Who are you beyond the bio on your LinkedIn profile? In today’s episode, we tell the story of Alison Taylor—a designer and strategist who went to great lengths to find that out.
Who are you beyond the bio on your LinkedIn profile? In today’s episode, we tell the story of Alison Taylor—a designer and strategist who went to great lengths to find that out.
After being hospitalized due to extreme burnout and a toxic workplace, Alison knew that she needed a change. So she started a journey of healing and self-discovery spanning five years and three countries. And that’s just the beginning.
I just want to be me. I don't want to be "Alison: business designer/strategist, helping creative freelancers, early-stage startups, and folks design sustainable, unique products and systems that scale sustainably." I don't want to just be that. I'm so much more than that. And I felt like I was losing who I was….And then I realized, "Yo, you can unsubscribe from all of this.” Who's making up these rules? Everything is made up. And you don't have to subscribe to any of this. You can decide to be the person that you are, you can decide to use your voice.
—Alison Taylor, founder, Augur
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Alison Taylor 0:00 Even the most mundane pieces of life are in technicolor in a way that they haven't been, maybe ever. 2022, so far, has been the best year of my life. I will not trade it for anything. I get to be the fullest expression of the person that I felt like I had put on the back burner.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher 0:22 This is Alison Taylor. She's a business designer currently based in Medellín, Colombia. Here's how she described herself the day I met her in March 2022:
AT 0:32 I am a medium-brown-skinned African American woman. I have curly hair that is up in a silk patterned scarf and falling up to the side, with large glasses and a turquoise chain on, wearing a linen jellyfish-printed jumpsuit.
SWB 0:50 And I gotta say, I'm sorry you all can't see this outfit she's describing. It was amazing. It was a little like Alison herself: sunny, warm, cool as hell. We talked for almost two hours. And I left that conversation feeling lighter, more energized, happier. I think she has that effect on a lot of people. But it wasn't always like this for Alison.
AT 1:15 I ignored all the symptoms and signs of burnout, every single one. And on May 10, 2017, I wound up in the hospital. My body just, like, flat out gave out. The doctor said they couldn't figure out what was wrong. But I was there running all these tests.
SWB 1:31 So how did Alison Taylor go from burnout so bad she went to the hospital to the thriving bundle of energy we hear today? It's a story that spans three countries, five years, and a whole lot of rethinking. And we're going to tell it today on Strong Feelings.
[THEME MUSIC]
SWB 2:00 Hey, everyone, I'm your host, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and I'm so glad you're here for this installment in our special series on pandemic clarity. Now, let's get back to Alison. Like I said, she's a business designer now. She runs a company called Augur, that's A-U-G-U-R, that wants to build better businesses from the ground up. But before that, back in 2017, she had just moved to LA, and she had a job that was exactly what she wanted, on paper at least. She was a project manager for a big resort and hotel brand, doing hospitality design projects. But the reality? It was not so glamorous. First off, she was working constantly, like 12 to 15 hours a day. Then, people were getting suddenly fired around her. She felt gaslit by management. In a word, things were toxic. But Alison was good at her job. She's not easily daunted. So she pushed through and pushed through until one day her body just shut down. And that brings us back to the hospital where no one could figure out what was wrong.
AT 3:10 Eventually, I was released, went to go see my actual doctor the next day, and she was like, "Alison, you've lost like 40 pounds in the span of six months. You're stressed, you're not eating, you're not sleeping, working 12 to 15 hour days. I'm gonna write you out for a month, you need to find a new job."
SWB 3:29 So Alison hears this message, and she, maybe for the first time, really listens. She takes a leave of absence from work. She enrolls in a super intensive outpatient therapy program for five months. And she starts to realize just how much trauma and abuse she'd suffered in her workplace.
AT 3:47 Everything that I experienced in that workplace, gaslighting, whatever it was, you name it, it was there. So from that time, I then decided, what am I going to do? Right? Like, I can never do hospitality project management ever again. I can never go and build buildings. I can't punch them. I can't do any of this stuff. So I was sitting around, and my partner at the time was a UX designer, is a UX designer. And so I was like, "Well, maybe I'll get into tech. Maybe I'll get into digital design from built environment design. I don't know, what does this look like? What am I going to do?" And I was spending some time on LinkedIn Learning, as one does when you have ample time and you're no longer working. And I was coming across the Frog Ventures venture design course. I was like, "Oh my goodness, this is it. The thing that you're spending all your time inside of these organizations trying to do, process, improving, you know, how we work together on our teams? What does our ecosystem look like? How are we making better for our guests? How are we interviewing the people before we go into this hospitality design? Like, what is the outcome that we're trying to get? And I realized, why am I spinning my wheels in these giant corporations, trying to make them better, facing all this adversity?
5:06 And there was something that gentleman said, which was: "It takes a long time to turn around a big ship. And that's why we like working with startups because they're like jet skis." And it was like a lightbulb went off for me. That's it. I want to go and work with startups. I want to help people make these businesses better because if we start at the absolute foundation of how these businesses exist, then this stuff won't happen. This is a fundamental core problem. This is why our company had 300% churn. This is why I got onboarded, and the person who onboarded me was unceremoniously fired because they weren't given support for a project that went sideways. And then I took on that project, and guess what? It still continued to go sideways because of how it was structured from the beginning.
SWB 5:48 Okay, so Alison was figuring out what she wanted to do next. Amazing. But how? Well, that is a fascinating story, too. Because like I said, Alison was in an intensive therapy program at the time, and it was actually her therapist who, in a way, helped her start her business.
AT 6:05 When I was in therapy, my therapist was like, "Alison, this is a workers' comp issue. You are not here because you did anything wrong. You are here because you were harmed, and abused, and injured in the workplace." And from there, she was like, "Boom. Here's an attorney's number."
SWB 6:24 So what Alison learned from that attorney is that in California, in addition to making a workers' comp claim—which she did, and she ended up settling with her past employers—if you were injured at work and can't go back to your old job, you can also get something called supplemental job displacement benefits. These are additional funds that you can use for educational retraining or skill enhancement at state-approved or accredited schools. Here's Alison again:
AT 6:24 And so, I took that money, and I wound up going back to get a postgraduate certificate at UCLA Extension in general business studies and entrepreneurship, because to me, I was like, "I can't just help people build better businesses if I've not done it myself." So in 2019, I started Augur. Like, a Thursday, I came home from school one day, and I was like, "You know, if I'm doing all this paperwork for class, I should just do it for real." And the next day, I hopped on the bus, went to Van Nuys, dropped off my paperwork, had a DBA because I was a sole prop then. And they were like, "Cool, here you go. You can have a business."
SWB 7:32 So that was the start of Augur. Alison was ecstatic. But it was also late 2019, which means well...it means you know what happened next, because it happened to all of us in March 2020.
AT 7:45 So my life fell apart. I was in a relationship with my former partner. The pandemic was not going well for them. And I was at the point where my intuition was screaming at me, like, "You have to leave." Couldn't do it anymore, right? And I think it was any relationship that had fissures and fractures, some of them got filled, but some of them just got wider, and wider, and wider. And it got to the point where I was like, I'm building my business. I'm trying to manage and take care of my own mental, physical, emotional health during this pandemic. They were dealing with burnout as well that continued to grow and fester, and there was just only so much room and within that there wasn't room for me. I had been so far removed and so far on the back burner, that eventually at the end of 2020, I was like, "The greatest gift that I can give to you and I is for us to not be together anymore." And that opened everything up. Everything wide up.
SWB 8:48 So Alison left her partner, and then she left LA. She actually drove across the country with her ex—they'd become better friends after breaking up—all the way to Miami. She ditched emails and Zoom calls. She spent time camping.
AT 9:03 And then I went to my mom's place. And I was like, "Okay, Alison, you have to heal. This is what you need. You just need some of your mom's love. You need this space. You need this time." I was in Fort Myers, Florida, like, there was nothing for me to do but focus on myself, and, you know, separating all that signal from the noise, I eventually continued leveling up with Augur, getting in larger clients and started working with VC-backed startups.
SWB 9:32 So there Alison is in Florida. I like to imagine her with that silk scarf tied in her hair, sipping iced tea on a patio where everything smells like orange blossoms. Her business is blossoming too. Yeah. So it was while she was in Florida that her childhood friend got in touch and told her he wanted to introduce her to a startup that could use her help.
AT 9:51 He was like, "Yo, Alison, they're a mess." I was like, "Did you say mess?" I felt like that Marie Kondo meme, right? She's like, "I love mess." Because I do. Design and operations. I think design is the most important business function because everything is designed—every system, every service, every process, every product, every everything is designed. So I bring that lens to the work that I do. And I was like, "You're a mess? Well, it sounds like you have no systems. It sounds like you have no process. Let's come in." And I was gonna do some foundational capacity building for them within their business design sector.
SWB 10:23 Okay, personally, I so relate to this. I love a good mess. I love it. So as Alison's talking about this, I'm, like, nodding along like, "Yeah, yeah, go clean up that mess. Yeah." But it didn't quite work out that way.
AT 10:35 Then, that was the beginning of the end. That was when it really peeled my eyes open to what was happening sometimes within this ecosystem. What happens when rich white men get money with no business model, no plan. That's like, scaling bonelessly. Just vibes. Like a Chicken McNugget: no bones, just vibes. And I was floored. I was floored.
SWB 11:03 "No bones, just vibes." Oh, my gosh, I was screaming when she said this. But this is what Alison was there for, right? To help people design their businesses. So she didn't walk away. She went for it.
AT 11:15 And I come on board. I'm like, "All right, we'll do a three-month engagement. And then we'll have the chance to extend for another three months. We'll do six months, and we'll see how this goes." Get in, do my first five weeks of discovery. I'm interviewing everybody who works there, putting on my, you know, my UX hat, doing all the things. And I was just horrified. I was horrified when I got inside because I saw everything that I had experienced in that toxic, abusive, abysmal workplace that I had gotten out of four-and-a-half years prior. I saw how it happens. I saw how it starts when you have a founder who doesn't know what KPIs are, who doesn't know what metrics are, who can't make a budget.
12:00 And so you're sitting there trying to do your best job and say, "I need these things. I need you to provide me with these things. I need you to provide me with your runway. I need you to provide me with everything." And then you realize that, not only do they not know how to do it, they have no interest in learning how to do it. They're willing to exploit the labor of everybody around them. And in those first five weeks of discovery, six people quit. And I watched that sinking ship and was like, OK. So now I'm running, like, a baby accelerator inside of this company, having, like, design critique over pitch decks that are going out with, like, hot blue background with white text and sparkly GIFs because these junior employees, you know, they don't have anybody there to help guide them and ushering them in. And so I'm basically doing one-on-ones, and mentoring, and all of this stuff that was outside of the scope of work that I had already built for myself with this company, with this founder, who's just gonna do this kind of stuff again, and again, and again, and again.
SWB 13:14 Okay, by this point, Alison is like, wait, I'm getting anxiety about checking my email for this company, and I don't even work there. Oh, and on top of it all, you want to know what really destroyed her? This startup was a mission-driven social enterprise.
AT 13:29 It was supposed to be to empower women, but you're disrespecting women. You are belittling women. You are lying about women. Make it make sense, right? Like, you say you're doing this mission-driven work, but here you are causing more harm, you are perpetuating more harm. I'm seeing people go out, having burnout, having anxiety, all of this stuff. And it comes to, eventually I'm meeting with their investors. Why am I meeting with your investors trying to solve these problems that you won't solve? And eventually I just realized, "So, they're just gonna give this dude $2 million to burn into the ground?" And that, for me, was the full realization of this is the Thunderdome of American capitalism. Right? "Two men enter. One man leaves." And it's always going to be the rich, mediocre white man, or it's going to be these businesses that don't care about their employees.
SWB 14:32 So it's the fall of 2021, and Alison fires this client. And then, well, things are up in the air. Again.
AT 14:42 I just had to decompress. I didn't do anything. I meditated. I journaled. I went for a lot of very long walks, listening to music, smoking some weed, just disengaging from all of it. Because at the end of that, I was like, "Am I even good enough to do this?" That client and the way they behaved triggered something in me, and I saw it happening.
SWB 15:06 And that? That was the moment things became clear. Really, really clear.
AT 15:12 I cannot participate in this. I cannot prop this company up. I cannot close deals for this company and save meetings that are going sideways to perpetuate this kind of bad behavior. Because now I'm complicit. And I didn't want to be complicit any longer. Even if you think you're trying to do your best, you are complicit in upholding systems of white supremacy, systems of abuse, systems of patriarchy. I was like, "No, I'm done." So I had to do some serious soul searching to say, like, "No, Alison, you are good enough. And that's why you fired them. You are humane enough. You do care, and this is not the work you want to do." So I had to rethink the entire way that I was going about the way I was working.
SWB 15:56 So what was Alison's new way of working? We'll get to that. Right after we come back.
Emily Duncan 16:01 Hey, y'all, this is Emily: Strong Feelings producer and the ops manager here at Active Voice. If you're loving the season on pandemic clarity as much as I am, then you absolutely need to download our new report. It's called "Work needs to stay in its place." I love that title. And you can grab a copy at activevoicehq.com/research. It's based on an in-depth study of 236 tech and design workers about how their relationships to work have shifted in the past two years. And let me tell you, people had a lot to say. We learned so much from their responses. They told us about why they're no longer interested in climbing the ladder, how they're setting new boundaries, and what success means to them today. They told us what they want from their managers, and what they'll no longer tolerate, too. This report is also full of insights and recommendations for managers and organizations—recommendations for building a more humane culture on your team, for removing toxicity in your workplace, and for becoming the kind of company people want to work at now. So if you haven't downloaded it yet, head over to activevoicehq.com/research and get your copy today. Now let's get back to the show.
SWB 17:14 All right. So back to Alison. It's the winter of 2021, and she's still in Fort Myers, Florida. She's just fired her toxic client. And she's trying to figure out what's next.
AT 17:25 And so, I took what I had saved from working with them for those three months, and I realized I have to get away from this. The same way that I had to leave LA to heal from my relationship that ended, I realized that the greater scheme of it is, I was in a toxic and abusive relationship with America. And you can't heal when the call is coming from inside the house. You can't heal when you are still facing systems of oppression and abuse every single day. And I'm sitting here in Florida looking at Ron DeSantis just being peak Voldemort, just like the worst kind of person, and after that, maybe it's the first week or so, I was just like, "I can't do this anymore. I have to get out of America because I can't think. I can't think. I am so tied to the idea of still having to maintain the same kind of money and lifestyle that I did in LA. But do I have to do that anymore? No." So maybe two weeks after, I booked my ticket.
SWB 18:30 Her destination—Mérida, Mexico, the largest city in the Yucatan Peninsula. I haven't been there, so I googled it after our conversation, and now I kind of want to go there too. It's full of bright colors, surrounded by Mayan ruins. A friend had been there, and Alison had heard that there were even other Black people living there. So she booked a one-way ticket the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
AT 18:53 And that was actually when my big shift happens, when fully no work, no emails, do not find me, do not look for Gmail, do not slack me, do not discord me. I do not exist. And that was the turning point when I realized I do not need the things that I have been told that I need. I do not want to participate in the Thunderdome of American capitalism. I do not want to participate in being on the hamster wheel. I had been in this business coaching program, and everything was feeling so transactional, and "Make these content pillars, and make these threads, and do these reels, and make this positioning statement and put it in your bio, and here's these hashtags, and here's all the stuff." And I didn't want it.
19:46 I felt like I couldn't be a person. And that's all I want to be, right? I just want to be me. I don't want to be "Alison: business designer/strategist, helping creative freelancers, early stage startups, and folks design sustainable, unique products and systems that scale sustainably." I don't want to just be that. I'm so much more than that. And I felt like I was losing who I was. And I couldn't see myself through all the content strategy. And that's all I wanted. So I got to get back to myself. And then I realized, "Yo, you can unsubscribe from all of this. Who's making up these rules? Everything is made up. And you don't have to subscribe to any of this. You can decide to be the person that you are, you can decide to use your voice." I felt very much like Ariel and Ursula, like I had signed this contract to take my voice wave for legs, for what? Because if we're thinking about the real Little Mermaid, home girl dies, in the end. She becomes bubbles. She turns into seafoam. And I wanted my voice back. I wanted to feel like I could say what I could say. I wanted to be able to voice my opinions.
SWB 21:06 So Alison started loosening up online. She started tweeting like herself, not like the "business design strategist" she'd been trying to force herself into, but like an actual human.
AT 21:16 And if people want to work with me, this is who they're getting. They're getting jokes, they're getting fun, they're getting levity. They're getting someone who's going to say, "Are you giving yourself the permission? Because, actually, you're the only person who can do that. But I'll tell you. I'm giving you the permission to give yourself the permission to go do these things." And so that was really the lightbulb, so decompressing from that client, and then leaving America, decompressing from it. My rent in Mexico was $350. That is a good weekend of brunch in Los Angeles. It really is. And so that was the understanding of "I don't need all of these things."
21:55 And I was finding community, and, more importantly, I was finding myself again. And it felt so freeing. It was outstanding. So that's how I realized that my relationship to work really needed to change. And that was the impetus, and from here on in, these last two months or month-and-a-half, I have been rethinking every single solitary aspect of it. Like, I made a tweet a couple of weeks ago, saying, "I'm going to rethink the way that I'm doing my client intake process." Everything was feeling so transactional to me. And I didn't want it to be transactional, just that I just want to people with people. I don't want to people with brands. I don't want to be a brand. I want to be a person. Because I had already separated myself, yes. I'm the founder of Augur. I don't even consider myself the CEO. I'm the Managing Director of Design and Operations. I work there, that's my job. That's not who I am. That's not my existence. My value is not deemed from the work that I do. It is deemed inherently from who I am and how I participate in this world.
SWB 21:55 After a couple months in Mérida, Alison took a trip back to Fort Myers to drop some things off at her mom's house. She'd accumulated too many books, which, like, relatable right? So she drops off the books. She goes to Trader Joe's to stock up on her favorite snacks. And she heads back to Mérida through the Cancun Airport. And that's where things take another turn because, um, she'd been admitted on a tourist visa for a couple months already.
AT 23:33 And the guy at immigration looked at me and was like, "Ma'am, you can have 10 days here, and then you've got to bounce." And I was like, "Okay, all right. What am I gonna do? Where am I gonna go? I'm not going back to America, that would be a terrible idea." And so I looked at flights, thought about where can I go, continue doing my Spanish, and where is somewhere that I already love?
SWB 23:57 The answer? Medellín, Colombia, a city she visited a few years prior. So she booked another one-way ticket, and on February 10 of this year, that's where she landed. And again, things got even clearer.
AT 24:09 That was when I turned up the brightness. That is when the saturation went high. That is when the volume went to 11. And I started getting back in my consistent routine in this big, bright, airy studio that has this gorgeous view of the mountains and the city. And I realized Mexico was for me to decompress from the United States, and being here in Colombia was for me to figure out who I was, to fill my cup. Even the most mundane pieces of life are in technicolor in a way that they haven't been, maybe ever. 2022, so far, has been the best year of my life. I will not trade it for anything.
24:52 I go to dance classes. I go to tango classes on Sundays. I have a co-working space that I travel to. You know, I was doing drop-in for the first month and I realized this is outstanding. Lots of plants everywhere. There's a retractable roof. I just sit up and, like, hang out. Made some new friends from this Canadian who was sitting across from me earlier this week and I am invited to things. And I realized, I'm a bad bitch, and America was really hampering that. Like my body, my cuerpo, is a language. I want to dance, I want to express myself, I want to walk around, I want to feel free because I am free. And I get to be the fullest expression of the person that I felt like I had put on the back burner through building a business, through trying to save a relationship, through journeying past burnout, through all of this stuff, and I got so tired at looking at the four walls of the same country.
SWB 25:58 So I haven't been to Medellín either. So I asked Alison what really struck her about it, besides the mountain views and the tango lessons. Here's what she told me:
AT 26:06 There is a happiness that people have here that a lot of people in the US do not have. There's a socialness that people have here. People speak to one another. People smile, you can tell behind the mask, you can tell from the way that somebody's voice kicks up. People are interested in you in a way that people are not necessarily interested in one another in the US. And when you have this chance to look from the outside in, all I see is a country that is sick at its soul, at its spirit, at its core and is doing nothing to stop it. The systems work exactly as they were designed to. And those systems were never ever, ever meant to do anything but oppress, and suppress, and historically and systematically exclude so many people. And then when you get out of that, you realize how bad it is, how prevalent it is, not just state-by-state, not just federal government, but in school and curriculum, in everything, every single facet.
SWB 26:14 So finally, months after leaving the US, more than a year after blowing up her life in LA, Alison started looking at her business again—this time with a whole new lens.
AT 27:31 I realized I was out of alignment with what I wanted to do. So I was taking it easy, auditing myself, auditing my business model, figuring out who I wanted to work with, figuring out what I wanted to do. And now work is back in occupying a place that I'm excited about. But I didn't get excited about work until probably the beginning of this, month, beginning of March because I was able to take it easy, because I was able to think about how do I want to participate in work? What is it that I want to do? Stop being so transactional, get back to being a person, get back to establishing trust and healthy relationships with people who have challenges, and needs, and pain points, and all of that cool stuff. And getting back to me, like, I just want to collaborate. I want to work with you. I don't want to work for you. I want to be here, and championing stuff, and making cool shit with other people. And so, now work occupies a very happy space because I'm in a happy space. I can do my best versions of work, but only with the kind of people that I want to work with.
SWB 28:38 Okay, don't let all this clarity fool you. There's a lot Alison's still figuring out, like whether she should be open to enterprise work, you know, working with big companies with deep pockets. She doesn't want to be part of shallow PR moves. She doesn't want to contribute to fake inclusion. But she's also clear-eyed about the trade-offs.
AT 28:56 At the end of the day, I also realized I have to eat, and if I want to retire a little bit faster and stop working sooner, I am going to have to scale to people who, from a price sensitivity standpoint, can pay me like I am a white man. They can pay those rates, so that I can still be in service of the people, and communities, and creatives, and early-stage folks that I want to be in service of who can't afford those rates. So it's now looking at what does that balance look like? What does it mean for me to go in and offer to work with them? And also, I've been thinking about what does it mean to start doing longer term fractional work for folks? What does it mean to come in and say, "I'll be here for 9, 12, 16 months really building something with you, creating it, getting it flushed out, making sure that everything is working as we've designed it to work with the most positive impact possible and sustainable for the people who are inside of it and outside of it. And then you know, hand it off like a little gift. I'll be the Mary Poppins of business design with my, like, bag and, like, pulling all the stuff out. You know? So that's what I'm still thinking about.
SWB 30:14 We also talked about her future in Colombia. Is this for the long term? After all, a lot of people in tech do the whole digital nomad thing for a while, but then ultimately head back to places like LA. So is Alison going to come back to the US?
AT 30:28 Right now the answer is no because it's not that I'm afraid of who I'll become. It's just, I don't want to feel caged-in like that ever again. And there's no saying that being anywhere else in the world, and of course, everywhere has their own issues and problems. And I'm very cognizant and aware of that. But it's so different on the outside. And so how that work changes, I want to work with more startups and companies in Latin America. I want to get my Spanish up to the point where I can take some of this institutional knowledge and work with folks down here and see like, how do we build more bridges? How do I work with other cool folks who maybe don't have the same access to resource as we do in the US, right? Like, we have excess of it. And why aren't we bringing it down? And why aren't we learning from people here? And how do we make that mezcla? Right? How do we make that mix of doing better work in the world? And so I think that the only way I can continue to do my best work is by not being in the same place, in the same systems, is by constantly growing.
SWB 30:43 So she doesn't have it all figured out. But Alison is sure about some things. Like, really, really sure.
AT 31:42 If it's not a "fuck yes," it's a no, is really how work occupies my life at this point in time. If I don't like you as a person, why would I want to work with you? If I am not getting chills, if I am not getting geeked to have ideas about how we can make things brilliant and amazing for you, if I can't get as excited about what you're making as I am about the new step that I learned in salsa class, then I'm not going to do it. So I have a four-day workweek, I do not believe in five-day work weeks, I also did not believe in four 10s. I barely believe in four 8s. Four six-hour workdays. They are brilliant. They are fantastic. Because a place for everything, everything in its place, operational efficiency and excellence. I don't dream of labor. I truly don't.
SWB 32:38 Not only does Alison not dream of labor, she doesn't want you to either. I asked her what she'd like to broadcast to the world at the end of our interview. Here's what she told me:
AT 32:47 Workers—there are more of you than there are of management. There are more of you than there are of owners. There are more of you than there are of anybody else. You have rights, you have options, you have opportunities. Do not let these systems scare you into thinking and instill fear into you that you can't do something else, that you can't leave, that you can't report, that you can't sue, that you can't do anything. You have so many rights. Exercise them. It is terrifying, I know. But talk to each other, share your salary, share your experiences. I mean, CYA, and not all your colleagues are going to be your friend, so, like, watch out for snakes in the grass. But there's always going to be more of you than there are of them. And these companies, for the most part, do not care about you. If you get hit by a bus tomorrow, your job description will be up by the end of the day. You will be a footnote in a memo that says, "We've counseling services if you need it. But also, there's a $3,500 referral bonus if you know anybody for this new position." It is not worth your life. You only get one.
SWB 34:09 We only get one life, y'all. And while I care a lot about my work, this interview absolutely got me thinking even more deeply about the role that work plays for me. I hope it got you all thinking too. If you like today's story, stay tuned for our next episode. We'll be exploring another story of pandemic clarity. And this one—this one involves quittin’...for good.
Julie Threlkeld 34:32 I contacted a financial advisor and said, "Here's what I want to do. Here's our budget. You know, here's our overall health. Here's where we want to live. Look at it and tell me if you think this is possible." And he said, "Yeah, you can quit working." And I found myself talking with him about the concept of what he called "money insecurity." And he said there are some people who feel like even after he tells them, "Yes, you can do this," They have a compulsion to keep working even when they don't need to. The term for it is "One More Year Syndrome." And he said, "You could work another year, but in the large scheme of things, it's really not going to make any difference. So think about what you want to do with your life because you don't need to do this.”
SWB 35:10 That's Julie, and you'll hear her story next time on Strong Feelings. Till then, I'm your host, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and Strong Feelings is a production of Active Voice. Check us out at https://www.activevoicehq.com/, and get all the past episodes, show notes, and full transcripts for Strong Feelings at https://strongfeelings.co/. This episode was recorded in South Philadelphia and produced by Emily Duncan. Our theme music is "Deprogrammed" by Blowdryer. Go grab their album at https://blowdryer.bandcamp.com/ Thanks to Alison Taylor for sharing her story for today's episode. You can learn more about Alison's work at https://www.augur.design/. And if you want to send us love letters—or hate mail—reach out. We're at hello@activevoicehq.com. See you next time.