The Moment of Truth

What Led Me to the Placeholder

Have you seen children crying out of control on a bus or train? What about a thirty-seven year old woman?

That was me. One day in 2016, I wept for the entire sixty-five minutes straight on the shuttle ride from work. The shuttle bus was almost always so quiet, full of Meta employees who were either busy working on their laptops or being preoccupied on their phones. Although I did my best to muffle the sound, I must have made everyone around me awkward, including the poor engineer next to me. He was squinting at me from time to time while coding, but I couldn’t have cared less. No, this wasn’t how I behaved in public. This had never happened before. 

What had caused this? Right before getting on the shuttle, I was in a meeting with a senior executive and his team to talk about the project I led. The executive didn’t even look at me while I talked. His eyes glued to the laptop screen, he kept busy typing away. I tried reading his face, but there was nothing to read. Even before I finished my last sentence, he blurted out, “This is a complete waste of time. I don’t think we should do this.” Then he left the meeting.

Ouch.

Sure, it hurt, but I used to shrug it off and move on. This kind of work friction was common. What triggered my tears wasn’t the VP’s bluntness. Deep down, I could feel something else, more than just anger or frustration from work. During the entire bus ride from work, I kept thinking I cannot do this anymore, mixed with tears. I’d had enough. 

But enough of what? What do I want to stop doing? 

As I got off the shuttle and walked back home, it occurred to me that the VP had actually pointed out a truth in a way: I was wasting my life. To him, the project was a waste of time because he couldn’t find any value in it. To me, my job was a waste of time because I couldn’t find it meaningful anymore. 

In fact, this sense of emptiness had been percolating for some years, but I had to admit I kept ignoring it. I couldn’t comprehend it because I was living the life I wanted–at least I thought so. I had attended great schools. I had ventured to the U.S. from Korea to work in Silicon Valley. Working at Apple, Microsoft, and Meta, I built an amazing resume for fifteen years, a career which many people strive for. My work brought me all around the world from Africa to Europe, Asia and Latin America with all kinds of exotic experiences and surrounded me with incredibly smart and remarkable people. 

It was as if I had become an ungrateful spoiled child. With this ridiculous amount of privilege, I must not feel this way, I thought. What made this emptiness even more perplexing and exasperating was that I had already tried many things to fix it. 

I had changed jobs or moved to a different company. I took on more responsibilities in leadership, hoping a new challenge would make a difference. I took time off work so I could rest and prevent burnouts. I built new habits such as meditation and running, and learned new skills through many self-development courses. I was in therapy for depression, too. However, the emptiness remained. I was dealing with some insatiable longing. But longing for what? I couldn’t figure out what I was looking for. 

When I got to my apartment, still shaken and confused, one thing was clear. I really wanted to stop suffering from this emptiness. Quitting this job and looking for a new one or going on another exotic vacation wouldn’t do anymore. 

That was an old playbook; I desperately needed a completely different playbook this time. 

The Placeholder: Creating (Not Finding) What You Are Looking For

After that day of ugly crying on the shuttle, I started testing out random ideas I had never tried before. Because I didn’t know what I was looking for, nor where to look for it, in the beginning, it looked pretty much like throwing spaghetti on a wall to see what stuck. 

It was an intensely experimental period of my career with many hypotheses, small and big tests, and tons of insights. Like an anthropologist, I discovered and learned a lot about myself and what mattered to me. Like a designer, I constantly came up with new ideas to try. And like a mad scientist, I kept experimenting with those ideas. Some experiments were successful and some were disappointing. Nonetheless, those experiences helped me gather insights for the next new ideas and tests. 

Roughly five years into this experimental period I named the “Placeholder,” I finally crafted the right “input” for it, the work that became so meaningful to me. For the first time in my life, beyond the sense of fulfillment, there was contentment and joy from work that deeply aligned with my values.

No more emptiness.

There are many situations and reasons that might prompt you to enter the Placeholder. You might be bored to death with your current work. Or you have lost interest or meaning with your lifelong career, like I did. Maybe you are forced to leave your job, because of layoff. Whatever the reasons are, it’s very easy to get anxious and worried, because it seems as if you are deviating. This sense of getting side-tracked can make you fall back to the old pattern out of fear, making you look for a similar job again or moving to a different company for the more or less same work. Often, you intentionally ignore that urge to do something fundamentally different about the situation, hoping everything will be fine. 

But it’s not fine. I know it because I tried all of those, and none of them helped but put me back to where I was–emptiness. Even worse, it activated an internal saboteur, criticizing myself for not knowing how to figure it out. All my life, the question I asked myself was “What do I want to do?” but I was facing a new question I never asked myself–”What matters to me?” This question urged me to create my own path rather than following what’s already available. This was a brand new problem I never learned how to solve at business school or in any career coaching.

We are so well trained to search for a job or aim our career in a slightly different direction. There are thousands of books and YouTube channels about it. But what if none of them really works for us? What if what we find meaningful is something new that doesn’t exist yet? How do we break the mold and create our own career based on what truly matters to us? What is at stake with it? What does it take to do it? These questions compelled me to write a book, The Placeholder: The Place To Go To Create Your Noble Work.

The Placeholder: The Place To Go To Create Your Noble Work will be published in May 2025. Do you resonate this story of mine? Curious about how to stop feeling meaninglessness or emptiness with your work? If so, message me to read the FREE digital copy of the book earlier than others.

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