The Morning Email

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.