From Spite to Strategy: The Engine Swap of My Career
How a three-word impromptu performance review built a newsletter.
The Gut Punch
There are certain pieces of feedback that don't just bounce off. They leave a bruise.
Mine came during a one-on-one when a manager looked me in the eye and told me I “wasn't strategic enough.”
If you've ever heard that phrase directed at you, you know what it actually means. It means: you're a tool operator, not a thinker. You're the person we hand tasks to, not the person we ask for direction.
It is a complete dismissal of everything you think you bring to the table, delivered in three words that sound almost clinical.
It hurt. And it didn't just push me out the door of that organization — it lit a fire.
The Spite-Driven Enterprise
That's the secret origin story of The Department of First Things First.
When I launched this blog, I was not trying to be a benevolent mentor to the HR Technology community. Let me be honest about that. This was a purely spite-driven enterprise. Every post, every hot take, every architectural teardown was a broadcast into the universe saying, "Look at how incredibly strategic I am."
Spite is an unbelievable starter motor. It will get you off the couch. It will make you outline articles at midnight. It will force you to sharpen your arguments until they're bulletproof, because when you want to prove someone wrong, you leave no stone unturned.
Spite got me to publish when I had every reason not to. Spite built the habit.
But spite is a terrible long-term engine. It burns incredibly hot, and then it just…burns out. You can't sustain a career or a platform by being the person who loudly points out why everything is broken.
The Engine Swap
I can actually pinpoint the exact moment my fuel changed.
I wrote a post about Sana's UI layer: A hot take on whether the experience layer was real product innovation or just expensive frosting on someone else's cake. I published it, figured a few Workday people would nod along, and went to bed.
By morning, it had gone viral. Well…viral for a substack with 10 subscribers. Forty-one new subscribers in a week. My inbox was full, and the messages weren't what I expected. Nobody was writing to say, "Great rant." They were writing to say, "I just used your framework to push back on a vendor proposal," and "I forwarded this to my CIO because we're evaluating this exact architecture."
People were actually using my thinking to build things.
I sat with that for a while. And somewhere in that stretch of reading those messages, the ghost of that one-on-one finally left the room. Not because I'd proven her wrong - but because I'd stopped caring about proving her wrong. I genuinely just liked helping people architect. Turns out that's what being strategic actually looks like.
Nobody told me. I had to build my way to it.
The Real Fuel
If you're currently running on spite because someone told you that you weren't enough — use it. I mean that. Let it start the engine. Let it propel you out of a bad situation. Let it get you to publish the first post, send the first email, raise your hand for the first time
But the moment you have momentum, swap the fuel.
Stop trying to prove them wrong. Start trying to build something right. The difference between a critic and an architect isn't talent. It's what's driving the engine.
Mine runs on something different now. That's why I'm still here.
— Mike | The Department of First Things First