I Got Fired for Blowing the Whistle
The Amplified Impact Podcast
August 28th, 2023
In this episode, I share a powerful story about my final job working at a climbing gym and the crucial lesson it taught me about the fragility of relying on traditional employment.
I remember having a heart-stopping incident that exposed the vulnerability of depending on a single employer.
When safety standards were ignored and I found myself in a dangerous situation, I spoke up and took action.
However, my efforts led to unexpected consequences, ultimately costing me my job.
This experience ignited my journey into entrepreneurship where I discovered the power of owning my destiny and embracing the challenges that come with it.
Learn from my journey and consider the importance of having control over your future.
Remember, the key to success lies in taking ownership of your path.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
”
Entrepreneurship is better than being a W2 employee, but it has a lot of downsides as well, a lot of cons. It’s very hard, it’s very lonely, and it is also very insecure in a lot of ways, right? But it is worth the squeeze. The juice is worth the squeeze.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
Yo, I want to tell you guys a story of the last job I ever had, because I think there’s a really interesting lesson in there about the power of owning your own thing and having ultimate accountability and how fragile working for somebody else actually is. And because I think a lot of people have the narrative in their mind that the safe route in life is go to college, get your degree, come out, and then go work for somebody else in some big Fortune 500 company. Put your time in for 30, 40 years, and then retire. And I got an email not too long back from a woman whose husband was an architect, a great architect, been working with the same company for 25 years. So you can kind of extrapolate he’s probably near in his 50s or so. And just out of the blue, they laid him off. Out of the blue. I don’t know.
Anthony Vicino:
They were downsizing. It’s unclear. But he didn’t have anything else, no other income streams, nothing else to fall back on. And it was heartbreaking because he was just hitting his stride in terms of getting to do the projects and all the things that come with the seniority, of putting in that much time. And it’s just a reminder that working for other people, at the end of the day, if you have a boss, even a middle manager, you have one person who has the ability to decide your entire fate. That’s a lot of fragility, a lot of risk, and I think a lot of people just don’t realize that. I certainly didn’t. So when I got fired for the last time, and that’s a spoiler alert my last job that I ever had, I was fired from.
Anthony Vicino:
And I mean, to lay the scene, that wasn’t extraordinary. I probably had worked 30 or 40 different jobs between the time I was 16 to 27 ish, and I was probably fired from the vast, vast, vast majority of those. And I can blame my ADHD and just say, I’m just different. I am just not reliable or unfocused or whatever. I could point to all those things. But at the end of the day, I was a shitty employee. I couldn’t be motivated to go work for somebody else. I didn’t care.
Anthony Vicino:
And in my mind, I always created this victim mindset mentality that I was too good for the job and that my talent, my abilities, just weren’t being properly utilized and recognized and that they realized how brilliant and awesome I was. They would give me the responsibilities and roles that I was deserving of. And because they had me doing the menial tasks, they obviously didn’t value me and recognize what I’m capable of, so why should I put more in? That was my mindset, very, very misguided. But that’s where I was. So where I was in life at that point. And the last job I had, I was working at a climbing gym. This was during the time when I was a professional rock climber which really just means I got to travel the world and climb rocks and live in the dirt. I wasn’t making a ton of money and to supplement that I would coach and I was a root setter at climbing gyms.
Anthony Vicino:
Now a root setter, if you’ve ever been to an indoor climbing gym, they’re the guys that put the holds on the wall to create the roots or the different paths that the climber can follow to get from the ground to the top. And in the world of climbing, this is actually a very highly coveted role because root setters are kind of the, I don’t know, the rock stars of the local rock climbing community. They tend to be the strongest climbers, they tend to have the most connections, they tend to be the most highly regarded and so it’s kind of like the cool kids table in high school. I don’t know, that’s just kind of how it is. Very weird thing to be held in high esteem but I was considered, I would say probably top three root setters in the country. They put on these root setting competitions where root setters come together and they judge and I won a couple of those I root set for an ESPN TV show. I was highly sought after but I didn’t like playing the game of politics and bureaucracy and so I never went for my accreditation to go set at nationals or Olympics or anything like that. Instead I was a journeyman.
Anthony Vicino:
I would travel from gym to gym route setting and did very very well doing that and I ended up settling in California and root setting for a very, very large chain out there. So there’s actually two large chains and I’m not going to name names because I don’t want to go back to that place of my life and share and badmouth anybody. It’s not about that. This story is not about that. But I went and worked for a company that had many, many climbing gyms all throughout California and I was one of the head route setters that would coordinate the teams we’d travel around, we’d go from gym to gym to gym every day of the week putting up new routes. It was a very grueling job. You can imagine like hauling up these polyurethane rock, climbing holes and sticking them on the wall. It’s very grueling activity.
Anthony Vicino:
It’s also very dangerous because we’re working at heights on ropes 2030, 40ft off the ground. In a lot of cases you’re working over a non padded surface like you’re working in an environment where your coworker could drop a hold that weighs 20 pounds and it could crush your skull. All sorts of things could go wrong. But back then this was really the wild west of safety. I would say root setters and climbers in general always kind of had like this anticulture towards safety in a lot of ways, rock climbing from the it was like a rebellion against societal norms. People wanted to go adventure, they wanted to go out in the mountain and they didn’t want people over encumbering themselves with safety and tools and logistics, all this stuff. And so there’s a lot of freedom of expression and that has always been part of climbing and more so than anywhere else was in root setting you can imagine, like, testosterone driven 20 year old males who are the apex predators of their craft, great climbers. And so we were dumb asses, like no other way to put it.
Anthony Vicino:
We would do all sorts of stupid stuff on ladders, on ropes, and it was crazy times. Like, looking back on it now, I’m like, I can’t believe we didn’t get hurt more often than we did doing some truly ridiculous things. Anyways, there came a point in my career where I started to get a little bit more organized, I guess, in terms of not wanting to get hurt and trying to organize the team in a way to bring some level of professionalism into our craft and try to get away from that Wild West mentality. And so started to put a bigger focus on safety, on protocols, and just trying to be the standard bearer as a crew for the rest of the country and the world as root setters and kind of setting the standard. But it was very hard. You can imagine like, kind of pushing against that counterculture. So it was like slowly being implemented over time. Well, there was an occasion where we were working that day, the crew and one of the guys came in and he was high.
Anthony Vicino:
Listen, we were living in California and at the time, this is Berkeley, California. That wasn’t uncommon. He came in high and he was in charge of setting the anchors that morning. So what that means is setting up the ropes, securing them, making sure that they’re fastened securely incorrectly so that the crew, seven, eight guys are all going to be on these different ropes at height, making sure that those anchors are going to hold. And so the guy that set them up, set them up wrong. And I was at the top of the wall. And the way that we start our day is everybody climbs up their rope to the top of the wall and we strip the wall. So you go to the top, then you take down all the holds, you drop them to the ground and as you come down, you create a blank canvas.
Anthony Vicino:
And then we start from the ground up and put the holds back up. Anyways, we start at the top of the wall, we start taking holds off. I’m up there for about five minutes chatting with the guy right next to me, a couple of arms length to the right and the guy a couple of arms length to the left, when suddenly my rope fails, the anchor fails and I start falling. And fortunately, just to reflex, I happened to reach out and grab a hold on the wall and catch myself. So I only fell maybe like a foot before catching myself out of just pure startle. Reflex got really lucky, which is incredibly fortunate because it would have been about a 30 foot fall and there was a ladder directly underneath me. So there’s a very good possibility I would have just broken my back on this aframe ladder. I got really lucky.
Anthony Vicino:
And so we investigated, we kept the guy next to me was like, what the hell just happened? I was like, my rope just failed. I’m just like on the wall standing next to him, like holding onto a hold and I was like, you maybe should climb down because we’re all on the same anchor system. So I was like, I don’t know what just happened, why my anchor failed, but your guys didn’t. So we go down, we investigate, and the guy that set up the anchors did it wrong. Not just wrong, but egregiously wrong. Like in hindsight it was like being held up with duct tape. That’s the level of wrong this was. And it was criminal.
Anthony Vicino:
It was one of those things that could have gotten literally everybody on the team hurt incredibly badly. And this wasn’t the first time that we had an incident with this guy. But there was a transition period here where a new head root setter had taken over the team and there was like this weird bad blood, I think between him and I because they had passed me over to give him the role of head root setter. And I was actually okay with that because I don’t like managing people. But there was ego involved. Anyways, when my anchor failed, we launched an investigation, figured out what happened. We brought it to the new head route setter, we brought it to his boss, to the very upper top of the chain of the climbing gym, to the guy that like the right hand guy of the owner. And we escalated the situation and nothing happened.
Anthony Vicino:
Nothing happened. The guy wasn’t reprimanded, it wasn’t fired. No new protocols or safety trainings came down to ensure that everybody was up to speed on what happened, how to avoid it in the future, put any kind of new level of like, hey, this is how we’re going to do things moving forward, this is important, we need to do better. None of that. And after six months went by with nothing, no response or anything. And in fact I started getting very vocal with the rest of the team and getting vocal with management and just starting to get very anal about all safety things and holding us to a higher standard. And maybe I was being a dick about it, maybe I didn’t go about it the right way, definitely a possibility. But they started punishing me in terms of removing me and taking away my setting opportunities at big competitions and things like that, which are kind of prestigious.
Anthony Vicino:
And I had always been the guy who had set the finals roots, which is kind of like the creme de la creme of what everybody on the team wants. And I’d been doing it for five years up to that point. And then they took it away. Or not five years, more like three or four. And so I was getting penalized, I was getting punished. I was getting Ostracized and not Ostracized. The team was on my side here, but the management just wasn’t receptive. They weren’t doing anything.
Anthony Vicino:
And so I filed an OSHA complaint. And this was actually what was interesting about this was this happened. I filed the OSHA complaint about a month and a half, two months after the initial incident. And then it took them another five months before OSHA actually came to the facilities and followed up and did anything, and everything was fine up until that moment. And then they came to do the investigations, and the gyms got fined for all sorts of things. We’ll say a lot of things. And a week later, I was fired. And they came up with other reasons, obviously, to fire me.
Anthony Vicino:
But it really boiled down to at the end of the day, they knew that I was the whistleblower, that I had done this thing. And so we filed a lawsuit and took them to court over all this. But that’s not the point of the story. The point of the story is just we’re all fragile when you’re working and your fate is in the hands of somebody else. And that was the last time I ever had a job working for somebody else, because it wasn’t by intention that I got into entrepreneurship from that moment. But once I discovered entrepreneurship and could see the juxtaposition between being the one who is ultimately in control and responsible for my fate versus working for somebody else in a W Two where anything could happen, I was powerless. I was like, this is a no brainer. Entrepreneurship is the only path for me, and I’m really, really fortunate that I discovered that when I did in life, because I can imagine a scenario where I just never would have discovered that.
Anthony Vicino:
But I’m sharing this with you because depending on where you are in your journey, you might be starting to come to this realization that maybe W Two work isn’t the way to go. Maybe you’re already an entrepreneur and you’ve already gone down this path, and you just need a little bit of a reminder of what you’ve left behind. Because, listen, like, entrepreneurship is better than being a W Two employee, but it has a lot of downsides as well, a lot of cons. It’s very hard, it’s very lonely, and it is also very insecure in a lot of ways, right? But it is worth the squeeze. The juice is worth the squeeze. And so I just wanted to share this story with you guys, because that email I got from that lady a couple of months back about her husband, the architect Usyk’s. Job, just kind of reminded me it’s been a long time since I’ve been an employee. It’s been over a decade, and I just can never imagine a world of going back to there, because I understand just how inherently risky it is.
Anthony Vicino:
And hopefully in sharing this, if you did not already know this, then maybe you can look at your situation if you’re a w two employee through a different lens and maybe start hedging, maybe a side hustle, start investing on the side or do something else. So that’s not the only thing that you have to show for your efforts, and that’s my encouragement to you to learn more about that. If that’s a path you want to go down, make sure you go and you subscribe to our weekly newsletter. The hyper focused entrepreneur goes out every week. Share a very in depth, long form article about how to become a better, higher level entrepreneur, whether you’re first starting out or you’re hitting six or seven to eight figures and how to keep failing, but in a way that you maximize your return on life. You can go check out that newsletter. It’s totally free@anthonyvacino.com newsletter, so go check that out, and we’ll see you back around these parts tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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