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   Saturday, May 16, 2026 at 7:29 PM
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   Approved by client

   Friday, June 12, 2026 at 2:58 PM
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   Wednesday, June 24, 2026 at 2:52 PM

The exit interview I should have given myself

There is a version of an exit interview nobody conducts. It is the one where you sit down with yourself after leaving a role and answer this honestly: did I leave because the role was wrong, or because I was? For most of my career I left jobs blaming the leadership, the culture, the strategy. Sometimes I was right. There was always a thread. The thread was me. What I tolerated. What I avoided. What I refused to name while I was still inside the building. When you leave a role without doing the post-mortem on yourself, you carry the same patterns into the next one. You just change the wallpaper. The first ninety days after a transition should not only be about ramping up. They should be about answering one question: what is the version of me that would not have needed to leave the last one? You cannot Fail Forward into the next role if you have not finished the conversation with the version of you that left the previous one. Answer that honestly and you have already promoted yourself, whatever the new title says. After your last move, did you run the post-mortem on yourself, or just change the wallpaper?