Drive your career forward, and other travel metaphors
Let’s just say Nashville’s been a bit of a boomtown. Over the past decade we’ve added tens of thousands of residents in and around the Metropolitan area with surrounding suburbs becoming their own economies. For the most part I love it, but there is one thing we can all agree on……when they built the road systems they didn’t account for THIS type of growth. Plain and simple traffic sucks here.
So let’s get this out of the way…..no we aren’t Manhattan. No we aren’t LA. We're not even Atlanta (people from Atlanta love to tell us how bad their traffic is). But the transformation from predictable commute to “maybe twenty minutes, maybe an hour” felt like it happened over night. And the epicenter of this transformation happens at the downtown loop. Three main interstates; 65, 24, and 40 all shake hands creating a giant roundabout and you better keep your head on a swivel.
If you like adrenaline spikes, come around the east side of the Titans stadium from 8-9am where they you can head south down 65 by ditching 24 and hopping on 40 ever so briefly and then keep your left turn signal on until you can’t change lanes anymore and 65 is back on its own headed south. Can’t get over? Too bad, take the loop and try again or test your might with a downtown shortcut. It’s a little frogger, a little tetris, a little Dom Turretto, and provides the perfect analogy for our careers.
If your destination is retirement, the interstate you leave the loop on is your career path, your vehicle is the skills you pick up along the way, and your turn signal is your two weeks notice. Inside your car there are various distractions. Your phone is going off, the radio is on, your coffee is finally cool enough to drink, or you may just be on E wondering if you are going to make it. This doesn’t even include the distractions your life has caked into it before you got in the car that day. Commuting is so normalized that it’s easy to forget that everyday when you hit traffic we all HAVE TO WORK TOGETHER.
If we are going to continue with the metaphors (which we are) then the sedan behind you is your boss, the SUV next to you is someone from accounting, and the pickup in front of you is someone in sales. But we don’t really know them. In the summation of your career a lot of these people will be relatively faceless. You may only know them for a couple years. Your interactions with them seem relatively inconsequential because your last job had coworkers and your next one will too. But inside those cars is someone else driving the same direction for at least a little bit, with a similar but different set of distractions, and ultimately the same goal. They want to get to their destination on time and unharmed. You’ll encounter certain individuals with general disregard for others so you need to be mindful, but responding in kind with general disregard is going to have an effect on every other car around you. And how often do you have someone speed by you just to catch up to them a couple minutes later? Was it worth it?
Inevitably you’ll hit a road closure. These can be our layoffs, our RIFs. You might even take a wrong turn or a shortcut that doesn’t pan out. But there are so many roads to take, so fire up your navigation (Linkedin) and figure out where to go next. Just mind the others on the road, make sure to stop for gas, and please use your turn signals.
