What I Learned from Brain Surgery: The Unavoidable Effects of Early Career Decisions

For those of you who missed the original post explaining this series, then click Intro Post for a two minute explanation.

WILfBS Lesson 1

If you are working as an Independent Consultant*, DO NOT HAVE BRAIN SURGERY.

'* [Advertisement: Since Independent Consultant is often a euphemism for Unemployed, I would seriously consider any job leads my readers may have, USA or Brazil, or anywhere not on the travel ban list. Click my name for my Linkedin: Martin Greenblat. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming]

No, not because I lacked health insurance. Fortunately, my wife has a reasonable plan, although not the "Pay Nothing" plan of Microsoft, so the cost wasn't that bad. One child can still go to community college.

The reason is that once you are literally back on your feet, any momentum you may have had is gone. And to be honest, being an Independent Consultant may have been one of my sillier employment ideas, in a career full of them.

I had just left the local affiliate of a US multinational that was having issues at its home base in California. Only these issues were compounded by the fact that the local affiliate was essentially run by a psychopath, enabled by senior management. Going to work was giving me stomach pain, and I would come home just to be a bad husband and father. I may have kicked the dog if we had one at the time, and I love dogs. Finally, my wife got me to look in the mirror when she called me a "Bass Mole."

So I hit eject and decided to go out on my own since I fulfilled all the criteria of a successful consultant:

1. Lack a saleable specialty as I was mainly a generalist — check
2. Have a small professional network since I grew up and schooled in a different COUNTRY — check
3. Have financial pressure to pay private education for two kids that almost exceeeds my Wharton budget— check

Yeah! Let's do this!

Here was the pitch: If you need an ''American, who has been a political consultant in Ukraine, done PR at Microsoft, ran AdTech teams for online advertising, and speaks fluent Portuguese," then I am your man.

I anxiously put those terms into LinkedIn and The Google but, surprisingly, no results. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Therefore, as I was both unemployed and bed-ridden, I had a lot of time to think about my ‘’career.’’ In summary, I had never known what I wanted to do, so I was always open to something new and different. Thinking back….

No Plan was My Plan

When I first entered the workforce, my attitude was basically ''tasty waves.''

At first it seemed to work.

• Graduated Berkeley with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and had a job offer from EMC →
• Decided to forgo the job offer to work on the Presidential Campaign (Dewey v Truman). [Of course, one downside was that EMC was later acquired by Dell for $50B. But hey, I was single and had my entire career ahead of me to make up for lost earnings] →
• Since I was a political ''expert,'' post-election I decided to move to Washington DC, but I was going to work in the PRIVATE SECTOR. After all, as you know the private sector is huge in our nation's capital. #Not →
• I worked a couple of unsatisfactory engineering jobs, but had some other benefits. 1) Got a private tour of the White House via a friend from university; 2) Played softball against Ari Fleischer, dogmatic ex-press spokesperson for George W Bush. I am sure I took him deep, but no cell phones in those days; 3) Met lots of politicians and realized how stupid and slimy they were →
• Then I got a 3rd engineering job, but this one was in London (said in the These Go to 11 voice). London was awesome: Drive on the left, replace Zed with S, and drink pints of beer that had 20, not 16oz. (It took me like 8 months to figure this out, then I calculated I was drinking 25% more than I thought. 😜) →
• After two years in London, No Plan led me to Ukraine, where I worked as a Political Consultant. What qualified me to work as a political consultant beyond the previous campaign work? Easy. I was born in America. If you could explain market economics and democracy (this was Pre-Trump before we became a protectionist, racist, autocracy), then you were an expert →
• Ukraine probably got me into Wharton, because, while I had no career advancement, Business Schools have a quota for "people who did weird things."

I was < 30 and had worked in three countries and three languages. I led my life like Neil McCauley from Heat:

360 Degrees of Change

Upon graduation from Business School, I still didn't know what I wanted to do, so I became a management consultant. The main benefit of my time there was it sent me to Brazil where I met my wife.

However, in the sense of professional progression, I mainly learned horizontal skills — analysis, objectivity, critical thinking, client relations. These are great to have, if you have an area of focus. (I will get to this later.)

I left Accenture and went to work for an internet start up in late 1998. Seemed like a good idea as they had $5M in funding from Kleiner Perkins, the pre-eminent venture capital firm.

That firm was Google. Oh wait, no it wasn't. That was the OTHER company that was funded at the same time with $5M in funding from Kleiner Perkins. My start up was Zaplet. Never heard of it? Exactly. I was employee #30. You know who was employee #30 at Google. Marissa (bleeping) Mayer.

So as Zaplet went down the toilet, a lot of people jumped to Google, which we all knew would be big. But I wanted out of the start up capital of the world, Silicon Valley, so I went to Microsoft in Seattle. For the Ballmer years.

Occasionally those ex-colleagues who went to Google share photos of their island resorts and their sea planes with me.

Me? I tried to sell Windows Vista.

Microsoft was good for additional horizontal skills — corporate bureacracy, collaboration, managerial variety, working with A-holes, but as I moved from Windows Client to PR, Online Products, I again lacked a specific expertise.

Microsoft wore me down eventually. So like a fugitive from justice, I took the family to Brazil, which has no extradition treaty with the USA.

Brazil

Brazil really deserves its own post, or novel….

So soon to come will be WILfBS Lesson 1, part II where George Costanza and Jerry Maguire have a large say in my future.

Stay Tuned!