Kinsey Wilson’s recent, sudden and somewhat bizarre departure from NPR led to a furious round of tweets and other social media comments from those of us who have worked for him over the years. One that really resonated with me came from Max Pfenninghaus, a former NPR colleague who is now the executive creative director for marketing at The New York Times. “We are all just pushing the peanut as far as the circus will let us,” he wrote in response to a comment I made.

I’ve thought a lot about that comment lately. Journalism is a cruel business, and it’s particularly cruel to those on either end of the career spectrum. When you start out, you generally make a horrific salary if you can find work at all; at the end, you’re often doing all you can to avoid the layoff axe and constantly trying to convince people you’re still relevant.

I’m entering the last quarter of my journalism career. That’s a tough place to be in digital journalism, where the staffs run young and older employees can be viewed with a certain skepticism by those young staffers. This reality was the hardest thing about deciding to leave NPR (where, despite all its faults, senior staff are genuinely valued), and it was one of the things that made me think very, very hard about whether I should join a startup.

And then I did it anyway. I decided I didn’t want to push the peanut; I wanted to surf that sucker. And you can’t do that from a position of fear or comfort. You have to keep growing and learning or that peanut will actually turn around and roll right over you.

I learned that from Kinsey, who did everything he could to change an incredibly change-averse and even Machiavellian culture (a phrase I do not use lightly). He had a lot of success before NPR’s CEO du jour decided to replace him with His Guy. That sort of thing happens in the corporate clouds, and accepting it is a requirement for a high-level executive.

This would be a fine time for Kinsey to stop pushing the peanut. He’s choosing a different route. “Not done yet,” Kinsey put on his Twitter bio shortly after he was canned. That’s exactly how I feel.