Friday, August 14, 2026
When I quit my full-time job, there were counteroffers. Unpaid leave, sabbatical, pay raise, new assignments, administration – you name it. Sitting across from the dean that day, the pot sweetened, and on the table was what you might call “an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
After my full-time job ceased, I kept a part-time job, one that I enjoyed for a while. These wonderful people offered me a free apartment, right in the heart of a bustling and expensive city. On the table was another sweet pot, “an offer I couldn’t refuse.” I sat in the space where the apartment would be built, contemplating living there.
In 1999, at the end of my graduate studies, I was jobless. Everyone in my graduating class had plans, and I had nothing. My advisor warned me, “No one gets a college teaching job without a doctorate.” He wanted me to go right onto doctoral studies, or get a church job – a sweet “offer I couldn’t refuse.”
In the early 2000s I was offered a job at Duke doing wonderful things in the chapel music program. It would have been a choral and organ “dream job.” I remember sitting in that gothic structure, contemplating a future under the rose window in the south transept. Another sweetened pot and “an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
I refused each of these “sweetened offers.” I couldn’t see myself there. I couldn’t place myself in those scenarios.
You will be offered many sweetened things. If there is an “offer you can’t refuse,” carefully consider the godfather’s sales pitch. Jerry Seinfeld turned down 110 million dollars for one more season of “Seinfeld.”
Don’t sell your life for “an offer you can’t refuse.” You can refuse it if you can’t “see yourself in it.”
You’re not for sale unless the godfather is your daddy, and the pot is too sweet to refuse.