When I was eight years old, my Dad brought home a Four-Wheeler. My brother and I were stoked. My Mom clearly was not happy.
Over the course of the next few months, we took turns riding it in various locations around the neighborhood. Since I was younger, I would just ride it around in circles and through tracks in the dirt lots by our house. My brother was fifteen, so he would take off with buddies and ride all through the streets, into ditches, and with the other neighborhood hooligans.
Each week, my Mom would tell my Dad how much she hated that ATV, and how one of us boys was going to get hurt. My Dad, being the Dad that he was, wanted to try and give us some fun stuff to do, so he kept winning the fights on why the ATV got to stay.
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Somehow, my parents learned that my brother was taking the Four-Wheeler through a canyon that was a few blocks from our house. The canyon had all sorts of jumps and hills to climb, making it incredibly fun to ride in, but also the danger level rose to a 5 from my little dirt lot next door.
My brother was repeatedly told to stay away from the canyon with his buddies. I can still remember hearing my Mom shout at him when he would take off. "Stay away from the canyon!" Being the naive eight-year-old that I was, I had no idea what his plans were, but something told me that canyon was where shit went down.
Then, as expected, he decided to try and go full Evil Knievel, and he somehow landed awkwardly and snapped his metacarpal in his hand. Which basically means he broke his thumb. I'm pretty sure the four-wheeler was up for sale within about seven minutes of his arriving back at the house. In fact, he probably didn't even have a cast on his hand, and x-rays were completed before that four-wheeler was on the market and ready to be purchased.
Mike Bond had no option but to cut the ATV loose.
Scott Bond, however, was now without an ATV.
The actions of the stuntman brother of mine caused me to lose my fun and games. I had previously enjoyed getting to ride around, even if I was riding like an old lady looking for a place to park at a Walmart. I was still having fun.
It was the first time I learned that the actions of others can have an impact on us, but later, when I started my career, I learned how this plays out even more.
Over the last year, almost 250,000 tech workers have been laid off globally. That's 250,000 people with bills to pay, healthcare to think about, and in some cases, families to take care of. Some of those people were let go because their companies were struggling massively, and realignment might have been the only option for the company to be sustainable going forward. We get that narrative, we're adults.
Some of those people were let go because CEOs of companies made terrible decisions, like expanding when they shouldn't have, hiring staff they couldn't afford, launching new products they never had any business launching, or making aggressive investments. Look, everyone who runs a company has a tough job, but they also have a duty to take care of the people that they hire. When leaders of companies and boards make decisions that ultimately don't pay off, the people who pay the price are the people who were trying to do the work.
Unfortunately, the decisions of others have a massive impact on what happens in your career, and no matter how hard you work, how much effort you put in, and how much blood, sweat, and tears you give, you're just not always in control the way you want.
That's a tough reality to sit with, especially if you've built your identity around being dependable, hardworking, and someone who "does everything right." You show up early, stay late, hit your numbers, support your team, and then one day you're sitting in a meeting hearing that your role has been eliminated.
It doesn't feel fair, and in a lot of cases, it isn't. It feels a lot like watching someone else take the four-wheeler into the canyon while you're stuck dealing with the consequences.
This is where most people either get bitter or they get intentional. You can spend your time pointing at leadership, the market, the timing, or the bad decisions that led to your situation, or you can start thinking about what is actually within your control. You might not control the decisions that get made above you, but you do control how visible you are, how relevant your skills are, and how connected you are to opportunities outside the walls of your current company.
The people who navigate this the best don't pretend it's fair; they just refuse to be caught off guard by it. They build relationships before they need them, they stay close to the market, and they keep their options open even when things feel stable. They understand that loyalty to a company is not the same thing as security, and they don't wait for a breaking point to start thinking about what's next.
At some point, you realize the goal isn't to avoid the canyon entirely, since you can't control who decides to take the risk. The goal is to make sure that when someone else makes a bad decision, it doesn't take away your ability to move forward.
You can't stop the chaos around you, but you can build a career that doesn't get wiped out by it.