Yesterday I half-jokingly called for a moratorium on nerd sniping in honor of Mother’s Day. As fate would have it, shortly thereafter, I was nerd sniped by something that could have easily consumed my weekend: a heated debate about whether to wind down or transfer ownership of an ambitious project that failed to live up to its potential.

I won’t get into details about the project, but it reminded me a formative event that I went through early in my career, with a project that I was deeply invested in and had to give up on.

It was my mom who helped me through that transition. Probably one of the best gifts you can give a parent as an adult is validation that they gave you some good lessons in life, even if you failed to see it that way at the time.

This post is my way of offering some advice to some of the people involved in this kerfuffle and a belated thank you to my mother for her wisdom.

I’ll share the lesson first, then the story:

<aside> 📌 If you find yourself in strong disagreement with an organization that ultimately you have no real control over, walk away. Channel that energy and passion into building your own thing.

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Resist the temptation to escalate, dig up dirt on the leaders, launch a public campaign. Don’t instigate a civl war. Don’t attempt a coup. Don’t try to sway popular opinion by attacking the legitimacy of a key person or group of decision makers, no matter how angry they make you feel or wronged you feel by their actions.

It’s almost always lose-lose.

Even if you “win” in the short-term, you usually lose in the long run. Many reasonable people will secretly resent you for forcing them to pick a side. People will be nervous about getting close to you in the future because they’ve seen what you’re capable of. You burn bridges.

Remember: “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.”

Moreover, the rare individual who has the agility, vision, and political savviness to “win” in these situations AND look good while doing so is probably better off building their own movement, not trying to fix someone else’s.

Think you can do a better job? Take that confidence and create something new.

My mom taught me this lesson about moving on when I was 24.

I had spent most of the last three years, starting from when I was a junior in college, working on a project halfway around the world. My friends graduated and moved to New York; I moved to Tanzania.

I began as a researcher, secured some funding, and eventually launched a microloan program that grew to serve around 500 customers in a small village. I did this under the auspices of a local organization, which had originally helped me with my research. There was an informal arrangement that I could operate autonomously so long as I paid my share of G&A.

After about a year of grinding, the project finally got to the stage where it was operating in the black, we had a competent team in place, and there were even a few outside funders ready to give us more money.

Then, in the span of 48 hours, I was fired, had my residence permit cancelled, and was told I had to walk away from the community of people that I’d worked with closely for the past three years without saying goodbye.

All of this because, a few days earlier, I sent the founder of the organization — let’s call him “Pepe” — a letter with some proposed enhancements to our working arrangement.