The Second Act

What could be as good?

You stayed fifteen or twenty years because it was a good product and a good company. You believed in it. Now it's gone, and the question underneath every other question is: what's out there that could possibly be as good as what I just lost?

Let me tell you what I've seen, just in the rooms I've been in.

What's out there

I was in a final round with a company using AI to spot guns and knives in school parking lots. This was before everyone had a chatbot; AI has been around longer than that. Studies had found that most school shooters had the gun visible outside the building for five to ten minutes before they walked in. Five to ten minutes. Think about being part of that project.

The job I have now is building AI to reduce the risk of preterm birth. If it works once, a baby comes to term who wouldn't have. If it works once on the other side, a family doesn't lose a child. I'm the father of a preterm baby. I lived a month of that. The line I say is that parents should get to kiss their baby goodnight, not tell them goodbye. That's my job now: helping that not happen to someone else.

There are pill bottles that report to the doctor's office every time they open. If someone opens it too often, the doctor knows before the overdose. If an elderly person living alone is an hour late for medication they've never once missed, someone makes a wellness call and finds them on the floor, unable to reach the phone. That's a software job.

I interviewed with a home-services company where a homeowner calls, gets walked through the problem on the phone, and if they can't fix it themselves, the company dispatches someone from its own vetted network. No wading through a list of strangers wondering who's any good.

I could keep going. Heart monitors that report back. Firefighting equipment that reports back. There is an enormous amount of technology being built right now that would be exciting to be part of, and most of it is at companies you've never heard of.

Make it part of the search

Here's what I'd tell you. Don't just look for a job. Look for the one that pulls at you.

That's not a nice-to-have. It's tactical. When you find a posting and think "that's my job," and you can say exactly why, that shows up in the interview. They'll feel it. It's the difference between you and the person for whom this is the fiftieth call and just another job.

So make it part of the work. When you're logging opportunities, log why you want each one. If the answer is "it pays," fine, keep it on the list. But when the answer is "because I want to be part of that," move it to the top and put everything into it.

What the second act looks like

Mine looks like this. A team I lead. A mission I'd have chosen at twenty-five if I'd known it existed. A side project that turned into a company because I needed it and figured other people did too. And a salary that's a long way above where I was three years ago.

It came after the worst two years of my working life. After the interview where I couldn't answer a question I'd been living every day. After sixty-some rejections and a lot of silence. After being told "good luck to you" by a man who meant the opposite.

You stayed all those years because it was worth staying for. That says something about you: you commit, you build, you don't leave when it gets hard. There's a company out there that's been looking for exactly that person, and it doesn't know you exist yet.

Go find it.