Have you ever heard the saying: ‘If you want something done, give it to busy people’ ? It’s so true. Let me explain.

My last quarter of 2019 took an unexpected turn when Samsung decided to dismantle the CPU team in Austin – a team I had helped built, and a job I had loved for the last nine years.

This forced change set forth an avalanche of activity, that looking back now looks absolutely stunning. Loving my job at Samsung I had serious spouts of grief about the change. I loved the work, I loved the people and I loved the place. It was almost too perfect. But nothing lasts forever. Against my will this was going to change. From one day to the next my services at the office were no longer required. The grieving cycle set in: disbelief, anger, depression, bargaining, acceptance.

A buddhist would remind you now that you’re clearly holding on too tight and are identifying way too much with your ego. – True. What can I do?

But somewhere in the stages of disbelief and anger and beginnings of an unhealthy lifestyle I started to reframe the problem. Having been frustrated by not been provided a sabbatical as at Samsung, a year ago I had made a list what I would do if I quit or took unpaid time off from work. Having lost my dad a year earlier has given me perspective and the insight that work is just one dimension of our lives we need to be happy with, if an important one.

On that list were things like: Travel to South America, learn to fly helicopters, buy and fixup a junker car, get my instrument rating, fly my airplane through the entire United States, start an online business, build an airplane, fly gliders in Europe, amongst others (you see a pattern with flying here, don’t you?).

Samsung treated us well and we were given economic security while finding new jobs, but it was far from clear if there would be enough jobs in town for all of the high powered talent our team employed – we’re talking hundreds of highly qualified and equally highly paid engineers.

As it turns out there were. Our team had gained a good reputation in the industry for being able to create competitive high performance CPUs and cranking out a new one successfully seven years in a row. But I had switched into management two years earlier and I wasn’t so sure if an independent 3rd party would take me on – managers are often grown from within an organization.

But within four weeks I had four offers in town all interesting in their own way. The story for how I ended up where I did is left for another future blog post.

With the uncertainty gone I was still upset about losing the existing job that I had grown into and loved so much.

Then MrsM started the discussion of creating more space in the house. We ended up buying a new house and building a long wanted new swimming pool. It was a conscious choice to throw that change into the mix in addition to all the job uncertainty we both experienced (she was also at Samsung and equally affected – she, too, found a job she wanted within a month). But we felt we could handle the house purchase and as a team we managed through this process extremely well – our relationship benefited from managing this crisis together and we even enjoyed the process despite all the negotiating and documentation with the banks for the loan applications.

But then I switched into ‘sabbatical mode’. I picked the task of getting my instrument rating before starting on the new job 2 months later. So I went to work and flew every day for multiple hours and studied in the afternoon and evenings. Rinse, wash, repeat. 21days and 40hours of flight time later, I pulled in the check-ride by three days and passed. I was floored. Absolutely ecstatic! I finally held the privilege I had coveted for the last 30 years!

And that was it. No more grief. No more regrets. Just absolute happiness. I had experienced ‘flow’ the positive stress that you experience when you immerse yourself into a task and get lost in it. It absolutely worked. Why? Because I had found something I deeply cared about. (Hint: write down right now, while you’re balanced in your life what you would do if you had time and money and no constraints).

When I started on my new job in December, I again was immediately getting so involved into my new role that after the first week it felt like I had been there already for half a year.

So change, while stressful can be good. We need to embrace it, because the only thing that is certain is change. There’s no alternative.