Epilogue
When I made the life-changing decision to leave Google, move to New York, start a new job, and write a book, I knew it wasn’t exactly a “sane” thing to do, that it might lead to “major burnout” and potential “work/life imbalance” (as Chris Farley’s Saturday Night Live character, Bennett Brauer, might have expressed it). During one of the last conversations I had with Maggie Johnson, my wonderfully supportive manager at Google, who seems to magically handle about a billion responsibilities flawlessly (there aren’t enough adjectives to describe her brilliance), she said simply: “I would never let you do this, you know.” Of course, she didn’t really mean she wouldn’t let me write the book. She was referring to the fact that I was absolutely nuts to take on so much at one time.
However, I found the challenge to be just what I needed to bring clarity to the concepts in the Work Revolution. If I had any hope of finishing the book, and making it worth the read, I had to live and breathe every one of the principles I was promoting in it, religiously.
To accomplish what I needed to do, I embarked on a continuous process of challenging my assumptions, refining my work relationships, noticing my energy patterns, and making tough choices about how to spend my time. Given I wanted to make a great first impression at my new job, this was especially daunting, as I came face-to-face with all of my demons related to work expectations, both real and perceived. But as I came to realize, ...
