I spent years doing excellent work inside other people’s companies. My reviews were strong. My promotions came on schedule. Then I looked at what I actually owned from all of it, and the answer was a résumé and a retirement account. A paycheck and wealth get treated as the same thing because they land in […]
Read more →You Were Not Born Into a Circle. You Were Born Into a System. Somebody in your family probably told you that success comes down to who you know. Build the circle. Meet the right people. It sounds like strategy. It is actually a smaller story hiding a bigger one, and the bigger one explains far […]
Read more →I have said this sentence to myself more times than I can count, and every single time it felt like wisdom instead of what it actually was. A stall. Research on impostor phenomenon, first documented by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978, has been revisited and confirmed so many times since that the […]
Read more →Somebody in my life, and probably somebody in yours, sat me down early and gave me the instruction with total confidence. Work twice as hard. Get in the room. Earn the seat. It came from love, and it came from people who had lived through rooms that would not open for them at all, so […]
Read more →Your Network Is Not Your Net Worth. Your Thinking Is. I used to keep a running count of the connections, the follows, the double taps. It felt like a savings account. It was not one. A savings account grows when you leave it alone. My follower count grew and my decisions stayed exactly as sharp, […]
Read more →My father’s generation had a deal. Show up, keep your head down, give a company thirty years, and it would carry you to the other side with a pension and a clock for the wall. It was not a bad deal. For the people it worked for, it worked. The problem is that the deal […]
Read more →Some ships don’t take you where you meant to go. They take you to their destination. The job. Not yours, the mission. Sometimes what looks like your destination is actually societal expectation wearing your name. You board thinking it’s your journey. Forty years later you disembark, if you’re lucky enough to disembark at all, and realize the ship was always headed to a graveyard. Not your graveyard. A perfectly comfortable, fully-funded, thoroughly predictable one.
Read more →At some point during your education or early career, someone sat across from you. A counselor, a parent, a manager. And they asked a version of the same question: so what do you want to do?
Singular. One thing.