Divya

“I start to worry I’ve become the thing Calista once warned me about: someone who wants a promotion too much. “They can smell it on you, and if they can smell it, they won’t give it to you,” she said. “It’s not fair, but it’s true.” I need to pretend that external recognition is just a cute little extra bonus and that consistently delivering world-changing greatness for Amazon’s benefit is its own intrinsic reward. But everyone I know here is trying to get promoted. True, most of us grew up as hyper-achievers. Amazon didn’t create our yearning for recognition, but it exploits it for maximum return by holding the rat pellet just out of reach and then frowning on any rat who looks hungry.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.”
― Neil Gaiman

“My family had two settings: Everything Is Fine, and Screaming Fights with Lasting Damage.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“Here is how I got every single one of those jobs: I sat across a desk from a man old enough to be my father and I enveloped us both in a force field of earnest competence, the kind I’d been practicing since kindergarten with my hand permanently raised in class, the kind that says I will die before I let you down, and at some point in each of these interviews the man pronounced me “impressive” and gave me a job and the prophecy came true. I never let him down.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career