A Call to Arms: Guarding Yourself from Despair in an Ocean of Layoffs

Let’s be honest about the current environment in tech. The past decade made us soft. We got caught up in the hysteria of unicorn valuations. Companies succeeded despite mediocre execution. And along the way, we tricked ourselves into believing things would always be up and to the right. 

But we all have to learn this lesson sooner or later—never allow yourself to be caught off guard. To combat this, resourcefulness and self-sufficiency are critical—the ability to think for yourself, adapt, and focus on what’s within your control.

When you get caught up in it and lose your sense of self along the way, these lines become blurry. Your company and your job consume your identity. And over-identifying with a job or a company strips your ability to think for yourself and hands over your peace of mind to something beyond your control.

It’s difficult to guard yourself against this as you get further into your career or if you’ve idealized working at a certain company as your ‘dream job.’ The definition between you and your job begins to blur. You get wrapped up in your work because you care, you see your recent valuation as a lottery ticket, and you tell yourself that your Metafam will always take care of you. Then a downturn hits, your job is cut, and you’re facing an identity crisis. 

“No one is crushed by Fortune, unless they are first deceived by her.”

— Seneca

It’s easy to feel like it’s all over when the winds of fortune shift, as they can and will for all of us. Because too many of us have trapped ourselves into focusing on externals and things beyond ourselves to define who we are and fuel our sense of self-worth. And too often we fail to recognize that conditions of the recent past won’t extend indefinitely into the future. 

To combat this you must first untangle yourself. You are not your company. You are not your job. If you were impacted by a layoff and feel blindsided, you are not alone. Now is the time to build the muscle so you’re never caught off guard again.

This starts with a focus on the mental models and resources you need to establish a greater degree of self-sufficiency and resourcefulness. With these, you can build resilience, flexibility, and independence. That way, when the unexpected strikes, you are able to avoid catastrophe, instead using that as a catalyst for growth. 

Hold your identity lightly

“You are not your work” sounds catchy. People throw it around, but what does it actually mean? When you tell yourself you are a ‘Head of Product’ or your identity is constructed around the fact that you were an early employee at Stripe, and then you’re pushed out, things crumble. Because titles and companies are externals that fall beyond your complete control. Over-indexing here can make you rigid and fragile. 

“When you cling too tightly to one identity, you become brittle. Lose that one thing and you lose yourself.”

— James Clear

The reframe this, you must go back to why you do what you do. Who are you as a person? Forget the bullshit, forget the vanity, forget the ego. Who are you at your core? Are you the type of person who loves building and creating? Are you a storyteller?

When you base your identity in who you are rather than what you are or where you are, you create room for flexibility and resilience. Holding your identity lightly allows you to adapt. It allows you to find harmony in the motion that is life.

Assign things their proper value

Inherent to this focus on who you are rather than your title or your company, is a shift back to what’s within your control. Self-sufficiency begins with identifying what’s within your control, what’s beyond, and what falls in between. By going through this exercise, you can start to map out and assign things their proper value. 

You can control how you show up. You can control your focus on your craft. You can control the boundaries you set between your job and your identity so they’re not blurred beyond all recognition. You cannot control economic conditions. You cannot control every decision made at a company. 

Focusing on what’s within your control is about reducing the dependencies you create between external conditions and your internal well-being. The less reliant you are on others to provide the things that only you’re able to give yourself—meaning, character, integrity—the more resilient you become to the whims of market conditions and executives. 

“There is only one road to happiness—let this rule be at hand morning, noon, and night: stay detached from things that are not up to you.”

— Epictetus

Live below your means

If you’re working in tech, you have been in an extreme position of privilege in terms of compensation. But inflating your lifestyle to match your income is one of the most dangerous things you can do. And while you might be able to get away with this in good times, should economic conditions turn south, this mistake will crush you.

“Independence, at any income level, is driven by your savings rate. And past a certain level of income your savings rate is driven by your ability to keep your lifestyle expectations from running away.”

— Morgan Housel

If you’re in this position currently, write this on your mirror and stare at it every day: build a safety net. When you’re employed, you should be stashing away as much of your paycheck as humanly possible. While inflating your lifestyle to match your income makes you fragile and dependent. A safety net creates flexibility, independence, and peace of mind so you’re never buried in desperation. 

You always want to have options. This is about taking back your life from those who have you strung out on an addiction to your biweekly paycheck or annual bonus. 

Getting laid off from a job can be a catalyst to come back to yourself, find alignment, and focus on more meaningful work. But without a contingency plan—emergency funds and a modest lifestyle—you’ll throw yourself into a state of panic. This state of desperation forces you either jump at the next opportunity rather than the right opportunity or get stuck in jobs you hate. 

The mania will return one day, do not allow yourself to get caught up in it. Begin building a buffer to protect yourself against ruin. You always want to have the power to walk away or bounce back if difficult times come your way. Work your ass off to create a safety net that puts you back in control of your own life. 

The good times won’t last forever, but neither will the bad.
 

Take back your identity

If you want to take back control of your life and build resilience, focus on eliminating dependencies. Disentangle your identity, your sense of self-worth, and your well-being from your current job and company. Assign things their proper value by focusing on what’s within your control.

You are not invincible. You are not immune to the winds of the market. The best way to guard yourself against the waves of mania and panic that define the human condition is a relentless drive toward self-sufficiency and resourcefulness. 

With these skills, you can take your happiness, your well-being, and your life back into your own hands. No one else can do that for you. Not your partner. Not your job. And certainly not your company. This allows you to build resilience, flexibility, and independence which guard you against despair when all hope seems lost. 

It all starts with creating the space for yourself and sitting in that. No matter how uncomfortable it might be or how much easier it is to lose yourself in the busyness of work. You must sort through the noise and determine what is your own. 

Now is the opportunity to find your way back to yourself. Now is the opportunity to create your own momentum in life.

The Reality of Failing to Rise to the Occasion

What you don’t see when you look at the synopsis of great people’s lives are the times they fell short. From the outside, it looks like they operated with invincibility, rising up at each pivotal moment. When the stakes were at their highest, there was no stumble.

But when you dig into the details, there’s no one who has actually achieved this. Top performers assume more risk than others. They’re on the frontier, operating at the edge of their current abilities. If anything, this means failure is even more prevalent.

Failing to rise to the occasion

The truth is, there will be moments when you fail to rise to the occasion. You’re not always going to make the right decisions or act exactly how you imagined. And since perfection is impossible, what matters most is the ability to bounce back.

Even Warren Buffett had moments when he failed to follow through early in his life. At the beginning of his career, Buffett was terrified of public speaking. And while you might imagine that someone like Buffett stepped up, put himself through deliberate practice, and overcame the fear in one fell swoop — reality was much different.

In a widely-told story, at the beginning of his career, Buffett enrolled in a Dale Carnegie speaking course to improve his skills. But few sources include the fact that he quit the first time around. He was afraid of being called upon to speak so he dropped out of the class. It was only the second time around that he built the courage to follow through. Now Buffett credits this as the best $100 investment he’s ever made.

The ability to bounce back

Anyone can lecture you about decisions you should make, habits you should build, systems you should create. But the most successful people aren’t flawless in their decision making. They just have a remarkable ability to bounce back.

The greatest artists, entrepreneurs, and scientists take the misfortune in stride, turning obstacles on their end and using them as an opportunity to improve their craft. They embrace mistakes and capitalize on them, ensuring they never happen again. And that’s the real difference in top performers — they stumble, but they rarely repeat mistakes.

Whether you’re struggling against your internal limits — uncertainty, doubt, fear — or you’re facing external challenges, you’re going to have bad days. What matters is the ability to reflect, learn, and find the courage to start fresh the next day.

Awareness can go a long way when it comes to navigating failure and being kinder to yourself. It’s okay to hold yourself to your own high expectations, but expecting perfection will often lead you over the edge. Life is as much about resourcefulness and how you respond to challenging situations as it is carefully plotting a long-term strategy. You need both.

Professionals know this space well and embrace mistakes as learning cues. They learn from them, but they don’t obsess over them. Amateurs expect perfection and crumble when they fail to meet their own lofty expectations.

Failure is about reach

The goal is never failure itself. It’s the expansion of your reach and the rate of personal growth. That means pursuing opportunities where failure is a potential outcome. Not limiting yourself to situations where success and participation trophies are guaranteed outcomes.

If you’re willing to risk failure, you’ll take more chances and reach further beyond your current ability level. And this is the fastest way to learn and create more opportunities for accelerated growth. Take calculated risks.

There will be times that you surprise yourself. But there will also be times you fail to rise to the occasion. In those moments, what matters is your resilience and resourcefulness. The lean product mindset applies as well here as anywhere else. Build, measure, learn. Repeat.

Why the Worst Product Managers Expect the Best

With each product I’ve built, things rarely come together exactly as planned. But it’s not the inconveniences, technical challenges, or misguided people that are the problem. It’s that we ever allow them to catch us off guard in the first place.

Anyone can operate under ideal conditions. But ideal conditions are the exception, not the rule. Eighty percent of your time building product will take place in a maelstrom of ambiguity and obstacles.

It’s naive to expect that the world should bend to your favor and promote ideal conditions. Most reasonable people acknowledge this. But when it comes down to it, many of us cling to expectations that our work should progress without pushback and our lives should follow a neatly charted map. We forget how much of life is negotiating egos and hidden variables along the way. 

The best teams embrace imperfections beyond their control and create great products anyway.

The worst teams self-destruct because they’re too busy obsessing over inconveniences. 

It’s easy to pick out the product teams who struggle with this. Each challenge appears to catch them off guard, demoralizing the team and throwing people into a state of anger or despair. This type of reaction points to two things: inexperience and fragility.

Improvement comes from experience and perspective–you’re prepared to face a wider range of potential scenarios. In turn, this allows you to develop a deeper well of resilience and resourcefulness.

Creativity and resilience

At age 23, I started working for a healthcare startup, building out a web-based patient portal. Each setback caught me off guard because I expected things to just work–a laughable statement for anyone who has worked in technology for more than a week. When I went on-site for the launch with our first big client, I was unable to anticipate the ways I was about to get torched. 

There were technical challenges inherent to a complex healthcare organization and integrations with its existing software that we had to sort through. But the technical challenges were only half of it. The true test was handling stakeholders–internal and external–as well as the people who create noise and thrive on passive-aggressive emails.

Anyone who has worked in product is familiar with these challenges. There’s nothing unique about them. But I struggled to adapt because my expectations were off base. I lacked perspective. I was focused on perfection in our product and people pleasing–both impossible tasks–rather than creativity and resilience. 

The best product managers are able to cycle through dozens of permutations and anticipate certain situations through dimensional thinking. But no matter how good you are, at some point you’ll get hit by something you didn’t see coming. Whether the feature you’ve been working on breaks or a “senior leader” steps in and changes the rules at the last minute, you will encounter situations that test your limits. 

Your job isn’t to prevent these mistakes or eliminate every obstacle. Rather it’s to develop the ability to continue moving forward when the inevitable occurs. Leading product requires that you establish an unwavering sense of perspective and imbue this quality in your team. Then, and only then, can you build the resilience and resourcefulness to adapt, imagine creative solutions, and bring them to life. 

Resilient teams who cause a few more quality issues will always beat out fragile teams who are only able to operate under perfect conditions. The difference is self-awareness and being able to step back to put things in perspective. This means assuming responsibility instead of feeling sorry for yourself because something you built didn’t work or someone criticized you. 

This is not to say that you shouldn’t focus on promoting favorable conditions. You can’t create a complete shit storm for yourself and hope to come out better for it. But you should also understand that you’re never going to get ideal conditions. There are going to be things beyond your control. And that’s what keeps life interesting–the challenges and obstacles you have to learn how to overcome along the way.

Each team meeting, one-on-one, and retrospective is an opportunity to develop these qualities in your team. By challenging each other to maintain perspective and reflect on experiences, you can turn things back to what’s within your control–your attitude, the effort you put into your work, and the guiding principle that propels you forward.

Opportunities for reflection

In my experience, few things are more valuable to the morale and resilience of a team than holding retrospectives every few weeks. These are best done with your immediate team (keep things small so everyone can have their voice heard) in a low-stress environment, outside of work. There are multiple formats, but each person should have a chance to discuss what’s gone well and what hasn’t. 

This provides a valuable outlet for everyone to air their frustrations, without judgment or repercussions, and remind each other of recent accomplishments. It also allows the team to come together and consider how you might frame challenges in a more productive light and course correct the things within your control.

Retrospectives are just one outlet to discuss experiences and rediscover perspective. And with the right perspective, you can begin building the resilience to navigate the conflict and uncertainty inherent to challenging work. 

Creating more opportunities for reflection is the best way to harness experience and build perspective. It’s the first step towards realizing that imperfect conditions are where the majority of life takes place. Knowing this, you’ll be able to lead better teams, build better products, and live a better life. 

Expect challenges. Expect unknowns. Expect ego. When you set your expectations accordingly, you’ll waste less time consumed by the things that have happened to you. 

Anyone can operate under ideal conditions. But the best product teams don’t sit around waiting for the stars to align. Instead, they embrace the imperfections inherent to life, create their own momentum, and make things happen for them. To steal a line from Charles Bukowski, “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”

*This article was originally featured on Mind the Product.