{"id":53079,"date":"2017-07-28T04:45:44","date_gmt":"2017-07-28T09:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhyatt.com\/?p=223"},"modified":"2017-07-28T04:45:44","modified_gmt":"2017-07-28T09:45:44","slug":"three-lessons-i-learned-from-getting-fired","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fullfocus.co\/three-lessons-i-learned-from-getting-fired\/","title":{"rendered":"What I\u2019ve Learned From Being Fired"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chances are, you are going to be fired at some point in your career. This May, 1.7 million workers in America were laid off or fired. And according to the Labor Department, that was during a month of generally good economic news<\/a>.
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\nSometimes you are let go for reasons far outside of your control and there\u2019s not much to be learned from it. It just happens.
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\nDuring the recent recession, as CEO of Thomas Nelson at the time, I had to oversee the layoffs of 28 percent of our staff. It wasn\u2019t their fault and we told them that when we announced the layoffs. The market had just plummeted. We had to cut costs to survive.<\/p>\n

Learning From Loss<\/h3>\n

But often there are lessons to be learned from these career setbacks. I have been fired from three different jobs or gigs in my career and I learned from each one of them.
\nDon\u2019t get me wrong. Each of these was a painful experience. But these experiences also taught me important lessons that I probably could not have learned any other way. They were invaluable for my future success. Here are those lessons:<\/p>\n

1. Don\u2019t Take Your Job for Granted<\/h3>\n

I got my first real job at 15. I was hired as a dishwasher at Giovanni\u2019s Pizza in Waco, Texas. After a few months, I was given the opportunity to cook pizzas.
\nIt was a part-time job. I usually worked a few evenings after school and then Friday or Saturday night. It wasn\u2019t too demanding, but it gave me some much-needed spending money.
\nAfter working at this job for a little over a year, I was unceremoniously given the boot. I didn\u2019t do anything egregious. I just got sloppy. I was often late to work. I regularly asked my boss to change my work schedule at the last minute.
\nThe problem was that I thought the job was about me. My employer thought it was about the restaurant. In the end, I became more trouble than I was worth, so he canned me.
\nI was shocked, but it was the best thing that could have happened to me. It got my attention, and it was the beginning of my education. After this experience, I never took any job for granted.<\/p>\n

2. Manage Expectations, or Else<\/h3>\n

When I was in business for myself, I agreed to manage an artist\u2019s singing career. I was reluctant, but she was persistent.
\nShe was a B-level artist who was convinced that she could be an A-level talent with the right exposure. My job, as I understood it, was to get her better concert bookings, a book deal, and exploit whatever other opportunities we could create. As she understood it, my job was to make her famous.
\nI knew I was in trouble after the first month. In the first 30 days, I doubled her bookings, came up with a concept for and secured a decent book deal, and got her an appearance on a major national TV show.
\nI was feeling pretty good about our progress. But, she could only find fault. Over dinner, she complained that she still wasn\u2019t famous yet. I pointed out what I had accomplished. She dismissed all of it as \u201clow hanging fruit.\u201d She then pointed out all the things I hadn\u2019t accomplished.
\nI realized I had made a major error in not getting her expectations on the table from the get-go, but it was too late. She fired me, with a fax. It was painful, but, honestly, I felt relief.
\nAfter this experience, I decided to discuss (and document) expectations at the beginning of any new business relationship to avoid later moving of goalposts. I would need to be ultra-clear at the beginning so that we both agreed on what success would look like.
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