Career Coaching Backstory #6: The Big 2008 Crash

“I’m the Bad Guy?…How’d that happen? I did everything they told me to.”

– Bill Foster, Falling Down, 1993

2008 began as a terrific year. Just a couple months prior I shifted into a new job with the same company, the December right before I flew to Madrid, Spain to visit my Simon MBA colleague Gabriella and for the first time both my professional career and my creative pursuits found a good balance. Plus, between neighbor friends, work friends, Israel trip friends and local Simon Alumni friends (I’d started the Cleveland Alum Association when I first moved here), the social circle exploded. I found my groove. My creativity found its outlet. Here in Cleveland I became the most authentic version of myself.

Then mid-year, around late summer, early fall 2008, something began to change. It changed at work. It changed at the market. And something began to trigger a directional shift that just felt off. When everything looks right, but feels wrong, you know the tsunami is coming.

Despite all my best instincts, every warning sign and pragmatic intuition, I decided to, that August, buy my first house. Why I did this? To this day can’t answer that question. Looking back? The worst decision I made in the last 20 years.

I don’t need to remind anyone of what happened next. The big 2008 market crash: Bernie Madoff stole, the over-inflated real estate marked imploded and jobs evaporated. Panic prevailed. Meanwhile our tax dollars bailed out the auto and bank industries because the previous and the new presidential administrations both felt that they were Too Big Too Fail. (Not that they were mismanaged.)

But what about the individuals? America’s citizens that did all the right things throughout their careers: they earned their education, they worked hard, they saved. What happened to them? To us? We became irrelevant. No one was going to bail out us.

I don’t want to dwell too much on all the darkness that prevailed for the next several years. To say it was hard is an understatement. I, along with so many others, went into survival mode. And had to very quickly figure out how to be relevant again. Because the old formula? It no longer worked.

I began working full time when I was 17. And this was just two months before my 37th birthday. Twenty years I gave of myself to delivering profits to others. Two decades later, what was the reward for all my loyalty, including all those late nights, weekends, cancelled dates and Sunday night ulcers? Something inside me snapped. I had to take a step back and reevaluate everything. And I mean everything. Who was I if I wasn’t a corporate servant? I had to rediscover my roots.

Oh, and that Cleveland screenplay? The one that began during the summer of 2007 season of winning? It was due to the film commissioner exactly one day before d-day. Because that’s exactly how life works.