Introduction:

Welcome to Episode 14 of the Seven Eighths. I had the luck of sitting down with The Corey Quinn for a conversation. For the few of us that don’t know him, Corey is the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills by making them smaller and less horrifying. He also hosts the "Screaming in the Cloud" and "AWS Morning Brief" podcasts; and curates "Last Week in AWS," a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark and thoughtful analysis in roughly equal measure. Recently, the New York Times feature on Corey called him a part tech analyst, part internet troll and part watchdog. The article highlighted Corey’s success in helping his clients manage cloud infrastructure and how Corey got the attention of executives at AWS and Google themselves. But this podcast isn’t about what the media writes. This episode is about Corey’s journey, the string of failures that he went through, his struggles and how he retells his own story to himself. You will hear a Corey that you don’t get to on Twitter/LinkedIn or any other social media. Let’s sit down and listen in.

Conclusion

And that’s how the cookie crumbles. There are so many nuggets that I heard on this episode that felt like finding treasure! Corey reframed a resume as a sales doc. Now use the sales doc to tell the story you want to tell with it instead of a collection of plain experiences. Turns out, everyone including Corey has a fear of failure. But rather than it stopping you, turn this fear of failure into an expectation of failure and take it as an opportunity to reinvent yourself.

And lastly, reminding me that the failures that we are talking about are still failures from a place of privilege. So, a regular reality check and remembering to be humble and grateful is the antidote.

Thank you for listening to this episode. Do leave me your thoughts. I”m on twitter @femmenectar. Until the next conversation, cheers guys!