ROCKINGHAM, NORTH CAROLINA – APRIL 04: Dystany Spurlock, driver of the #66 Foxxtecca Chevrolet, looks on in her car prior to the Rockingham ARCA Menards East 125 at Rockingham Speedway on April 04, 2026 in Rockingham, North Carolina. (Photo by Meg Oliphant/Getty Images)
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The job market has never made patience easy. In a landscape where roughly 58% of 2024-2025 graduates were still job hunting after graduation, according to a report from Kickresume, and where the average job posting now attracts nearly double the applications it did just a year ago, the pressure to grab every opportunity that comes along feels overwhelming—even when your gut is telling you to walk away.
That pressure has a name: FOMO. And in the workplace, it may be costing millennials more than they realize.
Fear of missing out isn’t just a social media phenomenon. It’s a career trap. It’s what pushes professionals to accept offers that don’t align with their goals, sign agreements that don’t serve their interests, and say yes to shiny opportunities that quietly set them back. And the data suggests it’s widespread: 72% of millennial and Gen Z job seekers say they’ve started a new job only to find the role or company was very different from what they’d been led to believe, according to a survey by The Muse. Meanwhile, 70% of millennials report having career regrets—the highest rate of any generation currently in the workforce, according to research cited by NBC.
The hard lesson that many high-achievers learn—often too late—is that knowing when to say no is just as important as knowing when to say yes.
When “Yes” Is the Wrong Answer
Christopher Harris has spent years watching people make this mistake. As a business strategist and talent manager who has worked in sports and entrepreneurship, he’s seen promising careers derailed not by a lack of opportunity, but by too much of it—or at least, too much eagerness to take it.
“So many times, when people see a dream, they’re willing to sell themselves short for FOMO,” he tells me. He manages Dystany Spurlock, a Nascar driver making waves in the industry as one of the few women, and even fewer Black women, in the space.
“Even in their gut, it’s telling them, don’t do it. They’ll sign the contract. They’ll go work with this person instead of saying no.”
Harris is particularly attuned to this dynamic because he’s navigated it deliberately with the athletes and professionals he works with. His rule: protect the long game, even when it means turning down opportunities that look promising on the surface. “A no doesn’t mean it’s the end,” he says. “It’s just not right now.”
That reframe—from rejection to redirection—is one that career experts increasingly echo, but that the urgency of a competitive job market makes difficult to internalize in the moment.
The Shiny Object Problem
The professional version of FOMO is particularly insidious because it often wears the disguise of ambition. Taking every opportunity looks like hustle. Saying yes to everyone looks like network-building. And in the early stages of a career, when the fear of being left behind is loudest, it’s hard to distinguish between an opportunity that opens a door and one that quietly closes others.
According to Deloitte’s 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey—which connected with nearly 23,000 respondents across 44 countries—purpose is a central driver of workplace satisfaction, with 89% of millennials saying a sense of purpose is key to their wellbeing at work. Yet that same survey found that 43% of millennials have already turned down assignments that conflicted with their personal ethics or beliefs, suggesting that values-based discernment is growing—even if it hasn’t fully extended to strategic career decisions.
Spurlock understands the particular danger of saying yes from a place of fear rather than alignment. Her path to NASCAR’s truck series has been anything but linear—she came up through motorcycle drag racing, funded her own entry fees while holding down a day job, and built her reputation from scratch in an industry that wasn’t designed to welcome her. Along the way, she and her team turned down more than a few deals that seemed attractive on paper.
“We’ve said no to a lot of things that looked really shiny, but we knew it wasn’t going to be a fit for us in the end,” Harris says of their approach. The payoff for that patience has been a partnership built on aligned values rather than expedient money—which, in a sport where funding directly determines your competitiveness, matters more than almost anything else.
What Patience Actually Looks Like
Here’s the uncomfortable reality the “just hustle harder” crowd often glosses over: playing the long game isn’t glamorous, and it doesn’t always look like progress from the outside.
For Spurlock, the non-linear road meant years of working full-time while racing on the side, learning the hard way what she could sustain and what she couldn’t, and trusting that the foundational work would eventually matter. “Everything I’ve ever done in my life has always been that way,” she says. “It’s never been traditional. I’ve always had to put in the work.” Rather than viewing that as a handicap, she frames it as preparation: “I needed to go through that prior journey to prepare me for where I am now—so that the pressure doesn’t bother me.”
Research from the National Institute on Retirement Security reinforces this picture. Workers aged 25–34 today have a median job tenure of 2.7 years—only marginally lower than Baby Boomers at the same age in 1983—pushing back on the narrative that younger workers are uniquely impatient. What’s changed isn’t the generation; it’s the conditions. And in conditions of scarcity and uncertainty, the temptation to grab what’s available—rather than what’s right—is real and rational.
But Harris argues that the discernment muscle is worth developing anyway, precisely because the market is so noisy. “If you continue to put in the work, your people will find you,” he says. “There are many companies now looking to provide opportunities to individuals from underrepresented communities. Keep fighting for your dream and say no when you need to say no.”
The Network Gets You In. The Work Keeps You There.
None of this is to suggest that patience alone is a strategy. The other half of the equation is equally important.
“Your network determines your net worth—that doesn’t change,” Harris says. “Your network gets you in the door, and your merit determines how long you stay.”
It’s a two-part framework that cuts through a lot of the noise around career advancement. Networking isn’t optional—it’s the mechanism through which opportunities surface in the first place. But treating every opportunity as one you have to take, simply because you worked to get in the room, is where the logic breaks down.
Spurlock’s trajectory illustrates this point clearly. The relationships Harris built over years of working in sports created opportunities. Her performance on the track—and her refusal to dilute who she is for the sake of palatability—has kept them open. “A lot of people ask, ‘Is she like that all the time?’ Is she faking it for the camera?” Harris says. “This is really who she is.”
Authenticity, it turns out, compounds. And it’s harder to sustain if you’ve spent years saying yes to things that pull you away from it.
Reframing the No
For professionals—especially those from marginalized communities who have been conditioned to take opportunities when they appear, because the next one isn’t guaranteed—learning to say no requires something close to a philosophical shift.
Nearly half of millennials (47%) say they wish they had chosen a different career path when they started out, according to a Harris Poll survey of 1,000 U.S. adults ages 33 to 40, conducted for CNBC. Many of those regrets trace back not to risks that weren’t taken, but to compromises that were—roles accepted out of financial pressure, partnerships entered out of desperation, directions pursued because the opportunity was there rather than because it aligned with a larger vision.
The professionals who seem to navigate this most successfully are the ones who get specific about what they’re actually building toward—and use that specificity as a filter. Not every opportunity that comes through the door deserves a yes. The ones that do are the ones that move you closer to the thing you’ve actually decided you want.
Spurlock puts it more directly: “You have to keep your eye focused on your ultimate goal. That’s what I’ve always done.”
It’s not a complicated framework. But in a culture that equates busyness with progress and availability with ambition, it’s a harder one to follow than it sounds.
The Long View
It took Spurlock the better part of a decade to get where she is. It took Harris five-plus years of working alongside her before the investment they’d both made started to look like the trajectory they’d imagined. Neither of them said they’d trade the detours.
“Nothing happens right away,” Harris says simply. “But we’ve made it work.”
That’s not the kind of timeline that gets applauded on LinkedIn. But it might be the most honest account of what durable careers—the kind built on aligned values, genuine merit, and relationships that hold—actually look like from the inside.
The FOMO will always be there. The question is whether you let it make your decisions for you.