Exit options...

There are two things anyone can make out of the card game of FLASH:
a) The earlier you EXIT the lesser is the damage to your wallet!
b) More often than not, its not the one with the "highest" combination of cards that wins, rather it's the last man standing or in simpler words, the one who decides NOT to quit.

Allright...enough about cards.

There is something that bothers me whenever I talk to any of my peers about career/jobs and stuff. It's the idea of EXIT OPTIONS. There always always always (this was not a typo) HAVE to be excellent exit options of the next career move. In a nutshell, we are talking about the "Plan - B" even before a day at the new job. To put it more bluntly, the WAY OUT is an important criteria for deciding whether to get in or not in the fist place!

A phone call from an old friend the other day left me slightly confused. She had just started seeing a guy and really excited about the whole thing. The real good part, in her words, was the fact that they have already decided to not make it ugly if down the line things don't go the desired way. This was a good thing she said, as so many people around today are in such messed up relationships struggling to keep things together for no apparent reason. So as per her, in her new relationship there was not "extra pressure" to make this work at any and every cost, after all they had already talked about the EXIT OPTIONS. "Awesome ain't it?", she exclaimed at the end of the conversation. "Yeah...really...", was all I could muster...

What has really got me confused is the fact that all this while I was under the impression that the true fun of the thing lies in getting through rough the patches together and somewhere down the line, the whole experience of sticking through it all gets people closer. Similarly, I wonder why most of us (me included) aspire to do it all...I mean the "whole works" that we learned at our colleges in our first year at our jobs! When it's clearly proven through empirical studies that 6/10 MBA grads switch jobs within the first 11 months of their joining! How on earth do you expect the company to entrust the employee with the kind of responsibility we so often dream of in the first few months? Fact is...I myself fall prey to such thoughts quite often...

Of course, there are many cases when throwing in the towel is the only sensible thing to do. After all, who would want to live with an abusive husband? But somehow I am getting the feel that QUITTING is beginning to be the "in thing" these days. Quitting on anything and any person seems to be the norm rather than to toil through the rut and earn the pot of gold at the end of rainbow. This ain't easy though...No way! But I faintly remember the number of times I was scolded, at times "fixed" by my folks for something wrong that I'd do no matter how much they tried to correct me... till one day when I stopped doing that again... Would have been easy for them to give up too I guess but they didn't. Same for many of my friends who've all this while put up with me on my bad days, teachers who could have let me be another failure of the education system...and so on...

The point is QUITTING was never difficult. But my old fashioned self still believes I'd hang on a little bit longer, just may be the storm eases out later. Life is not a card game. Packing up your hand early to cut the losses isn't the wisest move always. The stakes are high, no doubt about that but it's sometimes more worthy to loose a well-fought battle then to bail out at the first sign of rough weather...