Tag: Career Advice

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Thought I’d End Up at DERM, But It Wasn’t a Match

by margaritakruyff1 Comment on Thought I’d End Up at DERM, But It Wasn’t a Match
Thought I’d End Up at DERM, But It Wasn’t a Match

Giving advice is a strange kind of time travel. As you dispense it, you find yourself digging back through old memories and discovering they mean something different now than they did when they happened.

Last week, I presented to Miami high schoolers on my career journey and current role heading up environmental strategy for a Fortune 500 company. Somewhere between the title slide and the Q&A, I caught myself referencing not only moments where I’ve made the “right” choices, but also the detours and rejections that led me here. It’s easier to say in hindsight: I am equally grateful those “not so right” moments happened too.

I wasn’t one of those kids that was born knowing I wanted to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an astronaut. Around age 11, my family went on a trip to the Yucatan Peninsula, and after my first snorkeling adventure, I decided I wanted to do that forever. Even still, when I applied early decision to the University of Miami, I wasn’t clear what that meant in practice. I was so open to opportunity I signed up for, and was denied from, the honors geology program.

(This was my first involuntary pivot. THANK GOD. Can you imagine me studying rocks for a living? Me neither.)

I ended up pursuing a degree in Marine Affairs and Policy and International Relations. Thanks to a marine biology lab internship my freshman year, I learned I am not energized by being alone, staring through a microscope for hours, in the lonely, formaldehyde-scented setting of a lab. Through trial and error, I discovered I wasn’t meant to do the science. I was meant to communicate what research findings mean to decision makers. That’s exactly what my degrees prepared me to do.

Still, I found myself newly graduated in 2009 with limited job prospects and no real understanding of my options. Right before I landed on a plan, my advisor Maria called with an offer: a teaching assistant and research position that would let me pursue my Master’s. One year later, I was newly graduated again, still unclear what people with Marine Affairs degrees actually do for a living.

I spent 18 months interviewing, watching my childhood savings and my self confidence dwindle with every rejection. I secured interviews at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) and Miami-Dade County’s then Division of Environmental Resources Management (DERM) only to BOMB them both. I’m talking sweating profusely, rambling unintelligibly, bombed. I’m talking I still cringe at the memory when I can’t sleep, bombed. And of course, I didn’t get either job.

At the time, every rejection felt like proof I was doing something wrong. After all, other UM grads with my degrees had all successfully landed positions at both agencies. Looking back, it wasn’t a rejection of me. It was a redirection toward a better fit.

My big break came in the form of a small consulting firm called C3TS, doing environmental impact studies for the Florida Department of Transportation. The job found me by surprise. I showed up to Jeff Marcus’s office in Coral Gables expecting mentorship and I left with a job offer. I didn’t know it at the time, but that transportation experience would become a critical credential for landing my current job.

When I entered the candidate pool in 2019 at my current company, the hiring manager was not sold on me. After C3TS, I spent nearly a decade working for the City of Miami Beach, and she was worried I’d bring a government pace to a fast-moving company. What she didn’t know is that our mayor came from the private sector and ran the city with the same urgency. Plus, we were racing against chronic coastal flooding that forced our residents to wade through knee deep waters and threatened our tourism economy. Most nights, I didn’t leave the office before 8 p.m.

I could have accepted the universe forcing another pivot. Instead, I made my case, leveraging past experience AND redirections (like my transportation work at C3TS) to argue why this role fit. I got the job and six years later, I’m still thriving here. It’s been a perfect match.

Looking back, none of it feels random. The UM rejection, the bombed interviews at FDEP and DERM, even the hiring manager’s hesitation about my fit at my current company—each one forced me to wait for the right timing or the right fit. Some doors closed because they weren’t meant to open for me. Others stayed open because I made the case for why they should. Both were necessary. I’m just grateful to see it now, standing on the other side.

Which “no” sent you in a direction you needed to go, even if it didn’t feel that way in the moment?

Continuing Education, Reading List

One Thing That Inspired Me This Week: “Share The Load”

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One Thing That Inspired Me This Week: “Share The Load”

These days I only write when I am so inspired by something that I have to share it. “Discipline Is Destiny” by Ryan Holiday is one of those occasions. Marshall Pasternak recommended the book during the February meeting of the United Way Miami Young Leaders Executive Committee. As I finished each chapter, I kept thinking, “Our team needs to hear this. They would be as energized by this as I am.”

When I finished the book, I launched a weekly team email series to share different lessons from the book. I kicked it off with “Share The Load,” because our team can take on too much at times. The chapter talks about the importance of delegating as a matter of self-discipline. In a culture that glorifies being busy, I found this to be a particularly effective argument for changing course.

I was excited to share what I learned with the team. I was even more excited when they responded with the parts that resonated most with them. That’s what inspired me to share the email below with you as well. I can’t always share our weekly team emails publicly, like when they delve too deeply into details of our work. But, when I can, I will be posting them here and anxiously await your thoughts!

Subject: One Thing That Inspired Me Most This Week: “Share The Load”

Team,

As you know, I’m an avid reader and am often inspired by the wide genre of authors that I read. Every time I learn something new or am inspired by something, you are the first people I want to share it with. Rather than save it for our department calls and take up time meant for group discussion, I am going to start sending short Friday morning emails with the “one thing that that inspired me most each week.” I hope that you will find these nuggets empowering, insightful, or just plain interesting. Have a great weekend!

This week’s “one thing” is an abridged transcription from Ryan Holiday’s book “Discipline is Destiny”:

Share the load.

It takes discipline not to insist on doing everything yourself, especially when you know how to do many of those things well. Especially when you have high standards of how they should be done. Even if you enjoy doing them whether it is mowing your own lawn, writing your own speeches, making your own schedule, or answering your own phone.

While a leader must know how to do anything, they cannot conceivably do everything. It’s not physically possible. It’s not mentally possible.  Often the best way to manage the load is to share the load.

Woe is the person who wears themselves out on trivial matters and then when the big moments come is out of energy. Woe is the person and the people around them who is mentally exhausted and strung out because they have taken everything upon themselves that now when things go wrong, there’s no slack or cushion to absorb the additional stress.

A glutton isn’t just someone who eats or drinks too much. Some of us are also gluttons for punishment, gluttons for attention, gluttons for control, gluttons for work. What makes it so tricky to identify, let alone to manage, is that it often comes from a good place. We feel obligated, we feel bad spending money, we feel guilty asking for help. No matter how well intentioned, the outcome is the same. We wear ourselves down, we harm ourselves, we harm the cause, we neglect “the main thing.” We end up depriving the world of progress, of the benefits of what economists call “the law of comparative advantage.”

You have to be able to pass the ball, especially when someone is open and has a better shot. You have to be able to share the minutes with the other players, because that’s what teams do. 

The insecure are unable to do this. They fear being criticized, they fear letting people see behind the scenes. Tyrants are unable to do this. Egotists are unable to do this too. The cheap are unable to do this, they want it all for themselves. They aren’t strong enough to bear anything being the center, the exclusive, the sole source of achievement. And what happens to most tyrannical regimes? They fail.

It doesn’t make sense to try to do everything yourself. You have to delegate; you have to find people who are good at things and empower them to help you. You have to be strong enough to hand over the keys, to relinquish control, to develop a system and organization that is bigger than just us. We need to share – that is if you’re trying to scale, trying to build something or do something that matters, something that is bigger than just you.

Each of us must know what an hour of our time is worth. We must have the discipline to figure out how to best spend that time and invest the fruit it bears. No matter how successful or important you are, we all have tasks that can be automated. We all have legacy tasks that ought to be reassigned. Everything in life is a team sport. You know these inefficiencies exist and yet you refuse to delegate them. You continue to try to do everyone’s job. Stop procrastinating – delegate. The value is virtually incalculable because it affords you the most expensive thing in the world: time.

What line or concept shifted your perspective the most? What is one change you will be making this week to practice the discipline of delegation? What is a book you have read recently that changed the way you behave? Let me know in the comments below!