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As CEO of The Atlantic<\/em>, Nicholas Thompson oversees a venerable magazine that has recently returned to profitability after several years of false starts, adding financial clout to its slew of star hires and considerable presence in the media landscape. Before beginning his career on the business side, having joined The Atlantic<\/em> in 2021, Thompson can boast significant achievements working in newsrooms, including building NewYorker.com into a vital, digital presence before an award-winning stint as Wired<\/em> editor-in-chief. But that\u2019s not really what he wants to talk to Fortune<\/em> about: He\u2019s here to discuss plantar fasciitis.<\/p>\n The long-time runner is discussing his new book, The Running Ground<\/em>, which only devotes a few pages to his journalistic career. Much more of it is about Thompson\u2019s activities as a competitive runner (including setting the American record for men 45 and older in 2021, as excerpted in Fortune<\/em>), and his relationship with his father, W. Scott Thompson. In 2017, Thompson eulogized his father\u2014a political science professor, member of the Ford and Reagan administrations and the first openly gay presidential appointment\u2014as having \u201clived a life that could fill a dozen novels, or perhaps a Shakespearean drama.\u201d He told Fortune<\/em> his father\u2019s fate was a valuable lesson, going from a man with \u201csort of infinite prospects,\u201d once thought of as potential presidential candidate, to someone \u201cwhose life is complete disarray.\u201d Thompson said his father would always talk to him about this dynamic: \u201cHe who the gods wish to destroy, they first make promising.\u201d<\/p>\n This gives him perspective, Thompson said. <\/p>\n \u201cI never, even though The Atlantic<\/em>\u2018s doing great, I never am too confident that it\u2019s gonna stay that way,\u201d he said. He added he\u2019s learned to like all the pain that running brings him. \u201cI\u2019ve been running most of my life. I started when I was 5 or 6,\u201d Thompson said in a recent Zoom call. He said he got \u201cvery serious\u201d in high school (a passage from the book describes running \u201cin a primal way, screaming inside,\u201d on a track in Deerfield, Mass.) before becoming even more passionate in his 30s, and then again in his 40s. \u201cIt\u2019s become an essential part of my life and something I do every day,\u201d he said, pivoting his camera to show his running clothes and shoes, gloves and hat, even his heart rate monitor.<\/p>\n On the one hand, he said running can be a \u201cway to build good mental habits,\u201d a form of meditation or a way to create mental space during the day. But in another way, the aches and pains that come from daily movement are part of the point. \u201cI don\u2019t have a sweeping world philosophy,\u201d Thompson said when asked if running has a spiritual component, but it does have \u201cdeeper metaphors\u201d that can inform a career.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things that I believe\u2014and I believe very strongly\u2014is that, you know, in running, it goes in waves, right?\u201d Thompson makes the point that you just don\u2019t, as a runner, set a personal record for several consecutive marathons. \u201cYou do well and then you do badly,\u201d and that\u2019s the way it\u2019s supposed to go. Sometimes you do badly because you lose focus, but other times it\u2019s because you get plantar fasciitis, or you had the wrong meal the night before the race. Once you realize you have to deal with all the things that go wrong in your running life, he added, \u201cit changes the way you think about life at all moments.\u201d When you\u2019re up, he added, don\u2019t get too cocky, and when you\u2019re down, don\u2019t get too down.<\/p>\n Which brings us to his famous firing from 60 Minutes<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cI was pretty fortunate to have had a lot of professional failure in my 20s,\u201d Thompson told Fortune<\/em>, referring to the story, many times repeated, about not making it past one day at the legendary TV newsmagazine in the late 1990s. The outlines of the story are well known, about legendary producer Phil Scheffler quickly sussing out Thompson\u2019s total lack of TV credentials and dismissing him.<\/p>\n As Thompson retold the story, he described being summoned to Scheffler\u2019s office to discuss how he\u2019d work as the associate for one of the producers for Steve Kroft, the legendary correspondent. He had moved to New York, bought \u201cnice suits\u201d and come with a good attitude, but when Scheffler asked who he was and what had he done, Thompson responded simply he hadn\u2019t done anything in TV. Scheffler asked in response, \u201cWhy are you here?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d Thompson replied. \u201cYou hired me.\u201d Then came the sudden termination, and Thompson said he didn\u2019t realize just quite how wrong a decision that was at the time. \u201cYou\u2019re not supposed to just fire someone after you hire them.\u201d He was just a kid, and the people who hired him were thinking \u201cWhoa, I guess we made a mistake.\u201d Looking back, Thompson said, he had no power at all in the situation.<\/p>\n Thompson laughs when asked what advice he\u2019d give to Gen Z, which is famously struggling with the entry-level job market of 2025, saying it would not be to get fired as quickly and prominently as he did.<\/p>\n \u201cMy advice is, if you do get fired, to just keep moving forward and to not to get too down on yourself,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n He repeated the relatively standard recommendation to follow your passions in college, study what you want, get whatever degree is \u201cmost exciting,\u201d but once you move beyond that, really think about where your career should be. <\/p>\n \u201cFind a spot to work where you have great colleagues and where you can learn from people who are smarter than you, and go into a place where you will have both colleagues who will rise with you as your career goes on and mentors who will teach you how to be better at your job,\u201d he said. This is what led to his redemption from the 60 Minutes<\/em> fiasco, he added, a detail he doesn\u2019t believe has ever been reported before.<\/p>\n Fifteen years after his humiliating termination, Thompson found himself at a Livingston Award ceremony where his New Yorker <\/em>work was being praised onstage by one of those good colleagues he found after 60 Minutes<\/em>, and none other than Kroft was a key player in the awards. Kroft walked into the elevator and recognized Thompson\u2014only from that night\u2019s speech, not from Scheffler\u2019s office. \u201cI worked for you for an hour, and I got fired,\u201d Thompson told Kroft about the \u201cfunny connection\u201d they actually shared.<\/p>\n Kroft\u2019s response was immediate: \u201cSteve looks at me and goes, \u2018You\u2019re that kid? I couldn\u2019t believe that [expletive] fired you. And I\u2019m so sorry we didn\u2019t back you up.\u201d (Messages to Steve Kroft were not returned.)<\/p>\n Thompson said it had apparently become lore around 60 Minutes<\/em> about the kid who had been kicked to the curb. Thompson recalled he was \u201creally happy\u201d to have this moment of serendipity, while adding CBS News has been very supportive of The Running Ground<\/em>.<\/p>\n In retrospect, the experience gave Thompson what he sees as a healthy kind of paranoia. Even when things are going well, he said, \u201cI never am too confident that it\u2019s gonna stay that way.\u201d <\/p>\n When reminded it\u2019s not unlike the plantar fasciitis that can flare up for a runner, Thompson agreed it\u2019s not dissimilar. When he overtrains in running, he gets tendonitis in his knee, \u201cand I can now feel it coming on pretty early,\u201d which means he dials back his running, uses a foam roller and puts CBD cream on his knee. When plantar fasciitis comes on out of nowhere, he does a similar routine, using a foam roller, doing Achilles stretches, putting Castor Oil on his feet when he sleeps.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is all of that wind pushing you backwards, but if you are smarter about your training and the way you live and all the choices you make, you can kind of go faster into the headwind,\u201d Thompson said. As in running and in jobs and in life, \u201cyou just have to learn how to cope with it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Atlantic #CEO #Nick #Thompson #learned #moving #famous #firing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As CEO of The Atlantic, Nichol… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[3517,1311,529,3521,3522,3520,716,702,3518,3519],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3546"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\nFired on his first day of work<\/h2>\n