You’re Probably Working on a Doomed Project
Years ago, I worked for a boss who was substantially more senior than me. I was in my early 30s and he was in his late 50s. He’d been around, worked at lots of companies, and had become wise in the ways of corporations and technology.
We were working on a doomed project at the time. Everyone on our team knew it. The tech didn’t work, sales couldn’t sell what did work, and office politics were tearing the team apart. The constant topic of conversation in hushed 1:1 meetings was how long the business would keep funding what seemed to obviously be a losing bet.
This situation was pretty challenging for me. I’ve always struggled with internalizing failure. From a very young age, if something went wrong, I assumed it was because of something I had done. When things went right, I assumed it was due to someone else or something else. Neurotic? Yes. Difficult to rewire my brain? Also yes.
This tendency to internalize failure had inevitably spilled over into my career. Here I was, almost a decade into my career, and it felt like none of my products had been super successful. I had begun to wonder if perhaps I was the weak link.
