
Nothing had changed.
Work was still slow. My income was suffering, and I was spending more time trying to improve the situation without seeing much improvement in the results.
I had given myself permission to disconnect while I was away.
Now I felt like I needed to make up for lost time.
I started making calls, asking questions, and trying to understand what had changed. I wanted to know what could be done to improve the situation.
I offered to travel farther if it meant more opportunities. I was willing to put in the time and effort.
That had never been the problem.
What bothered me was how much time I was already investing and how little I seemed to be getting back.
I knew what I was capable of earning. I had done it before.
But lately, I was putting in just as much effort, sometimes more, without seeing the same return.
For someone who places a lot of value on efficiency, that was difficult to accept.
I’ve always been conscious of how I spend my time.
And lately, I couldn’t help wondering how much of it I was wasting.
What else could I be building with the time and energy I was putting into a situation that didn’t seem to be improving?
I didn’t want to make a decision out of frustration. But I also didn’t want to look back months later and realize I’d stayed somewhere long after I should have left.
At what point does patience become wasted time?
I didn’t know.
But the longer things continued this way, the more I felt like something needed to change.
And if the circumstances weren’t going to change, maybe I needed to.
I started exploring other opportunities.
Applications turned into conversations. Conversations turned into interviews.
I also began putting more energy into several projects I had been developing. Things I could continue building over time that might eventually provide additional income and greater control over my financial future.
I liked the idea of creating something that didn’t depend entirely on someone else providing me with opportunities.
But those things would take time.
And time was exactly what I was becoming impatient with.
I had financial goals I wanted to reach. I knew what I wanted my life to look like, and lately it felt like I was getting farther away from it instead of closer.
Eventually, one of the companies I had been speaking with offered me a position.
I had gone through three interviews.
The conversations had gone well. They seemed interested in what I could bring to the organization, and I was interested in what the opportunity might provide.
They sent an offer letter.
I accepted.
Arrangements were being made for me to fly to Maryland for twelve days of training.
I was preparing to leave my current position and begin working for another company before the end of the year.
It looked like I had found a way forward.
And there was relief in that.
After weeks of frustration, I finally had something concrete in front of me.
A chance to change an outcome I’d been struggling to improve.
But then something happened that made me slow down.
It wasn’t anything major on the surface.
The company expected me to attend mandatory training out of state, but the lodging arrangements involved sharing accommodations. There wasn’t an option for company-covered private lodging.
It wasn’t simply about the cost of a hotel room.
It was what the expectation seemed to represent.
I was being asked to make a commitment. To invest my time and energy, travel away from home, and begin a new professional relationship.
Yet when it came to a relatively small investment in me, that same willingness didn’t seem to be there.
The scales felt out of balance.
And I couldn’t ignore it.
I began thinking about what else might be expected of me once I was there.
If this was how the relationship was beginning, what might it look like six months down the road?
Maybe the arrangement was perfectly acceptable to someone else.
Maybe it was simply how the company had always handled training.
But it didn’t sit right with me.
And I had learned over the years to pay attention when something didn’t sit right.
I’ve spent much of my professional life reading people.
Understanding what they say, what they don’t say, and recognizing when something doesn’t quite add up.
But I didn’t learn those skills through sales.
They developed long before that, during times in my life when being able to read a person or situation felt necessary for survival.
I don’t always get it right.
But I’ve learned not to ignore that feeling when something seems off.
This time, something was telling me to slow down.
I thought about the interviews.
The offer.
The conversations about opportunity.
The possibility of getting back to the income I had been earning before.
I wanted the change to work.
Maybe that was part of what bothered me.
I had become so frustrated with where I was that I was beginning to see leaving as the solution.
But was I actually moving toward something better?
Or was I simply relieved to have found a way out?
That question stayed with me.
Especially because I had already accepted the offer.
There was a part of me that wanted to overlook what was bothering me and move forward anyway.
I had spent weeks searching for an alternative.
Now I had one.
Turning it down meant returning to the same uncertainty I’d been trying to escape.
But accepting it meant ignoring something I wasn’t comfortable with before I’d even started.
Neither choice felt particularly good.
Eventually, I sent an email declining the position.
I thanked them for their time and explained that my decision wasn’t solely about accommodations.
It was about mutual investment and professional consideration.
The kind of relationship I wanted to enter at this stage of my career.
I wished them well and stepped away.
Part of me felt like I’d avoided something I might have regretted.
But another part knew I’d just turned down an opportunity that might have improved my financial situation.
And I was still facing the same problems.
I started thinking about why I’d been so ready to leave.
When I originally accepted my current position, I had reasons for choosing it.
I believed in the company’s values.
I appreciated the freedom to control my schedule without someone constantly looking over my shoulder.
There wasn’t unnecessary micromanagement.
I could do my job, manage my time, and have a level of independence that mattered to me.
Those things hadn’t disappeared.
In many ways, the company had been good to me.
But something had changed.
Whether it was decisions being made behind the scenes, changes in the opportunities available, or circumstances I didn’t fully understand, the result was showing up in my bank account.
And that mattered too.
I couldn’t ignore the financial reality simply because I appreciated the other parts of the relationship.
But I started wondering whether I’d allowed that one problem to outweigh everything else.
If the income returned to where it had been, would I still want to leave?
Probably not.
That was worth thinking about.
I wasn’t necessarily unhappy with the work itself.
I wasn’t unhappy with the independence.
I wasn’t unhappy with the way I was treated in many other areas.
I was unhappy with the outcome.
And I’d begun treating leaving as the only way to change it.
I had spent weeks searching for something better.
Now that I had found another opportunity, I was beginning to recognize the things I might be giving up.
And I wasn’t sure the trade was worth making.
As October continued, I found myself thinking more about time.
Not just the time I felt I was losing at work, but the expectations I’d placed on what I should have accomplished by now.
I remembered something Tony Robbins had said about how people tend to overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade.
I’d heard that idea before.
But lately, it seemed to carry a different meaning.
I had been measuring so much of my progress against what I expected this year to look like.
The income I thought I’d be earning.
The financial position I wanted to reach.
The things I’d hoped to have built by now.
And when those expectations weren’t being met, I felt an urgency to do something about it.
I didn’t necessarily think that urgency was wrong.
There are times when waiting around for circumstances to improve is nothing more than wasted time.
But I also wondered whether I was expecting every decision I made to produce results more quickly than it reasonably could.
The projects I had been working on weren’t going to produce meaningful results overnight.
They would require time, consistency, and a willingness to keep building even when the results were small.
I understood that.
At least when I thought about those projects.
But when it came to my employment, I seemed to be struggling with the idea of giving anything more time.
Maybe because I’d already experienced better results and knew what was possible.
Or maybe because I’d become so focused on what I wasn’t earning that I was losing sight of what I still had.
I didn’t know.
But I was beginning to question whether the urgency I felt was always helping me make better decisions.
The end of the year was approaching.
The holidays were coming, and business was beginning to slow down in many places.
Starting over somewhere new would mean another transition.
More time invested.
New expectations.
New uncertainties.
And there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t eventually find myself dealing with a different version of the same frustrations.
I began thinking about what I’d been so eager to leave behind.
There were still things about my current position that I valued. Things that had mattered enough for me to choose it in the first place.
But somewhere along the way, the frustration over what wasn’t working had begun to overshadow what was.
I wondered how often that happened in other parts of my life.
How often had I grown impatient with something because it wasn’t developing the way I’d imagined?
How many times had I started looking toward something else before giving what I already had enough time to become what it might?
I didn’t know.
And I wasn’t sure how to measure that.
There are certainly times when staying too long costs us opportunities.
But I was beginning to wonder if leaving too soon could do the same.
I thought about the time I’d been so worried about wasting.
What if some of that time wasn’t being wasted at all?
What if it was simply part of something that hadn’t had enough time to unfold?
That bothered me.
I’d always believed that when something wasn’t producing the results I expected, I needed to make a change.
But I was beginning to wonder whether changing direction too often could become its own kind of setback.
Maybe there were times when the most difficult thing wasn’t finding a new direction.
It was allowing the one I’d chosen enough time to see where it might lead.
I still didn’t know whether staying was the right decision.
Maybe things would improve.
Maybe they wouldn’t.
I could continue building projects of my own and creating other opportunities. None of that required me to make an immediate decision about leaving.
I could remain open to change without constantly feeling the need to create it.
And I was beginning to recognize that patience wasn’t necessarily the same as accepting less than I deserved.
Time invested and time wasted weren’t necessarily the same thing.
Some things needed more time than I wanted to give them.
But that didn’t mean everything deserved more of mine.
I had spent much of October worrying about how much time I might be wasting by staying.
But I hadn’t given nearly as much thought to how much time I might lose by leaving too soon.
-G. Hudkins
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