The morning coffee had no effect on
Megha. Still feeling sleepy in her cubicle. In a corner, there stood
a trophy which said 'Employee of the Year - Megha'. A couple of days ago,
that one got added to her long list of achievements. Just two years
in the race, she had set new performance benchmarks in the office. 2
promotions in two years!!
Today was different. She did not bring
her car to office. Took the metro instead. She was so deep in her
thoughts that she missed the announcement for her stop, went one
station ahead and came back. Never had she been so lost. Ten days
ago, she celebrated the second anniversary of her job. Her first job
after graduate school. She remembered how scared she was while taking
the interview and how relieved she was after getting a job offer.
Her chain of thoughts were interrupted
by Aditi who came to her to ask some questions. Megha was now the
'To-Go' person in the office. Her quick success did not go well with
her colleagues, but the junior folks in the company admired her short
term accomplishments. Megha was not used to being in limelight. She
did not have a good schooling record and her college performance did
not paint a pretty picture to be noticed. This was new to her.
Megha was good at 'making sense out of
numbers'. Infact, that was her job. She was paid to take unstructured
and complex data and to derive meaningful conclusions from it. Last
couple of months, she was getting the feeling that the only numbers
which made her more happy where the numbers on her paycheck.
Two months back, she was thinking of
moving to a more technical job. She wanted a new challenge. But this
new challenge meant a lot of things. It meant giving up something you
are really good at to go into an unknown territory. Giving up safety,
the comfort zone. Giving up the success stint she had achieved in
couple of years. Being in the race, she had the chance to create
history. One more quick promotion and she would be the youngest
manager of her company.
The longer she stayed here, more
difficult it would have been for her to try something different. The
last time she spoke to her friends about having thoughts of shifting
to a new job, they had a good laugh. Some of them were struggling to
be efficient at their current job and feared that someday they would
be thrown out. Megha throwing away a secure job to go through the
insecurity of finding a new job in a different field was beyond their
imagination.
She looked at the 'Star performer
award', opened her mailbox, replied to the unread email items which
needed a response. Opened up another email window and wrote 'Thank
you very much for everything, it's been a great journey, looking
forward to a new one, consider this my two weeks notice'.
Sometimes, logic defies sense! Giving up the job two days after being declared the performer of the year.
Some decisions are best made by the heart
and not the brain.
