I got a job. This is now my strategy.

It’s a winning one, I know already.

I’ve been through some struggles on the professional front, especially during the so-called mid-career stage. A stellar start in my younger years (investment banking), then various business roles and some experiments, then entrepreneurship that didn’t work out. A “non-linear” career path is a valuable experience until it’s not. At some point, the nonlinearity becomes a liability. I wrote several stories about it.

Then there is a problem of me being picky. I can’t stop mentioning one particular short gig I had. It was fairly recent. I got connected to a seasoned entrepreneur who had this “brilliant” idea of an employee surveillance app. He called it productivity monitoring. I can’t think of a worse product. It went against my every conviction; I had no belief in its ability to sell, let alone become a billion-dollar business (my boss had that vision), yet I hung around for a while, hating it, and got my paycheck.

One of my consulting jobs has been enjoyable and successful, but there were others that were absolutely not.

Anyway, a couple of months ago I came across a job opportunity that I found on my alma mater's job board. I went through several rounds of interviewing that culminated in a full day spent in the company’s office near San Francisco. It was an extremely rare occasion when I loved everything about the job, the environment, and the team that I met.