I spent 20 years teaching people how to navigate change. That was my professional identity. I could cite the frameworks, explain the research, walk you through every evidence-based approach to resilience and adaptation.
Then 2025 forced me to actually do it.
I started the year proposing to my partner in a Bucharest cocktail bar. We'd met as colleagues in Budapest a decade ago, lost touch when I moved to Germany, and then reconnected in 2024. The plan was simple: get married, keep building my career in a job I loved, run a newsletter on the side.
By August, I'd married her, left that job, turned the newsletter into an accidental business, deliberately cut my subscriber list by 70%, failed spectacularly at my first business positioning, and found myself back in therapy for the first time in 14 years.
Turns out knowing how change works doesn't mean you know how it feels.
What Actually Happened
I acquired The Human Stack newsletter in May. It was supposed to be a side project, build an audience, maybe monetize it eventually, keep the security of full-time work.
We married in June in a small ceremony with friends.
In August, I found myself unexpectedly entering the job market. The newsletter became the main thing by necessity, not choice.
Then I made a decision that looked insane. I culled my subscriber list. Hard. My email platform had been inflating numbers with people who'd never opened an email. I had 20,000 "subscribers," but only 6,000 were real. My open rates jumped from 40% to 80%. Watching that number drop still hurt my ego more than I want to admit.
So there I was: newly married, suddenly self-employed, trying to figure out what my business actually was.
I tried positioning the newsletter as a careers resource. I'd spent 20 years helping people develop their careers. I knew that world.
I lost 500 subscribers in the launch. Got virtually no signups. My audience didn't want that from me. Or I'd built the wrong audience. Either way, it failed.
Back to the drawing board. I talked to people and organizations about their pain points. AI came up in almost every conversation.
I'm 44 years old. I've led teams across five countries. I've designed learning programs for thousands of people, hundreds of leaders, and yet I felt like I was starting from scratch.
What My Professional Experience Didn't Prepare Me For
I thought I knew about change. God knows I've bored enough people to death via PowerPoint. You need a clear destination. You need a plan. You manage your emotions and stay focused on what you can control. You need resilience, the ability to keep moving when things get hard.
All of that is true, and mostly useless when you have to actually do it.
Because my 20 years of professional experience didn't prepare me for this: when you're in the middle of real change, you don't have answers. You have fog, almost paralyzing uncertainty. And you still have to move.
I change my mind about the business constantly. If you've been reading this newsletter long enough, you've seen it. Thanks for being patient.
Partly because I'm a magpie, constantly chasing the next shiny thing. But partly because the world is changing so fast that what feels like the right focus today might be irrelevant tomorrow.
The real struggle isn't figuring out what I'm good at. It's figuring out how to be useful.
Useful. That's always been my purpose, to support people's careers, to help them get better at what they do. But when the ground keeps shifting, when AI is rewriting how work gets done, when your first attempt at being useful fails completely, how do you find that purpose again?
That's why I went back to therapy. Not because I was breaking down, but because navigating this much change at once requires support. Someone to talk through the uncertainty with, someone outside the business who can ask the questions I'm not asking myself.
What I Learned Instead
Adaptation isn't about getting comfortable with uncertainty. It's about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable for longer than you thought you could handle.
I kept waiting for things to click, for my business model to crystallize, for confidence to return. That moment didn't come. What came instead was the slow realization that I could keep going without knowing exactly where I was headed. Discomfort became the new baseline, not something to solve.
The most valuable thing you can do during uncertain change is talk to people who are going through it too.
Not for advice. Not for answers. Just to remember you're not uniquely broken. Therapy helps. So do honest conversations with other people who admit they're figuring it out. Isolation and uncertainty are very unhealthy bedfellows. Try to keep them separate if you can.
Sometimes the change forces you to see something you needed to see anyway.
After months of consulting work, reading the hype and doom cycles of AI, talking to peers and leaders who knew something was broken but couldn't fix it, I realized something about myself:
I'd been chasing the wrong thing. I kept looking for the perfect positioning, the right niche, the business model that would make sense on paper. But what I actually care about (what I've always cared about) is helping people navigate complexity with tools that actually work.
The frameworks matter. The research matters. The methodologies matter. But only when I can help you apply them to your specific situation, your actual challenges, your real constraints.
That's what being useful means to me. Not selling certainty. Not promising easy answers. But sharing what I know and helping you figure out how to use it for whatever you're building.
Where This Leaves Me
It's December now. The client work is landing, writing projects, instructional design contracts, consulting engagements. Not because I finally figured it all out, but because I kept moving even when I didn't know where I was going.
I'm still changing my mind. Still in therapy. My wife is still rebuilding her life in a new country.
But I'm not waiting for the discomfort to end before I decide I'm doing okay. I'm not waiting to have everything figured out before I take action. I'm not pretending I know what's next.
And that's made me better at the work I do. When a client tells me they need help but don't know what exactly, I don't rush to frameworks anymore. I ask different questions. I listen for the uncertainty they're not saying out loud. I help them move forward without pretending we can see the whole path.
Because I can't. And neither can they. And that's fine.
Even when you're struggling yourself. Maybe especially then.
What You Can Take From This
If you're going through your own version of this:
You don't need to have it figured out to keep moving. Movement creates information. Information creates understanding. Eventually.
The discomfort is the work, not a sign you're doing it wrong. If it feels too hard, that might just mean it's actually hard. Not that you're failing.
Your first attempt will probably fail. Your second one might too. That's not a reason to stop trying. It's information about what doesn't work, which gets you closer to what does.
Talk to people. Not to get answers, but to remember you're not alone in the fog.
And maybe the change you're resisting is showing you something you needed to see anyway.
I didn't want this year. I wanted the simple one I planned in January. But this is the one that taught me what adaptation actually costs, and what it makes possible.
I'm still learning what's possible. But I'm not waiting anymore.