Tea with Author, Katie Harbath, The Adaptive Edge Podcast

20 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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In this excerpt from the Adaptive Edge Podcast, the host (Speaker A) reflects on the difficulty of separating personal identity from a company's identity, especially in the tech and social media sectors where the company is often treated like family. They argue that achieving large impact requires welcoming scrutiny and maintaining critical thinking, a practice that was lacking in early social media days. The conversation highlights a personal turning point where the host recognized the danger of inertia—continuing on a career path without questioning whether it still aligns with personal values. The host emphasizes that the only true control one has is over oneself, one's reactions, and choices, urging listeners to actively assess and steer their professional journeys.

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It's really easy to blur those 2 things of who you are as a person and who the company is. And I oftentimes try to reframe that because I think that if you wanna have a large amount of impact, you should expect and almost welcome scrutiny and be able to think and be thinking critically about what it is you're trying to do. Because that's one of the things I think we didn't do in the early social media days. Mm-hmm. And especially in the tech world, it was all about like the company is your family. But that was a really big turning moment for myself where I actually took a moment in time to sit with it and think about it. Because far too often we can let inertia just continue to drive us, right?
Yeah.
Like, I got this job, I got this project, it leads to this thing, and you could all of a sudden end up decades later being like, wait a second, I don't even know if I really like this anymore. To then being like, okay, the only thing I can control is me and how I react and what I do.