Ready for the Luck?
In Spring of 2024, I made the decision to retire early from my job as a professor of literature.
The institution where I’d worked for nearly 30 years offered a voluntary separation incentive, and I decided to take advantage of it.
A bit of backstory: as I mentioned in my last post, my dad died after a brief illness in July of 2006.
Before he did, he told me, “I know you’re going to be okay. And if you decide you just don’t want to do that job anymore, then don’t.”
Fast forward to April of 2024: I was 1 of 3 finalists for a job that I was excited about, but that, realistically, would have been “great” for me in some ways, but only “okay” in others.
One afternoon, an email landed in my inbox, offering the opportunity to simply retire, on my own terms, with enough lead-time to set myself up for the life I’ve always wanted.
I’m a fan of Ina Garten, and I loved the fact that she entitled her autobiography, Be Ready When the Luck Happens.
It doesn’t mean she attributes all of her success to luck. She worked extremely hard to achieve what she has.
At the same time, though, she suggests that it’s important to “be ready” to take advantage of any lucky breaks that may come your way.
Sometimes those breaks arrive as a result of the hard work that you’ve put in, but other times they’re simply opportunities that you need to be ready to take a chance on and jump at.
Personally, I knew that I was never going to be one of those professors still teaching well into their 70’s (or 80’s).
In my 40’s, my goal was simply to not quit my job before I turned 50.
I told friends, “Everything after that is gravy,” by which I meant that, once I turned 50, I’d given myself standing permission to quit being a college professor.
Although I enjoyed teaching, and I enjoyed writing, I never enjoyed the internecine politics and conflicts that inflected my day-to-day life as a college academic—and I knew they would continue to do so for as long as I remained in the job that I had.
Published in 2022, Annie Duke’s Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away was instrumental in helping to affirm my decision-making process.
In hindsight, if the Covid-19 pandemic hadn’t happened, I probably would have left even earlier than I eventually did.
As a fan of Cal Newport’s concepts of “deep work” and “lifestyle-centric planning,” I knew that in order to have other options, I needed to planned for how I wanted to pursue them.
In short, I needed to make sure I was ready when the luck happened.
On that now-memorable spring day in 2024, after I read (and reread) the email in my inbox and realized that the luck was in fact happening, I thanked my dad for giving me what was his last—and best—gift.
In giving me permission to decide that I didn’t want to stay in my job, he also gave me permission to ask the kind of questions that eventually led me to something better.
So what are you doing to be ready when the luck happens?
