career advice up in here?

One thing not being addressed here that I have struggled with:

If you stay where you are, will it allow you to grow professionally? At times, comfort can be a bad thing that way. Do you have an environment where you can continue to grow as a sports journalist or has the, to borrow a sports term, "player development" system of your current shop reached its limit with you?

I've been at the same paper now for double-digit years and I struggle with that question sometimes. Would a move help me grow?

 

My girlfriend (now wife) and I made the long-distance thing work, so don't discount the new gig as a death sentence for your relationship.
It sounds like an opportunity that I wouldn't pass up.

 

wow i really appreciate all the feedback....great points on both sides. some of it i had considered, plenty of it i hadn't.

as for the girl, i'm not shopping for engagement rings but she's much more than just some girl i hang out with. a few people brought up the point about growth, and thats a big concern...i dont really feel like im learning anything or growing here. it's just there's a comfort zone. i guess im trying to figure out if the comfort zone is due to really liking my current situation, or there just being hardly any stresses.

anyway, thanks again for the replies.

 

Go for it, dude. If the relationship is meant to work, it'll survive a little distance.

 

i downsized in a hard way to live in an area i love, and where i want the heartbreakers to call home while growing up.

i only "kinda" regretted it once since then, but it was a fleeting moment.

i'm happy and my family is happy every day. in the end, that's all that matters.

 

Sometimes people don't start examining all the realities until the offer is in hand. And why would you? Making a decision to take a job or to not take a job before you've interviewed seems a bit silly to me.

I think the "money" graf is here:

The answer: Yes. Being comfortable and happy is the most important thing.

 

Sometimes the things you say drive me batshit, Tom. Then you come up with something like this, something that is more "right" than 99.997 percent of every post ever made to this board.

Everybody needs to read that last line, print it and paste it to that monitor, do whatever you have to do to understand it: being happy and having a happy family is all that matters. How you find that happiness is your business. But if you don't put the effort into finding the answer to that question of what makes you happy, you are doing a disservice to yourself and to everyone around you.

 

Part of having that, however, is being able to send that happy family to college some day at somewhere other than the local commuter satellite campus, and also being able to spend your retirement years with your happy wife in relative comfort, without working at Wal-Mart until you're 85 just to buy groceries.

Money is not evil.

 

No, Waylon, no it's not. But if he's comfortable and happy now, I'm guessing the money is serving its current purpose. And if he were to leave, chasing money and prestige...well, that doesn't help you sleep at night and it doesn't make you happy. Trust me.

It's finding a balance.

 

For sure. I just think too often on this board we slip into this false dichotomy that making good money = unhappy and struggling to make ends meet = happy, and I thought I could start to see that happening again here.

I'm very, very, very wary of newspapers or any employer taking advantage of my "comfort" and "happiness" to justify not paying me what I'm worth. Very wary.

 

Oh, absolutely. I won't argue that at all.

But don't assume that's the situation here either.

 

One of the key phrases of the first post in this thread was that he was making decent money where he is now. If he were struggling to make ends meet, different story. I'd tell him to move on and move up. But if he's making decent money and he's happy, he'd have to have a compelling argument to leave. Frankly, I don't see that.