The True Measure of Success

I’ve had a great career. Really. Amazing companies, fun and smart people, work I’m proud of.

But I’ve also carried a frustration for a long time that I’m only now starting to put into words.

When you’re coming up, the rules are simple. Do good work. Hit the number. Solve the problem. You move up. Done.

Then somewhere in the middle of your career, the feedback shifts. And instead of hearing about results, you start hearing things like:

• You need to manage up.

• You need to be more visible.

• Make sure the right people know who you are.

I kept waiting to hear someone say “show me you can deliver and I’ll give you more.”

Never happened.

It was never really about what you did. It was about who knew you. About working the room as well as you worked the problem.

That bothered me then. It bothers me more now.

In March 2023, I got laid off. I was on vacation with my family when it hit.

No heads up. No conversation. Just a notification that changed everything while I was supposed to be unplugged and present.

The financial stress was real. The timing was lousy. But honestly, what stuck with me wasn’t the shock of getting cut. It was the realization of what hadn’t mattered.

I had managed up. I had the relationships. The right people knew my name. I was in the rooms I was supposed to be in.

Didn’t matter. Someone with a spreadsheet had to hit a number, and I was on the wrong line of it.

That’s when I stopped asking what I did wrong and started asking something harder:

If the game I’ve been playing my whole career doesn’t protect me when it counts — what exactly have I been playing it for?

I wasn’t some edge case. This was happening everywhere.

700,000 jobs cut across tech between 2023 and 2026. Google. Meta. Microsoft. Amazon. Salesforce. Household names. Careers people built their lives around.

Gone.

And these weren’t people who checked out or stopped performing. These were the ones who played the game exactly the way they were told to. Managed up. Built their networks. Made sure the right leaders had their names top of mind.

One Tuesday morning, a calendar invite they couldn’t decline. Badge stopped working by lunch.

MIT economists studied mass layoffs and found that individual performance ratings predicted who got cut less than 30% of the time. The other 70% came down to org structure, budget lines, and headcount math.

So you did everything right.

Severance package. Goodbye Slack message. Good luck out there.

None of this is new. The layoffs just made it impossible to ignore.

70% of employees say their performance reviews are biased. Gallup found the number one reason people quit isn’t pay — it’s their manager. McKinsey found that employees with strong political skills get promoted faster than stronger performers who just aren’t as good at working a room.

I’ve watched all of that play out firsthand. None of it surprises me.

What the layoffs exposed was the part nobody wanted to say out loud: the visibility, the managing up, the political capital — none of it actually protected you when the CFO needed to cut 10%.

Deloitte found that 79% of employees don’t believe recognition at work is based on performance. That’s not people being bitter. That’s people paying attention.

And when they figure out the game is rigged toward politics over results, the best ones — the ones who actually have options — stop playing.

LinkedIn saw a 34% spike in people updating their profiles in the 90 days after the big tech layoffs. Most of them still had jobs. They were just done pretending the old rules still worked.

I was in that group. Except I wasn’t updating my profile to find another company. I was building my own.

My layoff became SaaS Business Advisors.

And I won’t pretend that happened cleanly. There were dark days. Real ones. The kind where you wonder if you’re kidding yourself and whether the right move is just to find another job at another company and get back in the game.

But the clarity that came out of that period was worth more than anything I learned inside a corporate org chart. I finally got to ask a question most people never get to answer honestly:

What can I actually do — and is it worth betting on?

Turns out, I’m not the only one who asked that question.

The same layoffs that gutted departments across the industry created something nobody planned for: a wave of experienced professionals who stopped waiting for a company to validate them and started backing themselves.

Independent consulting in the U.S. has grown over 30% since 2023. Not gig workers or freelancers. Operators — people with 15, 20, 25 years of real experience — who took the skills companies paid them to build and decided to run their own play with them.

MBO Partners puts the independent workforce at over 72 million Americans now. The fastest growing segment is experienced professionals who looked at the game, did the math, and decided the house didn’t deserve their best anymore.

We were all forced to depend on the one thing that was always ours. Our track record. Our ability to walk in and deliver. Not politics. Not visibility. Just results.

That’s a different game. And honestly, it’s the one I should have been playing all along.

I tell my kids the same thing all the time: don’t tell me what you’re going to do. Show me.

I believed that before 2023. I believe it more now.

The companies that came out of the last few years with their culture still intact are the ones that actually tied advancement to contribution — not optics, not tenure, not who your skip-level liked. They kept their best people because their best people felt the game was fair.

The ones that leaned into politics over performance? They’re rebuilding. Paying consultants to recover institutional knowledge that walked out with the people they cut.

There’s nothing wrong with relationships. Nothing wrong with knowing how to communicate your work. That stuff matters.

But there’s a real difference between being known for what you deliver and being known for showing up in the right rooms.

The layoffs settled that debate for a lot of people.

Your work is your reputation. Your actions are your resume.

Everything else is noise.

Here’s to the people who put their heads down and make the real work happen.