Rebuilding After You Fall

What Lego, PlayStation, and a dusty hardback taught me about undoing and rising.

If you’ve ever taken risks in your career, not stupid risks like playing games on your PC all day instead of working, this isn’t Office Space after all, but good risks, then it’s quite possible you’ll at some point take a fall and have to pick yourself up and start again. It might not be from the very beginning, but it will be a big enough step back to sting, at least a little.

This has happened to me many times. There’s a part of your ego that’s screaming like a child — “I’m too good for this!” when you’re offered what feels like a demeaning run through the CV and interview ringer — “Don’t you know who I am?” — and there’s another part of you that might feel shame, or even anger, directed inwards while pretending to rail against the world. “It’s not fair!” the child howls, but you, the grown-up knows deep down, in the quietest part of your soul, that whether it’s fair or not is irrelevant. This is the situation you’re facing. What are you going to do to resolve it?

You took the risk. I took the risk. We are grown-ups, so we knew the potential downsides of that risk, and here we are, preparing to pay the piper.

Have you ever done any gym work, weight training or participated in a sport or video game where you achieved a certain degree of competence or even skill, and then had either an illness or injury, or some other interruption? You know when you go back and you feel like you were never that good in the first place? Well you were, but now you have to build up again.

If you do this right, you actually get stronger, better, wiser.

I founded a startup in 2001. I was on a 6-figure salary and then, I was in the gutter, and that’s almost literally. As close to literal as you can imagine.

Then I found safe harbour at PlayStation, where all my years of experience, reputation, and skill counted for nothing—because few people knew me, or what I could do.

After half a decade of hitting my head against the wall, I reached the turning point.

I still remember it vividly. I was on the top deck of the 98 bus heading into the London office. The sun was shining. I was reading a second-hand hardback of Brian Tracy’s Maximum Achievement. And then, something shattered.

The streets stopped.

The people stopped.

London stopped.

And so did the noise in my head.

I got it. I got it.

I finally accepted full responsibility — not blame — for my condition, my position, my reputation — everything.

When I began my transformation, everything started to change very quickly indeed. It began with my attitude. I started early, I worked late, I stopped complaining, I started delivering, then over-delivering, then massively over-delivering.

I ended up rising higher and faster than I could ever have imagined was possible. It almost made my head spin, but I was too busy consumed by devotion to the labour of being the best that I could be while keeping my substantial ego in check.

I modelled the best in the company and I over-delivered, not just according to their expectations, but most importantly, my own.

Perhaps the gutter offers the most awesome view of the stars?

Have you ever built a Lego set? You’re at page 47 and realise that you made a mistake earlier and now you have to undo to page 14 to get it right? Momentarily sickening, right?

Life’s like that. There are people who roll up their sleeves and just go again, then there are those who leave the set as it is, unfinished, then a little while later, buy a new set and repeat the process.

Life can’t be an unbroken season of building, whether it’s in the gym or the office. Sometimes, it’s about undoing what you’ve built in service of a better result. The time wasn’t wasted if you learned something from it.

My first five years taught me that working in a large corporation isn’t about what I can offer, it’s about aligning what you can do with what the company needs right now.

I was on a supertanker. It didn’t matter how good I thought I was at the wheel. If I had wanted to turn more quickly, I should have worked on a fishing boat — or built one of my own.

I like to build my Lego sets right, even if it means I have to undo scores of pages of what I thought was progress.

I’ve had to unbuild before. I’ll do it again.

Because getting it right is always worth it.

Always.