Bob Brody
Bob Brody

Forty-four years ago, you left a solid magazine job to plunge full-time into freelance writing. You were 29 years old and therefore knew everything about working for a living anyone could ever possibly know.

But stepping out on your own turned out to be a mistake. It was simply too soon.

Thirty-eight years later, at age 67, you once again went into business for yourself, only now as a public relations consultant. But now you were ready.

What happened between 1981 and 2019?

You held jobs, that’s what. Serious jobs. Hard jobs. Jobs that tried you and tested you and taxed you to the max. Jobs with big clients and big budgets in big offices in big buildings.

The magazine job mentioned at the outset? The easiest you would ever have. That was the problem. It was too easy. Your boss loved every word you produced. He unwittingly spoiled you.

You left that job after four years unprepared to operate independently. You suffered from an acute case of unrealistic expectations. You broke into full0time freelance writing feeling cocky beyond reason.

You still lacked an essential ingredient for a successful career, namely an operative work ethic. The freedom to run your own shop was more than you could handle. You slept late. You missed deadlines. You played too much afternoon pick-up basketball. You even had the gall and naivete to print up a business card that actually stipulated “No phone calls before 12 p.m.” because you preferred to write until lunch uninterrupted.

No kidding.

You lasted on your own for 10 years, getting just so far but never anywhere near far enough.

But then you resumed gainful employment. And for the next 28 years you held jobs at public relations firms, first a small one, then a medium-sized one, and finally graduated to 21 years at global PR corporations.

Smart move. Those jobs taught you what you needed to learn. About collaborating with colleagues. About making deadlines. About delivering client service beyond anything promised.

You learned so much – about tracking and budgeting your time, heeding the counsel of your savvier seniors, navigating 2,000-employee organization and keeping yourself profitable.

You learned to be disciplined, organized, committed. To give and take, ideally to give at least as much as you took and preferably more. To be a team player but also remain every inch an individual.

As you soon realized, nobody ever gets better at anything without conflict and failure. And you had plenty of both across those decades. You were denied raises and promotions and laid off twice. But every ordeal you underwent qualified as education. You paid close attention to where you went right and also where you went wrong. And in the end you scored those raises and promotions.

Those jobs – you say this at risk of losing your poetic license – turned you into tempered steel, a soldier trained for combat. Along the line, you picked up possibly the most valuable lesson of all. How to be a professional.

A professional is someone reliable, conscientious, businesslike, responsible, respectful, trustworthy. You do what you say you’re going to do. The best definition of a professional you ever heard was “someone with the ability to work well even on a bad day.”

The upshot is that your second time around as a solo practitioner has turned out well. Every lesson you absorbed from all your jobs you still apply today. Without those jobs you never would have gotten anywhere.

The other day you celebrated your sixth anniversary as a PR consultant. You could congratulate yourself and rhapsodize about it and thank the 4,592 people who played roles throughout your career as drill sergeants, mentors and cheerleaders.

But no. Instead, you’ll just say this. You’re 73 now, and you’re still at it, still in the game, still getting a rush from the action.

But you’ve never forgotten, or forgiven yourself, for going out on your own back in 981 too soon. You should have kept your job for another few years. It would have stiffened your spine for the competition that lay ahead.

So beware the premature exit strategy.

It’s hardly original to say that timing is everything. But there, you’ve said it anyway. So let’s say it again: timing is everything.

How will you know the time is right to take the leap? Believe me, if you’re lucky, you most likely will. But first, confer with those who know the landscape better than you. Study the marketplace. Deliberate over your decision at length. Then, as if you’re about to go bungee jumping, follow your best instincts.

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Bob Brody, a public relations consultant, served as a media strategist and editorial specialist at Weber Shandwick, Ogilvy Public Relations and Howard J. Rubenstein Associates. He is the author of the memoir "Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age," and has contributeed essays to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times, among many other publications.