The Year I Stopped Being Good at My Job
For years the needle was pinned at a hundred. Then it wasn't.
Nobody tells you the moment it starts. You just look up one day and realize it already has.
For me, it started with a number. Not a stat, not anything a front office would track. Something I made up in my own head: the Joy Gauge. How much of me still wanted to be there. For years the needle was pinned at a hundred, easy. I'd taken the leap, walked a long road, and landed the job people spend entire careers chasing. I wasn't just working in baseball. I was living the thing I'd wanted since I was a kid.
Then it started dropping. Not from anything going wrong. From everything going right, somewhere else.
I became somebody's husband. Then somebody's father. And the things I wanted started rearranging themselves without asking my permission first. The person walking into that ballpark every morning wasn't quite the same person who'd taken the job. He just hadn't updated the paperwork yet.
Baseball doesn't have a setting for that. There was no half-in, no half-out. No work-life balance, because there was no "life" side of the ledger built into the job. No off-season, not really. You were all-in, all the time, or the org found someone who would be. I'd been all-in for years without noticing it cost anything, because for years it hadn't. It had only given.
Then the Joy Gauge dropped below a hundred, and I started asking a question I hadn't asked before. Not "am I good at this?" I was good at it. The question was quieter. Do I still want to be the person this job needs me to be?
That question is the beginning of the end. Not because the answer is always no. Because once you're asking it, "all-in" is already gone, whether you've said it out loud yet or not.
Most people don't leave in the moment they walk out the door. They leave the moment the gauge first drops and they decide not to look at it too closely. I did that too, for a while. Told myself it would climb back. Told myself it was a rough month that would pass like the other rough months had.
It didn't climb back. It's not a mood. It's data.
You have a gauge like that right now, whether you've named it or not. If it's been dropping for a while, the question isn't whether you can push through. You already know you can. You've been proving it for years.
The question is whether you still want to.