In February 2022, on a crisp New York morning, Laura Brown received the call. She had been fired from her job as editor-in-chief of InStyle magazine, a role she had successfully helmed for over seven years.
“I got a call from my boss and HR person informing me via a corporate script that the magazine was closing. Twenty minutes later, the rest of my team was laid off. Management told us to finish up and that our emails would be turned off by the end of the day,” recalls Brown.
“Afterwards, I got everybody back on a Zoom, and did my best Churchill: ‘It’s gonna be all right. We’re gonna band together. We’re gonna work it out.’ Then, I spent the rest of the day sitting on the edge of my bed wearing a pair of sneakers and fielding a huge, vast deluge of texts and DMS from people. It’s like reading beautiful eulogies for yourself, but you’re still alive.”
Never one to linger in self-pity for too long, Brown reframed the experience as an opportunity to ditch the dictatorship of upper management and go out on her own, launching her own media company, LB Media later the same year.
But 14 months later, Brown received another call. Her friend Kristina O’Neill received a been booted from her job as the editor-in-chief of WSJ. Magazine.
Now both unemployed, the pair set plans to meet for a drink to commiserated over getting fired by their respective employers. On their way to the bar, Brown pulled out her phone, snapped a selfie and uploaded it to Instagram.
She caption the image: “All the cool girls get fired.”
The post sparked an outpouring of solidarity from women everywhere and by the next morning, as the comments kept flooding in, O’Neill texted Brown: This is a book.
Two and a half years later, their novel All the Cool Girls Get Fired: How to Let Go of Being Let Go and Come Back on Top was born. Here Brown, shares her lessons from the firing line and why it has been the best thing that’s ever happened to her.
Getting Fired Has Nothing To Do With You
Shame is absolutely useless, all it does is holds you back. Most of the time, being fired has nothing to do with you, so you cannot take it personally. It’s happening to everyone, you don’t have the exclusive. You don’t have the scarlet F on your back.
As women, we deal with being fired so much harder because it took us so much longer to get here.
The construct of the workplace is male: the corner office, the CEO, the CFO and the CMO. So the whole time, you’re working so hard, and then when you get pushed off, it hits you harder, because it took you longer and you do carry that.
What women don’t have is this lore and legend that men have. For example, Mike Bloomberg got fired, famously, from a bank. Steve Jobs was a college drop out. These things are legend. We don’t have that, and we deserve to have that.
In the book, we spoke to a number of women – including Oprah, Lisa Kudrow and Jamie Lee Curtis – all of who said that getting fired is the best thing that happened them.
At first, you want to punch them, but more often than not, it’s true. Sometimes you do have to be shocked out of something to remind, to be forcibly reminded that there’s a bigger world beyond maybe the one where one of you might have been a little blinkered
Even In Your Dream Job, Keep Your Eyes Open
You should always pay attention to what’s happening in your business. Don’t be paranoid, but be informed. Always keep an eye on on the outside.
Keep your resume and LinkedIn up to date consistently throughout your employment.
Don’t Tie Your Career To Your Identity
It’s important to have a passion and naturally, if you love your job and find it fulfilling, you’re going to tie something to your job. But you can’t tie all of yourself to it, because that’s where the danger is.
You should always be looking beyond because there’s more options available to you right now than you ever thought. You just have to let yourself see it.
Don’t Forget What You’ve Built
You’ve been through your whole career, and you might not realise it but you’ve been throwing seeds around. You’ve been doing the work, you’ve met people, you’ve built trust, you’ve earned your stripes.
Then when something like this happens, people show up for you, because you’ve done all those things. If you kind of been a nice girl and good at what you do, people are you’ll be rewarded for it.
You also have to make sure that you’re honest and you ask for help when you need it. People aren’t going to know you got fired if you don’t say you did.
Whatever happens, none of anything you’ve built disappears, and it’s up to you to discover other things that might fill you up. As time passes, and we all want currency, we all want success, but there’s ways for you to steer it.
All the Cool Girls Get Fired: How to Let Go of Being Let Go and Come Back on Top by Laura Brown Kristina O’Neill (Penguin, $36.99) is out now.
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