The last time I was laid off, a friend gave me a piece of advice from an SAS field guide that has stuck with me ever since. To wit: "When you're overwhelmed, lost, or in a crisis, the first thing you do is make a cup of tea." It sounds like a British fever dream, but the reasoning is excellent.

If you're panicking, you're probably not making good decisions. Making tea gives you one simple, concrete thing to do while your brain catches up. And in a genuine survival situation, it also forces you to solve one of the most important problems first: finding clean water. So when I got laid off again, I tried to remember the tea.

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Well.

Sort of.

I got the news around midnight. (I was up late, and they had intended for the email to reach me the following morning, but hey.) I took the excuse to stay up until 3 AM, partying like I was 20 again.

I may be professional, but I'm also human. ActiveCampaign was a great place to work. I worked with people I genuinely liked. We solved difficult problems together, and I learned a tremendous amount.

I'll miss it.

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The next morning, I started processing what had happened. I was also lucky: my wife and I had already been talking about cutting our household expenses pretty aggressively. The loss of income was a shock. The change in lifestyle wasn't.

Now I have six months of unemployment to retool for the singularity. No problem, right?

Step one: define your value.

I'm a generalist. Some people find an industry, go deep, and become extraordinary experts in that world. That's never been my thing. Staying somewhere stable and repetitive sounds like purgatory.

I like to get into a space, learn everything I can about it, and then find the next new challenge to tackle. I've worked in government, government contracting, finance, insurance, HR, product, technology, and now marketing technology. Every new job has involved some amount of drinking from the fire hose, and I love that part.

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Before the knowledge from a job gets cold, I try to ask myself: What did I learn here?

This past year gave me a few answers. I learned that marketing is, at least partly, the art of being willing to talk about yourself. That sounds obvious until you actually have to do it.

The first time you publish something and say, "Hey, I made this and I think it's good," there is a surprisingly large psychological splash. Then you do it again, and the world does not collapse. Eventually you realize that talking about your work is not arrogance. It's how people discover that the work exists.

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I learned a lot about enablement, too. People are afraid to fail. That's always been true, but it becomes especially important in AI-enabled development, where failure is not an exception to the process.

Failure is part of the LLM lifecycle. You try something. It fails strangely. You learn why. You adjust. You try again.

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One of the most successful things I did this year was also one of the smallest: I built a Cursor boot camp for product people.

The organization wanted people experimenting more aggressively with agentic development, but there was an invisible blocker: people did not feel like they had permission to be bad at it yet. So I created a place where they could be bad at it.

They experimented. They built things. And eventually product managers started asking for GitLab access because they wanted to keep building.

That taught me something I've come to believe pretty strongly:

Starting a small fire is often better than designing a giant furnace.

Give people something useful. Make it small enough to try. Let the energy spread.

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And I learned something important about myself. I spent a while thinking I wanted to move farther and farther toward leadership, and I did enjoy being close to the decisions.

I liked understanding why things were happening. I liked helping shape strategy. I liked working across teams and translating between technical and business worlds. But I also learned that I am, fundamentally, a builder.

I would rather be responsible for a concrete deliverable than an abstract outcome. I like making the thing, getting it into someone's hands, watching them use it, and fixing what breaks.

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AI changed something important for me here. For a long time I described myself with a caveat: "I'm not technical, but..."

I don't say that anymore. The board moved. The tools changed. And somewhere along the way I realized:

I am technical.

I am an engineer.

Not because I became a different person, but because the definition of what I could build expanded underneath me.

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So now I find myself unexpectedly back on the market, which raises an obvious question: What do I do next?

My first instinct could have been the standard one: update the resume, open LinkedIn, start applying. But instead I tried to ask a different question.

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What actually creates opportunities?

If the goal is employment, applications are not necessarily the thing I should optimize. They're a lagging metric.

So I asked: What increases the number of opportunities available to me?

The answer I keep coming back to is exposure to the right people. The more people who understand what I do, see evidence of my work, and can imagine me solving one of their problems, the more opportunities I have. That's the lead metric.

So instead of treating unemployment exclusively as a job search, I'm treating it as a small business and product problem. I already had some useful evidence.

My LinkedIn newsletter has been steadily growing. My layoff post received around 5,000 impressions. Normal posts often reach a few hundred people. And the thing that has consistently helped the most is not some secret growth hack.

It's boring old consistency: write the content on deadline, have the discipline to build a publication funnel, and use all the same skills I've practiced over my past 26+ years as a professional writer.

...well, that, and learning how to do email marketing.

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Email converts. So the first thing I built wasn't another elaborate portfolio. It was infrastructure.

I needed:

• somewhere a recruiter could understand me quickly,
• somewhere I could point people after handing them a business card,
• somewhere where a person could keep up on my work and be reminded of my existence,
• somewhere my professional writing could live,
• and somewhere a person who thought, "I want this person on my team," could immediately do something about it.

So in an afternoon, using the same AI-assisted development practices I've been learning all year, I built work.thearcades.me.

It isn't meant to be a design masterpiece. It's meant to work. It's an introduction to what I do, a collection of case studies and writing, and hopefully the beginning of an engine that creates future opportunities.

There are two doors. If your organization needs short-term help with AI, product strategy, enablement, or building something useful quickly, I consult. If you're building something ambitious and want someone like me on the team, I'm also looking for the right full-time role.

I even added calendar booking because if someone wants to talk, I don't want the next step to involve six emails and a telegram.

Steal my career coach.

One more thing. If you're reading this because you just got laid off too, I wanted to leave you with something more useful than advice.

So I packaged the process I'm using into a tiny AI skill: Career Coach in a Bottle: The Layoff Triage Skill.

It's free. Drop it into ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever assistant you use, and tell it:

“I was just laid off. Start with tea.”

It won't immediately hand you a 73-item job-search checklist. Instead, it helps you work through the problem in order:

• stabilize the things that are actually urgent,
• figure out what you learned,
• identify the value you create,
• separate lead metrics from lagging ones,
• build the smallest useful opportunity engine,
• and treat the search as a series of experiments instead of one enormous pass/fail test.

It even has an emergency command. If the whole thing gets too big, tell it:

“I'm overwhelmed.”

It will stop and give you exactly one useful thing you can do in 15 minutes or less.

Career coach in a bottle.

Download the free Layoff Triage Skill

Just add hot water.

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And now I'm going to run this the way I would run any other product: measure the funnel, publish consistently, talk to people, learn what resonates, adjust, and ship again.

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I'm not going to optimize for "get a job." That's too far downstream. I'm going to optimize for "create more chances for the right person to discover my work."

The job is an outcome. The work is building the engine that makes the outcome more likely.

And when things get overwhelming, I suppose I know what to do.

And if you're in the same mess? Put the kettle on. Breathe. Find a path through.