I keep thinking about layoffs, and it changed how I think about motivation

I’ve been thinking a lot about layoffs lately.

Not in a polished, “look at the market” way. More in the way that hits you when you read the same story too many times and realize it could be your friend, your customer, or you one day.

Reuters recently reported fresh cuts at Meta and LinkedIn, and what makes this wave feel especially unsettling is that some of these companies are still financially strong while reducing headcount anyway.

That combination does something to people.

It makes work feel less like a stable path and more like a temporary arrangement. It makes even good performers wonder whether they should quietly be preparing a backup plan. And it makes job hunting feel less like a choice and more like a survival skill.

I think that’s part of why I’ve become so obsessed with motivation and follow-through.

At Focido, we keep coming back to the same idea: most people do not fail because they are lazy. They fail because life gets noisy, confidence drops, and doing the next useful thing becomes weirdly hard. That is true for people trying to build habits, but it is also true for people trying to find work after a layoff.

What usually happens is painfully human.

You tell yourself you’ll apply today.
Then you need to update the resume first.
Then maybe clean up LinkedIn.
Then maybe think through your story a bit more.
Then the day gets away from you, and suddenly you feel worse because you “did nothing.”

I know that loop. I think a lot of us do.

And the funny thing is, the problem usually isn’t a lack of information. People already know the basics:

• apply to relevant roles,

• message people,

• build proof of skill,

• keep the momentum going.

The problem is keeping yourself emotionally available to the process after the first few disappointments.

That’s where accountability matters more than inspiration.

Not fake accountability. Not the kind that sounds good in a productivity tweet. I mean real accountability, where someone notices whether you showed up. Where the commitment is small enough to be human, but real enough to matter.

That idea is basically the heart of Focido for me.

We are not trying to build another app that makes people feel behind. I don’t care about that. I care about helping people stay in motion when their own energy is unreliable. Because honestly, that’s what most of life looks like.

Especially now.

If layoffs are teaching us anything, it’s that the job market rewards people who can keep moving even when the floor shifts under them. The winners are not always the most talented people. Sometimes they are just the ones who kept going after the second rejection, or the fifth awkward message, or the moment they wanted to give up and watch one more episode instead.

That sounds small. It is not small.

Small behavior is what builds outcomes.
Small behavior is what gets someone hired.
Small behavior is what makes a founder survive the weird middle months.
Small behavior is what keeps a person from quietly disappearing when things get hard.

I think that’s why this topic feels so personal to me.

Building a startup has made me respect consistency in a new way. It’s easy to admire big moments, launches, spikes, wins, attention. But most progress is invisible. It lives in boring repetition. It lives in the part nobody posts about.

So when I read about layoffs, I don’t just think about company strategy. I think about the individual sitting there with a laptop open, trying to stay calm, trying to figure out what to do next, trying not to spiral.

That’s the person I want to build for.

Not the productivity influencer version of them.
The real one.

The one who needs structure.
The one who needs a nudge.
The one who wants to keep their dignity while rebuilding.

If you’re building something too, I’m curious how you think about this:
do you see motivation as a feature problem, a psychology problem, or just a life problem that software can only partially help with?

I keep landing on the same answer: software can’t create resilience, but it can make resilience easier to practice.

And right now, that feels like a useful thing to build.