Tucker Max fired me, two days before Christmas. I was the first full-time employee at his new startup, Book In A Box. I quit my corporate job, and moved to Austin, Texas, at the start of 2015. I lived there for three months and then came back to the UK and worked remotely from home. The role was everything I’d wanted in a job for years. I escaped the prison of dull, unfulfilling corporate life and leapt into a fast-paced startup, working in a niche that I loved, not having to be at the office at any given time, free to work when and where I wanted. And I was working for someone that I had followed and looked up to for nearly a decade. In the 12 months I was at Book In A Box, I helped grow the company from 3 people to 9 people, and from $50k per month to $400k per month in revenue. I worked with authors from all over the world, helping them to publish their books and share their wisdom with the world. I met some fantastic people, and had some amazing experiences. And then I was fired. And it was all my fault. I want to preface this by saying that Tucker and his co-founder Zach are great people, and I have no bad feelings towards them at all. We’re still on good terms (they actually helped me write this article), and they were 100% right to fire me. In fact, their biggest mistake was not doing it sooner. So why was I fired? The easy answer is to say that I was fired for performance — or, rather, lack of it. I wasn’t doing a good enough job, so I was fired. But that’s not a complete answer. WHY wasn’t I doing a good enough job? What caused me to fail so badly, when I should have wanted to succeed more than anything? I’ve thought about it a lot, and now I need to write about it. I need to unpack all of my issues, assumptions, biases and irrational behaviour. I’ll warn you now — this post is long, and quite self-indulgent, but I hope it will help me deal with these issues, and stop others from falling into the same traps. It’s painful to write about it, because it’s painful to document all the different ways in which I screwed up. To write, in detail, about how I failed. But I need to do it anyway. What it boils down to is this: I was working remotely, in a job I didn’t like doing. Combined, these two things led to chronic, debilitating procrastination, and I would put off work for hours (or even days), and as a result, didn’t get enough done. That’s the crux of the matter — but again, we need to go a layer deeper than this. Why didn’t I like the job I was doing, and why did I choose to procrastinate so much? To start with, let’s look at exactly what my job was. My role: Publishing Manager Book In A Box helps people write and publish their own book. Our clients were typically CEOs, entrepreneurs, speakers and consultants, who were publishing their book to establish their authority in their niche, build their personal brand, and act as a lead gen tool for their business. As Publishing Manager, I managed their whole project from start to finish. I was the client’s main point of contact throughout the whole process, and talk them through every step of the way. That sounds straightforward — but in that description are the seeds of my downfall, namely: I was the main point of contact for all our clients — so I spent a large part of my day answering emails and on the phone, in responsive mode rather than actively creating things. I was the main point of contact for all our clients — so if they had problems, they came to me, and I had to deal with them and solve them. I was the main point of contact for ALL our clients — I was the only one doing this job, and the only person at Book In A Box that our clients would interact with for long periods of time. These attributes of the job, by themselves, aren’t bad. In fact, for some people, this job description sounds amazing. But not for me. They combined with some of my own personal issues to create real issues in my job. Issues like: 1. I don’t like working remotely, especially with a big time difference. This is actually a fairly simple issue. I’ve often struggled to create routines and structure for myself — I’ve failed when I’ve tried to pick up habits like exercising regularly, meditating, dieting, and the like. So for me, the structure that comes with a 9–5 office job is actually a good thing, as it forces me to get up at a reasonable hour, go to an office with other people, sit down at a desk, and work for a good number of hours. It forces me to be accountable. When I started working remotely, I loved it at first — I could go to the gym at 11am when it was quiet, or go to the driving range mid-afternoon at hit some balls — but I quickly realised I wasn’t actually getting much work done.