The summer after third grade, my dad walked through the door in the middle of the day carrying a small box. He’d been laid off.
It wasn’t entirely foreign to me. A few years earlier, money had been tight while he was in grad school. As a toddler, I’d wander around saying things like, “When my dad gets a job…” It worked out then. But the experience left a mark.
Fast forward to 2000: the dot-com bubble. My dad lost his job again, and this time the stakes were higher. I sat beside him in the college bursar’s office explaining why we needed an extension on tuition. We’d applied for a student loan and hoped it would come through within the month.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. My dad was the one pushing me toward degrees in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Computer Science — yet here we were. My 18-year-old brain struggled with the dissonance. Why work this hard just to get laid off? But he insisted it was the right path, and that things would pick up.
They didn’t, not right away. I’d be graduating in 2004, which meant I had to make my own opportunities. Microsoft and IBM visited my college campus, but those spots felt pre-claimed. So the summer of my junior year, I leveraged every connection I had to land an internship in a small town in Indiana and spent my off-hours studying for the GREs. Hedging every bet.
When I graduated, the market was still sluggish. I hustled through my senior year and landed a government job in Landham, MD, but couldn’t picture myself coding away in a windowless building. I turned it down, interned at Qualcomm instead, and was told upfront I’d likely need a master’s degree to get a full-time offer. So I kept interviewing. By summer’s end, I had two full-time offers: one in RTP, NC, and one in Mountain View, CA. I took California. I knew that’s where I needed to be.
But I didn’t coast. I noticed early that I was being pigeon-holed into low-impact work, so I enrolled in graduate courses at Stanford, on the company’s dime. A wise move, as it turned out, because two years later I got my first pink slip. The severance gave me room to breathe and explore. I joined Mint.com, we sold the company, and I finally paid off my student loans.
It was a whirlwind. But those years taught me something fundamental: change is constant. There is no guaranteed path, and no industry is immune to disruption. Many college classmates who’d gone into consulting or investment banking were burning out from 60-hour weeks and endless travel. The “safe” choices weren’t so safe after all.
I recently came across an idea about elite athletes: what separates the best isn’t raw talent, it’s their ability to recover quickly. To have enough fuel in the tank to get back up, make a clear decision with the information at hand, and keep moving.
That’s the real skill. And right now, in a climate of constant disruption, it’s the most valuable one there is.
So instead of fixating on everything that’s uncertain, I try to ask:
- What can I control?
- What’s likely to stay constant for the next 6–12 months?
- Where should I be directing my energy?
- And if I don’t have clear answers to any of the above, who do I know and trust that does?
My personal playbook:
Quiet the inner critic. This isn’t my first rodeo. I remind myself that I can do hard things and then get back on the bull anyway, with a little more padding than before.
Focus on 1–3 new things. Learn them deliberately, and connect them to what I already know. Understanding the boundary between old and new is where the real insight lives.
Stay consistent. Even 30–45 minutes a day compounds over time. I’ve done this before, in college, during my first job, and even before my Apple interview when my firstborn was nine months old. The process works because I’ve seen it work.
There’s a lot happening to us right now. But there’s still a lot we can make happen. Trust your process and if you don’t have one, start building it today.
And yes I realize the above might still feel a bit amorphous, so I’ll be back to dig into the specifics in a future post!
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