Elie El-Khoury

This is what a cluster of career failures, including a stint of unemployment, taught me: You can be the best leader and still get fired.  You can be a high-performer and still not get a job interview. You can interview for a job 5 times and still never hear back.  You can have the most experience and still have your ego destroy all the good opportunities.  You can be the nicest person and still be treated badly.  You can be the most honest person and still be lied to.  You can be an inclusive person and still be excluded.  Your life is designed to test you over and over. What you can control are your own actions.  Eventually, good people win in their careers . It just takes a heck of a lot of work and the process goes unnoticed. 

A birthday after the lockdown. These lessons will prevent you from ruining your life the way I nearly did. This year is completely different. I’m writing this after a pandemic and simultaneous global recession. There are no birthday presents due to the economic crisis. My birthday is spent with myself. So what’s my birthday present then? Life is the birthday present. Being alive is better than being in the hospital. What a gift!  How you perceive the world is how you experience it. Here are 26 life lessons I have learned the hard way over the last 26 years of being alive. The world can change in a heartbeat - Be adaptable If I told you last year that the entire world would go into lockdown and be placed in a coma, you would have said I was crazy. But it happened. The world can change quickly and while you can’t control those changes, you can adapt to them. When you prepare yourself for the worst and allow yourself to change and let go of the past as quickly as you can, you have a huge

Many of the companies who raised huge amounts of money last year are firing people left, right, and center. As soon as times get slightly tough, they're the first to fire people rather than consider alternatives that can save jobs. These are the same companies that were bragging about culture and how important people are to their business. Companies that do the wrong thing by people are sacrificing their future and the enormous upside that's possible when the global economy recovers. How you treat people during Covid-19 is how you do business.

It happened again. I sent an email and got this reply: "Sorry, they are no longer with us. We had to let them go." Even people you could never imagine would lose their jobs are going through this humbling experience. It's not easy to watch even when it's not you. You feel for them and you wonder what they might be feeling. How can you be helpful? Find them on LinkedIn and send them a direct message. Remind them they matter and highlight what you admire about working with them. It may seem small, silly, or stupid but it's not. Right now, anyone who has lost their job would love to hear from you. It's a lonely experience and you can be the spark that ignites them and causes them to take action. That is the power you hold. You don't need a title or to be a leader, to be helpful.

I love losing clients Any guy who runs a business won't ever bring out this point many times and neither do I, but we did lose clients. Be it because of COVID or the market or any other reasons. Everyone does. And at first, I hate it. I just want to cover myself in a blanket and go to sleep. This is called denial. First of the five stages of grief. But then, after all these clouds go by, I get some clarity. It is the best thing that can happen. The reason is simple. You get 10 clients. You get happy. You get complacent. You feel satisfied. You feel safe. Basically the same feeling a job gives. I have seen this happen multiple times to me as well as my agency life acquaintances. And I didn't start an agency for it to be a job. I didn't foray into entrepreneurship for get the safe 9 to 5 life. So whenever you lose a client, remember, it is a good thing for you. Step up your game and stop beating yourself up. Get over a lost client as quickly as you get ove

People always say, “Winners don’t quit.” But, that’s not true. Winners quit all the time. They quit jobs, relationships, habits and thoughts when they recognize that they no longer align with their purpose. It takes courage to quit things. It takes discipline to say “no” to immediate pleasures so that you can invest in long-term rewards. It takes believing in yourself enough to give it all you’ve got, heart and soul, so that you can reinvent yourself and have the freedom you’ve always dreamed of. A huge part of growth is knowing what to let go of and what to focus your energy on.