I think just about everyone has heard the saying: “The writing is on the wall”. If you hadn’t before now you have. This idiom actually refers back to Daniel when the hand of God literally wrote on the wall foretelling the end of the kingdom of Babylon. Since then it has been used to express when the end is in sight. For some situations this far more obvious than others. Then some others well…. Let’s just say that is what you have friends for.
But the fact of the matter is that more often than not you can see when the end is coming. Let me tell ya the end sometimes flies at you a million miles an hour. What is far more sad to me is when everyone else can see the end but the one who can do something about it just ignores it. I refer specifically to work, relationships are a whole other ball of wax. In the last few years the economy has been rough, which has prompted many different articles explaining how to be happy or how to measure your happiness. Ironically enough most of these articles to me are in the “Well Duh!” category, which seems to me a waste of time but they are being printed and people are reading them. Because maybe people don’t expect to be happy? Or maybe they just don’t think you should like your work? With most of these articles there seems to be the corollary of when to move on when you aren’t happy, more or less there are all kinds of articles telling people how to see the writing on the wall when it is there. I just wish some people would look.
One of the things that I will truly never understand is how people don’t know when it is time to move on. More on that specifically later but for now I just want to say that I don’t understand stagnation. Maybe it is the way my parents raised me – to want better, to be the best I could be and not to just be satisfied because the job is done but more so when the job was done right. Maybe it is the life I’ve led, I’ve been that girl to hang on too long to a relationship or the employee who just did enough to get by. But I am at a point now in my life where I don’t see the sense in just sticking something out or waiting for something to get better. I figure you’ve got two options when you think it might be time to move on. First is to just walk away and give up as soon as you see the warning signs. The second is to push through and try to make things work longer. On occasion this works and sometimes it is a futile attempt to salvage something that is already finished. But the reality is that the second option is typically the hardest to make work.
Walking away and not caring is easy, why? Because if you aren’t there you won’t see the damage that followed. But sticking it out? Yea, that is very difficult. Because at that point you have committed to the situation, you have invested yourself into a possible solution and you have decided that it could one day be better. Who would want to walk out at that point? But the fact still remains you saw the end was near long ago and if you haven’t actually seen a change or at least a small improvement you do still need an exit strategy. Because let’s face it the writing is on the wall. After you have chosen option two when do you give up? When do you walk away? That is up to you, but you have to know the longer you try to work it out the harder it will be for you to get out smoothly. Remember that the best way to tell when the writing is on the wall is when it stops being fun. Your job isn’t something that makes you sad, it shouldn’t be just a paycheck your entire life, and bumps in the road will happen but you need to learn to tell the difference.
