What to actually do with the severance, the time, and the expertise that just walked out the door with you.
I'm going to make an argument that sounds insane for about ninety seconds, and then I hope stays with you for the rest of your career: getting pushed out of your job might be the single best thing that happens to it this decade.
I'm not saying that from the cheap seats. A while back I left the CEO seat of a company through a buyout, so I've sat on both sides of this. I've handed someone the packet, and I've carried my own box to the car. This episode is what almost nobody does with that moment, and what a small number of people are quietly using it to do instead.
Press play above. If you'd rather watch it, the video version is right here on YouTube.
What this episode is really about
The story in your head is that getting let go is a stain, a gap you'll spend two years explaining. That story is about fifteen years out of date, and the numbers say so. Median job tenure in the U.S. is down to 3.9 years, the lowest in two decades. Nearly one in four workers were laid off or fired in the past year. And more than half of this year's layoffs name AI or restructuring as the cause, not your performance. A spreadsheet got reorganized and your name was in the wrong cell.
Meanwhile the thing that comes with getting cut has quietly gotten better. Average severance ran about nineteen weeks of pay in 2024, up roughly seventy-five percent from a few years earlier. A lot of packages now include garden leave, a real legal category where the company pays your full salary while barring you from competing for a while. We have a word for being paid not to work while you figure out what's next. It's called a sabbatical. You just got handed one, and you're treating it like an emergency.
The 90-day plan we walk through
The whole episode is really about what to do with that time instead of panic-applying to the exact job that just let you go. In short:
- Days 1 to 7: Excavate. The most time-sensitive asset you own isn't the severance check. It's the twenty years of pattern recognition in your head, and it goes soft the moment you stop using it. Before you open a single job board, dictate everything you know. Pattern knowledge, not their property.
- Weeks 2 to 4: Build the knowledge base. Turn that pile of dictation into a custom AI trained on your own expertise. Building it forces you to actually learn the tools. The excavation is the bootcamp, and you end up owning an asset no one else on earth could build.
- Weeks 4 to 8: Ship one thing a week, in public. However small. One artifact out into the world every week. Not one more course watched. One thing built.
- Weeks 8 to 12: Point it at a door. The same body of work feeds three exits at once: consult, build a one-person business, or go back as a far more valuable hire or a fractional one. You pick the door in week ten with a portfolio behind you, not in a panic on day two.
And the most expensive mistake to avoid: do not go buy the ten-thousand-dollar AI course. Free courses get finished by five to fifteen percent of people. A course sells you content, and content is the one thing AI just made free and infinite. Spend on a finishing structure instead, not on information.
The part that makes this moment different
There's a Harvard and BCG study everyone quotes and almost nobody reads correctly. They gave consultants GPT-4. On the tasks the AI was good at, people were about forty percent higher quality and twenty-five percent faster. On tasks that looked similar and weren't, those same people were nineteen percentage points more likely to be wrong. The only thing that told you which side of the line you were on was domain judgment. Experience. The exact thing you just spent two decades building.
That's the whole game. AI made good-looking output cheap and infinite. It did not make judgment cheap. Domain expertise plus AI fluency is the arbitrage, and right now you're one of very few people holding both halves.
One honest caveat
No hype, so I say this in the episode too: this is real and growing, but it's stratified. If you're a contractor, hourly, at a small shop, or you were let go for cause, you may get nothing. Non-competes are still enforceable in a lot of states. Read your paperwork and talk to a real employment lawyer before you do anything clever. This is a genuine perk of salaried white-collar work, not a safety net that catches everyone.
Don't do this alone
The fastest way a ninety-day sabbatical rots into six months of doomscrolling is doing it by yourself in a room. That's why we're standing up Vibe Lunch, a group of people learning these tools and applying them in their own businesses, trading what works. Join that or join something else. A community is the difference between a plan and a habit.
Listen above, and if it lands, forward it to the one person you know who just got walked out. They need to hear it in the first week, while it's all still sharp.
I'm Dan. Go build something.
