Best Advice: Find a Place Where You Can Commit

In this series, professionals share the words of wisdom that made all the difference in their lives. Follow the stories here and write your own (please include the hashtag #BestAdvice in the body of your post).

To be honest, I don’t remember receiving that much advice over the course of my 30-year business career. Maybe I just wasn’t listening! But I distinctly remember a dinner conversation with Richard Fain in 1987 as my nine-month consulting/internship tenure with his shipping company Gotaas-Larsen was coming to an end in London and I was preparing to pursue an MBA at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France.

Richard’s message was clear and succinct: stop jumping around and find a place to which you can commit. I appeared to be acting as an ahead-of-my-time Millennial, having moved in about two years from a law firm in New York to a consulting gig with a law firm in Philadelphia to the shipping company in London and (imminently) to business school in France. Actually, my actions weren’t an exercise in randomness. I was a lawyer and I was committed to become “the client,” a transition that would eventually take 3.5 years.

Nevertheless, Richard’s emphasis was well-placed and stayed in my mind throughout business school and into the career placement process. It was accentuated when he offered me a full-time job with Royal Caribbean in Miami in the spring of 1988 — Gotaas-Larsen was an owner of Royal Caribbean — which I accepted. At the time, his message as I digested it related to the optics of jumping from place to place to place, even if the moves were all in furtherance of an explicit goal. I am reminded of that message every time I review a resume with a concerningly high number of career moves. Sure, the candidate always has a story for why he or she made a move every two years for two decades. And I don’t expect anyone to be at one place for 27 years (almost 10,000 days!) as I have been. But it does raise a question mark in the interviewer’s mind — at least in my mind — that is hard to eliminate.

Over time, however, I have come to appreciate the advice differently. I’m not as concerned with how an external observer might feel about how my bio looks. Instead, I’m more conscious of what I have gained as a result of being with one company for so long. Richard may have meant this as a part of his advice as well, as he had been with Gotaas-Larsen for about 10 years as of the time of our dinner. But neither he nor I could possibly have appreciated what it could mean to be a part of Royal Caribbean for as long as we both have now been at RCL.

First and foremost is the relationship with our colleagues at headquarters and in the field. There is an unspoken bond (well, unspoken except when we are recognizing 20-, 25- and 30-year service awards) that derives from what we have built together and the reality that we have given the length and depth of our careers to RCL. In our case, it is undoubtedly heightened by the knowledge that we weren’t just turning out widgets — with the vital assistance of the phenomenal men and women who serve on our ships, we were delivering millions of vacations that often provided the best memories in the lives of couples and families.

It is further accentuated by the projects we worked on together, the crises we handled, the new ships we celebrated and the global expansion we crafted. The stories are our stories, from the giants of the early years of the company who were finishing their careers as we were starting ours, to the trials and tribulations of the real Millennials who are trying to figure out if RCL can be for them something like it has been for me and my contemporaries.