Simon. My Interesting Colleague

 Being fired is not as bad as you might think.

At the time, however, it shook my entire system. It took me nearly three years to understand what had really happened, what it meant and what I was supposed to learn from it.

My colleague Simon was an interesting character. We had both studied at Macquarie Business School, and we both had an interest in finance. That was probably where the similarities ended.

Simon was the kind of person who looked as though he would go places in Sydney. Most people here could relate to him, or at least understand him. He was athletic, tall, physically imposing and carried a natural sense of authority.

Standing next to him, I looked like a tiny mushroom.

In fact, standing next to most of the other associates, I stood out like a sore thumb. One of them even assumed I was a high-school intern.

I entered that year intending to support Simon as much as I could. Simon, I suspect, entered it intending to make as much money as he possibly could.

Unfortunately, Lady Luck was not on our side. Quite literally.

Before long, we found ourselves looking closely at another very interesting company. When Simon first told me about it, I wondered why. But in that environment, nobody really asked why. You were given the work, and you did it.

I did not realise what I had stumbled into.

When I eventually lost that job, I kept asking myself the same question: why?

I believed the work was part of my purpose. I had committed myself to it. I wanted to build a career, prove myself and become someone within that world. So when it was taken away, I could not understand it.

Why would God take away something I believed I was meant to do?

What was I supposed to do next?

For a long time, I saw the dismissal only as a loss. I thought Simon had taken something away from me. I did not yet understand that, without knowing it, he had also given me one of the greatest blessings of my life.

The blessing was this: you can do what you love without surrendering your identity to a particular company.

Your purpose does not have to arrive in the form of a job title, a salary, a prestigious office or the approval of an employer.

Why?

Because companies are not permanent. It does not matter whether the name above the door is Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan or whatever institution comes next. Leadership changes. Priorities change. People make questionable decisions. Entire workplaces can be built around systems that no longer reflect your values—or even the world outside them.

You have seen how these systems operate. You know what they feel like from the inside. You know where they fail, and you may even know how they could be improved.

So why remain there, mourning something that has already become a dinosaur?

A company can give you an opportunity, but it cannot give you your purpose. It can employ your skills, but it does not own them. It can remove your position, but it cannot remove the part of you that made the work meaningful in the first place.

Being fired forced me to separate what I loved from where I happened to be doing it.

That distinction took me three years to understand.

But once I understood it, losing the job no longer looked like the end of my path.

It looked like the moment I was forced to create one of my own. Because God is always present in our life.