In 2011, after 10 years as CEO of Global Crossing, I sold the company and left the job. It was the first time in my adult life that I wasn’t working full time, and I ended up getting divorced the same month. It was a very different stage in my life. I spent some time sitting around, reading The Power of Now, and self-actualizing. I quickly realized that I sucked at not working. When a headhunter asked me to interview for the top job at T-Mobile, I did some checking and decided to take the meeting.
A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2017 issue (pp.37–42) of Harvard Business Review.
