Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson on how he learned to ‘just keep moving forward’ after his famous firing

The longtime runner discusses his new book, Running landHe devotes only a few pages to his journalistic career. Much of it revolves around Thompson’s activities as a competitive runner (including setting the American record for men 45 and older in 2021, as cited in luck), and his relationship with his father, W. Scott Thompson. In 2017, Thompson praised his father — a political science professor, a member of the Ford and Reagan administrations and the first openly gay presidential appointee — as having “lived a life that could fill a dozen novels, or perhaps a Shakespearean drama.” He said luck His father’s fate was a valuable lesson, as he went from a man of “kind of infinite potential,” who was once thought to be a potential presidential candidate, to someone whose “life is a complete mess.” Thompson said his father always talked to him about this dynamic: “Whoever the gods wish to destroy, they prepare first.”

Thompson said this gives him perspective.

“I never do, though Atlantic“He’s doing a great job, and I’m not at all confident he’ll stay that way,” he said. He added that he has learned to love all the pain that running brings him. “I’ve been running most of my life. I started when I was 5 or 6,” Thompson said on a recent Zoom call. He said he became “pretty serious” in high school (a passage from the book describes running “in a primitive way, screaming inside,” on a track in Deerfield, Mass.) before becoming more passionate in his 30s, and then again in his 40s. “It became an essential part of my life and something I do every day,” he said, turning his camera to show the outfit Running clothes, shoes, gloves, hat, and even a heart rate monitor.

On the one hand, he said running can be “a way to build good mental habits,” a form of meditation or a way to create mental space during the day. But in another way, the aches and pains caused by daily movement are part of the problem. “I don’t have an overarching universal philosophy,” Thompson said when asked if running has a spiritual component, but it does contain “deeper metaphors” that can benefit a career.

“One of the things I believe in — and I believe very strongly — is that when you’re running, things come in waves, right?” Thompson points out that, as a runner, you don’t set a personal record for several marathons in a row. “You do a good job and then you do a bad job,” and that’s the way things are supposed to work. Sometimes you perform poorly because you lose focus, but other times it’s because you have plantar fasciitis, or you ate the wrong meal the night before the race. He added that once you realize that you have to deal with all the things that go wrong in your running life, it changes the way you think about life in all moments. He added: When you go up, don’t be too arrogant, and when you go down, don’t get too frustrated.

Which brings us to his famous expulsion from 60 minutes.

He was fired on his first day on the job

“I was very fortunate to have had a lot of professional failure in my 20s,” Thompson said. luckreferring to the story repeated several times about not making it past a single day in the legendary TV news magazine in the late 1990s. The broad outlines of the story are well known, as legendary producer Phil Scheffler soon discovered Thompson’s complete lack of television credentials and fired him.

When Thompson retold the story, he described being called into Schaeffler’s office to discuss how he worked as an assistant to a producer for legendary reporter Steve Kroft. He moved to New York, bought “nice suits” and came with a good attitude, but when Scheffler asked who he was and what he did, Thompson simply replied that he had never done anything in television. Schaeffler asked in response: “Why are you here?”

“I don’t know,” Thompson replied. “You hired me.” Then came the abrupt termination, and Thompson said he didn’t realize how wrong the decision he made was at the time. “You’re not supposed to fire someone after you hire them.” He was just a kid, and the people who hired him were thinking: “I think we made a mistake.” Looking back, Thompson said, he had absolutely no power in that situation.

Thompson laughs when asked what advice he would give to Generation Z, which is notorious for struggling with the entry-level job market in 2025, saying they won’t get fired as quickly and as prominently as he did.

“My advice is, if you get fired, keep moving forward and don’t get too down on yourself,” he said.

He reiterated the relatively standard recommendation that you follow your passion in college, study what you want, and get whatever the “hottest” degree is, but once you get past that, really think about where your career should be.

“Find a place to work where you have great colleagues and where you can learn from people who are smarter than you, and go somewhere where you will have both colleagues who will step up with you as your career progresses and mentors who will teach you how to be better at your job,” he said. This is what led to his salvation 60 minutes He added that the fiasco is a detail that he does not believe has been reported before.

Fifteen years after his ignominious termination, Thompson found himself at the Livingstone awards ceremony where he was The New Yorker The work on stage was praised by one of the good colleagues he found afterwards 60 minutesAnd none other than Croft was a major player in the awards. Croft entered the elevator and recognized Thompson—only from that night’s letter, not from Scheffler’s office. “I worked for you for an hour, and I got fired,” Thompson told Croft of the “funny connection” they actually shared.

Croft’s response was immediate: “Steve looked at me and said: ‘Are you that kid?’ I couldn’t believe it [expletive] I fired you. And I’m so sorry we didn’t support you. (Messages to Steve Croft were not returned.)

Thompson said the matter apparently became known 60 minutes About the child who was kicked to the curb. Thompson noted that he was “really happy” to have this moment of serendipity, while adding that CBS News has been very supportive of him. Running land.

In retrospect, this experience gave Thompson what he considers a healthy kind of paranoia. Even when things are going well, he said, “I’m never sure it will stay that way.”

When reminded that plantar fasciitis is no different than the plantar fasciitis that can occur in a runner, Thompson agreed that it is no different. When he runs too much, he develops tendonitis in his knee, “and now I can feel it coming on very early,” which means he cuts back on his running, uses a foam roller and applies CBD cream to his knee. When plantar fasciitis comes out of nowhere, he does a similar routine, using a foam roller, doing Achilles stretches, and applying castor oil to his feet when he sleeps.

“There are all these winds that push you backwards, but if you are smarter about your training and the way you live and all the choices you make, you can go faster into the headwind,” Thompson said. As in running, in jobs and in life, “you just have to learn how to deal with it.”