It’s easy for us wizened veterans of the world of work to forget how important it used to be to get a promotion, a bigger-sounding title, a higher-than-average pay raise. We have the perspective of longer history and seeing many more patterns emerge over the years. We appreciate different aspects of life more highly than we used to when we were starting out. In the early years, there was an imperative for making progress.
When I was a few years into my first real jobs, I was working full time, attending a master’s program full time and had my first daughter. I formulated then what I called the Theory of Escape Velocity. My goal was to accelerate my career advancement to such a degree that I would reach a state of financial independence by the time I was 30 years old.
I’ll wait until you stop laughing.
