Turn the Page – A New (York) Chapter

Posted: August 26th, 2016 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Today is the last day of my unintentional summer vacation. Admittedly I thought I’d have spent this time writing a lot more, but I’m here now, so let’s get into it, eh?

Some things hardly change

As I’m writing this post, I’m sitting in an indie coffee shop.  This shop makes a good almond milk latte and plays deep cuts of underground hip-hop.  Even with all the options around me, I keep coming back to this place just as much for the coffee they make as for the location that serves as both a good space and a good launching pad for pedestrian exploration.

Some things change a f*ck ton

Oh yeah, this coffee shop is in Manhattan’s West Village, just a few blocks from our apartment in Chelsea.

And Monday I start the first “new job” I’ve had since Dec 1999.

What the what ?!

How did we get to this

I told my old boss years ago that he didn’t have to worry about me leaving the company so much as worry about me not wanting to live in Phoenix my whole life.  This isn’t an attempt to trash Phoenix, there are a lot of great things about the city, especially if you live in Central Phoenix and not a suburb. Nonetheless, once I got my passport in 2010 and Anie exposed me to the world of travel, at some level I always knew that we would live in another place.

Between completing my degree at W.P. Carey School of Business, committing to follow my career goals even if it meant leaving my employer, and a fantastic offer from Anie’s company, it was the perfect storm of opportunity and “if not now, when?” that led us to NYC just before the 4th of July.

So we decided to move, now what?

I’m sure that any of you who’ve made such big leaps would agree.  It felt like we were working towards a goal(s) for so long, and then everything started triggering at once and the actual transition was an intense, whirlwind experience. I’ll probably explore it in more depth when I have more separation from it, but in the space of just a few weeks we had to:

  • Decide between a handful of cities to move to
  • Figure out what to do with all our stuff*
  • Fly out and find an apartment in NYC
  • Say all our good-byes to friends, relatives and co-workers
  • Wrap-up our PHX jobs, including me giving notice and trying to help find my replacement
  • Actually get ourselves, our dog and our stuff across the country

Thankfully for that last one we had the massive help of my brother for the 3,000 mile drive; teachers getting summers off FTW!

Oh yeah, while all this was happening I still had two accelerated five-week courses at ASU to finish the last few credits I needed, so every day was split between work, school work, apartment hunting, packing, move preparations, good-bye functions and lots of purging.

Over the last ~7 weeks we’ve gotten pretty well settled in.  Bought all the furniture, got the art hung up on our walls**, and even Dewey is getting used to being a city dog again.

More to come

In my naivety, I thought that as soon as I became a free agent on the open market, I’d have my choice of opportunities and all the great industry thought leaders would be fighting to recruit me.  Ha ha!

In the end, I did have my choice of some great offers, but it took a few deliberate steps and a bit more time than I would have liked. I actually think that discussing that process can be helpful as a post(s) of it’s own, so I’ll hopefully get those penned here in the next couple of weeks.  Needless to say, there’s no lack of opportunities here in New York for digital marketing and it would be great if sharing the lessons I learned can help someone else be less discouraged and stay hungry to find the right place, not the first place.

Cheers,

Ryan

————

* We thought we were living a minimalist style but man did we have so much stuff to sell, donate or give away.  Shifting from a 1500 square foot house to an apartment that’s ~1/5th that size and realizing that moving stuff costs almost as much as buying all new at the other end was a rough experience even for someone who’s spent 16 years working for “the moving experts”.  Too much stuff!

**At our last home in Phoenix it was probably about a year before we got all the walls covered, and some stuff never went up.


2 Comments on “Turn the Page – A New (York) Chapter”

  1. 1 Ophelie said at 6:07 pm on August 27th, 2016:

    w00t! Congrats on the move! NYC is so exciting, can’t imagine what it must be like to live there.
    Cheers to new adventures!

  2. 2 What This Blog is About - Revised - Relevant Wit said at 11:16 am on September 21st, 2016:

    […] would have made the cut, but honestly, with my recent move to New York, I’m not sure how viable that is right […]