What would happen if I let myself take a break, let myself rest, gave myself some time off from the checklists and the to-do lists and the need to publicly appear productive? Maybe I’ll lose some followers, maybe I won’t be first in people’s minds when they’re thinking of someone to speak at their conference, maybe I’ll stop getting put into random lists of “Cool Thought Leaders To Follow On Twitter Dot Com.” But I’m not going to lose my job or my apartment or stop being able to pay my bills if I give myself a break from “trying to be productive literally every single day.” Realistically, I’m pretty sure I’ll still be able to find things like speaking opportunities if I want them. I’m not going to disappear if I put down my armor and let myself relax for a little while.

This normalization of deviance means that people within an organization stop seeing problems as problems, making it impossible to learn from them. Stagnation kills resilience. ​ A change-resistant culture, however, risks burning out those new people, as they find that they are unable to make any meaningful changes. ​ Knowing what decisions were made and why can help prevent “we’ve always done it this way” as a fall-back reason for doing something. If you understand the constraints and trade-offs around why a past decision was made, you’ll be better equipped to understand if they are still relevant in your current context. ​ push authority for decision-making down closest to where the work gets done ​ If different members of an interview panel have very different views of how the organization works, that can be a sign of deeper issues. This often indicates implicit power structures or lack of clarity around process that can be frustrating to deal with and difficult to change.

There’s a big difference between feeling like I did some things that were failures versus feeling that I myself am a failure. Rationally, I know I’m dealing with the former, but emotionally it feels much more like the latter. ​ Transitioning and moving to a new country weren’t career progress, but in retrospect they were necessary for me to get in a place where I could focus on my career again. ​ For me right now, that means figuring out how to be okay with things not feeling “Done”, and looking for ways to celebrate the progress I’ve made even when that isn’t wrapped up in easy-to-cupcake achievements. ​ and isolation is not good for burnout. ​ Focusing so much on discrete, publicly visible accomplishments made it harder for me to see the small, gradual pieces of progress that matter more to me at this point in my career – and life. I started the cupcakes as a way to demonstrate what it meant to celebrate my successes, and I hope that sharing this will help other people see what it might look like to sit with and learn from failures as well.