I remember sitting in a cramped, windowless conference room at a mid-sized logistics firm in Chicago back in November 2016. I had my resignation letter printed out on 32lb heavy cardstock (I used to think the weight of the paper communicated gravitas; I was completely wrong, it just made me look like a weirdo). I…
I was at this massive tech mixer in Austin back in 2018—I think it was during SXSW, but the whole week is a blur of bad tacos and humidity—and I spent exactly forty-seven minutes locked in a bathroom stall at the Hilton. I wasn’t sick. I was just hiding. I could hear the muffled roar…
I didn’t get the promotion because I wasn’t there to smell the coffee. That sounds like a joke, or some weird boomer advice about ‘firm handshakes,’ but I’m dead serious. In 2022, I was working for a mid-sized tech firm—let’s call them CloudPulse—and I was crushing every single one of my KPIs. My output was…