Many times you make a game plan, stick to it, and then suddenly something occurs and you have to make a change in your life. There are numerous times where that has happened to me and I had to make a major pivot in my life. When that happens some people shut down and don’t know exactly how to react to it because they have already laid out what was ahead of them. However, that is what you are not supposed to do when you have to make a change in your life to do something that you weren’t expecting.
This has happened to me so many times that I cannot even keep track of when I had something planned but then had to make a change to accommodate it. There are many times when you will map out what you think is right for you but deep down you know that you should be doing something else.
This actually relates to a small story that I want to share with you guys that happened to me this summer.
During the summer, college students usually find an internship to work for to gain experience that they can put on their resumes. I had an internship the summer before my junior year, therefore I had already fulfilled my requirements for my major. However, this summer people usually get a better internship that they can have under their belts before they graduate.
So naturally, I was following what everyone else was doing, applying for internships, doing phone interviews, and hoping I would get a great internship for the summer. But during that entire process, something didn’t feel right for me. I had already done an internship the summer before and despised working 40 hours a week. I learned a lot, but my heart wasn’t working for something that didn’t make me happy.
I got numerous internship interviews, got a couple of offers, but you know what I did? I didn’t take any of the offers and decided to not do an internship for the summer. I did that because I realized the only reason I was getting an internship was because that was what you are ‘supposed’ to do in the summer before you graduate. Making that pivot to stay home and work on my side business was probably the best decision that I could have ever made this summer.
Did I see myself making that decision a couple months ago? No.
Did I know that my summer plans of being in a different city was going to change? No
Did I plan of going against the crowd and doing what I wanted to do this summer? No.
All of it happened unexpectedly and it turned out to be in my favor. It was a major pivot I had to make because I was already planning to be in a different city for the summer, I was budgeting my expenses, and seeing the opportunity costs that I had to make if I was going to take an internship.
Many people may have not reacted the best way or may have not even had the strength to go against the public and do what they wanted in the summer. It was hard because people were expecting me to do an internship at a big corporate company this summer, but my choice of being happy this summer and doing what I actually think would benefit me in the long run won over everything else.
Therefore, making pivots in life is not something that you can prepare for, they are things that just occur and usually they work out in the future!
Sabah Ali
#theclockisticking
