Gap Year

There's an election tomorrow. Take advantage of your right to vote.

In sports, it is common for coaches to be fired. The LinkedIn crowd might appreciate that "accountability" comes for the coaches being fired.

Of course, if you were the coach, you know full-well how difficult your job was. It is highly unlikely that you didn't try your best ... you likely gave everything you had to be successful. It just didn't work out. Happens in ecommerce all the time, likely has happened to you at some point in your career.

When a head coach is fired, it is common for the coach to take a "gap year" ... a year off. The coach doesn't rush into a bad job (which likely harms the coach long-term), the coach studies how everybody else does their jobs. The coach looks for innovation, for blind spots in how s/he performs compared to others.

A year later, the coach reappears, wanting a new head coaching job or potentially taking a step back to become an offensive or defensive coordinator.

I was never smart enough to take a gap year. I moved on from Lands' End to Eddie Bauer in the course of a weekend. I moved from Eddie Bauer to Avenue A in the course of a weekend. I took one (1) week off moving from Avenue A to Nordstrom. I took a weekend off moving from Nordstrom to my consulting life. All of it was stupid. I should have studied how to be better as a professional, how to be better as a leader, how to be better as a co-worker, how to better help my new company be successful.

If (and only if) you can possibly afford to financially take "some" time off, do so when you are forced to change your path or you voluntarily change your path. Learn from somebody else. Shadow an acquaintance for a few weeks. Learn how other people with comparable skills approach your job.

If you're in this situation, contact me (kevinh@minethatdata.com). I'll share how I view things, you can take my advice and throw it away or you can apply it to your work - that's what you get to do if you take a gap-week, gap-month, or gap-year.