alexpgp | LJ Idol Exhibit B.2. Um...

Writing this now, two decades and some months after the fact, the only other things I remember about that Thursday was how the California weather was bright and sunny, and I had about a million things on my to-do list when I was called into my boss's office.

“Alex,” my boss said once I sat down in the chair across the desk from him, “I'm sorry, but we're going to have to let you go. Your position is being eliminated, effective today.”

I may have said something intelligent, such as “Um...,” or I may have said nothing at all in immediate response to the news. But once that crushing “I-don't-believe-this-is-happening-to-me” wave of feeling had ebbed, I stood up, turned away from my now-former boss, went to the window, and spat out a pithy, Anglo-Saxon expletive or six, directed at nothing and nobody in particular.

I did not stop to catalog my reactions at that moment, but I recall feeling a range of emotions that included rage, betrayal, and helplessness. Then I took a deep breath and felt a kind of calm come over me, despite the nagging little voice in my head urging me into all-out panic mode with taunts along the lines of "Oh, man, you're so screwed!” and “You're toast!”

As the calm intensified, my self-talk changed, to simply an urgent “Okay, calm down and figure out what you're going to do!" In retrospect, I figure the calm I felt was that odd sort of high that hits when the adrenaline kicks in. Fight or flight, dude. It's wired into our DNA, and makes an ancient, reptilian part of our brain tick.

I was no stranger to layoffs. I had worked as an engineer for nearly 15 years prior to coming to work in Silicon Valley and I had emerged unscathed because I always had a full helping of work on my plate—or at least that's how I figured it.

Humbug, as it turns out. In the end, having something to work on may keep you from getting laid off, or it may not. Security is, at best, a mirage; at worst, a superstition. The idea that your job can be somehow "secure" is as goofy as the idea that a college degree can somehow "guarantee" a good job upon graduation.

A little while later, after the formalities of the layoff had been completed, I realized, as I walked back to my office, that I was actually experiencing a feeling of liberation, my mind having gravitated to the idea that what I was now facing was an opportunity, even if it had crashed the party wearing a keenly unhip set of threads.

* * *Other employees who lost their jobs that day took the news in various ways, and I sometimes wonder: What it was that caused me to react the way I did? Was it because that's “just the way I am”? Or was it the result of a lot of previous decisions I'd made to react in certain ways to that sequence of stimuli that is more commonly referred to as "life"?

Are there “naturally optimistic” (and by extension, “naturally pessimistic”) people out there? I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. But I also know that people can and do change—optimists can become pessimists; and pessimists, optimists.

This convinces me that whichever way you may “naturally” start out, it is the choices you make—consciously or otherwise—in response to life's laurels, slings, and arrows that will either help you maintain your attitude, or impel your attitude to change. In other words, your past choices determine how you'll react in the future.

Said another way:

You don't smile because you're happy; you're happy because you smile.

* * *When I got back to my office, there was a telephone message waiting for me, from my now-former employer's biggest competitor. Would I be interested in flying up for an interview?

“Impeccable timing,” I thought to myself, "but it can wait," and picked up the phone to call my wife with the news.