I turned down a great job offer...

A few months ago, my former co-worker and friend Nathan messaged me with a job offer.

"Hey Aaron, I remember you had some success with doing online retail and I was wondering if you'd be interested in a similar position at a bigger company. Better pay, bigger opportunities."

I didn't even have to think twice about this offer.

"Hey, thanks but I don't really want to go back to a sales-related job."

Yeah, I turned that job down to stay at YP as a Data Quality Analyst as a contractor with minimum benefits. Does that beg the question, "What in the world were you thinking?" I think it does. And if I explain myself, I'm sure you'd understand my position (although you might not agree with the decision.)

Sales jobs are attractive because incentives such as commissions both motivate and enrich the experience. I mean, so what if a potential client yells at you? As long as they're buying your product, you're getting the better of them, right? Just push on, carry on, make money and enjoy your life. Good sales people are thick-skinned and opportunistic in the best sense of the word, and if you who are reading this fit in this category, you're an asset to whatever field you're working in.

But, then again, there is a downside to such an aggressive, number-based career. Anxiety.

For me, the worry that I carried with myself throughout my rather successful sales endeavor was that my success can be measured by a collection of numbers on a piece of paper. The aggregate sum total of all my efforts, which cannot be quantified, would inevitably be whittled down to a set of numbers. Last month, up 150% in sales. This month, down 40% in sales. Profit margin increasing. Decreasing. Increasing. Decreasing. Like the hands on a clock, ticking along.

There's something about number-based jobs that gives me the chills. Now, of course, I'm not saying that job performance should not matter, nor am I saying that job performance should not be quantified for evaluation. I'm just saying that as an employee, becoming a set of numbers on a sheet of paper during a performance review is rather terrifying. And while I am not a generally anxious person, I get nervous at the thought of someone seeing me as under-performing at work and dismissing my employment based on those numbers.

Work is very often seen as a fruitless endeavor. I think it only becomes fruitless when you begin to marginalize the working experience and focus only on a numerical success. As we all know, money comes and goes.

And I believe performance is more than numbers.

Quite an oxymoron, I know. Now as a general manager of a company, I understand that I need to see the numbers of a company to see its fiscal performance (and if you're not a NPO, does anything else matter?). Yet as an employee of a company I would like other important factors, such as my enthusiasm, creativity and personality, being weighed when I'm evaluated as an employee.

I wonder, though, if personality and creativity can ever thrive alongside fiscal success. I hope it can, and I'd like to see that happen - somewhere down the line, inside a multi-million, multi-billion dollar company. And if it does happen, I just might take up sales again. <>