A few months ago I was fired from my job. This was a side job–one that I enjoyed parts of but despised the culture and paperwork. Thinking about that today had me grateful for my real job as a tenured professor. This is a job I realize they wanted me to give up to work for them, and thankfully I did not. Job security matters. It means that you can take chances and learn and make mistakes and grow. As a faculty member I’ve done and continue to do all of those things with the knowledge that a mistake is not going to end my career. If I try out new content and students are just meh about it, I am not going to lose my job.
For others tenure might mean that it is time to stop working altogether. I’ve gone through moments of that myself. I went a solid semester where I was thinking ‘how little can I do?’ and then I realized that it is not who I am as a person. So, I did more. I poured more into the classroom experience. I am the instructor I am today because I realize that I want to be there doing what I am doing.
I will never forget the video conference where I was fired. I will never forget how those two under-qualified individuals smiled at me and gleefully told me I was done working with them. I will never forget how the actual talent of the place–the writers who matter most to the clients–rallied to me and told me they still wanted to roll with me. That showed me that I was doing the right thing. The firing showed me that taking chances doesn’t work in corporate life and neither does growth.
You go along to get along. You keep your head down and you let the boss pretend to be a God. At some point in the near future that experience will translate into my writing. I look forward to writing about it in a fictionalized world. However, in the real world I look forward to continuing to focus on growing and getting better in a safe environment where the wolves are not at your back.