What to Do When Your Career Changes Direction

His career started out poorly, to put it mildly.

He went to law school in upstate New York at a law school no one I know ever heard of. He worked a few years at a small law firm in Albany, New York, and when that did not go particularly well, he moved to a small town in Wisconsin to practice. He practiced there for two years when his office building, containing his entire practice, burned down.

He moved to California to work in a retail store with some of his brothers but returned to Albany when that did not work out. He went back to California a couple of years after that.

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When he returned to California, he and his brothers finally got into a business that worked … after four failures.

But even with his business success, his life continued to be challenged, and this time by a personal tragedy. His only child died from typhoid fever as a young teenager.

The name of this life-buffeted lawyer, whose career knew nothing but disappointment after disappointment for many years, is Leland Stanford, co-founder (with his wife) of Stanford University.

No matter how you start out, or no matter what change in course your career may take, resolve to go on well and end well.

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. You can find him and his writing on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.