#relevant media

;; relevant music for “Behold the Great Dragon” Act 1.

“I’ve come up with 3 warning signs that I think people should pay attention to. One, and I think this is absolutely the most important one, is that it’s time to go when you have too much self-respect to stay. You should not be putting up with a work environment that doesn’t respect you or your role. Because life is too damn short for that. It just is. You have to demand better from people you work for. Otherwise they don’t deserve you. And you don’t owe them! This is a business transaction. It always is. The second thing is, it is time to go when your body starts *screaming* at you that it’s time to go. And you wanna know what happened to me? You wanna know what the clue was for me? My hair started falling out. All the sudden, I mean I have thin hair anyway, but all of a sudden I had these big patches on my head where it was just thinning beyond anything normal. And I went to the doctors and there was nothing wrong with me physically. It was a manifestation of stress. So pay attention to what your body is telling you. And third, it’s time to go when you’re asking yourself the question, ‘How will I know when it’s time to go?’ The fact that you’re even asking it means it’s past time to start thinking about it. And, you know, this is where I think it’s really a good idea and it’s healthy for you to always be thinking about what that next move might be. Even if you are *so* happy in your job, it’s exactly what you want to be doing, you never know when that’s going to change. So it’s really a good idea to have in your back pocket, in the back of your head, what might be the next thing that I do. Is there something I’m doing outside of work? I’m not the follow your passion person because I think that can be really dangerous, but is there something that you’ve come to love, that you might be able to create a second career out of? Once you’ve crossed that hurdle of being okay with *having* a second career, which I think is also a good idea to start thinking about. I’m not that person who would have thought that I could do anything like this. And walking away from that job ultimately made it easier for me to make other decisions about risk down the line, over the last six years. The fact that I was able to survive that and even thrive out of it taught me that I could move forward no matter what. And that I could handle whatever decisions I would make, whether they ended up right or wrong, and I learned that it was worth taking that personal risk, and doing something that seemed absolutely bananas at the time.”

My online bookstores from now on. (I saw this bouncing around twitter and don’t have the original post on hand but when I find it I’ll link)

Tom: “Oh it destroys some people. And they in turn, you know, go on and destroy other people’s lives. I mean, I have no doubt of that. I mean, I could kind of palpably feel my humanity ebbing as I was doing the job. You begin to become very cynical about the people you’re dealing with. I mean it’s just an odd position to be in where, you know, disasters seem to be, like, commonplace.”

“Today’s tip is that it’s okay to quit things. Doing something indefinitely isn’t a virtue, if you’ve determined that it’s not the best use of your time.”

“The truth will out usually.... When my career started, people would say, ‘I feel like a mushroom.’ ... It meant you were kept in the dark, left uninformed, and just fed a bunch of shit. But you wouldn’t say that! You would just say ‘I’m feeling..like a mushroom.’”

“That’s kind of the thing about community, right? We have the best intentions but then we’re human, and the minute our weirdnesses touch other weirdnesses, things get complicated. It’ll never be anything but messy.”