Key learning: Take accountability for how you let an organization shape your behavior and sense of self. You may not control the system, but you do control the meaning you give it.
In January, I left an eighteen-year career at Amazon. I joined in 2008 and spent nearly two decades building, scaling, and leading across IMDb, Retail, Alexa, and Music. Amazon shaped my career, but more than that, it shaped how I think.
What surprised me the most was how easy it was to leave. There was no resistance and I did not experience much grief. Not because the work or the people didn’t matter. They absolutely did. But because I had already completed the chapter internally. It had taken me an entire year to prepare and get myself comfortable with leaving Amazon.
I didn’t walk out in anger or exhaustion. I walked out with a quiet sense of closure. The attachment had loosened long before the exit became official.
For most of my career, I lived several years ahead of myself by design. Even when the path was unclear, the horizon was real and very much expected. There were customers, constraints, and an eventual outcome everyone would converge on. I was very good at navigating ambiguity inside of that framework.
Now, my days are still structured, and my calendar is very full. It just holds different things: building a website, writing, golf, yoga, pickleball, photography, and long walks. I didn’t abandon structure. I just reassigned it. The shift is not from discipline to freedom. It is from foresight to presence.
I continue to put pressure on myself to keep a consistent workout routine, launch my website, edit my photos, and follow through on the things I say I care about. But it is no longer pressure to prove relevance, justify existence, or outrun a future version of myself.
Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, I wish I had balanced movement, rest, and stress reduction better. Not because it would have solved everything or changed the outcome, but because it would have reduced the toll on my body and mind. Amazon runs on metrics, goals, performance cycles, and constant forward motion. That structure is not inherently personal, but it becomes personal when we internalize it.
That is the part people still inside actually have more control over than they think. You may not be able to change the performance cycle. You may not be able to change the goals. But you can experiment with changing what you let that system mean about you.
I am starting to realize just how deeply I internalized those dynamics and how much of my day is spent unlearning that behavior. Somewhat unexpectedly, I am doing a lot of that unlearning through bird watching and photography.
When you are photographing birds, you cannot force the moment. You move your feet. You change your angle. You watch behavior. You wait for light. You stay open. The bird is constantly changing. The scene is too. Your relationship to what you are looking at is the only lever you truly control.
A quote by Wayne Dyer kept resurfacing for me this month: “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
That line feels less like a philosophy now and more like a description of what I’m actively learning.
The other thing I have noticed is that I still get occasional spikes of cortisol and anxiety. The same kind I used to feel before a QBR, a doc review, or an OP1 meeting. It has made me realize how stress, over time, alters you at a physiological level, not just a psychological one. And how hard it is to flush that out of your system after spending years in an environment like Amazon that, in many ways, thrives on that state. These early days feel less like a mindset shift and more like a slow unwinding.
Through that lens, I have started noticing patterns in the birds I am drawn to. For years, I lived like a Great Blue Heron: strategic patience, long stillness, conserving energy, waiting for the right conditions before committing to a strike. It moves when the probability is high. It assumes a correct moment exists. That posture served me well in a world built around long horizons, big bets, and consequences that compound.
Right now, I feel closer to a Green Heron: curious, inventive, dropping bits of bait into the water just to see what responds, using small actions to generate information. It doesn’t wait for certainty. It creates conditions that produce feedback. It moves to learn.
And lately, I’ve been noticing something new. Less scanning ahead. More small movements. More willingness to try, pause, and adjust without needing to know where it leads.
January feels like standing in shallow water, surprised by how complete the ending felt, and relearning how to move and breathe without asking the future to justify the present. I am living with more breath and space than I have felt in years.
Onward!
Natasha
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