Blogocentric Formulations

Road Forks

"30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  | May 12

Prompt ▼

Write about a fork in the road in your life, and how you made the decision to go the direction you did. What would have happened if you chose the other path?

Back in Spring 2018, I made the difficult decision to leave my dream job working for Marvel. While I really loved working there and was proud of the work, I had taken a huge pay and title cut to get my foot in the door, and our corporate parent (Disney) had just made it abundantly clear that no promotion or raise would be forthcoming. I was a bit resentful of being hired (and a bargain to them) under the pretense of having ample opportunities for advancement, and then discovering those opportunities were merely false promises. So even though I wasn't looking to leave, necessarily, when another opportunity presented itself, I decided to leave.

There was a lot that went into the decision, but ultimately it could be boiled down to materialistic choices. The new opportunity offered me a title and salary that was commensurate with my experience (and a major upgrade from my situation at Marvel), and it was a startup company so there was a ton of opportunity for growth. It was the kind of job that people take to make a major jump in their careers and financial situation... in my case, from a low-level manager at Marvel to an executive-level and on a path to grow into a senior executive and department head role. The only problem was that I wasn't particularly excited about the job. At Marvel I directly contributed to the productions themselves, and this was a step back into the kinds of jobs I had before Marvel, which is to say very corporate, very administrative, and very little connection with the projects themselves.

If I had chosen the other path, i.e., to stay at Marvel, I would have continued to love my job, but I can only assume my resentment would have grown at continuing to be sidelined and offered no opportunities for advancement. I likely would have been in a much worse financial situation, and even though I would have still enjoyed my job immensely, I have a feeling the politics surrounding it would be really, really frustrating.

The lesson I learned from the experience, though, is that the money and the title and the trappings of success don't really matter so much to me. I'd rather like what I do than be paid well to do a job that doesn't excite me. It was a valuable lesson, and guided me on my job search after that startup company went under after only a few months (long story, but the founder apparently didn't raise the money he claimed he did).

And the story has a happy ending too; less than a year later, Marvel came calling and asked me to come back for the improved title and salary I had been asking for and Disney had previously refused. So I essentially got my dream job back, at a salary and title level that is appropriate to my experience. But if I had never left in the first place, I'd likely be doing my old job at the reduced salary, and be resentful about it. So even though it was a roundabout way of getting to where I ultimately wanted to be, it was a circuitous route that showed me what's really important in my career (prioritizing the work I do over than the money I earn), and it showed Marvel that the work I did for them had more value than they previously thought.

Since it was a roughly 15-month process from when I quit to when I rejoined the company full-time, I often think back to that time in my life, the different paths that were available to me, and what the likely result would have been depending on the choice that I made. It all seems to have worked out in the end (and who knows for sure what would have happened if I had just stayed put at Marvel and ground it out), but it's definitely a lesson in how roads in life can lead to forks... and how sometimes those forks can end up leading you back again.