Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

Finally – You Resigned! CONGRATS

There is a huge relief that comes with just picking a direction. Even if a decision isn’t perfect, it provides data and momentum, whereas sitting in “limbo” only drains your mental battery.

In many ways, the “wrong” decision is often better than no decision because it at least tells you where not to go, allowing you to course-correct quickly.

Lets talk about  – what no one tells you about leaving a position of power, status, company name  — and the styrofoam cup that says it all.

You have decided. You handed over the letter or the ID badge, laptop, and mobile phone  — there is something you need to understand. Not about your next chapter. About the one you are closing.

The calls will stop. Not gradually. Suddenly.

You Resigned. The Room Moved On Before You Reached the Door.

You Handed In the Letter. The Group Chat Already Has a New Admin.

You Resigned. Your Replacement Was Already Being Interviewed.

The VIP invites that once arrived as a matter of course — the conference panels, the private dinners, the exclusive previews — will reroute themselves to your successor’s inbox before you have cleared your desk. The LinkedIn notifications will go quiet. The DMs will dry up. The comments, the likes, the carefully worded endorsements — they will migrate, as if by gravity, to whoever now holds what you held.
No one was loyal to you. They were loyal to what you could do for them.

The interview you could fast-track. The cheat sheet only someone inside would know. The reference letter. The performance rating you could shade upward. The endorsement that opens a door. These were the currencies in which your professional relationships were denominated. You mistook the transaction for affection. Most of us do.

Your work colleagues will keep it moving. You will cease to be top of mind not because you are forgotten — but because you can no longer influence outcomes that matter to them. You were relevant to their 360 feedback. Their performance reviews. Their next role. Without that leverage, you become a warm memory at best, a contact for emergencies at worst.
Work friends are no different from social media followers — largely phantom, occasionally real, useful in the moment, and surprisingly easy to scroll past.

The Styrofoam Cup
Simon Sinek tells a story that captures all of this in a single, devastating image.

A former Under Secretary of Defense speaks at the same conference two years in a row. In year one, he is still in office. He is flown business class. Someone meets him at the airport. A car takes him to the venue. When he arrives backstage and asks for coffee, a young staffer hands it to him in a beautiful ceramic cup. He is, after all, the Under Secretary.

Year two, he is retired. He flies coach. He takes a taxi. He checks himself into his hotel. He finds his own way backstage. When he asks for coffee, someone points him to the machine in the corner. He pours it himself. Into a styrofoam cup.
Same man. Same conference. Same coffee.
The ceramic cup was never his. It belonged to the office. He was just holding it.

The title was a loan. The deference was borrowed. The styrofoam cup was always the truth — it just waited patiently for the moment to reveal itself.

Identity Is Not a Job Description
The danger of significant roles — and this is a particular hazard for those who have held them for a long time — is that the costume becomes the person. The executive floor. The travel policy. The ‘Sir’ and the ‘Ma’am’. The assistant who knows your coffee order. The room that goes quiet when you walk in.

These are not tributes to you. They are set dressing for the role. When the role ends, the set gets struck.

This is not cynicism. It is simply the architecture of institutional life. The organisation needs symbols of authority to function — the corner office, the business class seat, the ceramic cup. It lends these symbols to whoever occupies the chair. It does not give them away.
The trap is to have built your sense of self on top of something that was never yours to keep.

What Remains
Here is the uncomfortable and, eventually, liberating truth: you matter more to yourself than to others. You always did. The difference is that now — without the buffer of the role, the title, the access — you get to find out who that self actually is.

And legacy, real legacy, turns out to have nothing to do with your LinkedIn connections or your calendar density or the quality of cup in which your coffee arrives. It is built in the slower, quieter work: how you treated the person who had nothing to offer you. What you did when no one was watching or taking minutes. Whether the people you led grew — not just their careers, but themselves.

None of that gets stripped away when you hand in the letter.

The perks were on loan. Your character was always yours.

One Last Thing Before You Exit the Building

Enjoy the ceramic cup for as long as you have it. There is no virtue in refusing comfort or pretending the perks do not exist. They do. Enjoy them — with eyes open and feet on the ground.
But when you exit, hand over the cup too. Hand it over cleanly, without clinging. Hand it to the person who will hold it next, knowing that it was always theirs to hold — just as it was always yours.

The styrofoam cup is not a demotion. It is just the truth, finally available in full.

Go find out who you are when no one is calling.

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Dr. Mzamo Masito writes Between Thoughts — Intellectual Musings, where behavioural science, African philosophy, and lived experience meet in long-form reflection.

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table..