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Dear Quota Team, 
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I've been in sales since I got out of college (about 11 years) and for the last four, I’ve been an AE at a large telecom company. Generally, I do pretty well. I usually hit my quota and stay off my manager’s radar, but I’m definitely not a top performer or anything. That being said, I make a great income, and never have to worry about money which is great. My problem is that I have such big swings in my attitude and how I feel about the job. Sometimes, I feel great about what I do and believe that I made the right career decision, but then other times, I get so low and start thinking that the job is pointless and I wonder what I’m even doing with my life. I even have this dream of resigning and just taking off to travel in South America or Europe for a few years or going back to school to learn about something I’m actually interested in like history, but my practical side keeps me from quitting. Is this normal or do I just not belong in sales? What do you think I should do? 
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Unsure in New Hampshire 
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Dear Unsure, 
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It’s perfectly normal to have ups and downs while working in sales. It’s a demanding profession, and since it’s performance-based, everyone will have good days and bad days, good months and bad months. If you didn’t have some swings in how you felt, then you wouldn’t be human -- you can’t appreciate the good things in life if you don’t experience the bad things too. 
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Where your question gets a bit more complicated is when you talk about getting so low that you start to wonder what you’re doing with your life, and that’s a point you definitely need to address. What you need to figure out is whether this is about the job, or about you, because there’s a not-so-small chance that you could leave sales altogether and still feel like this. If that’s the case, then quitting would only leave you jobless, and possibly feeling worse than you feel now. 
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That being said, if you can’t stop thinking about leaving your job to travel the world or go back to school, and you can make it work financially, then give it a shot. That way, you won’t have to live with the regret of not pursuing your dreams. But keep in mind that many salespeople have been where you are now, and quite a few of them ended up rejoining the sales world after trying their hand at something else. It’s a lucrative, fast-paced profession, and it can give us opportunities we couldn’t get elsewhere. But you might not be able to truly appreciate it until you take a step back and look at the big picture, and that’s okay too.