What Keeps You Awake at Night?

Am I in the Right Career?

Peter H Christian
7 min readAug 27, 2021

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Are you laying awake at night because you are not satisfied with where you are at in your career? It doesn’t make sense, but yet it bothers you so much that you are losing sleep over it. And you can’t understand why.

You really knew what you wanted to do as a career.

You knew it in high school. You picked colleges that had majors in your functional area and you got selected to a great program. You studied hard and got good grades. You did a couple of internships and got terrific experiences.

When it came time for interviews, every one you applied for was accepted. From it you had some terrific job offers with some outstanding firms

You got what you thought was a dream job with a dream company.

It started out that way. Everything was glorious. You made some great friends and loved your work assignments. You were killing your projects and getting fantastic reviews. Each new project was a challenge you couldn’t wait to get started on.

Despite all of this, there was an underlying feeling that all was not well. As much as you loved what you were doing, where you were doing it, and who you were doing it with, something was missing. While you thought that everything should be fine, it wasn’t. And so you lie awake at night, thinking about what is bothering you and whether you are really where you want to be, doing what you really want to do.

Or, the opposite is true. You really weren’t sure what it was you wanted in a career.

While you have many skills and talents, you just weren’t sure what you really wanted to do. You got lots of advice from friends, family and counselors, on what your strengths were and how you should best utilize them.

You finally hit on a job with a company that you thought was a good fit. There were certainly challenges, but you never backed down from them and did well in completing your work. You got good reviews, but you never felt quite satisfied with what you were doing and the accomplishments you were making.

You are unhappy and

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Peter H Christian

Peter played a key role in the 700% growth of Crayola over 17 years. His first book, “What About the Vermin Problem?” is now an Amazon bestseller.