Three Years After the Layoff: What I've Learned About Work, Time, and What Actually Counts

By Alissa Hsu Lynch  |  Career & Leadership

I went back to Google last week. Not to work — to have lunch with my husband at the New York office, something we hadn't done since before the world changed for both of us. I ordered a cappuccino, found a quiet corner, and sat with the strangeness of being a visitor in a place I once belonged.

In January 2023, I was among the 12,000 Googlers laid off in a single day. No warning, no runway, no ceremony. One morning you're a global health executive at one of the most recognized companies on earth, and by afternoon you're logging off for the last time. The shock of that day took longer to process than I expected.

Nearly three years later, I'm happy to report that I'm not just fine. I'm genuinely thriving, doing the most interesting work of my life, and asking questions I didn't have the space to ask before. What I built in the whitespace after that layoff has taught me more about leadership, creativity, and what a career can actually look like than two decades in the Fortune 50 did.

Here are three lessons I keep coming back to.

1. Build a Portfolio, Not Just a Resume

The hardest belief to let go of was the one I didn't know I held: that real success meant one big, prestigious, full-time role. I had spent twenty-plus years optimizing for that. Title, scope, budget, headcount. The résumé logic of corporate climbing.

What I have now looks nothing like that. I serve on corporate and nonprofit boards. I host a podcast. I'm writing a book. I speak to leadership teams around the world. None of these roles exist in a single job description, and that is precisely the point. Harvard Business Review has written compellingly about the shift from career paths to career portfolios, describing how the traditional ladder model, singular pursuit, linear ascent, narrowing focus, is being replaced by something more fluid and more durable.

I lived that shift without a name for it. What I found on the other side was that a portfolio of complementary work is not a consolation prize for people who couldn't hold a seat in a boardroom. It is, for many executives at this stage of a career, a more honest expression of what they actually have to offer. Breadth, judgment, pattern recognition across industries and contexts. These are exactly the assets that a single job title tends to underuse.

HBR's guide to launching a portfolio career notes that the transition is harder than most people expect, and I can confirm that. The ambiguity of the early months, with no manager, no OKRs handed down from above, no one to tell you what success looks like on Tuesday, can be genuinely disorienting. What helps is starting with a clear, articulated view of what you want the portfolio to accomplish: flexibility, intellectual range, contribution, creative latitude. Know your "why" before you build the "what."

2. Structure Is What Creates the Space to Create

There is a version of the post-corporate life that people romanticize as unstructured freedom: sleep late, follow inspiration wherever it leads, work only when the mood is right. That version lasts about two weeks before it collapses into restlessness and guilt.

What I discovered, and what surprised me, is that the most creative period of my professional life has also been the most rigorously structured. Daily routines. Hard prioritization. Clear separation between deep-work blocks and everything else. The discipline that dance trained into me over decades, the discipline of showing up at the barre even when you don't feel like it, turns out to be the same discipline that makes creative work sustainable.

Deloitte's 2026 Global Human Capital Trends research finds that the organizations moving fastest are not the least structured. They are the ones that have designed the right frameworks and freed their people to operate with agility within them. The same principle applies at the individual level. When I know exactly what I'm committing to, and what I'm deliberately choosing not to do, the creative work gets better. The podcast improves. The writing deepens. The speaking engagements land differently when I'm not fragmenting my attention across twenty competing obligations.

Rigorous prioritization is not the opposite of creative freedom. It is the condition that makes creative freedom possible.

3. Time Is the Currency That Actually Compounds

The most honest accounting of the past three years is not financial. It's relational.

When I was in the corporate world, I told myself that my family was my first priority. And I believed it, mostly. But when I look at where my actual time and attention went across those decades, the honest answer is that my calendar told a different story. Early flights. Late dinners with clients. Weekends reading briefing decks. The relational debt accumulated slowly, quietly, in ways I couldn't see until I stepped off that track.

Research from Babson College published in Harvard Business Review found that flourishing in a career depends as much on the quality of relationships, both inside and outside work, as it does on the job itself. People consistently overestimate the importance of what they're doing and underestimate the importance of who they're doing it with and for. That research confirmed something I had been quietly learning through lived experience.

Having the bandwidth to spend real, unhurried time with my parents has been the most significant ROI of this chapter. Not the board seats. Not the podcast downloads. The Sunday calls that don't have to end because there's a meeting at 7am the next morning. The ability to be present, without the cognitive tax of a senior corporate role running in the background. This is not something I will take for granted again.

For Anyone Navigating a Pivot Right Now

The layoff was a shock. I won't minimize that. Losing a role you were good at, in a company you believed in, without warning or ceremony, is a particular kind of professional disorientation. HBR's research on career transitions describes this moment well: the period between the old chapter and the new one is uncomfortable precisely because it requires tolerating ambiguity about identity, not just income. Who are you, professionally, when the title is gone?

What I can tell you, from the other side of that discomfort, is this: the whitespace is not the problem. The whitespace is where the important questions live. What do I actually want to build? What does my experience uniquely qualify me to contribute? What do I want my days to feel like in five years?

Those questions don't get asked inside the machine. There's never time, and the machine tends to provide the answers anyway, in the form of the next promotion, the next scope expansion, the next performance cycle. The layoff forced me to ask them with no scaffolding and no deadline. It was uncomfortable. It was also, in ways I'm still discovering, the best thing that happened to my career.

• Give yourself time before you optimize. The instinct after a layoff is to replace the structure as fast as possible. Resist it long enough to be intentional about what you're building toward, not just what you're escaping.
• Let the portfolio logic work. Not every new commitment needs to be the same size or shape as what came before. A board seat, a speaking engagement, a writing project, and a podcast can add up to more than a single job title, intellectually and financially.
• Build structure on purpose. Freedom without form is just chaos with better branding. Design your days deliberately. The creative work will be better for it.
• Audit the relational account. If you've been in a high-intensity corporate role for decades, the relational debt is probably real. The career pivot is a chance to address it before it compounds further.

Visiting the Google office last week, I felt gratitude. For what I learned there, for the colleagues who shaped how I think, for the push the layoff gave me, even if I didn't ask for it. But I walked out more excited about the next chapter than I was nostalgic for the last one.

The choreography changed. Turns out, so did the dancer.

Keep dancing.