After some recent time of reflection, I am starting to view my career as a roller coaster ride. There are a lot of ups, downs, twists, turns, the occasional screaming and everything is moving very fast. Now, if you’re someone who works with me, you are probably nodding your head right now saying, “that’s the truth.” But the more I think about it, the more things do always seem to follow the path of a roller coaster, and you are the sole person responsible for how fast you are going to go. Careers are like very long timelines where you grow to be able to take on more and more the longer you progress. But even though they look horizontal when written out on a page, there is a lot of vertical action in them as they go up and down.
Even though I never played dominoes when I was a kid, I did always enjoy laying on the floor with a box of dominoes, setting them up in a long and twisty line, and flicking my finger so that I could knock them all down right in a row. Something about seeing how fast they would all fall down after all that work was nothing short of mesmerizing and something I would do over and over again just to watch them fall. The part about dominoes that was so cool is how you have one block hitting the other and creating a continuous action over and over until they are all knocked down.
Most people probably don’t summarize their work life with things like roller coasters and dominoes, but then again, most people aren’t in automotive marketing, either, so I guess it comes with the territory. I use the roller coaster to remind myself there are ups and downs just like there are good days and bad days. And then there is always the occasional screaming when you are scared half to death. But just like a roller coaster, the track always leads the cars back to the station where you can get on or off.
I think now the reason I still think back to my days of dominoes with such a fond memory is because that is how I try to set up my days in any given week. I’m the type of person who puts so much on my daily task list that there is probably no way I can ever get it all done. But it’s the allure of trying to bite off more than you can chew that keeps me doing it on a daily basis. But when things get busy and stuff starts happening, I get excited because marking things off my list can be like me setting up a whole set of dominoes on the floor and then knocking them all down. Just a flick of the finger and the blocks start to fall just like when you start making calls and creating action; the dominoes all start to fall. The only problem I run into is that sometimes I need a bigger set of dominoes.