Because the highlight reel doesn’t tell the whole story.
Name: Tina Brescanu
Objective: To keep showing up, learning and creating.
Experience
Job Seeker (since redundancy)
• Applied for hundreds of jobs; secured a handful of interviews.
• No offers yet — but learned the art of resilience and rewriting cover letters in my sleep.
A Stint in the Corporate World
• Failed to fit in, didn’t understand the jargon, and couldn’t appreciate the infantilisation of adults in the workplace.
• Allergic to KPIs, buzzwords, performance reviews, “circle back,” “touch base,” and other corporate rituals.
• Learned that pretend urgency and scheduled enthusiasm are not my natural habitat.
• In hindsight, redundancy wasn’t failure — it was freedom.
Author — 20+ Books (ongoing)
• Wrote over twenty books, none of which became bestsellers.
• Consistently failed at marketing because writing felt more meaningful than algorithms.
• Created Involution Labs as a way to store all my far-out ideas — not a failure, but something that grew out of failure. It became a way of holding myself accountable, and now I’m designing courses from that ever-expanding creative ecosystem.
Various Online Work (survival era)
• Took on various online work during difficult periods, including emotional labour and boundary-testing roles that taught me more about human psychology than any textbook ever could.
• Learned resilience, communication, and the courage to navigate unconventional spaces.
Print Journalist Trainee
• Trained for a world of ink and presses… just as the industry went digital.
• Failed to build the professional network needed to pivot when everything changed.
Full-Time Parent (career break)
• Managed small humans with complex needs and strong opinions.
• Gained skills in management, conflict resolution, diplomacy, advocacy, and negotiating with multiple authorities.
• Failed to convince employers these were “real” workplace skills.
Early Career Misstep (mid-90s, Ireland)
• Posted a job ad titled “Swedish girl looking for work.”
• Failed to anticipate the replies this would generate.
• Learned the importance of precise wording.
Early Education + Work Life Wanderer
• Left school early, failed to get on the straight-and-narrow career path.
• Moved from one job to the next — quirky, fun, physically demanding work like grave digging, baking and farming.
• Moved from town to city, from Sweden to Finland, and eventually Ireland.
• Didn’t get the posh job. Cleaned toilets in a caravan park in Wexford before starting in the home care business, where I failed to keep a “professional distance” and instead made friends with everyone I encountered.
Education
• Learned that success is never linear.
• Learned that failure isn’t the opposite of success, it’s part of it.
References
My children — they can vouch for my authentic parenting style, and will give both the positive and the negative, because authentic parenting is about being real.
Involution Labs 