How I Became a Potato

CHAPTER TWO

“Welcome to Brita!” the Microsoft Teams Brady Bunch array chirped in unison.

Three days after the layoffs, I joined the first meeting of my new role. Some familiar faces, a few new ones, and a product category I knew almost nothing about beyond corporate osmosis. I smiled, nodded, took notes, and delivered my standard new-team remarks. Yes, real background. Yes, that’s a cat. I’m looking forward to working together.

This should have been exactly what I needed. A business with a meaningful mission. My new boss, Elizabeth, already knew the real me. We’d worked together years ago as scientists, so I didn’t need to present some polished, corporate-approved version of myself. Plus, it was a fresh start without the responsibility (and terror) of choosing on my own.

But within weeks, the same feelings returned.

Different team, identical role.

I’ve done this all before. Woo-hoo…

Clorox was getting a very solid return on an experienced manager. The company kept nearly all of the reorg’s benefits. The projects were technically new, but the pattern stayed the same. Sure, I could do the work. But every day was my personal Groundhog Day. Just like Phil Connors, I endured the work, spending more energy suppressing sarcasm than finding engagement or growing in any way I cared about.

The bathroom scale sat in the corner, screen blank. Why confirm what I already knew? If I didn’t change anything, why should I expect a better result? Day after day, I logged in by 7:30 a.m., still keeping my emerald Microsoft Teams light shining bright.

The harness was tight, the wagon was heavy, and I was still pulling.

Because that’s what I was.

A Clydesdale.

Running with Blinders

That was my career at Clorox. Steady, reliable, and proud of it. Like the Budweiser horses, I could haul serious project weight and never seemed too far from a beer. I’d become the dependable fixer they put on stuck teams. “Project struggling? Put Jared on it!” They’d learned to use me well, and I’d learned to be useful in ways the company valued.

Workhorses get outfitted to maximize that return: the harness, the reins, and most importantly, the blinders. Blinders keep the horsepower from getting distracted by anything off the intended path. At first, they provide the focus needed to pursue some dangling carrot. Wear them long enough, though, and we fail to notice how much of the horizon has disappeared.

I gradually realized that I’d buckled every strap of the harness and attached the blinders myself. With every choice to specialize and every decision to stay the course, I’d chosen to focus because that’s what gets rewarded. That’s what we’re supposed to do if we want to build a successful career. Right?

As normalcy returned after the layoffs, the carrot lost its appeal. When I tried to look ahead through the fading corporate fog, I couldn’t identify anything that excited me. My underlying malaise grew when the company announced that the layoffs had only been “round one.”

In call after call with departed colleagues, I started to understand what had happened to my horse mentors. I’d always assumed being let go meant failure. Like you’d outlived your usefulness. Sent away while the rest of the team kept pulling. But Brian’s perspective made me realize that he hadn’t been sent to the glue factory.

He’d been set free.

For the first time in two decades, he could see the whole landscape.

Talking with him reminded me that I’d put my blinders on myself, so in theory I could take them off. But I’d worn them so long they’d become part of me.

The horse explained why I’d kept pulling. It didn’t explain how I’d become so useful yet so misaligned without noticing.

The Potato Parable

There’s a thought experiment from Rory Sutherland that I fell in love with the first time I read it.

Imagine you’re stranded on a deserted island with shelter, all necessary cooking equipment, and an infinite supply of food. Cool. But there’s a catch: you get one food. Only one. What do you choose?

A potato is a perfectly reasonable answer.

You can bake it, fry it, mash it, or boil it. As Matt Damon demonstrated in The Martian, you can survive for a surprisingly long time on the starchy root vegetable. It’s a low-risk, versatile, safe choice.

Now change the scenario. Instead of one food, you get ten. Given the opportunity for variety, does a potato even crack your list?

Maybe. Growing up culturally Midwestern, where culinary diversity is best described as 50 Shades of Beige, it would practically be legally required. But suddenly, with more options, we can afford to take risks we couldn’t before.

Consider a pineapple. Acidic, sweet, delicious, especially in tiki drinks. A pineapple offers something a potato simply doesn’t. They’re unique. Distinctive. That makes them a better fit, but only in the right context. As your one food forever? Too much commitment to one specialized tropical direction. Too risky.

Sutherland highlights that our tendency to avoid risk often overrides the potential for greater reward. When we can only make one choice, we default to defense. We choose potatoes. The problem is that risk aversion persists even when we have more options. We still reach for the safe choice while more interesting, more us options are available. I kept thinking about careers, realizing our professional identities echo that logic.

We assess what exists, figure out what seems viable, and select the option that looks respectable, or at least less likely to find us living in our childhood bedroom into our thirties. And once we choose, we establish our default. Our identity takes root. It’s easier for us to mold ourselves into a generic, acceptable version rather than confront the more difficult challenge of finding a better fit for who we are, a task complicated by the fact that we continually evolve.

Before we go any further, I need to stress something important:

Potatoes aren’t bad. Neither the tuber nor the career.

Plenty of people choose a potato career and thrive. They find their niche, grow into the role, and discover fulfillment. If that’s you, terrific. I’m not here to stage an anti-potato uprising. What I’m questioning is the process by which we became potatoes in the first place. Given how most people choose college majors or first jobs, what are the actual odds that early-twenties you, with minimal self-knowledge, maximum financial anxiety, and a burning desire to appear employable, nailed the selection of your ideal career on the first try?

I’m dubious of early-twenties me’s judgment. That guy thought Sam Adams Cherry Wheat was a classy beverage and khakis worked for all occasions.

The truth is we grow. We accumulate experience. We develop strengths we didn’t have when we made those early choices. We change, slowly and mostly invisibly, until one day the professional identity that once fit reasonably well starts to feel like a costume. Still, the environment keeps rewarding us for what we can do after we’ve become someone else.

How I Became a Potato

I wandered through my early years with a functional career strategy that amounted to repeatedly looking around and thinking, “I can do that!”

In high school, I thought, “Doctors are well-respected and make good money. I can do that!” Then I realized I liked people, just not when they were sick, and that a decade of medical school and residency wasn’t exactly the most sustainable route to my life aspirations.

So I looked around again.

Ooh! My professors! That seems like a good gig. I can do that!

I followed that turtle all the way to a PhD in chemistry and a job in academia. That was my path, right up until I found myself proctoring a general chemistry exam while scrolling LinkedIn for inspiration, realizing I didn’t have another three or four decades of this in me.

At twenty-eight, following two professional false starts, I showed up at a job fair and kept doing what I’d always done: looking around for plausible identities to try on.

Then I got an unsolicited email from someone at Clorox.

We saw your profile. We’d appreciate it if you stopped by our booth tomorrow.

Sure, I thought. I’ll take the practice interview.

I showed up in my new suit, résumé printed on classy cream-colored linen paper, with zero belief that this was the answer.

Then came the first question:

Are you willing to move to California?

Answering “no” felt like a choose-your-own-adventure path that ended the discussion immediately, so I gave the obvious answer.

Absolutely.

Complete lie.

My wife had never been further west than New Orleans. I had no intention of relocating to the Pacific Coast. But that one confident fib was enough to get me to the next round and, eventually, to an offer.

In reality, it was my only offer.

Faced with the choice between moving across the country for decent money and staying put and hoping another option would materialize, we packed up the car and headed to the Bay Area.

And just like that, I wandered into my Valley of Potatoes.

I didn’t know who I was when I scanned my badge that first time and dropped in. Not yet thirty, I was the stem-cell equivalent of nondescript edible produce. Moldable, unformed, without enough experiential evidence to declare any identity with certainty. What I had was curiosity and a willingness to see where this completely foreign path might lead.

The Valley and What It Does

I evolved into a good potato. I developed skills I’d been previously oblivious to. I grew in directions the valley rewarded, and I found satisfaction in that growth. I met well-respected spuds like Brian and modeled my career after them.

For years, I thrived.

I was proof of how Potato Valleys often work. They don’t only invite people who fit perfectly today. They create a mold and then slowly press everyone into it. Organizations naturally reward capability and predictability. Know your role. Execute reliably. No one asked me to stop being myself. The valley just kept rewarding the parts of me that fit and ignoring what didn’t.

There’s no malicious intent or grand conspiracy behind this. Organizations hire us to fill a certain gap, then reward us for occupying it efficiently. Over time, the feedback loop shapes us. We develop reputations built on our most valley-compatible qualities, and with enough time, pressure, and incentives, we let those reputations creep into our identities.

That’s true even for residents who aren’t potatoes. Pineapples can hang out in the valley for years. They don’t stop being pineapples simply because of their address. The spiky crown is still there. The distinctive acidity. The sweetness that makes them what they are and nothing else. The valley doesn’t eliminate those qualities. It just makes them inconvenient.

So we learn to manage them. We comb down our leaves into a more corporate-approved hairdo and file off edges that make residency uncomfortable. We lead with our most potato-compatible qualities and deprioritize the rest. It works. The valley accepts us. We become valued and respected citizens.

And somewhere in the process, we forget we were ever anything other than a potato. That is the subtle, slow-motion loss at the center of what I call the Potato Problem. We didn’t choose the wrong career. The gap between what our environment rewarded and who we became widened so gradually that we didn’t notice. Then disruption strikes, like layoffs or a health scare, we catch a glimpse of reality beyond the valley walls. We suddenly realize our potato uniform isn’t who we’ve become.

By the time the layoffs hit, I’d spent over a decade as a valley dweller. I had the title, the reputation, and a very clean answer to America’s most common icebreaker: “So what do you do?”

Except increasingly, that answer felt rehearsed and weirdly performative.

After more than a decade of becoming a better potato, capability was no longer the question.

Can I do this? Absolutely.
Should I?

The valley never asks. Annual reviews measure our output. It’s up to us to question whether we still belong or if it’s time to go.

Oh, but the gravity is strong.

Why the Valley Is Hard to Escape

Even when we know something is off, it seems like it’s impossible to leave. Several forces kept me where I was.

The first was money.

My wife and I had built a life that significantly exceeded any expectations of our humble upbringing. Continuing along the path whispered sweet promises of future security. Bailing without a clear path forward meant jeopardizing everything. Even after the layoffs demonstrated that I could be evicted against my will at any moment, the financial case for staying still felt overwhelmingly rational. Uncertainty about whatever benefits lay over the horizon seemed way worse than staying. The devil you know, and all that.

The second force was identity.

I’d spent over twenty years becoming who I was. An R&D manager, a PhD chemist, and an innovation leader at a well-respected company. It was no longer just a job. It was the accumulation of my adult life’s effort, compressed into a tidy LinkedIn headline that succinctly communicated value to the world. Walking away from that identity felt like I was erasing myself. Turning my back on all of that work raised the unsettling possibility that I’d been wrong. Had all of those years of effort created someone who wasn’t even real?

But there was one final, simpler force.

I was exhausted.

The daily effort of being a good potato, especially as we become increasingly aware of our misalignment, is draining. Maintaining performance, continuing to play the role of a competent, engaged professional consumed resources that might otherwise have gone toward figuring out what I really wanted. The idea of adding “rethink my career” on top of “survive my current job” felt like being asked to run back-to-back marathons. And as my bathroom scale would testify, I was in no condition for anything close to that.

As much as it pained me to admit it, I envied Brian. He’d been shoved out of the valley. If I wanted to do the same, all the energy to climb out needed to come from me. Testing something else required me to muster up the strength. Instead, I stayed in place, plodding forward, one heavy step at a time, telling myself this was fine, that maybe the path would look better if I kept pulling long enough.

Then a recruiter messaged me.