INSPIRATION
Here is the morning chat
Shea went to Hampton to become a pilot. Then a soccer ball hit him in the eye, changed his vision, and pulled him right out of the cockpit before he ever sat in one.
He didn't quit aviation. He changed course. Air traffic control instead of flying the plane. Then he watched the FAA freeze hiring his junior year and heard his parents in the back of his head telling him he couldn't come home after graduation. So he changed course again. Landed at Oracle for a role he couldn't even explain to his parents. Twenty-five years later he's a VP at Salesforce running the solutions engineering team that eventually hired me on interview number sixteen.
Shea didn't go chasing the change. The change came for him. Every plan he made got interrupted, and every interruption pointed him at a bigger room than the one he was walking toward.
That's the part they don't teach us.
Most of us are told to make the plan, work the plan, protect the plan. The invisible economy runs on something else. It runs on how fast you can read the room when the room shifts on you, and how willing you are to trade the plan you loved for the plan that's actually available. Every executive I know has a version of this story. They just don't talk about it because we've been trained to make it sound like it was all intentional.
It wasn't.
The show drops tomorrow but ▶ Watch the trailer here:
COLLABORATION
Bruce Feiler has a stat worth sitting with. He spent three years interviewing 225 Americans about the moments their lives got interrupted (a job loss, a diagnosis, a divorce, a move). His finding: we now go through what he calls a “lifequake” every twelve to eighteen months. If it feels like the ground has been shifting under you more often than it used to, that's because it is. His book Life Is in the Transitions gets into what to do about it. Worth a look.
→ Grab Life Is in the Transitions
▶ The TEF Show — the full episode with Shea Lewis drops tomorrow morning. If the trailer moved you, come back for the whole thing.
EXECUTION
This week, name the change you didn't plan for. Not the one you wanted. The one that came for you. Write it down in one sentence: “The plan was X. Then Y happened. So I did Z.” Just naming it puts you back in the driver's seat.
PASS IT ON
Know someone whose plan got interrupted this year? Forward this. The trailer will make sense to them.
THE EXTRA
My current YouTube obsession: [TEF Show].
— DéRecco
The Invisible Interview · The Invisible Score · The TEF Show
