hen Megan Hellerer picked up the phone to call the HR department at Google, her then employer, following a brief sabbatical, she found herself handing in her notice. “If you’d have told me the day prior that I was going to do that, I’d have laughed in your face,” she says, on the phone from New York. “But it was the most honest thing that I had said or done in years.”
Ever the high-achiever, Hellerer had been scooped up straight out of Stanford University as part of a grand experiment by Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s vice-president of sales and operations: “the idea was: hire as many smart people as they could and then figure out what to do with them”. She became a strategic partnership executive. So far, so successful. “But, if I’m honest, I knew on day one that this didn’t feel like home,” Hellerer says. “I got further and further away from myself and it became harder to remember who I was outside of work. I’d arrived there two weeks out of finishing college, I barely took a vacation in the eight years I was there. I was getting more and more depressed and anxious.” She describes regular panic attacks, nausea and difficulty getting out of bed.
“I was so ashamed that I could be so outwardly confident, climbing the ranks, in the best job in the entire world on many lists, and yet so dissatisfied,” she says. “I thought the problem must be with me. How could I be so ungrateful?”
Of course, we know how Hellerer’s story ends. She is now a world-renowned career coach who guided Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on her journey from full-time bartender at a Manhattan taqueria to the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. But there is no such thing as the end of a story, in the Hellerer school of thought – only an ever-evolving journey on which you can learn to enjoy the ride. “We should be living directionally, not destinationally,” she says.
If the past year has taught us anything, it is that we have no idea what the future is going to look like. With that in mind, Hellerer says, it seems bizarre to try to operate within a societal framework that praises choosing a path and never straying from it: “It’s a very 20th-century, ‘OK boomer’ way of doing things.” She points to the way developments like 24/7 technology have rendered the working world completely unrecognisable from what it was like a century ago. “Institutions want people to fit into an old way of being. But it’s hard to be living destinationally in a directional world.” It’s impossible, she argues, to think about where we want to be five years from now, when tomorrow may be completely different from yesterday.