Just Because It Wasn’t What We Wanted Doesn’t Mean It Didn’t Happen At The ‘Right Time’

What do we mean by the “right time”?

Maybe this is redundant.

When you don’t get that marketing job at Twitter HQ that you have been dreaming of day and night, what do you tell yourself?

“It’s just not the right time.” Or “It’s not my time.”

It is 100% okay to comfort yourself and justify why things didn’t work out the way you expected them to, but I think it’s time we starting owning it. Instead of deflecting the hurt you are feeling from indirectly being told that you aren’t enough, why don’t we own those reasons instead?

Think about it—it was the right time for you to get turned away. It was your turn to be rejected. You get the chance to really feel what it is like to not be wanted. To understand what it means for someone to be more qualified than you are. To absorb the fact that you aren’t all that and a bag of chips like you thought you were. It really is the right time because you’re going to remember these feelings in the future. When you take a chance again on another dream job, these raw feelings that you get to experience are gonna make you study harder, work harder, and dream bigger. It was the right time for you to feel this.

And you know what else? It was someone else’s time to be the most qualified person in the pool. It was someone else’s turn to be wanted. Just because it wasn’t yours doesn’t make it any less right for happening.

You didn’t get that job at Twitter HQ because you didn’t have enough work experience. It was the “right time” for you to accept that. You didn’t get that job because you don’t pay enough attention to detail, but you think you do, and it was about time you realized that. It really was the right time, it just wasn’t what you were expecting.

We constantly define the “right time” as the moment things work out the way we want them to or how we envisioned them. The “right time” supposedly means that is when we get what we wished for—what we dreamt of. Except that’s just one version of it.

Everything that is happening to you, me, and everyone else is already happening at the “right time.” I didn’t get that job in San Francisco last year because I needed that rejection. I needed to not get that job because I had more to learn at the job I already had. It was the “right time” for me to be turned down. It’s not that it wasn’t the right time for me to work in San Francisco, but it was the right time for me to keep learning where I was.

Sounds redundant, right?

It truly is a matter of perspective. Everything happens the way it is supposed to, but not because of some divine force or the moon being in retrograde. Everything is happening the way it is supposed to because that is how we are setting things up.

I worked in retail after college instead of taking on an internship or hopping into recruiting like everyone else from my class. I set myself up for delaying my chance at getting a corporate job because I delayed getting the type of work experience I needed to say that I was ready for a corporate job. But the way I see it, it was the right time for me to work in retail. Those two years of working in retail after college solidified my desire to continue working in the fashion industry. Working in retail after college set me up for pursuing a real career in fashion, and here I am doing just that. Now I get to have that corporate job for a fashion company. I picked a good time to go back to retail, right?

We say that it isn’t the right time when things do not happen, and that it must be the right time when certain things do happen. But the right time can mean either—it can even mean both.