What Was Waiting

Part One

The assumption I operated on for most of my working life was one many senior people share, and almost none of them articulate. The assumption is that the career is the instrument by which the larger question of your life gets answered.

It is a compelling assumption, because the career is the most visible thing about you, and because other people are always ready to evaluate it, and because there is a legible ladder you can climb with feedback at every rung. The career is a dashboard. It gives you numbers. It gives you reviews. It gives you titles. It gives you, above all, the sensation of progress, which is almost indistinguishable from the sensation of meaning, until you slow down enough to notice that they are different.

The quiet problem with the assumption is that the career does not actually address the question. The question is something like: who am I, what am I for, how do I want to spend the finite years I have, and what kind of presence do I want to be in my own life. The career can produce answers to adjacent questions. What it cannot do is answer the central one. You can have the most impressive career in the room and still not know the answer to who you are, what you are for, or what kind of life you actually want.

I worked this out slowly, by which I mean I refused to work it out for about fifteen years, because working it out would have required stopping, and stopping was not on the list of options I had given myself. The career kept generating dashboards. The dashboards kept reading well. Underneath the dashboards, the larger question kept getting quieter, not because it was going away, but because I was no longer in a position to hear it.

Part Two

What was actually waiting, once I had been forced to stop, was not an answer to the larger question. It was the larger question itself, which I had not actually faced in two decades. The career had been a reasonable substitute for having to face it. The career had also been a reasonable excuse for not facing it.

The work I have done since then, and the work I now do with the people I work with, is not about finding the answer to the larger question. The answer is different for every person, and it is rarely reachable in a straight line. The work is about getting into a position where you can actually hear the question, sit with it, and respond from something truer than the dashboards you have been reading for the last twenty years.

Most senior people never get there, because they never stop long enough to be found by the question. They keep climbing, and they keep generating better dashboards, and the larger question recedes further and further into the background, until eventually it becomes something they remember having cared about, a long time ago.

Continue reading: The Version You Were Trying to Avoid →

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