Taking the Stairs Won't Fix It

Sometimes you need someone to send the elevator

"The game ceases to be worth the candle. You start straining at doing something when it just isn't worth it." — Alan Watts

For twenty minutes every morning, I walked to a job that was burying me deeper into debt, reciting the same words: “All is well. Everything is working out for my highest good. Out of this situation only good can come. I am safe.”

Then I got fired.

Go to school. Go to university. Get a job. Get married. Get a mortgage. Have kids. You have arrived.

Arrived where?

There is no sliver of space to consider another game. Day after day, you persist. Until repetition reveals futility.

Cost of living goes up. Salary stays the same. Promotions don’t come. Then one night, a few days before the mortgage is due, an unexpected property tax bill arrives. There’s no way to come up with that money in two days. So it goes on the credit card. The one that’s almost maxed out.

I played this game for ten years. Starbucks, then IT support, then cybersecurity in the UK government, then Cybersecurity in insurance. Each move felt like a step up. In reality I was trading a better job title for ninety-minute commutes, frozen public sector salaries, and doubling of train costs. I climbed the ladder and kept sinking.

By the time I reached the insurance job, finally walking distance from my house, I had hit a ceiling I couldn’t see. I was desperate. The debt didn’t happen all at once. A few hundred here, a few thousand there. Service charges. Water leaks. Property expenses nobody tells you about. Every month, our household spent more than I earned. The hole got deeper just by existing.

Is this all there is? It can’t be.

I had asked myself that question many times, but always in passing, just before closing my eyes. I wouldn’t allow myself to sit with it. One night I did.

I looked around. Everyone was playing the same game. They’d learned to justify the suffering. When I suggested the game might be tilted, some would nod and agree, some got defensive. So I looked elsewhere. I started looking for people who had made it out. Not optimized their way to the top of a broken ladder but actually changed games. I needed proof it was possible.

Tony Robbins helped me survive. I started listening to his CDs. I joined one of his programs. I walked on coals at Unleash the Power Within in May 2013 and felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Alive.

I had affirmations taped to my mirror. Handwritten on yellow sticky notes. “God’s wealth flows to me in avalanches of abundance. All my needs, desires, and goals are met instantaneously.” I read them every morning before that twenty-minute walk to the office.

The seminars, the books, the affirmations—they kept me going, all the while the math wasn’t working out in my favour. They couldn’t change the math. But maybe they were shaping the person who could eventually walk away from it.

It was paradoxical. I kept finding advice for people already winning. Wake up at 5am. Journal. Cold showers. How Jeff Bezos structures his day and chooses the stairs instead of the elevator at Amazon HQ. These rituals are for people with agency, doing work they love, with people who value them. I was ten floors underground, looking up. Taking the stairs wouldn’t have fixed anything. I needed someone to send the elevator down.

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On a Friday morning, three years into the Cybersecurity role with the insurance company, I got to work around 8:30. I went to the cafeteria for coffee and a croissant. Before I could finish, the IT director’s PA appeared. “You need to come to HR. Now.”

“Can I finish my breakfast?”

“No.”

I carried my half-eaten croissant in a paper bag and followed her. In the HR office, the IT Director and HR Manager were waiting. They read from a letter. My role was being eliminated. Twenty-five people, same day. They call it redundancy. You are not needed anymore.

My manager had taken the day off. I connected the dots later that day.

I packed my desk. Nobody would look at me. Nobody spoke. As if I had something terminal and contagious. I walked out, started walking home, and found myself smiling at the sky. I had a wife and a five-year-old at home. We’d just booked tickets to Greece, our first visit in four years.

I thought it was a joke. All these affirmations, and this is what I get?

We went to Greece anyway. Couldn’t get refunds for the tickets.

I started calling recruiters. For the first time, I didn’t have to explain why I wanted to leave my job. I was made redundant. They expressed sympathy. The conversation was easier.

I did what I knew how to do. I applied for permanent roles. Same ladder, different companies. After the second, third interview, waiting to hear back from multiple employers, a recruiter asked: “I have a contract role. Would you be interested?”

I said yes. I had nothing to lose. I was waiting anyway.

She sent my CV. The first week in Greece, I got a call. I was at my grandmother’s house in Athens. I’d told my mother I needed a quiet room with good wifi as I had an important telephone interview.

Fifteen minutes with the hiring manager. His name was Paul. Forty-something, recently joined from a decade in private equity. I didn’t know any of that yet. What I sensed was that he wasn’t looking for textbook answers.

I had nothing left to protect. No job to go back to, no reputation to maintain. So I stopped performing. When he asked about risk frameworks, I told him what actually works and what’s theater. When he asked about stakeholder management, I told him most security teams lose because they can’t translate jargon into business language. I said things I’d never said in an interview before—things I believed but had learned to keep quiet.

He wasn’t interviewing me. He was looking for an ally.

I called the recruiter back afterward, as you do. She’d already spoken to him.

“I don’t know what you told him. He said cancel everybody else. Make him an offer.”

Paul was the one who sent the elevator down.

I had twelve years in IT, six in cybersecurity. But no certifications. No employer had ever paid for training. On paper, I wasn’t qualified for the contract role I’d just accepted.

I felt like a fraud. In permanent roles, I’d learned to keep my head down. I wouldn’t speak up in meetings. I couldn’t articulate my thoughts the way senior people seemed to. I stayed quiet, hoping not to be noticed for the wrong reasons.

What I did have was willingness. No credentials, no connections, no safety net. But whenever I was asked to figure something out, I jumped. That instinct was all I brought with me.

In my last permanent role with the Insurance company, I’d been there three years. I worked on one or two projects at maximum. Two or three goals per year. That’s how slow it moves when you’re a cost, not a solution.

On my first contract, I worked on eight projects in the first eighteen months. It was exhilarating. I stayed up late learning, but now I was getting paid for it, gaining experience on the job instead of waiting for permission.

People started asking my opinion. I was a consultant now, a resource with experience across environments. I found myself helping others who reminded me of my old self: permanent employees, three years in, never having seen how anything else worked.

For the first two years, I carried a new fear: that all this would disappear. That I’d wake up back where I started.

But five years in, I realized the door had closed behind me. After all those contracts, all those environments, I was perceived differently now. They couldn’t put me back in the same box I’d been in for ten years. I wouldn’t fit. Ten years later, I run my own company.

That’s when the self-help advice started working. Wake up at 5am. Journal. Take the stairs. Now that I had agency, these rituals actually helped. You can’t think about growth when you’re fighting for survival.

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I’ve been writing this essay trying to explain what happened. Only now do I see what that incantation was. I wasn’t affirming my reality. I was calling out to a place I couldn’t see yet. “All is well” wasn’t a lie. It was a destination I didn’t have directions to.

Then I got fired. And the directions appeared.