EAR me out

My son's team lost a close one this season — he's young, it's small-kids soccer — and the real contest started after the final whistle, on the sideline, among the parents. A blown offside, a soft foul that wasn't, a call that "cost us the game." Was the referee even being fair? Everyone had a theory. I caught the coach as we packed up the cones and asked what he made of it. He just shrugged. You don't control the referee, he said — you never will. What you control is your Effort, your Attitude, and your Response. He called it EAR. I drove home turning it over, and somewhere on the highway it stopped being about a kids' game and started being about every layoff and reorg I've sat through.

Because organizational churn is just a referee you can't appeal. Layoffs, reorgs, and the long stretches of ambiguity in between aren't events you wait out — they're the weather. Almost none of it is yours to control, and the call rarely feels fair. What you can control is the same three things the coach named. EAR.

Effort is the one input that is entirely yours. The org can take your team, your roadmap, your title — it cannot make you stop doing good work. When everything around you feels arbitrary, effort is the lever that still answers to you, and it's the one that compounds. The people who keep shipping through the fog aren't naive about what's happening; they've just decided their hands stay busy regardless. Pour yourself into the work and the uncertainty shrinks, because at least one variable is finally settled.

Attitude is how you carry that effort. You won't always feel optimistic, and faking it fools no one — but there's a difference between honest concern and corrosive cynicism, and the second one spreads. Choose to be the person others feel steadier around, not the one narrating every dark cloud. A good attitude isn't pretending the situation is fine. It's deciding not to make it worse.

Response is what you do in the moment the news lands. Something will blindside you — a reorg that splits your team, a manager who's suddenly gone. The gap between that moment and your reaction is where your reputation lives. Pause before you forward the email, vent in the meeting, or fire off the Slack you'll regret. A measured response, again and again, is what people remember long after they've forgotten the reorg that triggered it.

Which brings me back to the referee. In every churn there's a parallel economy of rumor — who's next, what the real reason was, whether any of it was fair. That's just the parents on the sideline relitigating the ref's calls: it feels like staying informed, but it's negative energy on a loop, and every hour you give it is stolen from real work. The irony is cruel — the surest way to become a candidate for the next round is to spend this one arguing about the last one instead of doing your job.

Here's what the seasons eventually teach you. Anything that goes up comes down, and anything down comes back up. Teams get cut and rebuilt; stars fade and unknowns rise; the market that punished you last year rewards you this one. None of it is permanent — including the bad part. So keep your effort high, your attitude steady, your response calm, and play alongside people doing the same. The referee will keep missing calls. The team that stops arguing and gets back to work is the one still on the field when the season turns — and usually doing the best work of its life by the time it does.