You didn’t get laid off because you were bad at your job. This sentence circulates through professional networks with the force of revelation, and something in it rings true. The people who lose their positions in corporate reductions rarely match the profile we’d expect if merit drove the process. They include top performers, devoted employees,…
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If you collected the reasons startups fail and arranged them by what founders believe versus what the data shows, you’d find a striking mismatch. Founders tend to blame external forces – fierce competition, bad timing, market downturns. The evidence points inward. Most startups die from dysfunction that builds quietly inside: relationships that fracture, psychology that…
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Most career advice treats networking like compound interest – just keep depositing connections into your account and watch wealth accumulate. Build relationships. Expand your circle. Never eat lunch alone. The advice isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just radically incomplete. What nobody tells you is that some connections subtract. They drain energy, compromise judgment, or expose you…
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The first time someone steals your work, you remember the room. Mine had fluorescent lights that buzzed at a frequency just below conscious awareness and a conference table scarred by years of coffee rings. Nadya was presenting my distributed systems architecture to the board – not our architecture, not the team’s architecture, but hers. Three…
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