This is the scary crisis. It happens before you reach that first career capstone and, in Doom Loop language, it means that in your job you have moved to the top of the Doom Loop and are starting to move from Q2 to Q3.

This is dangerous! Your feelings of frustration and boredom can cause you to make ill-advised career moves. You might listen to an executive recruiter who is offering the same sort of job with a different company and at a much higher salary. BE CAREFUL – this is where you might blur your skill mosaic! So think twice before you make such a move. If you do so, you might find a great deal of happiness at first – being in Q2 in the new organization – but after about four months, you will be right back in Q3 but this time at a higher level of compensation and a skill mosaic that is starting to blur.

As an executive recruiter, I was always Doom Looping individuals without their knowledge to see exactly where they were on the curve. Knowing this, it was rather easy to devise strategies to entice them to make a move – but I never intentionally moved someone who was in Q3 in one organization to virtually the same job in another organization. This would have been a prescription for disaster and totally unprofessional on my part.