Would You Jump Jobs Without a Parachute?
I don’t often watch YouTube videos, but a certain featured video on the BBC website caught my eye the other day: “Jumping From 25,000 Feet With No Parachute.”
Now, you have to assume that this didn’t result in splattered blood and guts all over the ground, or the BBC wouldn’t feature it, so I was curious to see what the trick was. Surely no one would be so mad to jump out of a plane without a parachute. But, sure enough, there was this guy, and 25,000 feet below him was a surprisingly small net on the ground. Part of you thinks that he has surely had practice at this sort of thing, but the realist in you knows that anything could still happen. A sudden gust of wind and “blood and guts” here we come. Sure enough, he impressively hit the net, but he was far from in the middle and only a matter of metres away from his demise.
Seeing his partner run up to him afterwards, you wonder why he would do it….
It is almost the same as leaving your job without another job to go to. The moment that you walk out that door, the pressure starts to build, and the money starts to drain out of your bank account. I know that there are a whole host of problems involved in securing a new job while you are still in your old role, but it is far less stressful than waving goodbye and wondering what happens next. You would walk out the door, find the nearest bench and see the figurative ground speeding up towards you….
We see people coming into interviews who are emotional wrecks because a few things “haven’t gone their way” in the interview processes that they have been involved in. The pressure is building and the redundancy money is running down. Let me tell you something, recruitment is not always plain sailing. At LMA, we do our best to smooth the process along, but it is fairly rare that candidates get over the line at the first attempt. When it gets to the point that your worry is getting in the way of your interview performance, that is when the situation can threaten to become terminal.
To be honest, most people will do this once in their careers – it is just too tempting not to turn your back on a terrible job. However, the likelihood is that they will do it only the once – the scars will remain for a long, long time. The reminders from your partner will ensure that you don’t make that foolish mistake again.
Maybe I’m wrong here. If so, please correct me. I am lucky enough to run my own business, and while that presents its own unique challenges, I don’t have the choice of looking for “something else” so I cannot tell this story with any recent first-hand experience.
Have you ever jumped from a job without a parachute? How did it work out for you? If it did work out, was it rather by luck than judgment?