What I’ve Learned in 20 Years of Corporate Work

I spent the better part of 20 years in corporate marketing. White collar, open plan office, quarterly targets, the whole thing. Somewhere in there I stopped being able to tell the difference between a real emergency and a slide deck due Monday. That's the short version of how I ended up walking away. It's also part of why I now sit across from men who are somewhere on that same road, usually a few years behind where I finally stopped.

What follows is what those two decades actually taught me. Not the LinkedIn version. The version I wish someone had handed me at 28, before I learned most of it the slow, expensive way. If you're reading this from a desk in Hong Kong, wondering why the money stopped being enough, some of it might land.

The Things That Stopped Being Opinions

I've been at this long enough that a handful of things stopped being opinions and hardened into convictions. Here they are, roughly in the order they cost me something to learn.

• Stress isn't real. Mine came from the stories I told myself about consequences, status, and other people's expectations. The fire drills were mostly fake. Very few work problems are actually emergencies, and yet we treat almost all of them like life or death.
• A lot of deadlines are made up to keep someone else happy. Not the legal or contractual ones. But plenty of the internal ones are arbitrary and movable, and they get ignored the moment priorities shift. The pressure is cultural, not practical. In my last job I built a global deck for a huge meeting and at the last minute the client cancelled, because something more important had come up. The meeting never got rescheduled. Turns out it wasn't that big a deal.
• I never wanted to be a CEO, CMO, or C-anything. The C-suite comes with less freedom and a lot more politics, plus a low hum of annoyance that never quite lifts. The idea is sexy. The reality is that you're still selling yogurt. Or handbags. Or makeup. I wasn't willing to trade my one life for someone else's dream, and definitely not for bags nobody actually needs.
• Climbing the ladder for the next title or the next raise is a loop with no exit. There's always another level. Someone told me years ago that the day I hit "my number," the number would move. It did. After some genuine damage from a workplace, I had to learn to be happy with what I had. And it was enough. I was enough. If your happiness is tied to what's next, you'll live in a permanent state of low-grade disappointment.
• People make the job worth it, not the work. Jobs change. Responsibilities change. But the people you spend eight hours a day beside are what make it good or unbearable. A mediocre job with great people beats a great job with a toxic boss every single time. I've had both. I still miss the years when I made less money and worked next to people I was learning alongside.
• You have to be your own cheerleader. Nobody is going to celebrate you more than you celebrate yourself, and validation from above is inconsistent and political. If your motivation runs on recognition, you'll burn out waiting for it. I was proud of my work and proud of my teams, and I said so. Loudly. Without apology.
• There is no end to the rat race. The work will always be there. What you killed yourself to finish by midnight on Friday won't get opened until Tuesday. So why give it your Friday night? Finishing one task only summons the next one. Peace comes from choosing when to put it down, not from getting it all done. And remember, the deadlines aren't real.
• Good leaders are rare. Most managers get promoted for being good at the job, not for being good with people. Genuinely supportive, self-aware leaders are the exception. I've had a couple of great ones and a few truly bad ones. Find the person who cares about your wellbeing, not just the KPI. And to the leaders reading this: take care of your people and they'll take care of you.
• You are an expense, not a member of the family. Companies use warm language, but the decisions get made with a spreadsheet open, and on that spreadsheet you're a cost to manage, not an asset to protect. Loyalty is rarely returned once the conditions change.
• Corporate sustainability talk is often greenwashing. There's a real tension between sustainability and profit growth. To be sustainable you often produce less. To grow profit you usually sell more, which means you produce more. Efficiency and smarter models can close some of the gap, sure, but a lot of the time the math just doesn't math. So I nodded and smiled whenever it came up. I'm not proud of that one either.
• The smartest thing anyone ever told me: it doesn't matter where or how, just do your job. As a leader I never cared where my people sat or what hours they kept. I didn't check whether they were online. I trusted them to get it done when it needed doing, which is the entire reason they were hired in the first place. If they needed more time, we moved the timeline. There are only so many hours in a day. You cannot make the impossible happen by staring at someone.
• And finally, it's just a job. It is not who you are. When work becomes your identity, every setback lands as a personal wound. Mine did, completely. I never fully learned to separate myself from the title, the salary, the role, and eventually I had to walk away because it was slowly killing me. The thought of another 20 years inside an industry that valued the work over the people felt like the wrong life. I didn't know what the right one was. I just knew I wasn't going to keep choosing the wrong one.

For Men in High-Pressure Careers in Hong Kong

If you're a man building a career in Hong Kong, you already know the water you're swimming in. Long hours are a status symbol. Being reachable at 11pm reads as commitment. The city runs on ambition, and ambition is a wonderful engine right up until it's the only thing holding you together.

Here's what I watch happen. A guy ties his whole sense of himself to performance. To the promotion. To the number. And it works, for years. Then a restructure, or a bad quarter, or a boss who just doesn't see him, and the floor drops out, because there was never anything underneath the role to stand on. I call this the performance-identity trap, and it's worth understanding before it has you rather than after. It's one of the most common threads I see in the men who come to me, and it's almost always the quiet start of burnout.

The Line Between Doing Your Job and Burning Out

Point eleven on that list, just do your job, sounds like freedom. And it is. Until the job stops staying inside the hours you gave it. That's the line I want you to watch for. There's a version of doing your job that's clean and contained, and there's a version where the job has colonised your sleep, your weekends, and your patience with the people you love. The second one has a name. It's burnout, and it rarely arrives as a dramatic collapse. It shows up as Sunday dread, and a shorter fuse, and the creeping sense that you can't remember the last time you felt properly rested.

Most of the men I see didn't fall apart. They just kept functioning while something underneath went hollow. They hit their numbers and felt nothing. They took the holiday and couldn't switch off. Part of why setting boundaries is so hard is that the whole system is built to reward you for not having any.

If any of that is landing a little too accurately, don't give yourself a hard time about it. Noticing is the first useful thing you can do. It's also, usually, the thing people put off the longest.

My Corporate Years Still Shape How I Work

I don't sit across from men as someone who read about corporate stress in a textbook. I lived 20 years of it. I know what a fake fire drill feels like in the body. I know what it costs to keep smiling through a greenwashing slide, and I know what it's like to realise your identity has fused to a job title without you ever noticing it happen. That history is the reason I do this work, and it shapes how I do it. You can read the longer story on my about page if you want it.

A lot of the men I work with aren't in crisis. They're successful, competent, and privately exhausted, and what they want is a space to think out loud with someone who has been on both sides of the desk. Some of that overlaps with executive coaching, which I talked through with Deno Hewson. But therapy tends to go somewhere coaching usually doesn't, into why the work got its hooks in so deep in the first place.

If you're a man in Hong Kong feeling some version of what I've described here, my men's therapy work is built for exactly this.