After dinner, Matt and Sabina settled onto the couch. Matt brought out a notepad he had bought earlier in the day for this process, following the lead of the other Third Shift Entrepreneurs.
“Okay, I'll start. I love…” Matt tapped his pen. “I love parts of my job. I love new clients and winning new clients. I love talking with someone and understanding where they feel stuck and helping them design a finance strategy to help them achieve their strategic goals…I like…being creative and finding unconventional ways of solving what look like typical challenges – like a merger or an acquisition.”
Sabina interrupted him, “You hate mergers. Two years ago, I barely saw you when you were working through that complex transaction with SmartHome Controls. I feel like you were just grinding it out at all hours and when you did come home you complained about it.”
Matt paused to reflect back. “Okay, that's fair…but I want to think about that. I hated the hours, true. Though, if I'm honest, I probably came home and led with complaints to try and justify the fact that I was never around. The last thing I would want you thinking is that I'm having a blast not spending time with you.”
Sabina looked at him with that skeptical squint he was used to, “So…you complained for my sake? Hmmm….”
Matt continued, “No I'm not saying that…I'm just saying that I think if I'm honest with myself, there were parts of that deal that I loved. I loved the work itself – I got lost in it. It was challenging, lots of personalities involved, the detail of the transaction made it complicated, but at the end of the day it was the most satisfying thing I did that year. Did I love working crazy hours? Not necessarily – but I also know that I poured myself into that because I liked it. It was interesting to me. Some of the personalities I could have done without, but the CFO was awesome and is one of my closer work-friends today.”
“Okay,” Sabina conceded. “So keep going then. What else?”
Matt continued, “I like understanding the people involved and what makes them tick, to design a solution that will make everybody happy. Well, maybe not everybody but most people.”
Matt paused, wrote some notes, and kept thinking out loud, “I love spending time on a budget, actually. Not all the time, but some of the time. I can geek out diving into a spreadsheet and running numbers and doing correlations and analysis that might be buried in the numbers. I also love feeling like I'm in a pursuit – going for something, whether a new client or a new solution. I've actually noticed that when it comes to just servicing an existing client, I get bored, frustrated, and feel stuck. Other people I work with love that. They hate the ambiguity of new clients or complex challenges.”
Sabina was listening. Matt's self-assessment seemed more accurate than she would have thought him capable.
“What else?” he asked himself out loud.
Sabina perked up. “Remember when you first made partner and you took it upon yourself to organize the social outing for the new associates? You loved that. I don't know what all went into that. I just know you talked about it for months.”
“You're right. I love helping people think about their careers and mentoring them along the way. I loved not only planning the social outing, but we did a host of things to make those new associates feel connected to the firm and to each other, which was really fun and different from what we normally do.”
They sat in quiet for a second, both thinking.
“This doesn't sound terribly original at this point, or anything that would give me some future direction. I'm wondering what else?” Matt continued to ask out loud. “I mean, I've dreamed of being my own boss. I've wanted, in my core, to start my own business and be able to move as fast as I can possibly move or the clients want – not slowed down by mediocre performance around me.
“I mean, there are other things I love but I don't think they have anything to do with work, like technology, politics, and video games and outdoor adventures and camping. It's hard to stay active with those things, and part of me thinks those are just lost dreams from college or my youth, but I still dream of going camping more than we do and exploring national parks.”
He looked at Sabina. She knew how much of a passion he held for hiking, exploring parks, camping – anything having to do with being outside, which had been much more a part of their lives when they first started dating. That part of Matt had not showed up in a while, and she sensed it was part of his low-grade mid-life crisis. Being in an office she knew was not part of who Matt was or what made him tick. He was a numbers guy and liked finance, but he was also a soldier at heart and wanted to be outside and in some level working with his hands.
“I mean, I'm sure every former college athlete loves the sport but also knows they will never play again,” Matt continued, as if to preemptively dismiss the idea, “so I'm not sure that things like playing in the dirt or being in nature belong on the list of what is possible, but I'll capture it for now. I don't want to sound like one of those people that you ask what they love, and they just answer, ‘being on a cruise or on a beach with a cocktail' as if that's some insight into a future career. I do love being outside, and you know as well as anybody how I begin to lose my mind a little if I can't get into nature in some form, but I don't know how that translates.”
“There is something there,” Sabina jumped in. “You're not a guy who just sits in an office. Your health, being outside, being physically active has always mattered to you. So has your passion for politics. Don't ignore it.”
Matt listened, and continued, “I think you're right. This actually does matter. If I think about my best days, it almost always involves doing something physical or outdoors. I have no idea how that relates to finance but there's something there.”
Matt and Sabina continued with this conversation for another hour or so, sitting on the couch, finding increasingly specific anecdotes to pull from. Sabina at one point thought about how she appreciated just the novelty of sitting and talking with her husband instead of whatever else they might have been doing, like watching TV. She could see something coming alive in him. She also thought it strange, and was admittedly a bit skeptical, that he shortly would be meeting with another woman named Yisel whom he had just met that morning. The novelty of going out on a weeknight and to this new place was strangely exciting. Even stranger was that he realized the address that Yisel had given him was actually pretty close to his house, though he had never ventured there. He had explained to Sabina that this was part of his research, which she supported, even if she didn't understand how going to see coffee being roasted had anything to do with his professional future.
By the end of the conversation Matt had pages full of notes, and he and Sabina had shared a few good laughs about some of his previous adventures and misadventures alike – all the good memories that informed who he was and what he loved, many of which he had forgotten about or had lain dormant and forgotten in the back of his mind. His Army years. His movement into finance. Some of the things he got right and a lot of the things he got wrong. His adventures outdoors, and his false starts with business ideas that he would passionately pursue for a week and then lose interest. This could be different, he committed to himself. Somehow, this will be different.