4 Ways To Rescue A Broken Career

Don’t turn to entrepreneurship just because you're desperate

Barry Davret
Index
Published in
5 min readJul 11, 2021

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Licensed from Shutterstock // Maslowski Marcin

You’ve probably heard stories about that man or woman who quit their job on a whim and moved across the country to live happily ever after with their long-distance lover. Yeah, that was me.

But let’s put aside the happy ending and talk about the messy middle. You rarely hear about the struggle to find your footing in an unfamiliar environment. You especially don’t hear about the difficulty in rehabilitating your career after abruptly quitting your job and leaving behind your network of friends and colleagues.

I never regretted sacrificing a solid job with great pay to build a life with my future spouse and mother of my children. But I do wish I had planned before I made a life-changing decision.

Six months after my move, I had landed just a single interview and zero job offers. It devastated me both financially and personally.

So, I did what any average middle-class white dude would do. I ventured into entrepreneurship, throwing everything I had left into a doomed venture. After two years out west, my accomplishments included a stint as a car salesman and an absolute failure at self-employment.

On the precipice of bankruptcy, I asked a former mentor for help. With his coaching, I fought my way back into the world of gainful employment.

That wasn’t the only time I had to rescue my career from oblivion. It’s happened several times throughout my adult life.

You may hear lots of stories about people giving entrepreneurship a shot after struggling with their careers. It works for some folks, sure, but there’s a difference between starting a business out of inspiration versus jumping into one out of desperation.

I tried entrepreneurship out of desperation, thinking it the only viable on-ramp to a reliable income after falling down the professional ladder. But as I later learned, you can employ a variety of strategies to rescue your career. These four have proven most beneficial for me.

Let your network guide you.

At the end of my two-year descent into financial and professional insolvency, my mentor had…

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Barry Davret
Index
Writer for

Work in Forge | Elemental | BI | GMP | Others | Contact: barry@barry-davret dot com. Join Medium for full access: https://barry-davret.medium.com/membership