Functionally Unemployable

Working title. This page previews a book in progress — the title, cover, and copy may change before launch.

At forty-five — after two companies built and sold, and a career spent performing as the extrovert everyone took him for — Christopher Marr finally understood why every “good job” had felt like slow suffocation. He was wired differently: introverted, running on an operating system nobody had handed him the manual for. His ten-year-old son worked it out about himself in an afternoon. This book lives in the gap between those two facts.

Functionally Unemployable is part memoir, part field guide. Each chapter tells a true story from the work of building companies — a venture nearly sunk the week its supplier discontinued the one device it was built on; a CEO who preached transparency while quietly trying to defraud him of the equity he was owed; the mother-in-law’s dare — “what’s the worst that happens, you fall down and get back up?” — that led to the business that bought his wife’s ring — and then hands you a tool you can actually use, instead of leaving you thinking great story, but how does that apply to me?

It’s for the people who can build the thing but can’t sit through the meeting about the thing. Who’ve been called “too negative” and “too intense” by the same person in the same week. Who suspect they’re wired a little differently and have spent years performing their way around it.

The honest premise: he didn’t have it figured out. He figured a lot of it out late, in public, and sometimes painfully. This is what he learned — and how you might get there faster.

This isn’t a book about fixing yourself. It’s about finally building around the way you already are.