Tag: essay
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There is a story you tell yourself to make sense of things. School didn’t prepare you for the real world. Then the real world promised guides, but the guides were hard to find, and when you found them, they didn’t know your terrain. So the structure fails you quietly, repeatedly, and the story writes itself:…
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“Too big to fail“. We say it about banks. A bank gets reckless, starts to collapse, and someone rescues it anyway. Not because it earned it. Because too much now depends on it staying open. That’s what happens to any institution once it gets large enough to be worth protecting. You’ve felt the same reflex…
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A few months before the role disappears, there usually are signs. A routine meeting gets cancelled for no reason. A project we’re on gets quietly handed sideways. An email thread we used to be copied on no longer includes us. We explain the signs away on the company’s behalf. Something urgent. Busy quarter. Last-minute change.…
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I was a sole trader in the UK for years. It wasn’t exactly simple, but its logic was legible. You build something, and you get taxed on what it earns after costs are deducted. The structure had friction, but it had a shape you could work with. When I looked seriously at continuing that in…
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You have been tweaking the same thing for longer than you care to admit. You keep second-guessing it, adjusting, pulling back, adjusting again. You can’t leave it alone. Is this you? What if the problem isn’t with your creation? What if the real problem is that there is nobody around who understands enough to tell…
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I can’t remember exactly when I was first asked what I wanted to do with my life. I don’t mean the whimsical question we ask toddlers for fun. I mean the time when that question carried real, heavy consequences. Sixteen? Seventeen? Do you remember when that question was put to you? Perhaps, like me, you…
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Most of us have been in that room. Or on that call. The interviewer asks one of their stock questions: “tell me about a time you faced a significant challenge.” I’m willing to bet that your answer is right there, already thought out, rehearsed, ready to go. Now try to remember the last time you…
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“He’s a dreamer! “This is how my primary school teacher described me when I was 9 years old. I didn’t know at the time, but the dreaming came from boredom. For a long time, many of us have internalised labels that are meant to manage us. We learn to tamp it down, to focus, to…
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The case for building your personal brand before you need it. A book published before Google changed everything There’s a book that’s marked me above many. Brand You by Tom Peters, published in 1999. In it, Peters made a prediction that sounded almost radical at the time: that the era of the lifelong company employee…
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There’s a particular pleasure in the early stage of an idea. The designing. The mapping. The hours you spend arranging things in your head until they feel ready to exist in the world. I know that pleasure well. A little too well, as it turns out. Because here’s what I eventually had to admit to…