I didn't know what I wanted. For decades.

The promise

When I was at university, and I suspect even now, the message was drilled into you: you'll walk into a job. Degrees were golden tickets. This was the era when a mobile phone was a Nokia you could drop down a flight of stairs and lose nothing but the battery cover, which tells you how long ago the world was making me that promise.

I came out of university expecting something amazing. I had no idea about anything. Worse than that, and this is the part people don't usually admit: I had no idea what I wanted. Not a clue. Not a direction, not a pull towards anything, just a vague sense that the amazing job would announce itself.

The drift

It didn't. And at thirty, nothing had changed. I was working, I was capable, I was getting on with it. But if you'd stopped me in the street and asked what I actually wanted to do with my working life, I'd have had nothing for you. A decade out of university and the question was exactly as open as the day I graduated.

In my late thirties I went contracting. Project and programme work, big organisations. It suited me in ways I didn't fully appreciate at the time. But by forty I wanted to abandon it. A career path I'd only just started, and I was already looking for the exit. That should tell you something, and at the time it told me nothing, because I wasn't listening.

I kept going. Contracting has a way of keeping you going: the next contract, the next programme, the next organisation with the same problems wearing different lanyards. And somewhere in my late forties, something shifted slightly. I started to see a path. Not where it led, I want to be honest about that, but for the first time I could see that I was on one, rather than just moving.

The company

Then I contracted for a company so bad it changed my life.

I won't name it or describe it, because it doesn't deserve the ink and the details don't matter. What matters is what it did: it made me see myself in a different light, because they saw me in one I didn't recognise. They saw a failure. Years of getting things delivered, and to them I was the problem in the room.

For a while that lands exactly the way you'd expect. Then something more useful happens. You start examining the measuring stick instead of the measurement. I cared about the work. I wanted to make a difference. Genuinely, unfashionably. And they didn't. Not really. Once I saw that clearly, their verdict on me stopped being information about me and started being information about them.

I quit early. Before the end of the contract, before it made financial sense, before any of the tidy exit points. My professional integrity and my health were worth more than seeing it through, and it took me until my late forties to be someone who acted on that rather than just knowing it.

The turn

And then, for the first time in this whole story, I did the thing I'd never done at twenty-one, or thirty, or forty. I stopped waiting for the amazing job to announce itself, stopped asking organisations to tell me what I was worth, and turned inward, towards what I could actually accomplish. Looking back, the fifteen years of patterns I only recognised afterward turn out to matter here too, the subject of Fifteen Years of Preparation That Didn't Look Like Preparation.

That's where the next chapter starts. But it only starts there because of everything above, including the company that thought I was a failure. In a way I owe them. I'm just never going to send the card.

That next chapter is the subject of The Product Was Me.