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When the Dream Job Offer Falls Apart: What a Career Change Setback Is Really Telling You · Happen To Your Career - Meaningful Work, Career Change, Career Design, & Job Search

• 0:00
  Scott Anthony Barlow: The law startup pulled his job offer because Adam was asking questions. Turns out this was the best thing that ever happened to him.
• 0:07
  Introduction: This is Happen To Your Career. Most people let their career happen to them, falling into jobs by accident, staying longer than they should, and wondering if this is really all there is. But a few people decide to stop settling and do something different. This podcast is for you to take control, get intentional, and design your career to fit the life that you want to build. Real stories and real research so you can stop waiting and start making it happen. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow.
• 0:34
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Let's back up for a second. Adam had spent more than a decade trying to get out of law. He had the degree, you know, many years, even had his own firm at one point, but he wanted to write.
• 0:44
  Adam: I remember the first day they were walking us around and they said they were giving us our offices, and they showed me my office, and I looked in there, and I was like, "Oh, no, no, no, no. Nope, no. I'm not going in there." It was literally like the scene in the movie where the guy's been sent to jail, and he's walking down the long hallway carrying his blankets, right? And he has to go like, "Here's your cell." That's how I felt, where I was just like, "Great. Lock me in this box, why don't you?"
• 1:08
  And so I left there and finally was like, "I wanna try some different stuff," but I was applying for jobs, and by that point I'd been practicing for six, seven years, and when you're that far into a legal career, nobody wants to let you try new stuff. They wanna hire you for the stuff that you know how to do.
• 1:23
  Scott Anthony Barlow: And what he had going for him, in this case, was a combination of strategic and observational strengths that turned out to be this very serious asset for not just the work that he was currently doing in law, but also for writing.
• 1:36
  Adam: And also the fact that they had called me out and said, like, "You're a strategist." So just when I was looking around, like even searching on LinkedIn or searching on Google and saying who's hiring for what, I started throwing the word strategist into my searches, and it opened up...
• 1:51
  Before I'd been saying copywriter, I'm a copywriter. What do you need for copywriting? And so I was seeing a list of opportunities for those kinds of roles, but then when I threw strategist into it, I started seeing other roles, and that was very interesting.
• 2:03
  Scott Anthony Barlow: My team got to meet Adam, and he landed this copywriting job with a startup that combined tech and law, and it looked like this perfect intersection, legal background plus writing, and that turned into a full-time offer. And it was absolutely all wrong.
• 2:19
  Adam: You mentioned I had a job with a startup here in LA that they hired me to write content about sort of certain legal subject matter. And they offered me a full-time job, and it was the first job that I had been offered to do anything other than be a lawyer since I worked on the presidential campaign in 2004.
• 2:39
  I got the offer, and it was funny because my girlfriend and I had taken a weekend and just gotten a hotel room in LA so that we had a sort of little staycation, and we knew the offer was coming, so like there was a bathtub in the room, so we had a bubble bath, and we had a bottle of champagne, and I got the offer, and I looked at the offer, and she looked at me, and I was like, "This doesn't work."
• 2:59
  Scott Anthony Barlow: The role, as it turned out, needed changes to line up with what Adam had declared what he needed to be able to accept an offer at a minimum level, what we would call an ideal career profile, split into minimums and also what you're heading towards, ideals. The role needed some changes to really be a good fit, so he started negotiating. And as he negotiated, he learned more about the company, the leaders, what his future would look like there, and this seemingly perfect fit started to come apart.
• 3:28
  And then the startup withdrew the offer altogether as a knee-jerk reaction to him asking questions, which told him almost everything he needed to know about working there and what that would've been like. It was exactly the right outcome. Adam could see it, our team could see it, even the company could see it. But in that moment, it felt like everything fell apart because Adam was trying to get out of law for almost 10 years at this point.
• 3:51
  Adam: To be honest, upon reflection, I felt sort of empowered that, like, somebody could offer me a job not as a lawyer, and rather than have this desperate, frenzied attitude that you always had as a lawyer, especially during the recession, of, "You need a job. There's a law firm offering you a job. Just take the job. They'll give you money. Like, don't interrogate it. Don't go asking them for this or that. Just say yes and move on. Sit at the desk, do the work, take the money, go home. Try not to get fired."
• 4:22
  So to be able to actually come to a situation and say like, "Yeah, this is good, but it's not great. I really appreciate it, guys, but I don't think this is for me. Thanks anyway," that in and of itself was kind of empowering.
• 4:32
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Now, every single person that I've ever seen make a major career change that is really trying to get to fulfilling work or an extraordinary opportunity that fits them, not the other way around, they hit some version of what Adam did.
• 4:47
  They hit a wall at some point. They experience those setbacks, and it feels like the whole thing is over when it happens. It isn't, and even if it seems like it costs you four months, it might save you four years.
• 4:58
  Adam: I had been applying for some part-time copywriting gigs, but just wasn't landing anything, which can happen. Copywriting is like that. So I actually started emailing recruiters and former legal clients and saying, "I'm back open for business. If you need legal help, I'm lawyering again. I can help you."
• 5:16
  And I had some people give me a couple of assignments. So I was right back on the precipice of going back to practicing law just by pure economic necessity, and I was like, "Here we go again, man. Third try and just can't get the escape velocity to get out of the atmosphere of practicing law." Like, I was right on the edge of the cliff, and I submitted this resume to Coinbase at the same time that I was emailing and talking to legal recruiters and legal clients just to try and get some work just to make some money, 'cause I needed income.
• 5:44
  And right as I thought, "I failed again. This'll be the third time that I've tried to escape from my legal career, and it's not gonna work out again," I got the job from Coinbase. It was just that close. But it came down to one question, which was, "Okay, well, do you wanna quit or do you wanna keep going?" And that fundamentally is the choice.
• 6:00
  Scott Anthony Barlow: But if we fast-forward to the end of the story, Adam eventually became a content strategist. But the real question is, how? How did all that happen? How did he go from law into something entirely unrelated that was super exciting for him?
• 6:13
  Adam: I said, "I wanna be a TV writer." That's where this started. And so, you know, I was not like, "I wanna be a cryptocurrency content strategist." Not one of those words was anywhere in my mind as a career option when I started this process.
• 6:26
  It really was like, you know, requires a sort of, I would say, radical open-mindedness. You just have to accept the fact that You don't necessarily know where this is gonna go or how it's gonna get there. And like the Animaniacs theme song, you have to expect the unexpected. Just lean into it.
• 6:42
  Scott Anthony Barlow: If you want to hear the whole story, I would encourage you to listen to Happen To Your Career episode 437, where Adam shares in his own words how this happened. If you want help with that, by the way, then I'd love to invite you to drop me an email, scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put 'Conversation' in the subject line, and I'll connect you with the right member of my team, and we'll have a conversation.
• 7:03
  We'll understand what you're trying to accomplish. We'll understand some of the concerns that you have and help you figure out how to navigate through your exact situation. It's what we do, and it's what we love to do. Until next time, I'm Scott, and this has happened to your career. Adios. I'm out