Take some time off, even if you just stay close to home and enjoy a week away from work. Like, really take some time away from work (e.g., don’t check your emails!).

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As you are reading this, I’m in Alaska. I’m taking the rest of August off to spend time with my children and a few other family members. We’ll be hiking, backpacking, and generally enjoying life. Summer in Alaska means long days, since the sun doesn’t start setting until 9 PM. So, I’m sure we’ll have some bonfires on the beach, too.

I’m finally taking that whole work-life balance thing more seriously. Better late than never, I guess!

I understand the temptation to focus on your career, work all the time, and put off using your vacation days. I once went four years without taking a real vacation. I didn’t feel like I could! It didn’t feel safe for my career to be away from the office for too long.

Hell, I once had emergency surgery on a Friday and limped back to work on Monday. I spent the next couple of weeks in pain, carefully easing into and back out of my chair several times a day for various meetings. Wonderful, huh?

I should have been building my escape plan. Instead, I was planning how to reach the next rung on the corporate career ladder. Mapping out the path to the executive ranks.

Sure, I made more money as I climbed higher. But I also became increasingly stressed, depressed, unhealthy, and unhappy. I worked constantly and rarely spent time with my family. I kind of hated my life back then.

However, I finally had enough, and I escaped that trap.

So, my hope for you is that you make plans to escape to freedom later while you’re still employed now. It’s easier to plan rationally when you don’t feel desperate (i.e., you have a steady paycheck).

• ❌ Don’t count on that job—or any job (there have been so many layoffs this year!)

• ❌ Don’t let yourself get trapped in a single profession (the longevity of a profession is changing quickly)

• ❌ Don’t feel stuck in the only career you thought was your future (only those who adapt will survive)

And take care of yourself! Take that vacation. Exercise your body. Play with your kids. Explore the world. And enjoy these moments!

Life is short, folks. The fun part of the ride ends sooner than you think. Take it from someone who recently turned 60 and wonders where all those years went. It seems like just yesterday that I started my career at IBM in 1993 and moved on to Apple in 1995. Those memories are so vivid! Thirty years went by in the blink of an eye.

I’m here if you want to chat about improving your work-life balance and planning your escape from the corporate world. Book a free call with me anytime.

Schedule Your Free Call

Larry Cornett, Ph.D., is a career coach who spent 20+ years in Silicon Valley at Apple, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and several startups as a designer, leader, and product and design executive. Whether you're fighting for a promotion, navigating a layoff, or planning your exit to independence, he combines executive experience with psychological insight to help ambitious professionals reclaim their power and build an Invincible Career.

Would you like to help support my newsletter and podcast, but don’t want to commit to a monthly fee? Check out my ☕️ Buy Me a Coffee. I’m self-employed, and coaching and writing are how I provide for my family. Thanks for your help!

Buy Me a Coffee

• Who is in your corner?

  • Spend more time with people who want you to succeed.

• Who will join you?

  • Create a support system of similar ambitious peers.

  • Start this journey together.

• Find a support community

  • Online.

  • In-person.

Get the Update

The Invincible Career Guide for 2026

I created the companion guide to provide additional structure for the weekly emails I will share with you this year. If you haven’t grabbed your copy yet, use the button below to access and save it.

It’s in Google Slides format, so you can save a copy of the presentation to your own Google Drive in your preferred folder. This will allow you to edit the placeholder text to enter your answers to the questions in the guide.

Get the Guide

How to use the guide

Every month this year will have a specific theme.

• Each week will have a set of homework questions related to that month’s theme.

• I will share a new presentation document with that week’s questions via the newsletter email and in my private community (you’re welcome to join us for free!).

• Then download the new presentation, copy and paste the new slides into your editable copy of the guide, and use it to answer the questions.

New slides will come each month. Stay tuned for more emails about those.

Subscribe now

Themes this year

1. Your Goals

2. The Blockers

3. Your Toolbox

4. Strategy & Plan

5. Making Progress

6. Becoming Invincible

7. Your Network (July)

8. Targeting

9. Broadcasting

10. Systems

11. Resources

12. Evaluation

Schedule a complimentary call with me if you have questions about the guide or if you want to discuss the specifics of your career situation.

Book a Free Call

Larry Cornett, Ph.D., is a career coach who spent 20+ years in Silicon Valley at Apple, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and several startups as a designer, leader, and product and design executive. Whether you're fighting for a promotion, navigating a layoff, or planning your exit to independence, he combines executive experience with psychological insight to help ambitious professionals reclaim their power and build an Invincible Career.

📕 Check out The Invincible Daily Journals!

• Turning 60 😳

• How the industry has changed since 1993

• The tech backlash (some examples)

  • Sony boycott

  • Kindle frustrations

  • Anthropic destroying books

  • Flock backlash

  • AI data center protests

  • Amazon deleting movies

  • BMW Spider-Man ad

• The impact of AI on every industry and role

• How ageism, layoffs, etc. are affecting both the young and old

• What we discussed in our live community meeting last week

• My recommended strategy for navigating the job market and easing out of this chaos

  • Use AI to play the numbers game

  • Leverage relationships to focus on high-value roles

  • Make sure you stay visible and relevant

  • Follow the “ripples” to seek opportunities in other industries and geographies

  • Explore self-employment and semi-retirement

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Some resources I mention

The Exit Blueprint

An 8-week Exit from Your 9-to-5 Job (Issue 199)

I often see a common business planning mistake…

Listen now

a month ago · 2 likes · Larry Cornett

☎️ I’m always happy to have a chat with you! You can book a free call with me.

Book a Free Call

Larry Cornett, Ph.D., is a career coach who spent 20+ years in Silicon Valley at Apple, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and several startups as a designer, leader, and product and design executive. Whether you're fighting for a promotion, navigating a layoff, or planning your exit to independence, he combines executive experience with psychological insight to help ambitious professionals reclaim their power and build an Invincible Career.
➡️ Ready to create an exciting future? Book a free call today to learn how!

Would you like to help support my newsletter and podcast, but don’t want to commit to a monthly fee? Check out my ☕️ Buy Me a Coffee. I’m self-employed, and coaching and writing are how I provide for my family. Thanks for your help!

Buy Me a Coffee

Subscribers only

Almost every career network would benefit from some improvements to make it more powerful and useful. When we begin our careers, we tend to connect with peers.

We also tend to connect with people like us.

• Similar professions

• Same company

• Same industry

• Same age

A homogeneous network of people at the same point in their careers is okay, but not the best it could be.

Get the Update

The Invincible Career Guide for 2026

I created the companion guide to provide additional structure for the weekly emails I will share with you this year. If you haven’t grabbed your copy yet, use the button below to access and save it.

It’s in Google Slides format, so you can save a copy of the presentation to your own Google Drive in your preferred folder. This will allow you to edit the placeholder text to enter your answers to the questions in the guide.

Get the Guide

How to use the guide

Every month this year will have a specific theme.

• Each week will have a set of homework questions related to that month’s theme.

• I will share a new presentation document with that week’s questions via the newsletter email and in my private community (you’re welcome to join us for free!).

• Then download the new presentation, copy and paste the new slides into your editable copy of the guide, and use it to answer the questions.

New slides will come each month. Stay tuned for more emails about those.

Subscribe now

Themes this year

1. Your Goals

2. The Blockers

3. Your Toolbox

4. Strategy & Plan

5. Making Progress

6. Becoming Invincible

7. Your Network (July)

8. Targeting

9. Broadcasting

10. Systems

11. Resources

12. Evaluation

Schedule a complimentary call with me if you have questions about the guide or if you want to discuss the specifics of your career situation.

Book a Free Call

Larry Cornett, Ph.D., is a career coach who spent 20+ years in Silicon Valley at Apple, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and several startups as a designer, leader, and product and design executive. Whether you're fighting for a promotion, navigating a layoff, or planning your exit to independence, he combines executive experience with psychological insight to help ambitious professionals reclaim their power and build an Invincible Career.
Note: I’m no longer accepting private coaching clients. But I will offer courses, workshops, challenges, and more in group settings throughout the year. Stay tuned for those announcements!

📕 Check out The Invincible Daily Journals!

“How can I tell if a recruiter is legitimate? Some who contact me seem a bit sketchy.”

Predators are hunting job-seeking prey. This is always going on, but it ramps up when the market sucks and people are feeling desperate.

There are all kinds of scams behind these fake jobs and recruiters:

• The job offer text that eventually wants you to send money.

• LinkedIn messages where a fake recruiter or hiring manager asks you to apply with your name, social security number, photo of your ID, etc. (i.e., used to commit identity theft).

• Fake jobs that require you to buy equipment upfront from their preferred vendor. They send a check to reimburse you, which then bounces.

• Interviews that require you to install something for the meeting, which takes over your computer and/or account.

Below, you can see a conversation I had with a potential scammer, who posed as a recruiter. I try not to judge too quickly, but this conversation went south when he insisted on messaging via Signal and that the hiring manager was making her LinkedIn profile private “during this phase of the project.”

Yeah, right. 🤣

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Some clues that a recruiter might be fake

• They rarely have a profile photo.

• Their LinkedIn profile is sparsely populated or really new.

• The domain for their email isn’t something you don’t recognize, or they just use a Gmail address.

• If their email is xxxVP@gmail.com, it is definitely fake.

• If their messages have a lot of run-on sentences that don’t make sense.

• If the message has a few random characters from a different language.

• If the job description matches your background perfectly, it is probably a fake JD generated by AI based on your LinkedIn profile data.

• They make excuses when you try to get more information about the company, hiring manager, etc. (e.g., “Oh, it’s stealth!”, “The hiring manager is keeping a low profile on LinkedIn.”).

• They always try to get you to use Signal (or some other private messaging service) for a meeting with them or the hiring manager.

• They ask for confidential information upfront (e.g, your ID, social security number, etc.). Never send that!

• They don’t seem to want you to research the role, etc. Nothing is online.

• The entire process is “urgent” and needs to kick off immediately.

• If they insist you hire a resume coach or some other third party to improve your resume.

In the end, if it sounds vague and too good to be true, trust your instincts. It’s probably a scam.

Never send money, never give your personal info or identity until you are 100% sure it’s a real company with a real job, and never install something on your computer or give them your login information for an account.

That’s why using reputable job posting services, corporate career pages, and good ol’ referrals from trusted sources works much better. Real people from real companies with a real job opening are happy to have a phone call, meet you over Zoom, provide references, and have you do your research first. They have nothing to hide!

The only thing worse than being out of work is being out of work and getting scammed by a fake recruiter. Be safe out there!

Apply to Join My Free Community

Larry Cornett, Ph.D., is a career coach who spent 20+ years in Silicon Valley at Apple, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and several startups as a designer, leader, and product and design executive. Whether you're fighting for a promotion, navigating a layoff, or planning your exit to independence, he combines executive experience with psychological insight to help ambitious professionals reclaim their power and build an Invincible Career.

Would you like to help support my newsletter and podcast, but don’t want to commit to a monthly fee? Check out my ☕️ Buy Me a Coffee. I’m self-employed, and coaching and writing are how I provide for my family. Thanks for your help!

Buy Me a Coffee

• A cold network is one you have not engaged with recently.

  • Colleagues from a past job who haven’t heard from you in years.

  • Fellow students from college who never saw you again.

  • People you met at an event, added to your LinkedIn, and never spoke with again.

  A small network is one you’ve never bothered to expand intentionally.

  • Adding a few people here and there, but not thinking about it strategically.

  • Only adding people from work to your network.

Get the Update

The Invincible Career Guide for 2026

I created the companion guide to provide additional structure for the weekly emails I will share with you this year. If you haven’t grabbed your copy yet, use the button below to access and save it.

It’s in Google Slides format, so you can save a copy of the presentation to your own Google Drive in your preferred folder. This will allow you to edit the placeholder text to enter your answers to the questions in the guide.

Get the Guide

How to use the guide

Every month this year will have a specific theme.

• Each week will have a set of homework questions related to that month’s theme.

• I will share a new presentation document with that week’s questions via the newsletter email and in my private community (you’re welcome to join us for free!).

• Then download the new presentation, copy and paste the new slides into your editable copy of the guide, and use it to answer the questions.

New slides will come each month. Stay tuned for more emails about those.

Subscribe now

Themes this year

1. Your Goals

2. The Blockers

3. Your Toolbox

4. Strategy & Plan

5. Making Progress

6. Becoming Invincible

7. Your Network (July)

8. Targeting

9. Broadcasting

10. Systems

11. Resources

12. Evaluation

Schedule a complimentary call with me if you have questions about the guide or if you want to discuss the specifics of your career situation.

Book a Free Call

Larry Cornett, Ph.D., is a career coach who spent 20+ years in Silicon Valley at Apple, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and several startups as a designer, leader, and product and design executive. Whether you're fighting for a promotion, navigating a layoff, or planning your exit to independence, he combines executive experience with psychological insight to help ambitious professionals reclaim their power and build an Invincible Career.
Note: I’m no longer accepting private coaching clients. But I will offer courses, workshops, challenges, and more in group settings throughout the year. Stay tuned for those announcements!

📕 Check out The Invincible Daily Journals!

I know many of you reading my newsletter are white-collar professionals or young people in college. I suspect that most of you are pursuing a career in tech.

However, the tide is shifting for younger children (i.e., Gen Alpha).

Red Wing, the work boot brand, conducted a survey of 2,000 parents and their Gen Alpha children (ages 5-16) to see what they are thinking about the future of work and their careers.

Here are the key findings…

• 85% of Gen Alpha kids want a hands-on physical job.

• 70% of parents would encourage their child to pursue a trade or blue-collar career, rising to 80% among parents who do trade work themselves.

• 68% of kids knew what trade and blue-collar jobs are; of those, 85% think that those are good careers and 88% think they’re important ones.

• 70% of kids who know what blue-collar jobs are want one when they grow up.

• Some already have a trade in mind: firefighter (11%), construction worker (9%), electrician (8%), welder (7%), or carpenter (6%).

I can tell you that this shift differs from my childhood as a Gen X person. Parents and teachers discouraged us from pursuing a blue-collar career. Many of our parents didn’t have college degrees, and they worked blue-collar jobs. So, they wanted us to go to college, secure a good degree, and land a white-collar professional job to make more money than they did.

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I was encouraged to pursue engineering, so I entered an undergraduate program in Mechanical Engineering at UNL. Later, I changed majors to psychology, discovered that an undergraduate degree wasn’t very useful, went on to get a Ph.D. in psych and studied human factors and HCI, and ended up designing software in Silicon Valley (IBM, Apple, eBay, Yahoo).

Computer science wasn’t a huge thing in the 80s, so I guess that’s why my high school advisor guided me into engineering instead. The whole tech push happened later with Millennials and Gen Z kids. They were told, “Get a CS degree, learn how to program, and head to Silicon Valley to get rich!”

However, AI is changing everything.

More and more tech companies are conducting massive layoffs every week. Entry-level tech roles are disappearing, since entry-level job activities can now supposedly be handled by a more senior employee managing AI agents and workflows.

I’m hearing about the impact of AI from my colleagues who still work in tech. In addition, some have shared what they are recommending for their children. I’ve also heard from my Gen Z kids about what they are experiencing in the working world and what is happening with their friends. FYI, one of my children is deep in the heart of Silicon Valley, pursuing a tech career. The other two decided to avoid my fate after watching me in that industry for almost 20 years. 🤣

So, if you work in tech, what are you experiencing? How has AI changed your world?

If you have children, what are you recommending that they study and pursue for a career now?

I keep hearing about this return to the blue-collar trades (and the need to buy good work boots). But I wonder how widespread the shift actually is.

Leave a comment

Larry Cornett, Ph.D., is a career coach who spent 20+ years in Silicon Valley at Apple, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and several startups as a designer, leader, and product and design executive. Whether you're fighting for a promotion, navigating a layoff, or planning your exit to independence, he combines executive experience with psychological insight to help ambitious professionals reclaim their power and build an Invincible Career.

Would you like to help support my newsletter and podcast, but don’t want to commit to a monthly fee? Check out my ☕️ Buy Me a Coffee. I’m self-employed, and coaching and writing are how I provide for my family. Thanks for your help!

Buy Me a Coffee

Grab the content of this week’s update so you can paste it into your copy of the Invincible Career Guide. It’s about creating your relationship management system.

• How to export your LinkedIn connections.

• Importing them into a relationship management spreadsheet.

• Prioritizing and categorizing your connections (e.g., leaders, influencers, insiders).

• Making notes of what you want to discuss (i.e., get clear about who you are and what you want next).

• Connecting and reconnecting with a few people every week.

Get the Update

The Invincible Career Guide for 2026

I created the companion guide to provide additional structure for the weekly emails I will share with you this year. If you haven’t grabbed your copy yet, use the button below to access and save it.

It’s in Google Slides format, so you can save a copy of the presentation to your own Google Drive in your preferred folder. This will allow you to edit the placeholder text to enter your answers to the questions in the guide.

Get the Guide

How to use the guide

Every month this year will have a specific theme.

• Each week will have a set of homework questions related to that month’s theme.

• I will share a new presentation document with that week’s questions via the newsletter email and in my private community (you’re welcome to join us for free!).

• Then download the new presentation, copy and paste the new slides into your editable copy of the guide, and use it to answer the questions.

New slides will come each month. Stay tuned for more emails about those.

Subscribe now

Themes this year

1. Your Goals

2. The Blockers

3. Your Toolbox

4. Strategy & Plan

5. Making Progress

6. Becoming Invincible

7. Your Network (July)

8. Targeting

9. Broadcasting

10. Systems

11. Resources

12. Evaluation

Schedule a complimentary call with me if you have questions about the guide or if you want to discuss the specifics of your career situation.

Book a Free Call

Larry Cornett, Ph.D., is a career coach who spent 20+ years in Silicon Valley at Apple, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and several startups as a designer, leader, and product and design executive. Whether you're fighting for a promotion, navigating a layoff, or planning your exit to independence, he combines executive experience with psychological insight to help ambitious professionals reclaim their power and build an Invincible Career.
Note: I’m no longer accepting private coaching clients. But I will offer courses, workshops, challenges, and more in group settings throughout the year. Stay tuned for those announcements!

📕 Check out The Invincible Daily Journals!

This will also be the summer I turn 60. Yikes! Just writing those words feels crazy. It sounds so old! Luckily, I don’t feel old, thanks to investing so much in my health and fitness. It also helped to step away from the stress of my old corporate job when I left in 2010 to take control of my destiny.

Stress ages you. I’ve even lost friends and colleagues all too soon, and I blame the stress of that lifestyle for contributing to the issues that took them away so young.

I’ve talked about the cycles of life before, and how I’ve noticed a repeating 10-year cycle in my life of change and reinvention. I guess that partly explains what I’m announcing this week.

⬆️ I discuss everything in more detail in the audio for this episode, so scroll up, hit play, and check it out.

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Taking a coaching break

At almost 60 years of age, and after a decade of coaching, I’m giving myself the gift of stepping away (a bit). I think the time has come.

• My life and my needs have evolved.

• I’ve become a different person.

• The industry has shifted.

• The world has changed.

So, I’m taking a break from accepting new career coaching clients (perhaps forever). Of course, I’m still working with a few clients on retainer, and other engagements are in progress and will need to wind down over the rest of the year.

Also, if we’re friends, or we’ve enjoyed working together before, I may make an exception here or there. But that’s about it.

Instead, I am shifting my focus to my new Exit Blueprint business coaching and Gen X life coaching. I will also offer a few courses, workshops, and retreats throughout the year (I miss working with folks in the real world). So, even though I won’t offer new one-on-one career coaching, I will have courses and workshops:

• The Invincible Goals System (success strategies and planning to achieve your goals)

• The Invincible Job Quest (job searching, interviews, and negotiations)

• The Exit Blueprint (business design, planning, and testing self-employment)

This change will free up my time for all the side quests I’ve put on hold for years (e.g., finishing my book, writing fiction, making music again, painting, etc.). Of course, I’ll still be working out every day, hiking as much as possible, traveling the world, and visiting my children often. Life is too short!

Newsletter and podcast

So, what happens with this newsletter and podcast? That’s a great question.

I’ve written almost 700 articles to share my advice on the job search, interviews, getting promoted, dealing with bosses and coworkers, and generally making yourself so valuable and known that you get to call the shots in your career. My podcast episodes date back over six and a half years. I know many people aren’t even aware of half of what I’ve written and shared in my podcast.

So, I’ll resurface more of my evergreen advice and freshen up details to make sure they are relevant for today’s working world. If something ignites my passion (or anger 🤣) about a recent event or topic, I’m sure I won't be able to resist writing about it. But I don’t think I need to write any more articles about how to interview, using AI for this or that, or how to bypass all the BS that is keeping people from finding better jobs.

I’ve shared the secrets to all of that so many times. I know some people listened and landed great gigs. Others ignored it, kept trying the same old approach, and wondered why it's not working.

Literally yesterday, I saw someone post…

🙄 Sigh… It makes me so weary. Seriously. You just realized that? Even though I’ve been beating that drum for 10 years?!? And I know you’ve seen my articles that I post every week for those 10 years.

Okay…

I guess you can lead a horse to water, but… Yeah, I’m done leading horses to water and watching them not drink—over and over again. Either you get it, or you don’t.

I want to have more fun with the podcast. I want to invite more entertaining guests and have enjoyable conversations with people who have wisdom to share and stories from their amazing careers and lives. I’ll be dipping into my network that I’ve grown for over 30 years and reconnecting with some fun and familiar faces.

So, I guess that’s that!

• 60 years of life (soon).

• 20+ years in my tech career.

• Another 10 years of career coaching.

It's time for a new adventure!

I’m excited about focusing on business coaching and life coaching. I’m really, really tired of American corporations and the games they play. I had to live it during my own career. After that, I had to hear horror stories and try to help people navigate their careers. So, now I’d rather help good people live more amazing lives through self-employment, early semi-retirement, and chasing more adventures before time runs out.

Thank you for being a reader and a listener! I will still be writing articles and recording podcast episodes. That won’t change. And I still have the community for the few people who enjoy the support and encouragement of like-minded peers.

A big thanks to those of you who became clients! And for those of you I never got a chance to work with, sorry. I guess it won’t happen now.

But maybe I’ll see you in one of my courses, workshops, or retreats. Or, you may be one of those few brave souls who decide to take the same leap I did, escape the 9-5 world, and create your own path. If so, check out my Exit Blueprint business coaching.

Subscribe now

Larry Cornett, Ph.D., is a career coach who spent 20+ years in Silicon Valley at Apple, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and several startups as a designer, leader, and product and design executive. Whether you're fighting for a promotion, navigating a layoff, or planning your exit to independence, he combines executive experience with psychological insight to help ambitious professionals reclaim their power and build an Invincible Career.

Would you like to help support my newsletter and podcast, but don’t want to commit to a monthly fee? Check out my ☕️ Buy Me a Coffee. I’m self-employed, and coaching and writing are how I provide for my family. Thanks for your help!

Buy Me a Coffee

Freedom is about living the life you want and making decisions based on your beliefs, values, and goals. You are in charge of your career and life. You are not controlled by someone else.

• It’s impossible to feel empowered if you do not have the freedom to make decisions.

• Time freedom means you decide how you will spend your days.

• Work freedom means you decide how your career will progress.

• Personal freedom means you decide how you live your life, where you live and work, who you spend the most time with, and how you make decisions that impact your life.

• My sense of freedom blossomed when I gained control over my time, life, health, happiness, and fulfillment.

Get the Update

The Invincible Career Guide for 2026

I created the companion guide to provide additional structure for the weekly emails I will share with you this year. If you haven’t grabbed your copy yet, use the button below to access and save it.

It’s in Google Slides format, so you can save a copy of the presentation to your own Google Drive in your preferred folder. This will allow you to edit the placeholder text to enter your answers to the questions in the guide.

Get the Guide

How to use the guide

Every month this year will have a specific theme.

• Each week will have a set of homework questions related to that month’s theme.

• I will share a new presentation document with that week’s questions via the newsletter email and in my private community (you’re welcome to join us for free!).

• Then download the new presentation, copy and paste the new slides into your editable copy of the guide, and use it to answer the questions.

New slides will come each month. Stay tuned for more emails about those.

Subscribe now

Themes this year

1. Your Goals

2. The Blockers

3. Your Toolbox

4. Strategy & Plan

5. Making Progress

6. Becoming Invincible (June)

7. Your Network

8. Targeting

9. Broadcasting

10. Systems

11. Resources

12. Evaluation

Schedule a complimentary call with me if you have questions about the guide or if you want to discuss the specifics of your career situation.

Book a Free Call

Larry Cornett, Ph.D., is a career coach who spent 20+ years in Silicon Valley at Apple, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and several startups as a designer, leader, and product and design executive. Whether you're fighting for a promotion, navigating a layoff, or planning your exit to independence, he combines executive experience with psychological insight to help ambitious professionals reclaim their power and build an Invincible Career.
➡️ Ready to create an exciting future? Book a free call today to learn how!

📕 Check out The Invincible Daily Journals!

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As a coach, I frequently talk with people who want to quit their jobs. They’re frustrated, angry, and stressed about their projects at work and relationships with coworkers and management.

They feel anxious about their job performance and fear they might receive a bad review or be placed on a layoff list. The thought of continuing to work for their employer every day for several more years is depressing.

I hear statements like:

• “They don’t appreciate me.”

• “I don’t feel respected at work.”

• “My boss isn’t investing in me.”

• “I never receive any training.”

• “I don’t feel like I’m growing in my job.”

• “I want to walk away now, even though I don’t have another job lined up.”

• “I’ve lost faith in my abilities.”

• “I’m beginning to doubt myself.”

• “I’ve lost my mojo.”

These feelings are more common than you might think. Our work has a significant impact on our sense of wellbeing.

I’ve shared this data before from research by Clarine M. Jacobs, Ph.D., published in Ineffective-Leader-Induced Occupational Stress:

• ~75% of employees said their leader is their most significant source of stress.

• ~70% of employees said their work is a substantial source of stress.

• ~80% of employees experienced stress-related physical symptoms (e.g., fatigue, irritability, anger, lack of motivation, headaches).

It can take several months or even years to recover from a toxic work environment or a terrible boss who tears you down and destroys your confidence. I’ve experienced that myself. I didn’t feel like my normal self for almost six months after I quit a job that had an incredibly negative, backstabbing culture.

I thought I could push through the stress and anxiety that I was feeling in that job. But I paid a steep price for not dealing with it (e.g., my health suffered considerably). However, I eventually took steps to get it under control, and I changed my life for the better forever.

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Years ago, I shared some strategies and techniques to relieve stress. I’ve found that actively managing my stress levels also dramatically improves my creativity and productivity. Maybe some of these can help you too!

However, these strategies still feel more like a painkiller than an actual solution. They treat the symptoms more than they stop the stress and anxiety from happening in the first place.

I’ve thought more about this problem, worked with clients struggling with stress and anxiety, and managed my own issues and struggles with depression. I still use all the techniques I shared to manage my symptoms. But I’ve found that it’s better to head them off at the pass sooner.

One of the most effective and lasting strategies is to take complete control of what you believe is your life’s mission versus simply adopting your employer’s mission and giving your heart and soul to a company that doesn’t really care about you. Owning your sense of purpose gives you more control over your physical, mental, and emotional health.

I made that mistake earlier in my career. I drank my employer’s “Kool-Aid” and threw myself into that job 100%. My sense of identity was tied to my job title and the company’s mission.

You are vulnerable if you let someone else (e.g., an employer) hold the keys to your wellbeing and sense of purpose. Tying your identity to your employer, its mission, and a specific job title is always risky.

• When a project fails, you feel like a failure.

• When your boss gets upset with you, you feel stressed and anxious.

• When your world-changing product gets canceled, you get depressed.

• What happens if your employer makes a strategic pivot away from the mission you committed to for years?

• What happens if your company gets acquired and the new leadership changes everything (e.g., your title, role, projects, etc.)?

• What happens if you get demoted or lose your job?

Don’t fall into that trap as I did.

Yes, you should absolutely have a job or run a business that feels meaningful. But your sense of purpose needs to rise above that. It should endure beyond the boundaries of any specific job or company.

When you have a sense of purpose, and your efforts have meaning, you can keep going and push through almost anything. But they need to be under your control.

I work one-on-one with my coaching clients and give them “homework exercises” to explore and create their personal vision and mission. We discuss how this can become their purpose in life instead of solely focusing on what an employer wants them to do for their job.

I know that when I created my purpose; I felt more in control, and that reduced my anxiety. I look forward to every day because I will work on my mission. Having a meaningful sense of purpose takes the edge off my seasonal depression too, which became a little less seasonal and a little more persistent in past years.

For most of my life, I didn’t feel like I had a purpose. Over a decade ago, I probably had some shallow, corporate, materialistic answer to the question, “What is your purpose in life?”

But now? Now, I finally feel like what I’m doing matters.

When I launched Invincible Career and started working with people who were frustrated with their jobs, feeling sad about their careers, and wondering about their future, it made me realize I was finally doing something that actually helps people! I could see the change in their confidence, happiness, and hope for the future. I’d never experienced that before in my corporate jobs.

So, this is how I answer that question today:

I want to give you a sneak peek at some of the homework I give my clients. We work on this very exercise of exploring and defining their purpose, vision, and mission to align their career path with what matters most to them.

A calling versus a passion

Not long ago, it became quite popular to tell people to follow their passions. I’m not a fan of this recommendation because I think it misleads people. They believe they can identify a passion and then make a living from it. Easy, right?

My problem with this is:

1. Something might be a passion (e.g., playing guitar), but that doesn’t mean that you are actually good at that thing.

2. You may have a passion for something (e.g., birdwatching), but it doesn’t solve a problem or meet a need for anyone else. Therefore, no one will pay you to pursue this passion.

3. Finally, when someone turns a passion into a way to make a living (either as an employee or an entrepreneur), they often lose their passion for that very thing. For example, there are many stories of people who loved singing for fun but lost their passion for it once it became a job to pay the bills.

I would rather have my clients think about their “calling.” A calling isn’t necessarily a passion, although you can feel passionate about pursuing a calling (many people do). It also isn’t necessarily fun to pursue a calling, but you feel drawn to it and driven to make it happen. Some might call that an obsession. I prefer to think of it as finding meaning and fulfillment in life.

I see a calling as something that taps into your core talents, strengths, knowledge, and experience in a way that changes the world or improves the lives of others in a meaningful way. It is valuable enough to these people that you can, indeed, turn it into a way to make a living for yourself. Your unique way of bringing this to the world gives you purpose every day.

What do you feel compelled to do?

What would you say is your calling?

Your vision and mission

I’ve used a vision and mission framework to propose new corporate projects and formalize business ideas. But I also find it useful for my clients to help capture their thoughts around their calling and purpose.

It helps to think about yourself and the world we live in, since a purpose has more meaning when it improves the world and helps others. The following questions can help.

1. What does the world need? What problems need to be solved? What are the big opportunities?

2. What are you great at doing? Think about your natural talents and the skills you’ve acquired. What are your unfair advantages (e.g., you’re brilliant, naturally persuasive, people seem to like you, etc.)?

3. What do you love doing? Most importantly, what do you love doing that you’re also great at doing?

4. What can you get paid to do? Unless you’re financially independent, you’ll want to align your purpose with some way to make a living.

Here is an example of how someone might turn the answers to these questions into more meaningful work:

In this example, Sarah said that her calling is to help educate disadvantaged children. She could expand on this to create a more detailed vision and mission statement for her business.

What is a vision statement? It’s an aspirational view of the future that would inspire yourself and others. As you think about your vision, what would your life ideally look like at the end of the next 15-20 years? How would you like to change the world? What impact do you want to have on others?

What is a mission statement? Your mission is a realistic endeavor you believe will enable your vision to come true. Your personal mission statement will be what you want to commit to for your vision to become a reality.

For example, Sarah might create the following statements for her business:

• Vision: Every child is prepared for the future of work.

• Mission: We provide disadvantaged children with affordable and accessible educational opportunities to learn the latest technologies to prepare them for their future careers.

Exploring your purpose

You are absolutely unique. No other person on this planet has experienced the same life as you.

No one else has the exact combination of who you are, what you know, and what you are capable of accomplishing. Someone’s exact purpose is just as unique as they are.

For some people, their purpose is deeply tied to a creative act. They can’t imagine life without making “the thing” that gives them purpose every day. This could be writing stories, creating designs, making music, creating art, writing code, etc.

These creators feel compelled to bring their work to life. Even if they weren’t getting paid to create it, they would do this.

For others, their purpose is deeply tied to people. They can’t imagine life without helping certain types of people every day.

Some teachers obviously feel this way about children. Some medical professionals feel this way about patients. So, this type of purpose is less tied to a specific act of creation and more about helping the people they care about the most.

Sometimes, these two types of purpose overlap when a creator uses what they create to help a specific kind of person (e.g., a children’s author who wants to entertain and educate young people).

Now, consider yourself. Do you feel compelled to create something, and you can’t stop doing it no matter what?

Or, do you feel drawn to helping specific types of people, and you believe that your purpose in this world is to make their lives better? You may even be one of the few whose sense of purpose lies at the intersection of both.

What are your thoughts on your purpose?

Once you have your own vision and mission statements, you’ll probably find it easier to define your purpose in life. Your purpose will be to follow your mission to make your vision of the world come true.

Your purpose is larger and more significant than any single project. It’s more meaningful than the work most employers ask us to do. It belongs to you and gives your life meaning beyond jobs that come and go.

Defining and following a purpose—your life’s mission—gives you more control over managing your physical, mental, and emotional health, too. Focusing your energy on making your vision come true takes the edge off any stress or anxiety you might feel in a job, which suddenly seems a little less important in the grand scheme of life.

Of course, when you pursue an Invincible Career, the ultimate goal is to rebuild your career around your own vision, mission, and purpose. Getting there might take years. But when it happens, you can then dedicate all of your time to something that you find personally fulfilling and meaningful.

What is your purpose?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on your purpose. What do you feel is your mission in life? What vision do you want to make come true? How do you want to change the world?

Feel free to share with me in the comments if you’d like. Or, reach out to me. I’m always here to listen.

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Larry Cornett, Ph.D., is a career coach who spent 20+ years in Silicon Valley at Apple, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and several startups as a designer, leader, and product and design executive. Whether you’re fighting for a promotion, navigating a layoff, or planning your exit to independence, he combines executive experience with psychological insight to help ambitious professionals reclaim their power and build an Invincible Career.
➡️ Ready to create an exciting future? Book a free call today to learn how!

Would you like to help support my newsletter and podcast, but don’t want to commit to a monthly fee? Check out my ☕️ Buy Me a Coffee. I’m self-employed, so coaching and writing are how I provide for my family. Thanks for your help!

When you take control of your life, you empower yourself to navigate challenges with more resilience and hope. Control, autonomy, and agency are vital components of our wellbeing, motivation, and fulfillment.

• When you feel in control of your life and career, you will experience a sense of agency, which will build your autonomy.

• Autonomy is your ability to make your own choices and decisions.

• Agency is your capacity to act on your decisions.

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The Invincible Career Guide for 2026

I created the companion guide to provide additional structure for the weekly emails I will share with you this year. If you haven’t grabbed your copy yet, use the button below to access and save it.

It’s in Google Slides format, so you can save a copy of the presentation to your own Google Drive in your preferred folder. This will allow you to edit the placeholder text to enter your answers to the questions in the guide.

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How to use the guide

Every month this year will have a specific theme.

• Each week will have a set of homework questions related to that month’s theme.

• I will share a new presentation document with that week’s questions via the newsletter email and in my private community (you’re welcome to join us for free!).

• Then download the new presentation, copy and paste the new slides into your editable copy of the guide, and use it to answer the questions.

New slides will come each month. Stay tuned for more emails about those.

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Themes this year

1. Your Goals

2. The Blockers

3. Your Toolbox

4. Strategy & Plan

5. Making Progress

6. Becoming Invincible (June)

7. Your Network

8. Targeting

9. Broadcasting

10. Systems

11. Resources

12. Evaluation

Schedule a complimentary call with me if you have questions about the guide or if you want to discuss the specifics of your career situation.

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Larry Cornett, Ph.D., is a career coach who spent 20+ years in Silicon Valley at Apple, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and several startups as a designer, leader, and product and design executive. Whether you're fighting for a promotion, navigating a layoff, or planning your exit to independence, he combines executive experience with psychological insight to help ambitious professionals reclaim their power and build an Invincible Career.
➡️ Ready to create an exciting future? Book a free call today to learn how!

📕 Check out The Invincible Daily Journals!

We are in an employer’s market. There have been 224,621 employees laid off this year. So, hundreds—sometimes thousands—of people are competing for the same open position that you are. For example, I recently saw that 15,000 people applied for one position at Coinbase!

The only way to get noticed and have a chance is to connect with people on the inside who can be your champions.

• They will introduce you to the hiring managers.

• They will help you secure an initial interview.

• They will help you succeed because their reputation is now on the line.

My resume was actually pretty damn strong back in the day. I worked at Apple, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and a bunch of startups. I climbed from entry-level intern to an executive role.

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However, my network is what helped me find and land new jobs every single time. Not once did I apply cold. Not once did I send my resume and expect it would do the heavy lifting for me.

Connecting, reconnecting, refreshing, and strengthening relationships within my personal and professional network got me into IBM, Apple, eBay, and Yahoo.

Sure, create a decent resume. Learn what matters and what they want to see. You’ll need it later to have on file, and the interview teams will want to refer to it.

But don’t fall for the advice that a “magic resume” will open doors for you on its own. Not gonna happen.

Schedule a free call with me if you’d like to discuss what will really help you land a great new job.

Book Your Free Call

Larry Cornett, Ph.D., is a career coach who spent 20+ years in Silicon Valley at Apple, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and several startups as a designer, leader, and product and design executive. Whether you're fighting for a promotion, navigating a layoff, or planning your exit to independence, he combines executive experience with psychological insight to help ambitious professionals reclaim their power and build an Invincible Career.
➡️ Ready to create an exciting future? Book a free call today to learn how!

Would you like to help support my newsletter and podcast, but don’t want to commit to a monthly fee? Check out my ☕️ Buy Me a Coffee. I’m self-employed, and coaching and writing are how I provide for my family. Thanks for your help!

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Larry Cornett, Ph.D., is a career coach who spent 20+ years in Silicon Valley at Apple, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and several startups as a designer, leader, and product and design executive. Whether you're fighting for a promotion, navigating a layoff, or planning your exit to independence, he combines executive experience with psychological insight to help ambitious professionals reclaim their power and build an Invincible Career.
➡️ Ready to create an exciting future? Book a free call today to learn how!

Would you like to help support my newsletter and podcast, but don’t want to commit to a monthly fee? Check out my ☕️ Buy Me a Coffee. I’m self-employed, and coaching and writing are how I provide for my family. Thanks for your help!

Buy Me a Coffee

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