5 Reasons Why Unemployment Was The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me

“Benjamin, can we have a quick word in our office”.

My blood ran cold.

Surely it’s can’t be that bad? I’d been desperately searching for accommodation for weeks – but spending a few minutes a day looking for houses during work hours is hardly a sackable offence, is it?

Of course it isn’t. Stay cool, they probably just want to go over the new product designs. That’s it, the new product designs.

Ten minutes later I was walking out of the building, jobless, and to an extent, hopeless. I hadn’t even liked that job. Don’t get me wrong – the people were great, they often are – it just wasn’t me. I’d been hired as the social media guy, little did I know my position was being seen more as an experiment than a long term option.

As is often the case when small businesses try out new ideas, they got scared and jumped ship.

The whole journey home was a blur. All that was going through my mind was the question “How am I going to pay the rent?”. I’d signed a six-month contract on a new flat a week beforehand – the stress of finding a place to live had just subsided, to be replaced – in the speed of light – by the even greater stress of unemployment. I was down on my luck, and I knew it.

Fast forward twelve months and I couldn’t be happier. In my three months of unemployment I grew up untold amounts. Unemployment really was the best thing that ever happened to me, and these are the reasons why…

1) I Matured More in Those Three Months Than I Had Done Throughout My School Days, or Even My Three Years at University

Spending my days searching for jobs full-time, and spending my nights staying in to save money – or occasionally going out and feeling guilty for spending time and money with friends was a strange existence

Sure, my parents were on the end of a phone, but they couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.

In this situation you really do have to keep yourself to a schedule or you will fall into a downwards spiral of daytime television and sitting in your pants. This process certainly didn’t tip me over the serious scales, but it did leave me with a heightened ability to cope in a wide variety of situations.

When meeting up with some old friends that had fallen into so-called ‘good jobs’ during this period I found myself feeling distant towards one or two of them, not because of ways in which they’d changed as such – more due to how I’d changed.

Though I’m by no means suggesting I was as low down as I could possibly go, I do believe there is a lot of truth in the popular saying stating you have to go as low as you can go to truly appreciate the climb back up – or, as your friend and mine Oscar Wilde much more elegantly puts it – “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”.

2) I Learnt That Being Laid Back is an Incredibly Important Quality I Should Not Undervalue

I’ve always been laid back. I remember even from a very young age my mum would say nothing ever really phases me.

This has been confused with a lack of interest, or even rudeness in the past. Is is certainly not that, I’ve just always been very good at skipping the ‘worrying’ aspect of most situations.

This quality was bought under fire several times during my unemployment, at times I worried myself stupid over questions such as “When will I eventually sort myself out?”, “Why didn’t I just say this/that?” (in an interview), and of course the aforementioned favourite “How am I going to pay the rent?”.

Eventually, however, old habits kicked in. I’ve always seen the cup as half full, and I always believe everything will work itself out – and be okay in the end.

It’s important not to mix up being laid back with inactivity. Just because I believe everything will be fine in the end doesn’t give me permission to sit down and do nothing – waiting for everything to work itself out. It doesn’t work that way. I am laid back, confident, and positive that everything will be okay in the end because I will make everything be okay in the end.

Never, ever, confuse being laid back with being inactive. Keeping this in mind, learn to be more laid back. Your piece of mind will love you for it.

3) It Taught Me Never to Judge Anybody. Ever.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve always tried to not unjustly look down on or discriminate against anybody because of my unfounded beliefs about them as a person – but as we all know this is often an impossible ideal, at least unconsciously.

Unemployment forced me to think long and hard about other people, and myself. Two quotes that illustrate this beautifully are this old Indian proverb – “There is nothing noble about being superior to some other person. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self” and this quote by Samuel Johnson – “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good”.

Variations on this story have been quoted time and time again, but picture this. A kid is sat with his dad, screaming blue murder on a packed train.

You’ve just finished a long day at work and all you want to do is relax on your long journey home.

You get angry. “Why can’t this man control his child?”. The screams are deafening you. He doesn’t even appear to be trying to calm the child – he’s just staring into space with an annoying emotionless expression slapped across his face. You’re furious. How can somebody be so inconsiderate?

You snap and eventually shout at the man, telling him to shut his kid up.

Now picture the same situation from the other perspective. You’re on a packed train on the way to your mums house to drop off your child. He’s screaming, but you can’t focus. He is verbalising how you feel on the inside.

What right have you to shut him up, you’d be doing the same if you were experiencing this at his age. You stare into space, oblivious to the world around you.

Your wife has just died, leaving you widowed with your child to support single handedly.

A man starts shouting at you, snapping you out of semi-unconsciousness.

We don’t all lead the same life. You can never really know what another person is feeling or experiencing at any one time. Next time you feel anger brewing up against a total stranger like in the above example, remember this simple question – “Do I really know what his reality is right now?”.

4) I Learnt to Enjoy My Days (Both Personal and Professional - When Back in Employment), by Limiting Responsibilities in Fields I Wasn’t Interested in While Increasing Effort in Fields I Was Interested in

Important as is it to figure out what you do want out of life, I believe it is more important to figure out what you don’t want.

What you do want can change rapidly, within the space of years, or even months. As human beings we change our minds about important decisions almost as often as we change our underwear.

What we don’t want, however, is much more consistent, spanning timescales much closer to lifetime than your positive wants could ever hope to – “I don’t want to work in a office, I don’t want to spend my life working for others, I don’t want to be stuck in the same one-horse town for the rest of my life”.

An example of employing more of what you enjoy into your life while eradicating actions you are not interested in comes from Paul Myers, first introduced to me through the eBook A Brief Guide to World Domination by Chris Guillebeau. Paul proposes his Ideal World exercise.

In summary, the Ideal World exercise requires you to think through your idealised, perfect day in detail, beginning from the time you get up in the morning, to the meals you have throughout the day – planning out each hour in as much detail as you possibly can. Then you make plans to slowly change your life to get closer to the perfect day you’ve designed for yourself. Check out the full exercise here.

5) I Gained Self Realisation

More than anything else, the best thing about being unemployed was gaining self realisation.

During my unemployment I went through many different options for myself. In these three months I had to dramatically alter and cut these options almost as quickly as they arrived (see point four).

First off I was only interested in going into Marketing. Then I looked into recruitment consultancy (the most cut-throat, yet profitable industry I’ve ever come across), then I was dead set on being self employed and running my own small business.

During these times of decision making, I was making these choices partially based on necessity (“I need £X to live X kind of lifestyle, I need to change Y to stand a chance of working for Y”), but I soon discovered I was mostly making these choices based on my subconscious - my gut feeling, if you will.

Your body knows you better than anybody. If something’s not right you will FEEL it, no need for anything else.

In this time I discovered that what I really want out of life is far less conventional, and far more difficult to pin down than a simple career or lifestyle choice.

I learnt that misfortune is simply a point of view. Eckhart Tolle puts it across perfectly when he says “Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life”.

Unemployment really was the best thing that ever happened to me. I wouldn’t swap the experience for anything in the world.

Have you had similar experiences with unemployment?

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