Mike Lewis - When to Jump: If the Job You Have Isnt the Life You Want

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For Corey Griffin, a legend to us all

The most important jump of my life happened nearly a century before I was born.

My great-grandparents, Sadie and Gimpel, grew up not too far from each other, in different villages in what is now southern Ukraine. In the early 1900s, they and their families packed their bags and moved to a place on the other side of the world where Jews could live free from persecutionNew York City. There, Sadie and Gimpel found the security and opportunity they hoped for. They also found each other. They met, married, and settled into a walk-up apartment in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, sharing a bathroom with several other families on the floor.

They worked hard to build a good life for themselves. Gimpel was a street vendor, pushing a cart to sell his wares. Sadie gave birth to eight children: three girls, five boys. One of those boys was my grandfather Emanuel, whom everyone called Manny. In his twenties, Manny worked in the post office while going to City College at night. Later, he sold insurance. I used to ask him what life was like in that crowded apartment and how in the world they managed with just one bathroom. Hed say in his raspy voice, You just waited your turn.

Eventually, I realized how ironic that answer was. Im likely alive today because Sadie and Gimpel didnt wait their turn. Had they not left Europe, my family almost certainly would have died in the Holocaust. Instead, my great-grandparents found the courage to build a new life in a new land. They jumped.

Flash forward to the year 2005, when I met my second cousin Mike for the first time. He was in eleventh grade. I was recently married and working at Google. I loved Mike right awayhe was funny and smart and way more thoughtful than I was as a teenager. In our first meeting, we sat down to figure out exactly how we are related. It turns out his grandmother Frieda was Emanuels sister. They grew up together in that one-bedroom apartmentwaiting their turn together. I wonder if they ever imagined that decades later, her grandson and his granddaughter would be sitting at a table in California, figuring out their family tree.

Since then, Ive seen Mike graduate from high school and college and start his career. Ive seen him take the audacious jump into becoming a professional squash player and saw how much joy that brought him. Ive seen him study how and why people jump and the lessons we can all learn about courage, resilience, and leading fulfilling lives. And Ive seen him take those lessons and put them into this bookone that I know will guide others as they face big decisions.

Like Mike, this book is smart, friendly, and ready to help people make a jump of their own. He explains the simple framework that many successful jumpers have followed and offers insights not just from his own experience but from people of many ages and backgrounds with dreams of all kinds. Some of their jumps led to small but meaningful changes in their lives. Others altered their futures in enormous ways. Not one of them regrets having jumped.

The question Ive come back to again and again in my life is, What would I do if I wasnt afraid? That question gave me the push I needed to make big jumps: from government to the tech sector, from Google to a company called Facebook run by a twenty-three-year-old with a vision of connecting the world. Each time, some people I really trusted told me I was making a mistake. Each time, they might have been right. But my heart told me otherwise. I wanted to jump. And Ive never looked back.

We all face moments in our lives when we have to decide: To jump or not to jump? That might mean leaving a familiar field to pursue a passion project or taking on a new responsibility at work. It might mean starting a new relationship or saying good-bye to one thats reached its end. It might be as small as embracing a new hobby or as big as moving to a new country. You never know exactly where those jumps will take you. They can be scary, and they dont always work out for the best. But theyre how we pursue our dreams. They can make us stronger, more resilient, just plain more interesting, and help us have more impact in the world. They let us imagine things not as they are but how they should beand then push us to do the hard work to make that change happen.

There are ways we can make those jumps more likely to lead somewhere great. This book tells you how.

Who knows? Maybe one day your great-grandchildren will talk about how that jump you made all those years ago changed everything for themjust like our great-grandparents changed everything for Mike and me.

SCOTT WAS MY cousins friend before he was my friend. We had met during a party at my cousins house and had grown close through coffee dates every so often, like the one just now ending on a neatly groomed sidewalk in downtown Palo Alto. It was a late February afternoon.

Midforties, tall, with a boyish smile and sharp blue eyes, Scott was soft spoken and a good listener, and he had a gift for making time spent with him feel important. With me, he played the thoughtful mentor, loyal older brother, and trusted confidanta sounding board for the dreamer, the kid. As we parted that afternoon, I wasnt quite ready to let him vanish into the dusk. After taking a couple of steps in the direction of my car, I turned around.

Is this crazy? I asked. I was squeezing the stained coffee cup lid in my left palm. The culmination of several years of fantasizing and planning was a few hours away, and I was fishing for a final bit of reassurance.

Scott had started his hustle toward home, his lanky frame hunched over his phone, checking back in to his own work and life. Our time together had run a bit long, and for Scott, there were business calls to return and kids to pick up from school. But he slowed his step and gently returned his attention to me. The sun had disappeared behind us. New customers scurried into the coffee shop.

What you have in mind is absolutely crazy, he said, quietly pushing his phone back into his jean pocket. But theres a difference between crazy and stupid.

* * *

Two years earlier, in an office toward the top of a pristine glass tower, above the bustling heart of Boston, I sat at my desk and stared at the wall. Taped to the top edge of my computer screen, printed in a size 50 font on leftover printer paper, was a quote from a commencement speech that Amazons founder and CEO Jeff Bezos had made to graduating Princeton students in 2010: When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.

What would I want my story to look like?

I knew my answerI wanted to become a professional squash playerbut I didnt know how to make that life happen.

Twenty-three years old, the youngest of six kids, born in New York City, raised in Nashville, Tennessee, and then in the beach town of Santa Barbara, California, I was the only child to live in Boston. A year out of college, I was ready to put down roots in Massachusetts. Or that was the plan, anyway.