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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)<\/p>\n
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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<\/a>, 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\u2014even when your gut is telling you to walk away.<\/p>\n That pressure has a name: FOMO. And in the workplace, it may be costing millennials more than they realize. <\/p>\n Fear of missing out isn\u2019t just a social media phenomenon. It\u2019s 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<\/a>. Meanwhile, 70% of millennials report having career regrets\u2014the highest rate of any generation currently in the workforce, according to research cited by NBC<\/a>.<\/p>\n The hard lesson that many high-achievers learn\u2014often too late\u2014is that knowing when to say no is just as important as knowing when to say yes.<\/p>\n When “Yes” Is the Wrong Answer<\/p>\n 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\u2019s seen promising careers derailed not by a lack of opportunity, but by too much of it\u2014or at least, too much eagerness to take it.<\/p>\n “So many times, when people see a dream, they\u2019re 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. <\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n That reframe\u2014from rejection to redirection\u2014is one that career experts increasingly echo, but that the urgency of a competitive job market makes difficult to internalize in the moment.<\/p>\n The Shiny Object Problem<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n According to Deloitte\u2019s 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey<\/a>\u2014which connected with nearly 23,000 respondents across 44 countries\u2014purpose 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\u2014even if it hasn’t fully extended to strategic career decisions.<\/p>\n Spurlock understands the particular danger of saying yes from a place of fear rather than alignment. Her path to NASCAR\u2019s truck series has been anything but linear\u2014she 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\u2019t designed to welcome her. Along the way, she and her team turned down more than a few deals that seemed attractive on paper. <\/p>\n “We\u2019ve 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\u2014which, in a sport where funding directly determines your competitiveness, matters more than almost anything else.<\/p>\n What Patience Actually Looks Like<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t, 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\u2014so that the pressure doesn’t bother me.”<\/p>\n