Good things go bad

There’s no good time to eat an avocado.

Rather, the right time to eat an avocado is a one-hour window in the middle of the night. Every second after that is a developing missed opportunity.

Everything good goes bad.

One minute, life is soft, sweet, and savory. The next minute, gross avocado. Once a good thing goes bad, we try hard to keep it. We remove the brown, add the salt, and dump in the lime. Because it was — once — all that we waited for it to be.

This happened to me at my last job. In the beginning, it was an incredible blessing. It was rotten by year three. And I stayed for 8. Because “Wasn’t this what I wanted? Wasn’t it once great? If I waited this long for it to ripen, is it too rotten to enjoy now?”

I’ve learned the hard way that jobs aren’t commitments. They’re temporary partnerships — momentary alignments. They ripen; then they rot. And there’s no prize for stomaching rotten ones.

I’m a naturally committed person. So this hurts to admit. But it also gives me the power to trust myself more and ask what I’m looking for — to eat as many ripe avocados as I can before I die.

Is the work you’re doing now ripe or rotten?

🥑 chan