Stay unhireable + Welcome to Amanda Thinks
Hello, friends!
New home, same me.
Welcome to my newsletter. It’s called Amanda Thinks, and it’s an all-encompassing place for me to write things.
You might be here because you found me through my course 👋, my recent article in the First Round Review, or because you’re a long-time subscriber of Thinking in Quarters 😘.
In all of these cases, you’re in the right place.
What is Amanda Thinks?
It’s a prompt — and a reason for me to mine my personal experience and think critically on a regular basis. In doing so, I hope to develop my POV on things like strategy, operations, consulting, advising, management and leadership. All thoughts are my own, typed with my own fingers.
I’m centralizing all of my writing in Substack, which allows for subscribing / unsubscribing to topic areas that you care about. Eventually, I’ll turn on subscriber chats so that we can really get to know one another.
How can you support, you ask? Share this newsletter with 2-3 people who you think it would resonate with. That would be very sweet of you.
Without further ado, some quick thoughts….
On staying unhireable
When I first started flirting with the idea of consulting, it was only supposed to be for 18 months. I was pregnant with our third baby (the other two were 5 and 2), and I couldn’t imagine keeping the pace that I was at.
I also remembered the feeling of going out and returning from maternity leave. My typical playbook was:
work until I’m ready to burst,
eat Chick Fil A daily while anxiously waiting to give birth,
bask in the afterglow briefly before losing myself to seven seasons of Scandal,
spend weeks anticipating work before finally returning at the peak of my baby’s predictable sleep regression.
I knew the drill.
I also had friends encouraging me – “just pick up a few projects” “you don’t need to have the whole thing figured out before you do it” “good thing you moved out of the Bay – time to be thankful for that low mortgage!”
All of this advice was good enough, and off I went.
And then: I fell in love with it.
The “it”?
Freedom: the feeling of being able to say “yes” for the first time in my career. No longer was I constrained by my employment relationship and therefore unable to advise that company, sit on that board, work in that friend’s startup, etc. I was a kid in a candy store. And then, when that wore off and the market went upside down, I was even more grateful to have….
Diversification: I had multiple clients in the middle of restructuring and layoffs, and others raising large rounds. I was working with CEOs who were being shown the door, and being called by others who were being hired. My fate wasn’t tied to a single company, and that really mattered.
Now, for me, this wasn’t just a work/life balance play. I did, and still very much do, value control over my schedule, and I did not want to work 80 hours per week.
But I wasn’t trying to go into cruise control or early retirement. I wanted to hustle, create opportunities for myself and others, stay on a steep learning curve, and drive real impact.
So I spent 18 months trialing self-employment. And then another 18 months loving self-employment. And now, I’m in my third 18 month inning and I’m thinking “how can I stay unhireable for another 3 years?”
By this, I mean: how can I keep enough meaningful opportunities on my plate that I wouldn’t dare walk away for a job? In doing so, I continue to optimize for my “it” above.
Will I always value Freedom and Diversification like I do today? Probably not. But for now, I sure as hell do.
Wanna hear me chat about this with another full-time consultant?
Click here to listen to my recent Lightning Lesson with Emily Hollender.
For those celebrating, Shanah Tova, and have an easy fast.
Amanda