The Wonderful Thing About Getting Fired

My old boss said he wanted to "unlock" me. He had no idea.

I know I talk too much about getting fired.

I see the flinch in people’s faces when it comes up. They look away or suddenly find something very interesting at the bottom of their coffee mug. It is that “oh... sorry to hear that” face. The same look people give you when you tell them your childhood dog died or that you have decided to give it all up and go to clown college. It is awkward. I get it. I am sorry.

But what I probably do not talk about enough is what happened next. The months since have been the most productive stretch of my career. I am building things I never would have attempted. Testing ideas I used to ignore. Learning at a speed that was impossible when I was spending my energy navigating someone else’s bad priorities.

My old business partner used to tell me he wanted to “unlock” me. He said it with a tone like I was a puzzle he had not figured out yet. He treated me like a Rubik’s Cube he would eventually just give up on and throw in a junk drawer. It turns out he was right about one thing. I was locked. Just not in the way he meant.

There is a concept in complexity science called the adjacent possible. A scientist named Stuart Kauffman used it to describe how things evolve in biology and technology. The idea is that change does not happen in giant leaps. It happens one step at a time. And each step reveals new options that were invisible before.

Think of it like a floor plan. At any given moment, you can only reach the doors next to the room you are already in. You cannot skip ahead. You cannot see three rooms away. But every time you walk through a new door, a whole new set of doors appears.

Getting fired did not just push me out of a room. It put me in a completely different building.

So this week, let’s talk about the adjacent possible, why getting knocked off your path might be the only way to find a better one, and how to start opening doors you didn’t know were there.

The Room You’re Already In

I liked my old job. I need to say that out loud because people assume if you got fired, things must have been terrible. They were not. Not always.

I had stability. Autonomy. Decent money. Real impact. I liked the safety of it all. From the outside, and honestly from the inside, it looked like a room worth staying in.

But somewhere along the way, the learning curve flattened out. I stopped growing. The work that used to challenge me became routine. And the people around me were not helping. Some were narcissistic and ego-driven. The kind of leaders who confuse control with competence. The professional equivalent of a toddler holding a plastic steering wheel in the backseat, fully convinced they are driving the car.

And as I got deeper into the company, I understood every system, every relationship, every unspoken rule. That knowledge made me valuable. It also made me feel like I could never leave.

That is what golden handcuffs actually look like. It is not just the money. It is the identity. The comfort. The story you tell yourself about who you are inside those walls. The longer you stay, the harder it gets to picture yourself anywhere else. You start thinking this room is the only room. That the walls around you are the boundaries of what is possible.

And that is the most dangerous part. Not the bad leadership. Not the stagnation. The quiet belief that you have already found the only room worth being in.

I was getting more unhappy and felt taken advantage of, and yet I stayed. Not because the room was great. Because I had forgotten there were other rooms out there.

When you stop moving through doors, you stop seeing them. The room does not lock from the outside. It locks from the inside.

The Push

Getting fired was NOT part of my plan. There was no graceful exit. No “mutual decision.” It felt disorienting. It felt gross.

You read about betrayal in books or see it in movies. But when it actually happens to you, it is not dramatic music and slow-motion rain. It is sitting in your car in a parking lot trying to figure out what just happened. It is staring at your phone wondering who to call first. It just makes you lose your sense of direction.

And I want to be honest about that part. I do not want to skip ahead to the inspirational reframe, the training montage, and pretend the middle did not happen. The middle was bad y’all. The middle involved a lot of staring at ceilings and questioning every professional relationship I had ever built.

But as terrible as that was, it was necessary. I never would have left on my own. The room was too comfortable. Too familiar. Inertia is the most powerful force in a career. It makes decisions for you so you do not have to make them yourself. You just keep showing up, keep cashing the check, keep telling yourself that next quarter will be different.

I did not walk through a door. I got shoved through one.

And that shove (as unwelcome as it was) changed what I could see. I had space to listen and observe. I had space to study things that felt scary just weeks earlier. Tools I “did not have time” to learn became the most important part of my day. Ideas I had parked in the back of my brain started demanding attention.

Just like that, I was in a different room. And when that happens, you look up and new doors appear.

Opening the Doors

Inflection points do not announce themselves. They do not send a calendar invite or post on LinkedIn. Most of the time, they just feel like upheaval.

The pattern only shows up in the rearview mirror. When I was in the thick of it, I was not thinking about rooms or doors. I was thinking about my mortgage and the fact that my business partners had just casually discarded me.

But I have had this weird, almost accidental timing with technology my whole career. I moved to Seattle in 1995. Which, as history has shown, was a pretty great time to show up in a city about to change the world. I got a job at Adobe in the late ‘90s. Helped build a startup a decade later. And now here I am, standing right in the middle of the biggest technology shift most of us will see in our lifetimes. Every single one of those moments felt like just another Tuesday when it happened. The pattern only became visible later.

That is the funny thing about doors. You do not get access to the next room by waiting around. You get it by moving, even when you do not know where you are going. You stumble. You fail. You figure a few things out. And you eventually realize that “unlocking” yourself is not a one-time event. It is a daily practice.

So if you are standing in a room that does not fit anymore, here are three ways to start moving.

• Stop asking for permission. You do not need anyone to “unlock” your potential. That is a lie told by people who want to keep you where you are. Build a small, messy version of your idea today and put it in front of someone who will give you honest, brutal feedback.

• Start a friction log. Patterns only show up later, so start writing them down now. Every day, jot down one thing that felt off, frustrating, or disorienting. In three weeks, that log will show you which doors are actually worth opening.

• Talk to someone outside your industry. Reach out to one person who has nothing to do with your current world. Ask them how they solve a specific problem you are facing. You are looking for a different perspective. One that breaks your golden handcuff thinking.

In Conclusion

Disruption feels an awful lot like destruction while you are in it. It forces motion. And motion is what opens the next door. That process is almost always uncomfortable.

I am not saying getting fired was a gift. But my old business partner was right about one thing. I was locked. I was spending my energy on someone else’s bad priorities instead of building my own.

Now I am gleefully unlocked. Running wild with ideas, energy, and execution. Building things I never would have attempted inside those old walls.

And if you see me at a party and the topic comes up, you do not have to make that face anymore. I am not the guy who got fired. I am the guy who got pushed into a different building and found better doors.

People still flinch (two for flinching!) when I bring it up. Fair enough. But I stopped flinching a while ago.

If you are waiting for someone to “unlock” your potential, stop. Who needs a key when you can kick down the damn door.

Ever forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)

Hey guys, lately I’ve taken this postscript to promote something for yours truly, but this time I am asking for a favor. A dear friend of mine is going through it right now and if you have even just a few dollars to spare, I know it would mean the world to their family. So please take a minute and do what you can with this GoFundMe.

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