Here’s the story of how that unfolded.

Once upon a time, I spent years as a police officer and detective—investigating crimes, pursuing actual truth, making decisions that mattered beyond quarterly metrics.

It was work that mattered. It mattered to the victims I sought justice for. It also mattered to me. In fact, it was a childhood dream of mine.

But alas, it wasn’t enough. I wanted the big payday. A chance at being on the cover of a magazine with my arms crossed, where they are talking about how we revolutionized something.

So I left police work after nearly a decade to chase this new “dream.” I joined a Fortune 500 company first—the kind of name that makes your parents finally stop asking when you’re going to get a “real job.” It was cool, but it was during the tech heyday. The time when Google had nap pods, Facebook had massage chairs, and Twitter...

Well, Twitter had a DJ booth, two specialty all you can eat lunch rooms, a game room, a coffee shop, a smoothie bar, and a fresh orange juice machine. How do I know this? Because after seeing all the people in these tech jobs getting lavish benefits, I decided I wanted it. So I found myself sitting in an all-hands meeting watching Kendrick Lamar perform while everyone around me pretended this was normal.

By now, I saw how the executives at every single company were treated. Like royalty. So I decided to shoot my shot and take a senior level role in an innovation division at Panasonic. This led a role where I was a VP level executive at a startup. I was certain that role was the one that was definitely, absolutely going to change everything. Want to know what happened to the stock after I left? I think you had to pay people to take it.

At this point, there were signals that things in tech were starting to change. So to keep my head above water, I had to take a step back and take a mid-management role at a large tech company with actual resources, stable stock options, and enough runway to take us to the moon and back.

But in the end, none of that mattered. I got laid off.

Here’s the rub. My calling was to be a police officer. I loved it. And I left it to chase prestige.

Now don’t get me wrong, all of it was a killer ride.

I’ve flown to Australia to attend meetings. I’ve eaten at restaurants where the menu doesn’t list prices because if you have to ask, the meal isn’t for you. I’ve had the career trajectory that’s supposed to work. The one where each move is strategic, each company more impressive than the last, each title carrying more weight.

But despite all of these experiences, I was left feeling empty.

When you’re a detective, you pursue answers. When you’re a corporate climber, you pursue titles. I didn’t understand the difference until I’d already traded one for the other.

As a cop, the work had a finish line: solve the case, find the truth, close the file. The satisfaction was real because the problem was real. Someone got hurt, you investigated, you built the case, you got resolution. The work ended when the work was done.

Corporate achievement never ends. Every rung feels like the destination until you’re standing on it. The Fortune 500 role was supposed to be it—the validation that I’d made it, that leaving law enforcement had been the right call, that all the years of building toward something had paid off. I got there and the feeling lasted approximately forty-eight hours before my brain recalibrated. Suddenly the Fortune 500 job was just the baseline, the new normal, and the real achievement would be getting to a company that moved faster, that mattered more, that was building the future instead of managing the past.

And that beast is something that never gets satiated.

Each move, the math made sense. Better company plus better title plus better compensation equals fulfillment. I had the data points. I had the trajectory. I had a career that looked, from the outside, like a series of smart moves that were obviously leading somewhere.

The somewhere was a layoff email and a severance package and a calendar that suddenly had no meetings.

Here’s the thing about the prestige treadmill: it’s not designed to get you anywhere. It’s designed to keep you moving. Every achievement resets your baseline. Every promotion recalibrates what counts as success. You get the title you wanted and immediately start eyeing the next one. You get into the company you wanted and immediately start wondering if you should have held out for the other offer. The treadmill speeds up to match your pace, and you never notice because you’re too busy running.

The status markers were supposed to help. Flying business class. Eating at restaurants where the chef brings out a course personally and explains the origin story of the radish. Watching Kendrick Lamar perform at a company event like it’s just another Tuesday. These were the external validators, the proof that the climbing was working, that leaving law enforcement had been worth it.

They didn’t stick. The flight lands. The meal ends. Kendrick leaves the stage. You’re back at your desk with the same hollow feeling, except now you can’t even complain about it because you just flew business class. How do you tell someone you’re unfulfilled when you’re living a life that’s supposed to be the destination?

When I was a detective, I knew what meaningful work felt like. Closing a case meant something. Finding the truth meant something. The work had weight because the stakes were real. Corporate work has the appearance of stakes—revenue targets, market share, competitive positioning—but it’s all just numbers on a screen until the company decides your position should stop existing. Then you find out exactly how much your leadership role mattered: it mattered until it didn’t, and then it was gone.

The system is designed so you can never admit it’s not working while you’re still on it. Everyone around you is also running, also climbing, also collecting achievements that reset their baseline the moment they’re achieved. Nobody says out loud that the treadmill is broken because saying it out loud means admitting you’ve been running toward nothing. Admitting you traded real work for prestige work. Admitting you left a calling for a career trajectory that led exactly nowhere.

Here’s the cruelest part: you can’t go back. I’m older now. Police departments don’t hire detectives in their fifties who’ve spent a decade optimizing stakeholder alignment instead of investigating crimes. The door silently closed behind me. I traded a calling for a series of impressive titles, and now I have neither.

The prestige treadmill doesn’t have an off switch. It just keeps running until you fall off. And when you finally stop moving, you realize the treadmill never went anywhere at all. You’re exactly where you started, except a few decades older and a calling short.

I investigated this case thoroughly. The evidence is clear. The conclusion is obvious.

I just wish I’d solved it before I became the victim.

I wrote a LinkedIn post about how almost anyone can spin up a little weekend business and make a few bucks.

Simple idea. We choose to sell lemonade and popcorn. But anyone could sell baked goods, packaged seasonings, or a myriad of other options. Nothing revolutionary—just the observation that the barrier to earning money outside your day job is lower than most people think.

Then a troll hops in the comments and says, “I don’t think anybody can do that.”

Cool. Except this guy is an entrepreneur coach.

Read that again. The person who gets paid to convince people they CAN build something doesn’t believe they can. That’s like hiring a swim instructor who’s scared of water. Or a marriage counselor filing for divorce every six months. The entire value proposition collapses the moment you notice the contradiction.

So I pushed back a little. Nothing crazy. Just pointed out that maybe telling people they’re incapable isn’t the best sales pitch for someone in the belief-building business.

And what does he do? Posts one more gem about how “people can’t even come up with $100 to start a business,” then blocks me.

Brave.

Here’s what that block tells you: he wasn’t interested in a conversation. He was interested in protecting a worldview. And that worldview—the one he’s selling to clients who pay him actual money—is that most people are too broke, too dumb, or too broken to do anything about their situation. Maybe think twice before hiring this winner.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: if you don’t believe your clients can succeed, what exactly are you coaching them toward? Expensive resignation?

The Belief Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Henry Ford nailed this a hundred years ago: “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

That’s not a motivational poster. That’s a description of how human behavior actually works. Belief operates as a causal force. If you genuinely think something is impossible, you won’t try. And if you don’t try, you guarantee the outcome you predicted.

The entrepreneur coach proved Ford’s point backward. He’s built a career on the assumption that people can’t, and then—surprise—his clients probably don’t. Self-fulfilling prophecy dressed up as market analysis.

But here’s where it gets interesting. Most organizations know belief matters. They just pretend it doesn’t because acknowledging it would require them to admit they’ve been ignoring the foundation of the entire structure.

Thomas Gilbert figured this out in the 1970s with his Behavior Engineering Model. He identified six factors that actually drive performance:

• Information. Do people know what’s expected?

• Resources. Do they have the tools to do the job?

• Incentives. Does doing the work make sense for them?

• Knowledge. Do they have the skills?

• Capacity. Can they physically or mentally handle it?

• Motivation. Do they believe it’s possible and worth doing?

Most companies obsess over the first five. They’ll spend six figures on new software, hire consultants to rewrite job descriptions, restructure incentive plans, send people to training seminars, and conduct ergonomic assessments of office chairs.

But motivation? Belief? That’s soft stuff. Touchy-feely. Can’t measure it on a dashboard.

Except you can measure it. You measure it by watching what happens when someone doesn’t believe they can succeed. They don’t start. They don’t persist. They quit before the first obstacle. And then everyone stands around wondering why the training didn’t work, why the tools went unused, why the incentives didn’t move the needle.

The entrepreneur coach skipped straight to the end of that process. He looked at his clients and decided they couldn’t. And once you’ve made that decision, everything you do reinforces it. You become a gatekeeper instead of a guide.

The $100 Smokescreen

Let’s talk about that $100 comment, because it’s doing some heavy lifting.

On the surface, it sounds like economic realism. “People can’t even come up with $100 to start a business.” Sure, some people genuinely can’t. Poverty is real. Financial constraints are real.

But that’s not what he was saying.

He was using economic hardship as a universal excuse. A way to preemptively explain why nobody should bother trying. And that’s where the gatekeeping gets insidious, because it wraps itself in concern for the struggling.

Here’s the thing: I’d hand $100 to somebody who says “I need a hundred bucks to start a business and feed my family” before I’d give a dime to someone who’s been bitter about a layoff for three years and just wants rent covered.

One person has a plan. The other has a grievance.

One person sees the $100 as a tool. The other sees it as proof the system is rigged.

Give a man a fish, he eats tonight. Teach him to fish, he eats forever. The entrepreneur coach is standing on the dock explaining why fishing is impossible and the lake is empty and the rods are too expensive anyway.

The real barrier isn’t the $100. The real barrier is the voice in your head—or in the comments section—telling you that you’re not the kind of person who does things like this.

And when that voice belongs to someone you’re paying to help you succeed? That’s not coaching. That’s a protection racket.

What We Owe the Gatekeepers

Nothing.

We owe them nothing.

The entrepreneur coach isn’t protecting people from failure. He’s protecting himself from being wrong. Because if someone actually does spin up a weekend business and makes a few bucks, it exposes the lie he’s been selling: that success requires his permission, his framework, his expensive program.

Gatekeepers don’t just fail their clients. They reinforce the systems that keep people from trying. They turn possibility into a luxury good, available only to people who’ve already cleared some arbitrary bar of worthiness.

And when you challenge them? They block you.

Because the last thing a gatekeeper wants is someone standing next to the gate saying, “Hey, you know this thing isn’t locked, right?”

Ford was right. You can, or you can’t. Both are true.

But only one of those truths builds anything.

The other just builds a career out of other people’s doubt.

If you are ready to build your own Handshake Business, I can help you get there.

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These people have just had the financial rug ripped out from underneath them. Their health insurance ripped away. Their sense of purpose vaporized.

And yet, in this dark moment, I watch these people thank the companies that did this to them.

I need someone to explain what the fuck is happening to our collective psychology.

Last week, I watched a senior UX manager—twelve years at the company—post a 400-word love letter to the organization that just eliminated her position.

“I’m grateful for the journey,” she wrote. “This company taught me so much about resilience and adaptability.”

The company taught her about resilience by making her resilient to being fired by them. This is like thanking your dentist for the opportunity to learn about pain management while he’s pulling your teeth without anesthesia.

The LinkedIn feed has become a grief theater where the newly unemployed perform gratitude for an audience that includes their former colleagues (scared), their former managers (relieved they don’t have to read these), and recruiters (taking notes on who’s sufficiently broken to accept low offers). I’ve seen hundreds of these posts.

They follow a pattern so consistent I could write a Mad Libs version:

Nobody writes: “Today I was fired because a consultant told executives they could improve quarterly numbers by eliminating my salary from the budget. I’m furious that I spent twelve years building something while leadership spent twelve minutes figuring out how to explain my absence to shareholders. I’m terrified about my mortgage.”

That post doesn’t exist because somewhere along the way, we’ve been conditioned to believe that acknowledging the violence of a layoff makes us unemployable. Bitterness, we’ve learned, is a career liability. Gratitude is a personal brand asset.

Here’s what I’ve figured out from investigating how companies actually operate: this didn’t happen by accident. The gratitude isn’t a bug in the system. It’s an engineered feature.

Companies spend years building what they call “culture.” They plaster values on walls. They talk about family and mission and purpose. They create elaborate rituals—town halls, offsites, team-building exercises where you fall backward into someone’s arms to learn trust. They’re not doing this because they care about your self-actualization. They’re doing it because employees who believe they’re part of something larger than a paycheck are easier to manage and cheaper to lose.

When you’ve spent five years hearing about how “we’re all in this together” and “people are our greatest asset,” the cognitive dissonance of being eliminated requires psychological gymnastics. Your brain has two options: accept that you were lied to for years, or reframe the layoff as something that makes sense within the narrative you’ve already accepted. Most people choose the reframe. It’s less painful to believe you’re graduating from one chapter than to believe you were a line item that became inconvenient.

I would love to get an honest statement from an HR director who helped design these systems:

Me: Why do you build these “culture building” systems this way?

Them: “We knew that if we could get people to internalize the company’s values, they’d be less likely to sue, less likely to trash us publicly, and more likely to speak positively about us after they left. The LinkedIn posts were a bonus we didn’t expect, but once we saw them, we realized they were gold. Every grateful ex-employee is a testimonial that we’re not the bad guy.”

The posts themselves are masterclasses in emotional labor. Watch how the language works. The employee always takes ownership of the transition. “I’ve decided to explore new opportunities” when they were told to clean out their desk. “I’m ready for the next challenge” when they’re terrified. “I’m grateful for the growth” when they’re grieving.

The passive voice appears only when describing the layoff itself. “I was impacted by organizational changes.” Nobody writes “Susan in Finance and Brad in Operations decided my job should stop existing.” The company becomes a force of nature, blameless as weather. You don’t get angry at rain.

Meanwhile, the company has already moved on. I’ve reviewed the internal communications. The day after a layoff, leadership sends an email to remaining employees about “moving forward” and “focusing on execution.” Your manager has redistributed your projects. Your email address has been deactivated. The security badge you wore for a decade has been remotely disabled. You’re not a person anymore. You’re a resolved ticket in the HR system.

But you’re still on LinkedIn, writing thank-you notes to people who haven’t thought about you since they approved the severance calculator spreadsheet.

The asymmetry is staggering. You’re performing gratitude for an audience that includes the company’s talent acquisition team, who will use your positive post as evidence in their next recruiting pitch. “Look how well we treat people—even our former employees love us!” You’ve become an unpaid spokesperson for the organization that just eliminated your income.

I’ve started asking people why they do it. The answers are depressing in their consistency.

• “I don’t want to burn bridges.”

• “I might need a reference.”

• “I want to show recruiters I’m not bitter.”

• “Everyone does it.”

That last one is the most honest. Everyone does it because everyone does it. We’ve created a social norm where the appropriate response to being fired is public gratitude. The performance has become mandatory. If you don’t post the thank-you note, people assume you’re difficult. If you post something honest about the fear and anger and betrayal, you’re “not a culture fit” for your next role.

It’s a nefarious form of censorship and companies have figured out how to make their former employees complicit in their own erasure. They’ve weaponized our need for narrative coherence, our fear of appearing unmarketable, and our desperate hope that if we’re grateful enough, someone will hire us quickly.

The most disturbing part isn’t that companies do this. Companies are going to company. They’re optimizing for profit and minimizing for liability. That’s what they’re built to do.

The disturbing part is that we’ve accepted it. We’ve agreed that the person being harmed should thank the person doing the harm. We’ve normalized a power dynamic so skewed that we perform emotional labor for organizations that just ended our employment.

I keep waiting for someone to break the pattern. To post something true. To refuse to perform gratitude for their own elimination. But the feed keeps filling with thank-you notes, and the companies keep laying people off, and everyone keeps pretending this is normal.

It’s not normal. It’s not okay. And someone needs to say it: you don’t owe your former employer a goddamn thing, least of all your gratitude.

We believed in what we were doing like the Three Musketeers:

We didn’t care that there were five of us crammed into a converted warehouse that smelled like stale Red Bull, old shrimp chips, and new possibilities. We had mismatched IKEA furniture, a whiteboard covered in ambitious diagrams, all worked in an open space, and had something we were absolutely certain we’d never abandon: actual principles written in ink.

We called them the Five Commandments, because we were the kind of insufferable idealists who thought literary references made us profound. We wrote them on the exposed brick wall in permanent marker:

1. No hierarchy - all voices equal

2. Equal compensation - we rise together

3. Transparent decision-making - no closed doors

4. Collective ownership - everyone gets equity

5. Distributed authority - we lead by influence, not position

We genuinely believed we were building something different. We’d all escaped corporate hellscapes where executives had assistants who had assistants, where “leadership” meant corner offices and first-class flights while the rank-and-file fought over conference room space.

We weren’t going to be those people.

Until we were.

Year 3: The First Revision

By year three, we’d hired thirty people. Thirty brilliant, passionate people who believed in the Five Commandments as much as we did. Which is precisely when we discovered the real flaw: we were only committed to equality as long as everyone agreed with us.

A designer named Chen suggested we pivot the product. A developer named Priya wanted to restructure the backend differently than we’d planned. A marketer named James thought our go-to-market strategy was wrong. They weren’t wrong. But they were different. And different felt like betrayal.

We didn’t want to be tyrants. We wanted to be collaborative. So we adopted a framework we’d read about in a business book: “Disagree and Commit.” It sounded perfect. We’d listen to Chen, Priya, and James. We’d genuinely consider their ideas. We’d debate them openly. And then we’d make a decision, and everyone would commit to it.

What it actually meant was: we’d listen and disregard.

Chen’s pivot idea was “interesting but not aligned with our vision.” Priya’s backend restructure was “technically sound but strategically premature.” James’s go-to-market strategy was “bold, but we need to stay the course.” We listened. We debated. We decided they were wrong. They disagreed. They committed anyway, because that’s what the framework required.

The beauty of “Disagree and Commit” is that it feels inclusive while being fundamentally controlling. It lets people feel like they are being heard, while ensuring you never actually change course. It transforms dissent into buy-in.

We felt like we were still egalitarian. We let people speak their mind, we just happened to know better. The wall didn’t need to change. We didn’t need hierarchy. We just needed a framework that let us enforce our vision while pretending to be collaborative.

Then something strange happened. It was an event as much as a quiet evolution. Without even a word, a few key leaders got small offices—not corner offices (at least not on purpose), just regular offices—because they needed a quiet space for “meetings”.

The compensation stayed equal. Mostly equal. I mean, more senior roles required more hours, so small adjustments made sense.

The thing about principles is they’re beautiful right up until they meet reality. Then they require interpretation.

Year 5: The Sophisticated Justifications Begin

At one hundred employees, we hired our first HR director. She took one look at our org chart—which resembled a child’s drawing of spaghetti—and gently suggested we might need “some structure.”

We created management tiers. Not because we wanted hierarchy, but because people needed “clear career paths” and “accountability.”

We formally established a leadership team. Not because we were special, but because coordinating a hundred people required dedicated coordination.

We gave leaders better laptops and earlier access to strategic information. Not as perks, but as tools necessary for their roles.

The wall with our Five Commandments got repainted (the warehouse was now “vintage industrial office space” with a monthly rent that would have funded our first year). The Five Commandments were professionally printed and framed:

1. All voices are equal; but once a decision is made, we commit

2. Compensation reflects role complexity and market rates

3. Transparent decision-making within appropriate contexts

4. You are an owner; we share equity based on role and organizational level

5. Influence is earned through meaningful contribution

See how much more mature that sounds? We’d evolved. We’d learned that pure equality was naive. The real world required nuance.

Year 10: The Executive Floor

Here’s what nobody tells you about becoming an executive: it happens so gradually that you never feel like you’ve changed. Every single decision makes sense in isolation.

You need an assistant because your calendar has become unmanageable, and your time is legitimately worth $500/hour to the company. The math works.

You’ve got to travel business class because, “the time savings and ability to work on the flight justified the cost.” The time savings works.

You need a corner office because you’re on confidential calls about acquisitions and layoffs, and you can’t have that in an open floor plan. The logic works.

You need first-class flights because you’re flying twice a week and you need to arrive functional, and the company can afford it now. The business case works.

You need a separate executive floor because leadership needs space to make difficult decisions without the emotional weight of being watched. The psychology works.

The Five Commandments are still there, framed in the lobby of our new headquarters. They’ve been revised exactly twelve times. The current version reads:

1. Everyone is important, but leaders decide

2. Important jobs pay more

3. Important people know important things

4. Most of the stock goes to leaders

5. Leaders have more say

Which is corporate-speak for: “Some animals are more equal than others.”

The Mirror

Last month, the executive team gave an all-hands talk to our junior staff about innovation and questioning authority. Ironically, they used Animal Farm as an example—a cautionary tale about organizations that lose their founding values and the importance of staying true to your principles.

The junior staff nodded enthusiastically. They were hungry and idealistic, just like we were. Several of them said they were planning to leave and start their own companies, where they’ll do things differently. Where they’ll have real equality and no hierarchy. Where their voice would be heard and they could make a difference.

That’s always how it starts.

It’s funny really. The executive team became exactly what they said they wouldn’t become, and they did it by choosing power one small rationalization at a time. They broke every principle they wrote on that wall and convinced themselves that each tiny compromise was necessary.

That’s the real tragedy—not that they changed into the thing they fought; but that somewhere along the way, they were fine with it.

Like in most things, everyone eventually moved on.

The original Five Commandments are probably still on that warehouse wall, under six coats of paint.

Just last week, I drove by that old building—it’s luxury lofts now—and I thought about those five idiots with their permanent markers and their principles.

As I looked out the window of my corner office, my assistant texts that my 3 PM is ready. I head back to the executive floor, where the coffee is better, the view is clear, and everything makes perfect sense.

All animals are equal.

Some are just more equal than others.

And if you can’t see the difference, you haven’t been here long enough.

It’s supposed to be a metaphor about staying calm under pressure during a football game. But Shane Falco accidentally described the entire modern economy, and nobody noticed because we were too busy watching Keanu Reeves play football.

Here’s what’s happening right now: massive layoffs, AI threatening to automate everything from customer service to creative work, economic uncertainty that makes 2008 look like a practice round. And the collective response? People are working harder. Longer hours. More credentials. Frantically upskilling. Hustling with the intensity of someone who just realized the Titanic is sinking and decided the solution is to swim faster.

They’re thrashing in quicksand.

The Definition of Insanity (That Einstein Probably Didn’t Say)

You’ve heard the quote:

It’s usually attributed to Albert Einstein, who almost certainly never said it, because Einstein was busy revolutionizing physics and probably didn’t have time to coin pithy sayings about workplace dysfunction.

But whoever said it—some motivational speaker in the 1980s, probably—nailed the current moment.

People are responding to systemic economic disruption by doing exactly what they’ve always done, just with more panic and less sleep. Got laid off? Better update that resume and apply to 200 jobs. AI threatening your industry? Time to take another online course. Economy looking shaky? Work weekends to prove you’re indispensable.

It’s the same playbook. The same strategies. The same inputs into a system that has fundamentally changed. And everyone’s confused about why the outputs are getting worse.

The System Changed. You Didn’t.

There’s an uncomfortable truth: the rules changed, and most people are still playing the old game.

AI isn’t just another technology shift like email or smartphones. It’s a fundamental restructuring of what has value in the labor market. The economic model that rewarded credentials, experience, and hard work is being replaced by something else—something that hasn’t fully formed yet, but definitely doesn’t care about your LinkedIn endorsements.

The labor market isn’t temporarily disrupted. It’s being rebuilt from scratch while we’re all still standing in it, like trying to renovate a house while living inside it, except the house is on fire and also it’s not a house anymore, it’s a subscription service.

But the advice hasn’t changed. Career counselors are still saying “network more” and “build your personal brand” as if we’re living in 2015. Companies are still demanding five years of experience for entry-level positions, apparently unaware that the entire concept of “entry-level” has collapsed into a black hole of unpaid internships and gig work.

Everyone’s following a map to a place that doesn’t exist anymore.

How Fighting Harder Makes You Sink Faster

Let me show you what thrashing in quicksand actually looks like:

The Burnout Spiral: You work 60-hour weeks to prove you’re valuable. You’re exhausted, so your work quality drops. To compensate, you work 70-hour weeks. Your health deteriorates. Your relationships suffer. You become less creative, less strategic, less capable of the kind of innovative thinking that might actually help you adapt. Congratulations, you’ve worked yourself into being less employable.

The Desperation Stink: You apply to 200 jobs a week, each application increasingly frantic. Employers can smell it. Desperation reduces your negotiating power to zero. You take a job that’s worse than the one you lost, just to stop the panic. Now you’re in a worse position, with less leverage, and the quicksand is up to your neck.

The Commoditization Trap: Everyone’s taking the same online courses, getting the same certifications, building the same “personal brands” on LinkedIn. You’re competing by doing exactly what everyone else is doing, which means you’re competing on price. Race to the bottom, population: you and ten thousand other people with identical resumes.

The Credential Treadmill: You get another degree. Another certification. Another specialization. Each one costs money and time. Each one promises to make you more competitive. But everyone else is doing the same thing, so you’re just running faster on a treadmill that’s speeding up. The quicksand doesn’t care about your master’s degree. It most certainly doesn’t give a shit about your 100th free “certification” (what do these actually certify, anyway?).

This is the insanity loop. The system changed, but the response didn’t, so people just do the old thing harder, which makes everything worse, which makes them do it even harder, which—you get the idea.

What Fighting Smart Actually Looks Like

Shane Falco’s advice for quicksand is simple: stop thrashing. Spread your weight. Move slowly and deliberately.

In economic terms, that means recognizing you’re in a fundamentally different environment and responding with strategy instead of panic.

Fighting smart means asking: “What are the new rules?” Not the rules you wish existed, or the rules that should exist, or the rules that existed five years ago. The actual rules, right now, in this broken system.

It means recognizing that some battles aren’t worth fighting. That some career paths have become dead ends not because you failed, but because the path disappeared. That the old metrics of success—the corner office, the steady climb up the corporate ladder, the gold watch at retirement—are artifacts from an economic model that’s already gone.

It means adapting instead of optimizing. Building optionality instead of specialization. Creating value in ways that can’t be easily commoditized or automated. Developing skills and relationships and knowledge that are resilient to disruption, not just competitive in the current moment.

It means, sometimes, doing less. Working smarter, not harder, isn’t just a cliché—it’s survival strategy in quicksand.

You’re in Quicksand

Here’s the thing Shane Falco understood: you can’t fight quicksand by being tougher or more determined or more willing to suffer. Quicksand doesn’t care about your work ethic. It doesn’t reward hustle. In fact, it’s the opposite. The more you fight and thrash, the more It just pulls you under.

The modern economy is quicksand. AI disruption is quicksand. The gig-ification of work, the collapse of job security, the widening gap between productivity and wages—all quicksand.

And the thrashing? The 80-hour weeks, the desperate networking, the frantic up-skilling, the performance of productivity on LinkedIn? That’s not helping. That’s sinking.

The only way out is to stop doing what isn’t working and start doing something different. Not harder. Different.

Which is terrifying, because different is uncertain, and uncertainty feels like failure. But you know what definitely is failure? Drowning in quicksand while insisting that if you just thrash harder, eventually you’ll touch bottom.

You won’t touch bottom. There is no bottom. There’s just quicksand, all the way down.

Shane Falco figured this out before a football game. Maybe it’s time the rest of us figured it out before we lose everything we worked for.

The quicksand doesn’t care how hard you’re trying. It only cares whether you’re still thrashing.

That world didn’t disappear because it was inferior. It disappeared because it was out-scaled.

Look around. The evidence is everywhere.

People sit in airports, shopping malls, parks — places built for human gathering — with their faces in their phones. Not because they’re antisocial. Because the economy trained them to consume content the way it trained them to consume everything else: passively, individually, through a screen, from a platform that gets paid whether they feel better or worse afterward.

The small town hardware store closed. The local bakery closed. The butcher, the tailor, the craftsman down the street — gone. Replaced by big box stores staffed by people earning minimum wage, selling products made in countries they’ll never visit, for corporations run by people they’ll never meet.

We didn’t lose the local economy because it was inferior. We lost it because it was outscaled. Because efficiency beat soul. Because a dollar saved on a mass-produced product felt like a win, right up until the moment the place that sold handmade things closed and we realized we’d traded connection for convenience.

The question isn’t why it happened. Scale beat soul. Efficiency beat connection. A handful of very clever people figured out how to put themselves between every buyer and every seller in the world and take a cut while they did it. We know how it happened.

The question is what you do now.

Because the modern economy has convinced people that entrepreneurship is for a certain type of person — the tech founder, the venture-backed startup, the person with an MBA and connections and capital. Not for the person with a recipe their grandmother taught them. Not for the person who can make something beautiful with their hands. Not for the person who just wants to sell something good to their neighbors and keep the money themselves.

That’s the lie this publication exists to dismantle.

The answer has been at the farmers market the whole time.

Not metaphorically. Literally. The person selling homemade jam on a Saturday morning has figured out something that most business school graduates never will — that the simplest, most human form of commerce is also one of the most financially viable. A product people want. A price that makes sense. A person willing to show up and sell it.

No algorithm required. No platform taking its cut. No venture capital. No permission.

Just the oldest transaction in human history: I made something. You want it. Here’s what it costs. Done.

This is the handshake economy. And it is more powerful than anything the digital world has built to replace it — because it gives people back something no platform can manufacture: the feeling of making something real and being paid fairly for it by someone who looked you in the eye.

This publication is for people who are ready to find out what that feels like.

For the person who’s been showing up to someone else’s job for years and quietly wondering if there’s another way.

For the person who has something to sell — a recipe, a craft, a skill, a garage full of things someone else would want — and doesn’t know yet that the market is already waiting for them.

For the person who misses the small town feel of commerce — where you knew the person you bought from and they knew you — and wants to be part of bringing it back.

Every week, you’ll find practical, proven guidance on building a real business selling physical products in the real world. The numbers. The branding. The venues. The pricing. The stories of people who did it — from a farmers market table, from a school event, from a tractor pull, from a pop-up outside a coffee shop — and built something that actually paid them.

You’ll also find the bigger conversation. About what the economy took from us and what we can take back. About why the handshake is more powerful than the algorithm. About why the person who makes something and sells it face to face is doing something more important than they probably realize.

A handshake was enough then. It’s enough now.

Welcome to the Handshake Economy.

The handshake is the revolution.

Join The Handshake Economy

Sit with that for a second.

Your reputation—the thing you’ve spent countless hours thinking about, the reason you typed, erased, and re-typed that social media comment seven times, the justification for the anxiety right before you hit ‘publish’ or ‘send’ on an article or post—doesn’t belong to you. It lives inside the heads of people you can’t control, can’t call, and definitely can’t correct in real time.

They built it from a highlight reel of your worst moments, your best moments, and a few things you never actually said but that sound like something you’d say. You had no editor credit on any of it. No approval rights. No final cut. They just went ahead and made a whole movie about you, cast you as the lead, and you found out about it when someone mentioned “that thing you did” that you absolutely did not do.

This is the system. This is what we’re working with.

Your reputation is a phantom construct assembled from fragments: that time you were brilliant in the meeting, that other time you said “you too” when the waiter said “enjoy your meal,” that one time you said “love you” at the end of a Zoom meeting, and approximately forty-seven interactions where you thought you came across as “thoughtfully reserved” but actually registered as “possibly sedated.”

The people maintaining your reputation in their heads aren’t necessarily malicious. They might just busy. They’re definitely running on partial information about you. Sometimes, they may have even created this whole evil persona around who they think you are. But the important takeaway is that they remember the shape of you, not the specifics. You’re a vibe to them. A general sense. A placeholder that says “competent at thing” or “weird about coffee” or “probably knows Excel?”

And here’s the part that makes this truly beautiful in its horror: you will never, ever get to correct the record. Because the record isn’t written down. It’s distributed across dozens of brains, each running their own version of you, like a decentralized database with no sync protocol.

So what do you actually own?

Your preparation. Your reps. Your judgment in the moment when things go sideways. The quality of the thing you just made. The way you showed up when nobody was watching and there was no upside to showing up well.

That’s the whole list.

You might write a LinkedIn headline that would make David Ogilvy smile. You could write an “About” section that paints you as the “Steve Jobs” of your industry. You can have the charisma of James Bond when networking.

But guess what? In the end, people are going to think what people are going to think. And developing a paper persona without receipts is definitely not going to end well.

Most people have this exactly backwards. They spend enormous energy trying to engineer what other people think about them, and almost none building the underlying capability that would make the reputation manage itself. They’re landscaping the front yard of a house they forgot to build.

They’re out there with the hedge trimmers and the decorative mailbox and the little solar lights that look like mushrooms, making sure everyone driving by thinks “wow, nice property,” while inside there’s just a dirt floor and a camping chair. Maybe a hot plate.

The obsession with how you’re perceived is just anxiety with a LinkedIn profile. It’s the same churning dread you felt in high school about whether people thought you were cool, except now it’s wearing business casual and has opinions about “the Oxford comma.”

When you optimize for reputation instead of capability, you get really good at seeming good. You develop an entirely separate skill set around perception management. You become fluent in the language of appearing competent, which is a completely different language from actually being competent.

You learn to position yourself near successful projects without doing the work. To speak confidently about things you understand shallowly. To take credit ambiguously. To avoid situations where you might be exposed as less capable than your reputation suggests.

Congratulations. You’ve built a career as a full-time reputation manager for a person who doesn’t exist.

The math here is brutal: every hour you spend managing perception is an hour you didn’t spend building capability. It’s opportunity cost 101. The gap between what people think you can do and what you can actually do doesn’t stay constant. It grows. And eventually, someone asks you to actually do the thing, and you’re standing there with your hedge trimmers and your decorative mailbox, and everyone’s waiting for you to show them the house.

Here’s what actually works, and it’s so simple it sounds like a scam: get so good at the thing that the gap between what people think of you and what you can do closes on its own.

Not because you curated it. Not because you managed it. Not because you posted about it with the right hashtags and a carousel of insights.

Because the work is undeniable.

When you’re genuinely good, reputation becomes a lagging indicator that eventually catches up. People figure it out. Not all of them. Not quickly. But the ones who matter—the ones actually paying attention to the work instead of the performance—they notice.

And here’s the secret nobody tells you: those are the only people whose opinions actually affect your life.

The rest are just maintaining their cached version of you, and that version is going to be wrong no matter what you do. You could spend your entire life trying to correct it, or you could spend that time getting better at your actual job.

You don’t control the verdict. You control the evidence.

The verdict is what people think of you. It’s the reputation, the perception, the story they tell about you when you’re not in the room. You have no ownership stake in that. It’s not yours. It never was.

The evidence is what you make. It’s the receipts. It’s what you ship. How you show up. The quality of your judgment when nobody’s watching and there’s no social media upside to being good.

That’s yours. That’s the only thing that’s yours.

So stop trying to own the wrong thing. Stop managing a phantom. Stop landscaping the front yard.

Build the house.

The reputation will follow, or it won’t. But at least you’ll have somewhere to live.

The first question I want to ask anyone who says “I’m a strategist” is: what does that mean? And the second question, which I’m borrowing from a 1999 workplace documentary, is: “what would you say you do here?”

These are reasonable questions. If someone tells you they’re a plumber, you know what they do. They fix pipes. If they’re an electrician, they fix wiring. If they’re a teacher, they teach. A surgeon operates. But strategy? Strategy is what happens when you’ve successfully convinced everyone that thinking about work is more valuable than doing work.

Here’s what “I do strategy” actually means: “I am going to tell other people what to do, even though I have never done it myself, and I have absolutely no intention of ever doing it.” It’s a job description that would make a feudal lord blush. At least the lord had to occasionally ride a horse into battle. The strategy person doesn’t even have to open Excel.

My favorite version is the freelance strategist. Like I am supposed to pay you to tell me what to do? All for the low price of $1,500 for the “strategy document”? That. Is. Hilarious.

Think about how we got here. At some point in corporate history—I’m guessing around the time we started calling employees “human capital”—someone realized you could rebrand “not doing the actual work” as “strategic thinking.” This was a genius move. Before this rebranding, if you didn’t do the work, you were just lazy. After the rebranding, you were too important to do the work. Your mind was occupied with higher-order concerns. You were seeing the forest while everyone else was stuck counting trees. But the irony here is that the person thinking about the forest, had never actually touched a tree or knew what trees were made of.

The beauty of strategy as a job function is that it’s completely unfalsifiable. If the strategy works, you’re a visionary. If it fails, well, the execution was flawed. You can’t blame the strategy. The strategy was perfect. The strategy existed in a pure realm of PowerPoint slides and whiteboard sessions, unsullied by the messy reality of implementation. It’s like being a football coach who only draws plays on a chalkboard and then blames the players when the plays don’t work, except the coach at least used to play football.

Let me walk you through what a strategy person actually does all day, taken from a time-motion study I did (ok, not really):

9:00 AM - Meeting about the meeting that will happen next week to discuss the strategic framework
10:30 AM - Coffee with a stakeholder to “align on vision”
11:00 AM - Work on a PowerPoint deck that explains why the strategy from last quarter needs to be revised
12:00 PM - Lunch meeting to discuss strategic priorities
1:30 PM - Review someone else’s work and provide “strategic feedback,” which means suggesting they think bigger without providing any specific guidance on what that means
3:00 PM - Another meeting about frameworks, methodologies, or roadmaps—anything that sounds important but doesn’t require doing anything
4:30 PM - Send an email about the importance of execution while not executing anything

You’ll notice that none of these activities produce anything you can hold, touch, or measure. This is by design. The moment you produce something concrete, someone can evaluate whether it’s good or bad. Strategy exists in the realm of the theoretical, the directional, the “let’s take this offline and circle back.”

The strategy person has convinced everyone that their job is to point at the horizon and say, “We should go that way.” Never mind that they don’t know how to build a boat, can’t read a map, and get seasick in the bathtub. They’re not boat-builders. They’re not navigators. They’re not sailors. They’re strategists. Their job is to have opinions about boats while other people build them, sail them, and bail water when they start sinking.

And here’s the thing that makes this whole system work: everyone is terrified to ask what strategy actually means because asking makes you sound like you don’t get it. It’s the emperor’s new clothes, except the emperor is wearing a lanyard and carrying a Moleskine notebook. If you ask “But what do you actually do?” you’re not strategic enough to understand. You’re too in the weeds. You’re not thinking at the right altitude.

The altitude metaphor is perfect, by the way. Strategy happens at 30,000 feet. Execution happens on the ground. The strategy person gets to fly over everything, pointing down at problems and saying “Someone should fix that,” while never landing the plane. They’ve literally positioned themselves above the work.

I think my favorite part of the strategy industrial complex is how it’s become self-perpetuating. Now we have Chief Strategy Officers who manage Vice Presidents of Strategy who oversee Directors of Strategic Initiatives who supervise Strategy Managers. It’s strategies all the way down. Somewhere at the bottom of this pyramid is one person actually doing something, and they’re probably an intern.

And consider how funny the specialization of strategy has become. For example, there are strategists within different job functions, i.e., “I do product strategy”, or “I do marketing strategy”, or “I do UX strategy”. All of these say one thing to me—“we specialize in doing nothing, but now within a specific discipline.”

The really impressive achievement is that strategy people have convinced everyone—including themselves—that what they do is not just legitimate but essential. More than essential: it’s the most important work in the organization. Never mind that the company existed before the strategy role was created. Never mind that the actual product gets built by engineers, sold by salespeople, and supported by customer service. The strategy person has successfully argued that none of that matters without someone pointing in a direction first, even if that direction changes every quarter.

We’ve built an entire corporate infrastructure around the idea that some people are too valuable to do actual work. We’ve created a class of professional direction-givers who have never done the thing they’re giving directions about. And we’ve all agreed to pretend this makes sense.

It’s another one of those systems that’s completely broken but nobody wants to admit it, because too many people have built careers on it. Saying strategy isn’t real work would be like telling a medieval peasant that maybe the divine right of kings is just something kings made up. Technically true, but you’re going to make a lot of people uncomfortable.

So the next time someone tells you their job is strategy, ask them what that means. Watch them try to explain it. Watch them use words like “direction” and “alignment” and “framework” and “strategic imperative.” Watch them describe a job that somehow requires their full attention while producing nothing you can see.

Then ask them what they would say they do here.

I’m still waiting for a good answer as I ponder why work doesn’t work.

Tess was the kind of coworker who would pour gasoline on you if you were on fire—if it would help her career move forward even an inch. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean if you were literally engulfed in flames, screaming for help, and Tess had a fire extinguisher in one hand and a can of premium unleaded in the other, she would carefully assess which option would look better on her performance review. And then she’d go with the gasoline.

The thing about Tess is that she wasn’t subtle about being terrible. She was openly, flagrantly, magnificently toxic. She had the interpersonal skills of a cheese grater and the empathy of a parking meter. When she smiled at you in meetings, it was the smile of someone mentally calculating exactly how to use your corpse as a ladder rung. Everyone knew it. Everyone could see it. And yet—the system loved her.

Let me paint you a picture of how Tess operated. I’d spend weeks building a project, collaborating with cross-functional partners, getting buy-in from stakeholders, doing all the things you’re supposed to do when you’re a functioning adult in a professional environment. My coworkers would support it. The people I worked with would say things like “This is great!” and “Let’s move forward with this!” You know, the kind of positive feedback that makes you think you’re doing your job correctly.

Then with the force and speed of a ninja assassin, Tess would strike.

She wouldn’t do it in the meeting, of course. That would be too honest, too direct, too much like actual professional disagreement. No, Tess would wait until I left the room, and then she’d sidle up to the decision-makers like a corporate assassin and systematically dismantle everything I’d built. She’d plant seeds of doubt. She’d reframe my ideas as her concerns. She’d position herself as the thoughtful one, the careful one, the one who was really thinking about what’s best for the company.

Then, to add insult to injury, Tess would go to our boss, you know the horrible one with the story for another day, and say whatever it took to get me drawn and quartered (in the professional sense).

By the time I found out what happened, my project would be dead, Tess would be leading the “new direction” (which was usually just my idea with worse execution), my boss would be praising Tess, and I’d be left wondering if I’d imagined the entire previous conversation where everyone agreed with me.

The gasoline-on-fire thing wasn’t hyperbole, by the way. Tess used me as a stepping stone to get a manager role. Actively, deliberately, with the kind of focused malice usually reserved for soap opera villains. She took credit for my work, undermined my credibility, and positioned herself as the natural successor to a leadership position. And it worked.

Here’s where the story gets interesting, though. Because this isn’t really a story about Tess being awful. Awful people exist everywhere—in offices, in grocery stores, in line at the DMV. They’re like pigeons: annoying, ubiquitous, and somehow always shitting on things you care about.

No, this is a story about why the system didn’t just allow Tess to survive. It created an environment where she thrived.

Think about it. What does a typical corporate promotion system reward? Individual achievement. Visible wins. The appearance of leadership. Being in the right meetings and saying the right things to the right people. Does it reward collaboration? Sure, in the same way it rewards “synergy” and “thinking outside the box”—which is to say, it puts those words in the values statement and then promptly ignores them when it’s time to hand out promotions.

Tess understood this instinctively. She knew that sabotaging a coworker’s project and then swooping in with a “solution” looked exactly like leadership to people who weren’t paying attention (especially to a horrible boss). She knew that taking credit for other people’s work was functionally identical to doing the work yourself, as long as you were the one in the room when the VP asked about it. She knew that the system didn’t reward being good at your job; it rewarded being good at looking like you were good at your job.

And boy did Tess do a good job of looking like she was doing a good job.

And the beautiful thing—and by beautiful, I mean soul-crushing—is that the system proved her right.

Tess got the manager role. There was the congratulatory email about it, full of phrases like “excited to announce” and “well-deserved promotion” and other corporate euphemisms for “we have no idea what we’re doing.” I’m sure someone in HR felt very good about themselves.

The role lasted three weeks.

Three. Whole. Weeks.

Turns out, when you’re a manager, you can’t just sabotage people behind their backs anymore. You have to actually manage them. To their faces. With your name attached to decisions. And shockingly, when your entire professional skill set is “being terrible to people in ways they can’t quite prove,” you’re not great at the job that requires you to lead, inspire, and develop a team.

The team HATED her.

Tess flamed out so spectacularly that I almost felt bad for her. Almost. It was like watching someone who’d spent years training to be a ninja finally get their big mission, only to discover that the mission was “teach a kindergarten class.” All her skills were suddenly useless, and everyone could see it.

But here’s the thing that keeps me up at night: the system didn’t learn anything.

Tess failed, sure. But the system that promoted her? Still there. Still rewarding the same behaviors. Still creating new Tesses every quarter. Because the problem isn’t that one toxic person slipped through the cracks. The problem is that the cracks are load-bearing walls.

We’ve built workplace systems that actively select for toxicity. We’ve created metrics that reward sabotage and call it ambition. We’ve designed promotion tracks that favor people who are good at taking credit over people who are good at their jobs. And then we act surprised when our offices are full of people who would pour gasoline on their burning coworkers.

The system didn’t fail to stop Tess. The system created her, promoted her, and when she inevitably failed, it went right back to creating the next one.

And that’s why work doesn’t work.

Here’s the setup: Let’s say your boss, Bob, has been doing something terrible. Maybe he’s been screaming at employees until they quit. Maybe he’s been sexually harassing junior staff. Maybe he’s been completely absent playing golf while running a whole department into the ground. Whatever it is, it’s bad, it’s documented, and you’ve finally worked up the courage to report it.

So you go to Human Resources (HR). Now, here’s where it gets good.

HR—the department that works for the company, gets paid by the company, and whose entire job security depends on keeping the company happy—will conduct an “impartial investigation” into whether Bob, who also works for the company and is probably golf buddies with someone in the C-suite, did anything wrong.

Expecting impartiality and fairness from a system like this is naive at best, and well, delusional at worst. It’s like asking a defense attorney to also be the prosecutor and the judge. It’s like having the fox investigate the missing chickens and file a report on whether the fox ate them. Spoiler alert: The fox is going to have some very interesting theories about a passing coyote.

But wait, it gets better. This is when the Oscar-worthy theatrics begin.

HR will sit you down in a conference room—you know the one, with the motivational poster about “teamwork” and the table that’s slightly too low for the chairs—and they’ll say things like “We take these allegations very seriously” and “We’re committed to a thorough and impartial investigation.” They’ll have a legal pad. They’ll nod with concern. They might even offer you water, which is how you know they’re really committed to justice.

Then they'll ask you to describe what happened, and they'll treat it like they're actually listening—nodding, taking notes, asking follow-up questions designed to sound thorough. But here's the thing: by the time you walk into that conference room, the outcome has already been decided. The investigation is just the paperwork that makes it look legitimate. Everything you say feeds into a legal file, not a fact-finding mission.

Because—and I cannot stress this enough—HR does not work for you. HR works for the company. Their job is not to protect employees from bad managers. Their job is to protect bad managers from employees. You are not their client. You are their problem.

The investigation will proceed with all the trappings of legitimacy. There will be interviews. There will be documentation. There will be phrases like “fact-finding process” and “due diligence.” Someone from Legal might even get involved, which is when things get interesting—lawyers need real facts to build a defense, but HR is usually busy editing the version that makes the company look best.

They might interview Bob. Bob will deny everything, or explain that you “misunderstood” his management style, or suggest that you’re “not a culture fit.” Bob will not be suspended during this investigation. Bob will continue coming to work, sitting in his office, attending meetings, and now he will know that you kicked off an investigation. Bob will likely even talk to your team members—in confidence of course—about the importance of “honesty” in the investigation (as long as honesty means you honestly better not say anything negative about Bob). You, meanwhile, will be wondering if you’ve just committed career suicide.

Here’s what happens next: After a thorough investigation lasting anywhere from two weeks to six months—during which you’ll hear absolutely nothing and begin to question your own sanity—HR will call you back into the conference room.

“We’ve completed our investigation,” they’ll say, “and while we can’t share the details due to confidentiality”—translation: we aren’t going to do anything and wouldn’t tell you anyway because we don’t want you to use it against us in court—”we want you to know we took your concerns seriously.” What will make this even more spectacular, is they will do this with a straight face.

Notice what’s missing from that sentence? Any indication that Bob did anything wrong. Any mention of consequences. Any suggestion that anything will change (other than your employment status).

That’s because the investigation found that while Bob’s management style might be “intense” or “direct,” there was no evidence of misconduct. Or maybe they found that “both parties could benefit from improved communication.” Or perhaps they’ve decided that Bob would benefit from “additional coaching,” which is corporate-speak for “we talked to him for five minutes and he promised to be more careful.”

Bob keeps his job. You get to keep working for Bob, but now Bob knows you reported him, and things are going to be super comfortable from here on out. HR has successfully protected the company from liability. The system works!

Except, of course, it doesn’t work. Not if the goal is actually finding truth or protecting employees or creating accountability. But that’s not the goal. That’s never been the goal.

The goal is to create a process that looks legitimate enough to satisfy legal requirements and make the company appear responsible, while ensuring that the company—and the people who run it—remain protected. It’s a magic trick. It’s theater. It’s a carefully constructed system designed to reach a predetermined conclusion while appearing to be open to evidence.

The absurdity is that we know that “impartial investigation” is an oxymoron when the investigator works for the accused. We know that the system is designed to protect power, not challenge it.

But we’ll keep pretending because we have no other option. We’ll keep filing reports with HR as if they’re a neutral party. We keep participating in investigations as if they might actually result in accountability. We keep using phrases like “speak truth to power” while working in systems specifically designed to ensure that truth never gets anywhere near power.

The fox will investigate itself and report back on the missing chickens. And we’ll all sit around nodding seriously while reading the report that concludes the chickens probably just wandered off on their own.

The system works perfectly. Just not for you.

Forty years of giving your best hours to someone else’s company, in exchange for a paycheck that covers the mortgage and, if you’re careful and a little lucky, a retirement that lets you stop right before your body gives out. Meanwhile, the people at the top of the org chart aren’t living that math. They’re not waiting until sixty-five. They’re not “careful and a little lucky.” They’re fine. More than fine. Some of them are on a yacht right now.

That’s not a conspiracy. Nobody designed it as cruelty. It’s just what the system was built to produce, and you happen to be standing in the part of it that produces yachts for other people.

If you’ve ever done everything right — hit the numbers, taken the extra project, stayed late, said yes — and still felt like you were running in place, you already know what I’m talking about. You don’t need me to explain feudalism to you. You’re already living a modern version of it. You just might not have had the words for it yet.

This is for you.

I spent years as a criminal investigator before I became a performance consultant, and the move was less of a leap than it sounds. Investigators and consultants do the same job in different rooms. Something is wrong. The obvious explanation is incomplete. The official story is definitely incomplete. The person closest to the problem — you — knows more than you’ve been asked. Your job is to find out what’s actually true, about the system and about yourself.

Here’s the first thing I want you to take from this, and I’ll keep saying it until it sounds obvious:

The system is working exactly as designed — just not for you.

Your stalled career, your burnout, the contentment that’s really just resignation wearing a calmer face — none of it is a character flaw. It’s the predictable output of incentives built a long time ago by people who were never thinking about you. If you don’t like the output, stop trying to fix yourself and go investigate the structure instead.

That’s the actual work. I take problems that get blamed on people and treat them as problems of design. A promotion that never comes, blamed on “not being ready,” when the real cause is that nobody was ever going to hand you the authority that role requires. A goal you keep almost-reaching, blamed on discipline, when the real cause is that the goal was never fully yours to begin with. Burnout blamed on resilience, when the real cause is a structural mismatch between what you’re giving and what you’re getting back — and no amount of yoga fixes a math problem.

But seeing the system clearly is only the first move. The second is harder:

Definitions matter.

Most people have never actually written down, in plain language, the precise distance between what they have and don’t want, and what they want and don’t have. “I’m unhappy at work” isn’t a diagnosis. It’s six different problems wearing one vague sentence, and you’ll spend years fixing the wrong one if you never separate them out.

Which brings me to the line I’ll repeat the most, because it’s the one the entire self-improvement industry violates:

Treatment without diagnosis is malpractice.

A doctor who prescribed before examining you would lose their license. The advice industry built around “you” does this constantly. Five-step morning routines arrive before anyone has asked what’s actually broken. Hustle arrives before diagnosis. This publication takes the opposite stance: the diagnosis is the work. If a post doesn’t end in a tidy action list, that’s not a failure. That’s the contract.

A few things I believe, stated plainly so you can decide whether to keep reading:

The gap between the life you’re building and the life you actually want is the most important territory you have. Most of corporate life is built to help you avoid looking at it directly.

You are almost always smarter than the system you’re operating inside of. When something isn’t working, the cause is usually upstream of you, not inside you. Stop excavating your own character for a flaw that was never there.

Frameworks are useful until they aren’t. The job isn’t to follow the framework. The job is to understand your actual situation. The framework is scaffolding, not the building.

Evidence beats opinion. Including mine. Especially mine. If something here doesn’t match your real life, trust your life over my paragraph, and write to tell me what I got wrong.

You don’t need permission to want something different. Most people inside a system like this are waiting for someone — a boss, a partner, a savings number — to give them permission to choose otherwise. The people who actually get out don’t wait for permission. They diagnose, they build a real plan, and they move.

Here’s what you can expect from me:

Posts that take a specific feeling you’ve had — the plateau, the burnout, the golden handcuffs, the promotion that keeps almost-arriving — and work it the way I’d work a case. Some will be short observations. Some will be longer investigations. Some will be arguments staked plainly, no hedge. All of them are trying to tell you something true about your situation, instead of something comfortable.

I will be wrong sometimes. When I am, I’ll say so. I’d rather be useful than impressive.

I won’t write to fill a content calendar. I’ll write when I have something worth saying — at least once a week, more likely twice. The trade for less frequency is that what lands in your inbox is worth opening.

I won’t sell you a course. I won’t sell you a certification. I won’t tell you five habits will fix your life. If I tell you something is hard, it’s because it’s hard. If I don’t tell you what to do about it yet, it’s because we haven’t finished diagnosing it.

This isn’t for everyone working a corporate job. It’s not for people looking for a pep talk, or someone to validate the version of “fine” they’ve already decided to settle for. It’s for the people who already know something’s off, who are tired of being told the fix is one more morning routine, and who actually want a way out — whether that’s the income to walk away, a creative outlet that makes staying bearable, or the plan to finally go all-in on something that’s theirs.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably the reader.

Subscribe, and let’s find your way out.

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Attached is this year’s employee engagement survey, complete with assurances about confidentiality and promises that leadership is “committed to listening.” Across the organization, employees experience the same weary recognition—it’s that time again. Time to pretend that filling out a questionnaire will change anything. Time to participate in corporate theater where everyone knows their lines, plays their part, and absolutely nothing changes.

Employee surveys have become one of modern management’s most successful cons: a mechanism that allows companies to claim they value employee feedback without the messy commitment of actually acting on it. They’re the organizational equivalent of “thoughts and prayers”—a gesture that costs nothing, demands nothing, and accomplishes nothing beyond allowing leadership to check a box labeled “employee engagement.” The real purpose isn’t gathering honest feedback. It’s creating plausible deniability. When employees complain about problems, management can point to the survey and say, “We asked, and you didn’t tell us.” Except employees did tell them. They just weren’t listening.

The Confidentiality Myth

The foundation of every employee survey is a promise: your responses are confidential, anonymous, protected. This promise is a lie, and everyone knows it.

Employees understand how data works. They know that “anonymous” surveys still collect metadata—timestamps, IP addresses, device information. They know that when results are broken down by department, location, or tenure, the pool gets small enough to identify individuals. Work in a three-person satellite office? Your “anonymous” feedback might as well have your name on it. Gave the only negative score in your ten-person team? Congratulations, you’ve just identified yourself.

The confidentiality illusion crumbles further when employees watch how information flows through organizations. They notice when a critical comment in Monday’s survey becomes Tuesday’s closed-door meeting. They observe which employees get quietly managed out after particularly honest feedback cycles. They remember the manager who, during a team meeting, referenced specific survey language that was supposedly anonymous. The message becomes clear: confidentiality is a legal fiction, not a practical reality.

Even in larger organizations where true anonymity might be technically possible, employees have learned not to trust the system. They’ve seen too many “anonymous” feedback sessions where leadership somehow knew exactly who said what. They understand that HR systems log everything, that IT can trace anything, and that “we can’t see individual responses” often means “we can’t see them easily” rather than “we can’t see them at all.”

This knowledge poisons the entire exercise before it begins. Employees approach surveys not as opportunities for honest dialogue but as potential minefields where one wrong answer could mark them as “not a team player” or “resistant to change.” The survey becomes a test of political savvy rather than a genuine feedback mechanism.

Contaminated Data, Useless Results

When employees don’t believe they’re protected, they cannot give honest feedback. It’s that simple. The result is data so thoroughly contaminated by self-censorship and strategic dishonesty that it’s worthless for any meaningful purpose.

Watch employees fill out surveys and you’ll see the calculation happening in real time. They hover over the rating scale, considering not what they actually think but what’s safe to say. That question about management effectiveness? Better give it a 4 out of 5—not so high it looks like brown-nosing, not so low it looks like troublemaking. The open-ended question about workplace challenges? Write something vague about “communication” or “work-life balance,” nothing specific enough to be traced back, nothing honest enough to be useful.

The gap between survey responses and reality becomes obvious in any honest workplace conversation. At lunch, employees will tell you exactly what’s broken: the incompetent director everyone tiptoes around, the promotion system that rewards politics over performance, the “optional” weekend work that’s actually mandatory. But in the survey? Suddenly everything is “generally satisfactory” with “room for improvement.” The survey captures the corporate-approved version of employee sentiment—sanitized, safe, and completely divorced from truth.

This creates a perverse feedback loop. Leadership receives data showing that employees are reasonably satisfied, with only minor concerns about standard workplace issues. They conclude that no major changes are needed. Meanwhile, employees know they lied on the survey, see that nothing changed, and learn that honesty is neither expected nor rewarded. The next survey cycle produces even more filtered, even less useful data.

Where Survey Results Go to Die

Even if surveys somehow captured honest feedback—and they don’t—it wouldn’t matter. Because survey results don’t drive change. They drive PowerPoint presentations.

The journey is predictable. Results are compiled, analyzed, and transformed into a deck with lots of charts showing mostly positive trends. HR presents these findings to leadership in a meeting where everyone nods seriously and commits to “taking this feedback seriously.” Someone suggests forming a committee. Someone else proposes “further analysis.” The deck gets filed away, and everyone returns to business as usual.

Leadership engages with survey data selectively, treating it like a buffet where they take what they like and ignore the rest. Results that confirm existing priorities get cited repeatedly: “As the survey shows, employees value professional development,” says the executive who already planned to expand training programs. Results that challenge leadership decisions get dismissed: “The sample size for that question wasn’t statistically significant,” or “We need to understand the context better before acting on that feedback.”

Actionable criticism simply disappears. Employees report that their manager plays favorites? That’s a “personnel matter” that can’t be discussed. Multiple teams flag that the new software system is dysfunctional? “We’ve invested too much to change course now.” Widespread concern about unsustainable workloads? “We’re all doing more with less in this economy.”

The most damning evidence of leadership’s disinterest is what happens when employees ask about survey results. Months pass. Employees inquire. Eventually, they get a vague email about “positive trends” and “areas of focus” that could have been written without ever looking at the data. Specific problems raised in surveys are never mentioned. Concrete changes are never announced. The message is clear: we asked because we had to, not because we cared.

The Cycle of Cynicism

Each survey cycle that produces no meaningful change teaches employees a lesson: their feedback doesn’t matter. This lesson accumulates, deepening with each repetition until cynicism becomes the default workplace attitude.

Employees learn to game the system. They figure out the minimum acceptable scores to avoid triggering concern. They master the art of the meaningless comment: specific enough to look engaged, vague enough to be safe. They participate because participation is tracked and non-participation raises flags, but they participate without hope or honesty.

The tragedy is that this makes surveys even more useless, which gives leadership even more reason to ignore them, which makes employees even more cynical. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of meaninglessness, and everyone involved knows it. Yet companies keep running surveys, keep promising that “this time will be different,” keep insisting that employee voices matter.

They don’t. The surveys prove it every year. And employees have learned to stop believing otherwise.

The basic setup was simple. A small group of people—let’s call them lords, because that’s what they called themselves—owned essentially all the land. And I mean all of it. Every field, every forest, every patch of dirt you could possibly stand on belonged to somebody, and that somebody was definitely not you.

Everyone else—the peasants, which was like 90% of the population—worked that land. In exchange, they got to live on it and keep enough of what they produced to not starve. Mostly. It was a very “you scratch my back, I let you continue existing” kind of arrangement.

Now, the lords were very clear that this was not slavery. Slavery would have been barbaric. No, the peasants were free. Free to leave anytime they wanted! Of course, they’d be leaving to go to... other land that was also owned by other lords, who would offer them essentially the same deal, except now they’d have to start over from scratch. But technically, they had options. The lords felt this was an important distinction.

The Daily Grind (Literally)

Your average peasant’s day went something like this: Wake up before dawn in the small dwelling they rented from a lord they’d never actually met. (The lord owned dozens of these dwellings across multiple villages. He had people to manage that sort of thing.) Pay monthly tribute for the privilege of sleeping there—usually about half of what they earned.

Then travel to wherever their labor was required. Sometimes this was a short walk. Sometimes it was an hour-long trek. Depended on where you could afford to live versus where the work was. The lord’s overseer expected you there at a specific time and you stayed for a specific number of hours—eight, ten, sometimes twelve—doing whatever task had been assigned to you.

Farming, mostly. But also: maintaining the lord’s properties, keeping his records, transporting his goods, preparing his food. The variety was impressive. The pay was not.

Here’s the clever part: the wages were calibrated to be just enough. Enough to pay your rent-tribute, buy food, maybe own a second tunic. But not enough to, say, save up and buy your own land. That would’ve defeated the whole purpose. The system was self-regulating, like a thermostat, except instead of temperature it regulated how close to broke you stayed.

The Debt Situation

Most peasants also owed money to various creditors. Many had borrowed substantial sums to attend training schools where they learned skills the lords required—literacy, accounting, specialized crafts. These debts could take decades to repay. Some peasants would still be paying them off when their own children were old enough to attend the same schools and take on the same debts. (Generational planning!)

Others owed money for medical care. When you got sick or injured, healers would help you—for a price. A serious illness could financially destroy a family for years. Some peasants avoided seeking treatment until things got really bad, which often made treatment even more expensive, or impossible. But at least they’d avoided debt for a while, so there’s that.

The peasant also needed various goods to function in society: a cart or horse for transportation, proper clothing, tools for their trade. Moneylenders were happy to extend credit when wages fell short. The interest rates ensured the debt grew faster than you could pay it down, which was probably just an unfortunate mathematical coincidence and not at all by design.

The Dream of Advancement

The truly beautiful thing about feudalism—and I mean this—was the mythology that sustained it.

Peasants were taught from childhood that anyone could become a lord. All it took was hard work, virtue, and determination. Sure, it almost never actually happened. But theoretically? Totally possible.

When it didn’t happen—which was always—this was explained as a personal failing. You hadn’t worked hard enough. Hadn’t been smart enough. Hadn’t wanted it badly enough. The system was fine. You were the problem.

Meanwhile, the lords obviously deserved their position. They were smarter, more capable, better at managing resources. That’s why they had all the resources to manage. Circular logic is the most elegant kind of logic.

The peasants mostly believed this. They worked harder, hoping loyalty and effort would be rewarded. They told themselves that next year would be better. They celebrated the rare peasant who did manage to rise in station, holding them up as proof the system worked, while ignoring the thousands who didn’t.

And if anyone questioned the arrangement too loudly? Well, the lords had laws and enforcers to handle that. But mostly they didn’t need them. The peasants policed themselves, and each other.

That’s how you know you’ve built a really good system.

I am not describing medieval Europe.

I am describing America, circa 2026.

We rebuilt feudalism. We just gave it a website and called it a meritocracy.

The most successful rebranding campaign in human history, and we’re all too busy working to notice.

You know the ritual. It begins with a gate agent announcing that boarding will start with groups named after rare gemstones and precious metals, i.e., sapphire, diamond, gold, silver. This group strolls to the gate like members of they have been given ownership stake in the airline.

Then comes active military. Followed by “passengers needing extra time.” Then families with small children (who somehow weren’t “passengers needing extra time”).

When the gate agent finally announces “We’ll now begin boarding Group 1,” 47 people immediately stand up, clutching their boarding passes like golden tickets, even though they’re in Group 7. They form a scrum around the gate, blocking everyone who’s actually supposed to board (right now, it’s Group 1), creating a human traffic jam before anyone’s even on the plane. But this is only foreshadowing what’s about to come.

Then comes Group 2. Then Group 3. Then Group 4. Then people with the airline’s credit card. Then Group 5, which is somehow different from “main cabin.” Then steerage. At some point you realize there are more boarding groups than there are rows on the plane.

The beautiful part? None of it matters. Because while this elaborate kabuki theater unfolds, everyone’s playing a completely different game: the Overhead Bin Hunger Games.

The System That Makes No Sense

Here’s what actually happens when you board a plane front-to-back, which is how we currently do it:

Person 12A gets on, walks to row 12, stops, and spends 90 seconds trying to fit their “carry-on” (a steamer trunk) into the overhead bin. Behind them, 150 people stand in the aisle, motionless, like a human parking lot. Person 12A finally sits down. Person 13B now does the exact same thing. Repeat 30 times.

Meanwhile, Person 34F has been standing in the aisle for 15 minutes, watching this happen, knowing their turn is coming, unable to do anything about it. It’s like waiting in line at the DMV, except you’re standing up and you paid $400 for the privilege.

The current system—boarding front-to-back by arbitrary “groups”—is mathematically optimized to create the maximum number of aisle-blocking events. It’s like designing a highway where every car has to stop and parallel park before the next car can pass. You couldn’t create a worse system if you tried.

Actually, that’s not true. You could create a worse system: you could have people board randomly while calling out numbers that don’t correspond to their seats and then act surprised when they don’t listen. Which is exactly what we do.

Here’s What Would Actually Work

The solution is so obvious it’s painful. Board rear-to-front. Window seats first, then middle, then aisle. Or just strict rear-to-front by row.

Think about it: If you board row 30 before row 10, Person 30A can take as long as they want with their overhead bin because no one is behind them. Person 29A boards next, same deal. By the time you get to the front of the plane, everyone’s seated and you’re done.

This isn’t theoretical. Astrophysicist Jason Steffen literally ran computer simulations and found that back-to-front, window-middle-aisle boarding is twice as fast as the current system. Twice as fast. We’ve known this for over a decade.

Or here’s an even simpler solution: Make first class board last. Right now, first class boards first, which means they sit there sipping champagne while 200 people shuffle past them giving them death stares. Cool for them, I guess, but it also means they’re taking up the aisle space while everyone else is trying to get to their seats. Board them last and they can walk directly to their seats with no one in their way. Everyone wins.

Want to get really radical? Ban carry-ons. Or actually enforce the size limits. The overhead bin arms race exists because airlines started charging for checked bags, so everyone brings everything on board. You know what doesn’t have a boarding problem? Trains. Stadiums. Movie theaters. Buses. Literally any other system where people need to sit down in assigned seats.

The fix is absurdly simple. We’re not trying to solve cold fusion here. We’re trying to get people to sit down in numbered chairs.

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Why Nothing Will Change

So why don’t airlines do any of this?

Because they don’t give a shit about you.

I don’t mean that as hyperbole. I mean it as a literal description of their incentive structure. Inefficient boarding doesn’t cost airlines money. It costs you time. And your time is worth nothing to them.

Think about what airlines actually care about: fuel costs, labor costs, gate fees, turnaround time between flights. You know what doesn’t affect turnaround time? Whether boarding takes 20 minutes or 35 minutes, because the plane isn’t leaving until it’s scheduled to leave anyway. The pilots need their pre-flight checks. The fuel needs to be loaded. The catering needs to happen. Boarding is rarely — if ever— the bottleneck.

But here’s what inefficient boarding does create: anxiety. Stress. A desperate scramble for overhead bin space. And you know what anxious, stressed people do? They pay $40 for “early boarding” so they can get on the plane first and guarantee their bin space.

The chaos isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. It’s a revenue stream.

Airlines figured out decades ago that customer experience doesn’t matter. You’re going to fly anyway because you need to get somewhere and they’ve consolidated into an oligopoly. There are four major carriers. They don’t compete on service because they don’t have to. They compete on routes and prices, and even then, barely.

The system is broken on purpose. It’s broken because fixing it would cost money (retraining gate agents, redesigning boarding procedures, enforcing carry-on limits) and generate zero additional revenue. Meanwhile, keeping it broken generates upgrade fees, credit card sign-ups for priority boarding, and gate-checked bag fees when the bins inevitably fill up.

You think I’m being cynical? Airlines haven’t cared about customer experience since deregulation in 1978. They’ve spent 40 years figuring out how to extract maximum revenue from minimum service. They’ve removed legroom, added fees for everything, turned their planes into flying buses, and made the entire experience as miserable as legally possible.

And boarding? Boarding is just another opportunity to make you pay to avoid suffering they created.

So no, they’re not going to fix it. They’re never going to fix it. Because the system isn’t broken for them.

It’s only broken for you.

It’s designed to meet compliance regulations.

The L&D system exists so that when the auditor asks, “Do you provide anti-harassment training?” the answer is yes. When the board asks, “Do we have leadership development?” the answer is yes. When the lawsuit asks, “Did you train people on data privacy?” the answer is yes.

The entire infrastructure—the LMS, the course catalog, the completion tracking, the certificates—is engineered for one purpose: documentation that training occurred. Not that learning happened. Not that behavior changed. Not that capability increased. Just that the training event took place and someone clicked “Complete.”

You know this is true because you’ve taken these courses. You’ve clicked through the sexual harassment training with its stilted scenarios where “Brad” makes obviously inappropriate comments to “Jennifer” in the break room, and you answer multiple-choice questions that insult your intelligence. (”Is it appropriate to comment on a colleague’s body? A) Yes B) No C) Only on Fridays.”) You’ve sat through the cybersecurity module that teaches you passwords should be “strong” without explaining what that actually means, then makes you watch a 4-minute video about phishing emails narrated by someone who sounds like they’re reading a hostage statement.

This is why L&D courses feel like they were designed by aliens who heard about human learning third-hand. This is why they’re filled with stock photos of diverse people pointing at whiteboards and “knowledge checks” that test whether you were awake, not whether you learned anything. This is why nobody remembers anything from them twenty minutes after clicking “Complete.”

They’re not supposed to teach you. They’re supposed to generate a timestamp in a database that proves you were “taught.”

The system is working exactly as designed. It’s just not designed to do what it claims to do.

THE COURSERA CHARADE

Now let’s talk about “development budgets.”

Most companies will tell you they invest in employee development. They’ll point to their generous learning stipends, their platform subscriptions, their tuition reimbursement programs. They’ll show you the line item in the budget. They’ll mention it in the job posting and again during onboarding.

What they’re actually giving you is Coursera (or LinkedIn Learning) access.

This isn’t development. This is a participation trophy. This is the corporate equivalent of giving someone a gym membership and calling it a fitness program.

Real development costs money—actual money, not the $400 per employee per year that platform access costs. It requires dedicated time during work hours, which means someone’s not doing their “real job” for a while. It needs mentorship, which means a senior person spending hours coaching instead of producing. It demands feedback, which requires managers who know how to give it. It needs practice, which means letting people try things and fail without punishment. It requires designing roles that stretch people into new capabilities, not just extract their existing ones. It means creating career paths that make sense and are actually available, not just theoretical ladders that lead nowhere.

Real development is messy and expensive and time-consuming and requires sustained attention over months and years.

Guess which one companies choose?

The beautiful thing about platform access is that it’s something to point at. “We offer professional development! Look, here’s the login!” It’s proof you “did something” without having to do anything. It shifts the burden entirely to the employee—if you’re not growing, that’s on you, buddy. We gave you the tools. Never mind that you’re working 50-hour weeks and have no time to watch videos about agile methodology. Never mind that even if you did, there’s no one to help you apply it and no project where you could practice it. Never mind that your manager has never asked about your development goals and wouldn’t know what to do if you told them.

You have access. You get the participation certificate to post on LinkedIn. What more do you want?

WHAT REAL DEVELOPMENT WOULD REQUIRE

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you’ve watched the gap between what your company says it values and what it actually funds.

Real employee development would require sustained commitment, not quarterly training initiatives that disappear when budgets tighten. It would require actual spending—real money (and time), not access codes. It would require managers to spend time developing people instead of just managing output. It would require designing jobs that build capability, not just extract it. It would require honesty about what people need to learn and courage to let them learn it on company time.

It would require giving a shit.

The looking is uncomfortable. The noticing is painful. But you already know all of this. You’ve sat through the trainings. You’ve clicked through the modules. You’ve used the Coursera access exactly once.

That’s the thing about broken systems—they only work as long as everyone agrees to pretend they’re not broken. The moment someone points out that the emperor has no clothes, that the L&D infrastructure is designed for documentation not development, that the whole thing is compliance theater masquerading as learning—the illusion cracks.

The next time someone shows you the L&D budget line item, ask what it’s actually buying. The honest answer will tell you everything you need to know about what the company thinks of you.

The noticing is uncomfortable. The looking is the work. You can’t fix what you won’t see.

You know it’s bullshit. Your manager knows it’s bullshit. HR definitely knows it’s bullshit. And yet here we all are, gathered around the glowing altar of the performance appraisal system, pretending this exercise measures something real. It’s like we’ve all agreed to participate in an elaborate play where everyone has memorized their lines but nobody believes the plot.

The performance review is corporate theater at its finest—a Kabuki dance of self-assessment, goal-setting, and feedback that exists in a parallel universe where words like “synergy” and “impact” actually mean something.

It’s a system that measures nothing, develops nobody, and exists purely because... well, because it exists. And that’s apparently reason enough.

The Great Copy-Paste Renaissance

Let me walk you through how this actually works, because the gap between what companies think happens and what actually happens is wider than the Grand Canyon.

Step one: You open last year’s performance review document. This is crucial. Why reinvent the wheel when you literally did the same job you did last year?

Step two: You copy your task list. All of it. “Managed stakeholder relationships.” “Delivered quarterly reports.” “Participated in cross-functional initiatives.” It’s all still true! You’re still doing these things! In fact, you’ll probably be doing them next year too, which is great because you can copy-paste this document again in twelve months.

Step three—and this is where the real artistry comes in—you add the magic words. You didn’t just “send emails,” you “facilitated strategic communications across multiple business units.” You didn’t “attend meetings,” you “drove alignment on key organizational priorities.” You didn’t “do your job,” you “delivered measurable impact on critical business outcomes.”

What impact? Doesn’t matter. The system doesn’t actually measure impact. It measures your ability to claim impact using the right vocabulary. It’s like Mad Libs for corporate drones: “I [action verb] the [buzzword] which resulted in [vague positive outcome] for the [business unit].”

The beautiful thing about this system is that it rewards creativity in exactly one area: your ability to make mundane work sound like you personally saved the company from bankruptcy. You answered customer service emails? No, you “enhanced customer experience through responsive, solutions-oriented engagement.” You fixed a bug in the code? Wrong. You “improved system reliability and user satisfaction through proactive technical intervention.”

Everyone knows this is what’s happening. Your manager knows you’re inflating routine tasks into strategic achievements. You know your manager did the same thing on their review. It’s bullshit all the way up and all the way down. But we’ve all agreed to pretend that this document—this carefully crafted work of fiction—represents an accurate assessment of your performance.

Personal Development: The Goals You’ll Never Achieve (And Nobody Cares)

But wait, there’s more!

You can’t just document what you did. You also have to set personal development goals for the coming year.

This is my favorite part of the whole charade, because it’s where the system’s dishonesty becomes most naked.

Your company wants you to identify areas for growth. They want you to set ambitious learning objectives. They want you to demonstrate commitment to continuous improvement. What they don’t want to do is give you time to actually develop those skills, or money to take courses, or any meaningful support whatsoever.

So you write something like “Develop advanced data analysis skills” or “Improve public speaking abilities” or “Learn Python.” And then... nothing happens. Because you have a full-time job doing the things you already know how to do. Because the training budget was cut. Because your manager has no idea how to help you learn Python and frankly doesn’t care if you do.

But next year, when you’re filling out this form again, you’ll need to address these goals. So you’ll write something vague about “making progress” or “seeking opportunities to apply these skills” or—if you’re feeling honest—you’ll just delete them and write new goals you also won’t achieve.

The company doesn’t actually want to develop you. If they did, they’d have a development program. They’d have mentorship. They’d have training. They’d have managers who give a shit. What they want is for you to perform the ritual of self-improvement, to demonstrate that you’re the kind of person who thinks about growth, even though the system provides zero support for actual growth.

It’s personal development as performance art. You’re not supposed to actually grow. You’re supposed to write down that you want to grow, in the correct format, using the approved language. The goal isn’t development. The goal is documentation that you thought about development.

The System Exists Because the System Exists

Here’s the thing that really gets me: nobody thinks this works.

I’ve never met anyone—not one single person—who believes the annual performance review system effectively measures performance, drives development, or improves outcomes. Not employees. Not managers. Not HR professionals. Not executives.

Everyone knows it’s broken.

So why does it persist?

Because the machinery exists. Because there’s a form. Because there’s a process. Because there’s a database somewhere that stores all these reviews. Because changing it would require admitting it never worked in the first place, and that’s a level of institutional honesty most companies simply cannot handle.

It’s easier to keep running the broken machine than to turn it off and ask hard questions like “What are we actually trying to accomplish?” or “Is there a better way to do this?” or “Why are we doing this at all?”

The system perpetuates itself through sheer inertia. It’s a corporate zombie—dead but still walking, consuming resources and time, serving no purpose except its own continuation.

We feed it our hours and our bullshit because that’s what the system requires, and the system requires it because... well, because it always has.

This is how broken systems survive in organizations. Not because they work. Not because anyone wants them. But because dismantling them would require someone to stand up and say “This is stupid and we should stop,” and that kind of honesty is career suicide.

So we keep the system. We keep filling out the forms. We keep having the meetings. We keep pretending it means something. And the system keeps existing, justified by nothing except its own existence.

What We’re Not Measuring (Everything That Matters)

Let’s talk about what the annual performance review actually measures.

Does it measure competency? No. Your manager sees you work every day. They already know if you’re competent. The review doesn’t reveal anything new about your abilities.

Does it measure growth? Absolutely not. Growth happens continuously, in small increments, through daily work and challenges. A once-a-year snapshot captures none of that. It’s like trying to understand a movie by looking at a single frame.

Does it measure your actual impact on the company? Not even close. Real impact is complex, often collaborative, and hard to attribute to individuals. But the review form needs you to claim individual impact, so you do, even though you know it’s a simplification bordering on fiction.

Does it measure whether you’re getting better at your job? No. It measures whether you can remember what you did and describe it in favorable terms.

What the system actually measures is:

• Your ability to document your work in the approved format

• Your skill at corporate language and buzzword deployment

• Your willingness to participate in organizational theater

• Your compliance with bureaucratic processes

In other words, it measures bullshit. It measures your ability to bullshit convincingly, in writing, once a year.

The things that actually matter—Are you solving real problems? Are you helping your team succeed? Are you learning and adapting? Are you making good decisions under pressure?—none of that shows up in the performance review. It can’t. The system isn’t designed to capture actual performance. It’s designed to generate documentation that the company performed performance management.

The Feedback That Never Comes

Here’s the cruelest irony of all: the performance review system is supposedly about feedback and development.

The whole point—the stated purpose, the justification for this entire apparatus—is to help employees understand how they’re doing and how they can improve. It’s meant to be a tool for growth.

But here’s what actually happens: You work for twelve months. During those twelve months, if you’re lucky, you get occasional vague comments from your manager. “Good job on that project.” “Thanks for handling that.” Maybe, if something goes really wrong, you get a tense conversation.

But real feedback? Honest, specific, actionable feedback about what you’re doing well and what you could do better? That doesn’t happen. Not regularly. Not continuously. Not in the moment when it would actually be useful.

Then, once a year, you sit down for your review. And if there’s critical feedback—if there’s something you should have been doing differently—you’re hearing it for the first time, twelve months too late to do anything about it.

Or worse: there’s no critical feedback at all. Everything is fine. You “meet expectations.” You get your 3 out of 5 or your “satisfactory” rating. And you leave the meeting with absolutely no idea what you should do differently, what you should keep doing, or what actually matters to your manager.

The system that’s supposed to provide feedback provides no meaningful feedback. The process designed to support development supports no actual development. It’s a feedback system with no feedback, a development process with no development.

If you wanted to design a system that actively prevented good feedback, you couldn’t do much better than the annual performance review. It’s too infrequent to be relevant. It’s too formal to be honest. It’s too tied to compensation to be developmental. It’s too focused on documentation to be conversational.

It’s everything feedback shouldn’t be, packaged as a feedback system.

The Dishonesty We Won’t Name

So here we are. A system that measures nothing. Develops nobody. Provides no useful feedback. Exists purely for its own sake. And costs thousands of hours of collective time across every company that uses it.

Why do we keep doing this?

Because naming what’s broken requires honesty that most organizations simply don’t have. It requires someone to say out loud what everyone already knows: this doesn’t work, it never worked, and we’re all just going through the motions.

It requires admitting that we’ve built elaborate systems that serve no purpose except to create the appearance of management. That we’ve institutionalized bullshit and called it performance management. That we’re asking people to waste their time on theater because we’re too cowardly to admit the theater is pointless.

But everyone knows. You know. Your manager knows. HR knows. The executives know. We’re all in on the secret: this is bullshit.

The question is: how much longer are we going to pretend it isn’t?

As someone who is focused on capability and enablement, I think it comes down to three primary failure points.

First, interview questions don’t link to actual competencies. Someone applying for a software engineering role gets asked “Where do you see yourself in five years?” as if their ability to generate corporate-speak about career trajectories has anything to do with whether they can debug code. A marketing candidate gets the classic “What’s your greatest weakness?” question, which measures exactly one thing: their ability to recite the same humble-brag everyone learned from the same internet article.

Second—and this is where it gets truly baffling—even when companies stumble upon profoundly competent or overqualified candidates, they don’t hire them. I’ve watched hiring managers reject someone with a decade of relevant experience because they “seemed overqualified” or “might get bored.” Imagine any other scenario where you’re offered something better than you expected and you say, “No thanks, this is too good.” You’d sound insane. But in hiring? Standard practice.

Third, there’s no system at all. It’s broken at every level. The job description was written by someone who doesn’t do the job. The recruiter screens for keywords they don’t understand. The hiring manager asks questions they Googled the night before. The team interview is just vibes. The final decision often comes down to whether someone “felt like a culture fit,” which is code for “reminded us of ourselves.” This isn’t a process. It’s improv theater where everyone’s pretending they have a script.

The outcomes from this are absurd and reach performance art levels when you look closely. Companies will reject 200 qualified candidates, then complain they “can’t find talent.” They’ll require five rounds of interviews for an entry-level position, as if they’re hiring the Secretary of Defense. They’ll ask candidates to complete unpaid “sample projects” that coincidentally look exactly like actual work the company needs done. They’ll make someone interview with twelve different people who all ask the same three questions, then take eight weeks to decide, then offer below-market salary because “we’re a family here.”

It don’t make no damn sense.

So why does it continue? Because fixing it would require admitting the system is broken. It would mean the VP of Talent Acquisition would have to say, “We’ve been doing this wrong for years.” It would mean HR would need to rebuild processes from scratch instead of copying what everyone else does. It’s easier to keep running the broken system and blame “the talent pool” when it doesn’t work.

Hiring will stay broken until someone with power is willing to say what everyone in the process already knows: this isn’t measuring what we think it measures. We’re not finding talent. We’re filtering for people who interview well.

The looking is the work. Someone has to be willing to do it.

The leadership at Red Robin had figured out something that apparently eludes most of the corporate world: they couldn’t possibly present every scenario a waiter would encounter, but they could prepare a waiter to handle any situation.

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A customer wants anchovies on their burger? A kid is having a birthday celebration and wants a yellow balloon (and we have none in stock)? Someone needs their fries arranged in order of length?

So instead of doing what most companies do—which is hand you a binder the length of War and Peace, chock full of scenarios that you’ll likely never encounter, a mission statement so vague it could apply to either a restaurant or a cult, and expect you to memorize it—Red Robin taught a very simple guiding principle:

“We have an all-out unbridled desire to create happy guests.”

Now, if they’d stopped there, this would be just another eye-rolling corporate slogan, the kind of thing you’d see on a poster next to a stock photo of people high-fiving. But Red Robin didn’t stop there, because they understood something crucial: words don’t mean anything until you define them, illustrate them, and demonstrate them.

They broke “unbridled” down. They illustrated it. They made us explain it. They made us demonstrate it. I knew it so well, I can still recite it 30 years later.

What does unbridled look like? If a customer said, “I want anchovies on my hamburger,” and we didn’t have anchovies, unbridled meant we sent somebody to the store to get them.

Because unbridled means having no boundaries to what we’ll do for a customer.

Here’s where most training fails: it teaches understanding instead of capability. Companies think if employees can define “customer-focused” or nod along to a mission statement, they’ve succeeded. But understanding doesn’t tell you whether to go buy anchovies. Red Robin didn’t care if we could recite their slogan. They cared if we could think our way through situations nobody had scripted for us.

As a trainer now, I see this everywhere. Companies build training around what’s easy to measure — knowledge checks, completion rates, certification pass rates — because those numbers are clean and reportable. But the question that matters is whether people can think their way through a situation nobody anticipated.

Information transfer is not the same as capability development. Red Robin understood that. Most companies don’t, and they wonder why the training didn’t stick.

Red Robin understood the power of building people with an unbridled capability; people who would go above and beyond to take care of customers. Everything else is just expensive theater.

I was on a work trip a few weeks ago and it was dinner time. So my teammates and I needed to find a place that was good and close. In 2026 this means we immediately pulled out our phones and started scrolling through Google and Yelp reviews like archaeologists examining ancient tablets for clues about whether the pasta would be al dente or a crime against Italy.

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This is what passes for decision-making in modern life.

And here’s where it gets interesting: we have collectively agreed, as a society, on a very specific rating that restaurants must achieve to be considered legitimate. Not five stars. Oh no, that’s clearly fake. Nobody’s that good. A perfect rating screams “the owner’s cousin wrote all these reviews from different email accounts.” And certainly not one star, because we’re not masochists.

No, the magic number is 4.3 to 4.6. That’s the sweet spot where a restaurant is good enough to trust but flawed enough to be believable. We also require at least 300 reviews, because we are nothing if not rigorous about our pseudoscience.

Think about that for a second. We’ve built an entire system where perfection is suspicious and mediocrity is unacceptable, so we’ve all silently agreed to trust only the narrow band of ratings that suggests “pretty good but with some haters.” This is the logic we’re using to decide where to spend forty dollars on moo shu pork.

But let’s talk about when people actually write reviews, because this is where the whole house of cards starts to wobble. In my experience, I write a review under exactly three circumstances: (1) I’m so angry I could spit, (2) I’m so delighted I want to marry the chef, or (3) the server asked me to review them and I’ve got some spare time.

Notice what’s missing from that list? “I had a perfectly fine meal that met my reasonable expectations.”

Nobody writes that review. Nobody fires up Yelp after an adequate steak to report: “The food was fine. The service was acceptable. I have no strong feelings either way.” That review doesn’t exist. So what we’re left with is a dataset composed entirely of people at emotional extremes, plus a handful of people who had some spare time and were cajoled into writing a review because the server flashed a pretty smile.

This is the foundation we’re building our dinner plans on.

Restaurants are living organisms—staff turns over, quality fluctuates, menus evolve—the only constant is the restaurant you go to today will most certainly not be the one you go to tomorrow.

Why would a review from last month be more trustworthy than one from last year? Because it’s recent? What if something changed yesterday? What if the good chef is on vacation and they’ve got the backup guy working tonight? What if—and here’s a thought—the person who wrote that glowing review just has terrible taste?

Here’s the really absurd part: we’ll dismiss a five-star review as potentially fraudulent, but we’ll absolutely believe a one-star review is the gospel truth.

Why?

What makes us think angry people are more honest than happy people? Have you met angry people? They’re not known for measured, objective assessments of reality.

Does this system actually help us pick the best restaurant? Of course not. We’re scrolling through reviews written by strangers having the worst or best nights of their lives, trying to predict our own future based on someone else’s past, and hoping the 4.4-star rating means something more than “enough people were sufficiently motivated by emotion or boredom to type some words into their phones.”

And then we’re going to dinner anyway.

Because what else are we supposed to do?

Every time I board an airplane, I participate in a ritual so magnificently stupid that it could only have been designed by a committee of people who have never actually been on an airplane.

The process works like this: First, they invite the people sitting in the front of the plane—the ones with the wide seats and complimentary mixed nuts—to board first. These passengers stroll down the jetway like they’re entering a spa, while the rest of us, crammed into the gate area like sardines auditioning for a smaller can, watch them with the kind of silent, murderous rage usually reserved for people who bring acoustic guitars to parties.

Then, and this is the beautiful part, everyone else has to walk past these seated first-class passengers to get to their seats in the back. It’s a parade of resentment. A gauntlet of class warfare. The first-class people are already sipping their pre-flight champagne, and we’re shuffling past them with our oversized backpacks, making eye contact that says, “I see you, and I hope your noise-canceling headphones malfunction.”

Here’s the thing: there is an obviously better way to do this. It’s so obvious that a reasonably intelligent golden retriever could figure it out. You board from the back of the plane forward. Row 35 gets on first, sits down, stows their stuff. Then Row 34. Then Row 33. Like a reverse avalanche of human beings, filling the plane efficiently from tail to nose. No one blocking the aisle. No one waiting while someone in Row 12 tries to fit a suitcase the size of a dishwasher into an overhead bin designed for a loaf of bread. It would be faster, smoother, and would prevent roughly 73%, give or take a tantrum, of the homicidal thoughts currently generated by commercial air travel.

But airlines don’t do this. They do the exact opposite. Why? The official explanation involves something about “premium customer experience” and “loyalty program benefits.” Which is corporate-speak for “we want rich people to feel special.” And sure, I get it. First-class passengers paid more, so they get to board first, recline their seats into actual beds, and enjoy the schadenfreude of watching economy passengers realize their “seat” is actually just a medieval torture device with a tray table.

But I think the real reason is darker and more primal: the overhead bins.

See, airlines have systematically reduced the number of bags you can check for free, which means everyone now carries on luggage that would have been considered a steamer trunk in 1952. We’re all terrified that if we don’t board early enough, there won’t be any overhead bin space left, and we’ll have to gate-check our bag, which feels like a personal failure on par with forgetting your own birthday. So first-class boards first to claim the bins. Then “premium” passengers. Then people with credit cards. Then people who made eye contact with the gate agent. The whole system is built around scarcity and anxiety, not logic.

And here’s what gets me: we all know this is insane. Every single person in that gate area understands that the process is backwards and inefficient. But we accept it. We participate in it. We don’t even really complain about it anymore, except in the form of jokes we make while standing in line.

This is how broken systems work. They’re not broken because no one notices. They’re broken because noticing doesn’t feel like enough. The looking is supposed to be the work, but we’ve convinced ourselves that the looking is pointless unless it comes with a solution, and solutions require power we don’t have. So we board the plane backwards, every single time, complicit in our own frustration, glaring at first class while they sip their champagne and we fight over bins.

The plane takes off. We all get to the same destination. And tomorrow, we’ll do it again.