Most professionals will be laid off, fired, or ousted at some point in their careers—it’s a universal, soul-crushing experience shared by even the greatest of leaders, including Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, and Mike Bloomberg. The CEO of the billion-dollar software company Scope3, Brian O’Kelley, spent most of his 20s job-hopping after getting fired over and over again.
“For many of us who are entrepreneurs, we don’t listen to anybody, and we just make a bunch of mistakes,” O’Kelley tells Fortune’s Orianna Rosa Royle. “I go back to myself in my 20s, I wasn’t going to listen to anyone. I thought I knew everything, I burned a lot of bridges, and spent a lot of time learning the hard way.”
