In one of my jobs, for months at a time I would have just five to ten hours of client work a week, but I was still expected to commute and be in the office for more than 55 hours a week. I literally did laps around the office, drank extra coffee just to feel something, and took two-hour lunches in the park, sometimes taking a nap on the grass. That

So many professionals accept this type of work arrangement as the best they can hope for, convincing themselves that work is not meant to be enjoyed. In fields like consulting, finance, and law, this situation is even normalized and many people enter these careers expecting to make sacrifices in their lives before they start.

“after you leave home, the old maps — reliable and helpful for so long — no longer work.”⁠

less. You repurpose your inherent creativity to figure

The questions I most often come back to include: What is work? How did you arrive at that conclusion? What scripts are you unconsciously living out? Are they serving you or holding you back? Is there a better script for your life, right now?

This is why when people ask me, “How can I do what you’re doing?” I can’t tell them what they want to hear. They want easy answers, a shortcut to a future state of success. But the path that will lead us to the life we want is uniquely our own, inevitably filled with the exact challenges we’d rather avoid.

“Good work and good education are achieved by visitation and then absence, appearance and disappearance. Most people who exhibit a mastery in a work or a subject have often left it completely for a long period in their lives only to return for another look. Constant busyness has no absence in it, no openness to the arrival of any new season, no bir

All accomplishments came at someone else's expense. The corporate world fuels this non-zero-sum anxiety: if others are working late in the office, you convince yourself to stay late too. When others get promoted “ahead” of you, you feel insecure and envious because you think it means you aren’t good enough. But when you find a path that is uniquely

So many professionals accept this type of work arrangement as the best they can hope for, convincing themselves that work is not meant to be enjoyed. In fields like consulting, finance, and law, this situation is even normalized and many people enter these careers expecting to make sacrifices in their lives before they start.