You need a coach. Friends said it. LinkedIn gurus said it. I heard the same sentence so many times it stopped sounding like advice and started sounding like a verdict. I had always assumed coaches existed to make anxious people feel productive while nothing actually changed. My employer offered a coaching program, and I put […]

You’re not stuck. You set the wrong goal. I had one rule before I ever applied for a job: the city and the lifestyle come first, the job title comes last. I wrote that rule in a notebook the week I decided to leave Europe. Instead of chasing jobs, I wrote a list of the

It was a freezing morning in Poland and I was on a train to Warsaw with one shot at getting into a visa program limited to 200 people. I spent most of my twenties trying to reverse-engineer why some people actually get where they say they are going. The gap between people who get there

A Friday pizza lunch at Altona Beach was supposed to be where I negotiated my future. It turned into the moment I found out I had to leave Australia. In 2016, I moved to Australia on a temporary visa, chasing a dream and a future. I had left my job in Poland and had an

The riskiest thing I ever did wasn’t quitting a job or starting a company. It was scratching a line through a number on a printed contract while my visa hung in the balance. In 2016, I was an engineer at a manufacturing plant in Melbourne, living in a suburb I hated and commuting past neighborhoods