His advice is great. He is great. Here’s how he opens it:

Man, I’m very sorry to hear that. That is terrible, and I wish you the best.

There are about a million different ways to answer this question, depending on one’s circumstances, but here’s what I did immediately after getting fired last year:

1. Called my mom and told her not to freak out and that I was going to be fine – Because my mom is a worrier, I waited about 45 minutes after hanging up with her the first time and called her again to reassure her I was going to be OK. She said, “I’m so glad you called again. I was trying to lie down for a nap but I’m just so on edge now.”

2. Deposited my severance check – Hopefully you got a severance check. If not, to hell with that company.

3. Got a haircut – Try this. It feels good. I turned off my phone, sat down in the barber’s chair, and closed my eyes. When the lady asked how my day was going, I said, “It’s really great,” and I 90 percent meant it.

Read his whole response here. (Also: Last year we talked a bit about his Career Journey.)

Check out Cord Jefferson on the the importance and value of public transit as, if not an equalizer, a way to expose us to different people than we normally encounter, particularly the homeless: “One bad thing about LA, I think, is how easy it is to avoid homeless people … At least New York—being a place of walking and public transit—makes you regularly confront the fact that there are homeless people all around, and that many of them are not receiving adequate care.”

Cord Jefferson has a really great and thoughtful essay about his dad, a black man and a lifelong Republican: “My father spent his whole life living up to the standards Republicans ostensibly expected of him, because that’s what came naturally to him. But he can never be white, and, more and more, that seems to preclude him from inclusion in the party where he once found a home.”