Resilience is an engineering quality.
One of the more unique aspects of working in the consultancy field is that you need to make yourself totally immune to some of the comforts indulged by a full time employee and it’s just part of the consultant’s way of life.
You still get vacation time. You still get benefits. You still get great pay. You get all of that and more. You get to build relationships with people you’d never otherwise get to meet, and create things that you’d never otherwise be able to get your hands on to work with, and people listen to you more often. It’s an incredibly rewarding way of life.
Oh– and man, you wouldn’t believe how fast you develop new skillsets. You have to. It’s sink or swim. It’s not for everybody but for the people that it is for (people who enjoy being challenged or accept challenge as necessary), a year in consulting is like 5 years in the field in one gig. You are instantly moved over into an entrepreneurial mindset and your survival tool, ultimately, is your ability to learn and adapt.
The tradeoff is sometimes potential stability, and you are definitely responsible for the generation of impactive results — for not reward but because it is what you are brought in to do. Your result is your brand and the good consultants stay razor sharp focused on meeting it.
In a way, I agree with this down to the core. What if everyone were held to that standard? It would be very competitive, yes, but imagine what it would be like where excellence were the expectation with everyone eager to meet that like it was part of who they are?
Now that’s a fantastic world full of brilliant innovation and determination, where everyone’s busy being awesome human beings . It might also bring some disappointment and uncertainty because people fail alot before they succeed. I’ve had a good stretch going for a long time now but I have failed many, many times. I just fail in different ways than I did when I was younger.
Sometimes you do things right and still must face change.
That change is not bad, and is certainly better than the changes that come with failure, but, is something that should be considered by the entering IT consultant. If you enter, it is good to remind yourself once in a while that you accepted the risks with the benefits.
All in all I’d never trade this period of my life for anything. It’s the first real sign of success coming and I’ve worked very, very hard for a long time just to be able to see it on the horizon. It ate my 20’s.
I’ll be enjoying a few days off between assignments to get my plan for 2017 down.
Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. You must look into that storm and shout as you did in Rome. Do your worst, for I will do mine! Then the fates will know you as we know you.
–Edmond Dantès