Positions that pay extremely high salaries can be impossible to walk away from.
I work with clients who earn really big salaries. Sometimes, they want to leave their jobs. The problem is, they make too much money to leave.
<< Stories told in this post are amalgamations of the stories of a number of individuals. >>
How much money are we talking about?
When you’re 25-years-old, maybe it’s more than your father earned at the end of his career. What parent could possibly advise their child to walk away from that? Most tell their kids to hang on for a couple of years, until they have saved enough money so that they are established. But from what I’ve seen, it’s a slippery slope that people can’t get off.
I watched a single father work himself to the bone.
He wanted to slow down, but he’s on a trajectory to run the company in a couple of years. Could you step away from that? He doesn’t have a plan that could compare to the kind of financial security he’s currently building. Anything else has draw backs. He should stick around for a couple of years, right? Until money won’t be an object?
I first encountered this problem when I was 28.
Betty attended university with the rest of us. She entered medical school before I graduated. She trained as a pediatrician because she didn’t like working with adults. I remember sitting at dinner one night and listening to her talk. She said she hated her job. She was earning $280,000 a year but didn’t like what she was doing. The problem, she said, was how do you walk away from money like that and start again? To give this conversation context, I was earning less than $40,000 at the time.
More than 30 years later, I have seen only one individual address this problem successfully.
I should correct that. I know an individual on a healthy trajectory to step away early from a high paying job. It remains to be seen whether she will pull it off. I expect she will, but the jury’s not in yet.
You’d think people would set a target amount to earn and then step away if they dislike their jobs.
What number should be enough? You’d think it would be tied to your lifestyle. If you don’t have a high burn rate, then you should be able to step away sooner. Just save enough to support yourself over your lifespan and then be done. Add some buffer in case the world goes sideways. The math is simple.
The problem isn’t that simple.
I watched one young professional for a couple of years. He said he was going to step away from his high pressure job once he had enough money. Initially, the amount wasn’t that high. Then it became enough to put a down payment on a substantial house. Then enough to pay the house off. Then enough to allow his wife to not work after they started a family. But then he landed a really big job, paying more than double what he had been earning, with a huge signing bonus. It wasn’t about having enough after that. It became not being able to step away from such abundance.
People continually raise the bar for when they will have accumulated enough wealth.
I remember reading Women, Food and God by Geneen Roth. She wrote that, initially, people said three million dollars would be enough wealth, and that then they’d stop working. When they reached three million, however, they raised the bar to five million. When they reached five million, they raised the bar to eight million. Roth wrote that the bar keeps being raised. The ceiling is never reached.
Why do human beings keep raising the bar?
Why can’t we step away when what we’re doing isn’t satisfying enough? Or when it consumes all our energy and leaves us exhausted? Leaves us unable to socialize or spend time with family or focus on our health? Leaves us with back problems that we can’t address because we’re working too many hours?
Everyone says, I’ll step away when I have more.
I think it has to do with more than money. Its about being enough. People never feel like they are enough, especially if they experienced developmental trauma as kids. They think more money will make them feel they are enough. Except when they have more money, they discover it hasn’t solved the problem.
I like to write posts where I can offer help. In this post, I want to document that this problem is real. The solution requires addressing your history of developmental trauma.
One young woman got away.
One young woman had told her boss that she was bored and needed more stimulation. Her boss told her to tell head office, so she did. She didn’t receive a bonus that year, which was the equivalent to being told to leave. She heard the message and left her job with no hard feelings a couple of months later. She went back to university to start over in a career she was passionate about.
Maybe this young woman wasn’t so naïve? Maybe she knew, subconsciously, that she was dealing the death blow to her career when she talked to head office about her needs? I saw the young woman the day after she received no bonus. She wasn’t sad. She was relieved.
Most people who earn really high salaries can’t get out.
Some say they want to make a couple more million so they can set their kids up. Once they have amassed more money than they could ever spent in their lifetimes, however, they still can’t step away. They know they will be philanthropic, but this doesn’t appear to be what drives them. They have no idea what to do next. I’ve watched people facing retirement with no plan. This can be is real struggle.
A very real issue is how to go from being somebody important to being nobody.
This hits the heart of the issue for many. How do you go from having a title everyone reveres to being nobody? To just being the guy walking the dog? Or spending your afternoons at the club? Or baking pastry in the afternoon?
These people appear to be hooped. They work themselves to the bone with the ideal of being able to step away. Then, when they have all the money in the world, they have no idea how to simply be normal. So, they stay in the race. They keep their foot on the gas and sometimes push up their level of ambition. They go from needing three million dollars to five million to eight million. They can’t emotionally step away from being somebody special.
I know someone who sold his company with plans to attend trade school.
This fellow got out at the five million dollar mark, so maybe he’s my second successful exiter. And perhaps the woman I am watching closely will be my third. What many of these individuals appear to have in common, and this is only anecdotal, is that they have reached the age of 50 and are more comfortable taking early retirement.
The single father I was wrote about earlier who couldn’t exit was still in his 30s. Another fellow wanted to exit in his 40s, but couldn’t. Another wanted to exit at 26 but couldn’t. Betty was only 28. Maybe the problem is tied to your point in the life span? Maybe you can’t step away from big money until you’ve passed 50? Until you can acknowledge that the end of your working life is somehow tangible?
These are my musings on the topic. They remain a work in progress.
— Dr Patricia Turner, PhD, Registered Psychologist in Private Practice in Calgary, Alberta