Everyone Should Commit to Firing Themselves—Repeatedly
Your job is to put yourself out of a job
When you start a company, doing every job yourself is a practical matter — there’s quite literally no one else there to do the work. But when my co-founder and I launched our startup in 2014, we also saw value in doing every job in the company ourselves.
We wanted to understand every atom of the business we were building. If we didn’t know what needed to get done, we wouldn’t be able to delegate it to someone else successfully. Once we’d done the jobs and understood the pain points and the skills necessary to be successful, we could hire, empathize, and manage people who would be taking that piece of the puzzle.
In essence, we saw our goal as eventually firing ourselves from every role — because we’d hired great people and designed smart processes that could take our places.
Four years later, we still believe this but with greater conviction. Everyone should commit to firing themselves — repeatedly. Whether you’re an entrepreneur scaling a company or in your first entry-level position, your job is to put yourself out of a job by outgrowing it and moving on to the next challenge.
