Three days before the biggest presentation of my career, I was still at the office.
That surprised no one who knew me. I have never been much of a risk taker. I plan ahead. I double check everything. I like knowing exactly what I’m walking into before I walk into it, and I like having a backup plan for the moments when the world refuses to cooperate. It’s a quality that made me very good at my job, and, I’ll admit, fairly predictable everywhere else in my life.
My pitch sat open on my laptop screen. I’d been at my desk since seven that morning, and the light through the office windows had long since gone gold and then gray and then dark. Four years I’d been at the firm, doing careful, excellent work that mostly appeared under other people’s names, and this promotion was my first real shot at running my own accounts. My first chance to stop being the reliable person in the background and become the person out front.
I was careful even with my own deck. The slides I’d been building only contained the main idea, the broad strokes, the concept I’d present in the room. The important details, the mechanics that actually made the strategy work, the specific sequencing and the numbers underneath it all, I kept in private notes on my personal device, away from the shared drive, away from anywhere a curious colleague might wander. It wasn’t paranoia, exactly. It was just how I’d learned to operate in a place where two people competing for the same role sat ten feet apart.
“You know they invented chairs so people could leave them, right?”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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