#career-identity

#career-identity

But after years of chasing success in all the wrong places, I finally get what he meant. My first startup was everything I thought I wanted. We had funding, a slick office, and all the right buzzwords in our pitch deck. I was working 80-hour weeks, convinced that grinding harder would somehow make me love what I was doing. Spoiler alert: it didn't.

In the mid-90s, I was working as an admin assistant on the listings magazine of the London Evening Standard, and was about to be fired. OK, I wasn't that good at the job, but I was also done with it. It was on my mind that I needed an actual job, one that you could describe to someone: I'm an X.