Three years ago I knew exactly what kind of job I wanted. I knew exactly what kind of career. I knew because I planned for it. Aligning resources, generating opportunities, strategizing and sacrificing with the goal of reaching that coveted position. Yesterday, I received a call from a recruiter saying that the position was open. Today, I turned them down.

Simply put, in twenty-fours hours I was forced to evaluate what I want out of life and to gauge my level of happiness and satisfaction. The arithmetic in the end did not add up in favor of the job being offered. Spending time with my wife and my parents, taking the dog on long walks after work, writing, reading, even weeding the garden all are more important than that dream job. Some how an inflated paycheck in exchange for eighteen hour workdays just didn’t seem attractive. Not anymore.

It took twenty-seven months to finish my MBA. Working full-time my class schedule was seven days a week, six weeks a class, with one week off between. Ten hours on the job plus eight to ten on course work resulted in a strained marriage, an extra forty pounds which made it difficult to walk up even a simple flight of stairs. This was a dry run for my dream job.

It took me close to a year to recover mentally and more than two to lose most of the weight. Am I ready to undertake that again? No. So I flubbed the interview with a white lie, a technicality. “Do you possess extensive knowledge of SDLC?” Well, practical knowledge is only a smattering. Theoretical? Well, much of my MBA was spent studying lifecycles and drafting project plans that were flexible enough to meet most contigencies. Life experience tells me that the latter is just about useless on the job. I’ve run projects worth millions juggling trades and massaging clients all while trying to keep every job under budget and on time and I was damn good at it. Software or not, large projects are large projects. So I said, “No, I have no real experience.” End of interview.

Stupid? Reckless? Wasteful? Hell, I don’t know. All I know is want I wanted is not what I want now so I’m going to take a pass on the boiler room jobs and the chance at driving the expensive import cars to be with my family and have the flexibility in my job to do the things that I need to and sometimes the things I want to.

They’re still interviewing in case anyone’s interested.