1975
In 1975, The Tubes released a song called “What Do You Want From Life?” and answered with a six-minute satirical avalanche: a Ginsu knife, a kewpie doll, a trip to Tahiti, someone else’s wife. The joke was obvious, because none of it was the answer.
Fifty years later, I’m still asking the same question, but I wait for a real answer.
The Blank
I sit down with smart people for a living, the kind who help other people figure out their lives: coaches, consultants, founders who’ve built things. And at some point in that first conversation, I ask them a simple question: What do you want?
Most of them freeze. Not because it’s a trick, and not because they’re being evasive. They freeze because nobody’s ever asked them directly, with the expectation that they’ll actually answer. They’ve spent years helping clients define outcomes, set goals, and build plans, but when the spotlight turns around on them, they go blank.
That blank isn’t a red flag. It’s the starting point.
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Finding the Mountain
Most consultants show up with ropes and crampons, ready to climb. They’ve got frameworks and methodologies and a whole system ready to deploy. The problem is that nobody’s decided which mountain yet, or if there even is one.
I do something different. Before we talk about the climb, I want to know if there’s a mountain in your future. Can you see it? Can you feel it? And if you can’t, that’s not a problem. That’s the work.
Close Your Eyes
I learned this from improv. You’re in a scene, doing the thing, saying your lines, and the coach stops everything: “Hold it. How do you feel about each other right now? What’s the emotion?” And you realize you’ve been so busy doing that you forgot you’re a human having an experience.
The same thing happens in business. We’re consumed with the doing, the strategy, the tactics, the next quarter. We forget to ask what we actually want and how it will feel when we get there.
So I ask people to close their eyes. I tell them it’s a year from now, they did the thing, they climbed the mountain, and I ask them how it makes them feel. What follows is silence, but not awkward silence. Working silence. Because for most people, this is genuinely hard. They’ve never future-paced, never let themselves sit in the emotion of accomplishment before it happens.
Here’s the discipline that took me years to learn: after I ask the question, I shut up. I don’t fill the space or offer suggestions or put words in their mouth. I just wait, because that’s where the truth lives.
Training, Not Therapy
Sometimes they can’t feel it. They go blank, not because they’re being evasive but because they’re genuinely disconnected from it. And that tells me something important: either we haven’t defined the mountain clearly enough yet, or nobody’s ever asked them to access that part of themselves.
This isn’t therapy. It’s training, and it happens right there in the moment. We practice together. Close your eyes. Look around. You accomplished this thing. What do you notice? What do you feel?
I don’t need someone else to tell me how I feel about my wins. I want to get that from myself, and I want my clients to build that same muscle. That feeling becomes fuel for the next climb.
The Scoreboard
Years ago, I met a game designer who went on to work at the Serious Games Institute in the UK, and he broke down gamification into five principles. First, you have to opt in, meaning you choose to play and you’re not conscripted. Second, you know the rules. Third, you know who the leader is. Fourth, there’s a scoreboard. And fifth, you have to have fun.
That fourth one changed how I work with people. If you’re climbing a mountain and you don’t know how to measure progress, you’re just wandering. You might be going in circles or even descending, and you’d have no idea.
The scoreboard has to be bespoke because your mountain isn’t my mountain, and your metrics won’t be my metrics. It could be revenue or churn reduction or getting written up in the Atlantic or finally finishing the book. But once we know what the scoreboard looks like, we can backcast from the summit. If this is a three-month climb, where should you be at three weeks? At three days? At three hours? Now we’re not guessing anymore. Now we can actually tell if we’re winning.
What’s at Stake?
This is the question that separates real work from busywork: What if we don’t do it?
Most people have never been asked that directly. They’re so busy justifying why they should do something that they’ve never sat with what happens if they don’t. And if there are no stakes, I’m not interested. Find someone else. I want to play at the highest level.
Think about it this way: if you’re the fastest runner in your country, you get invited to the Olympics. Do you show up without a coach? Of course not. You’re the best in the nation, and you still need someone in your corner, someone who’s climbed a mountain like this before and can see what you can’t see when you’re in the middle of it.
That’s what I do. Sometimes I run alongside, but mostly I’m the one helping you see the mountain clearly, measure the climb honestly, and understand what’s actually at stake.
Tony Robbins said something I’ve never forgotten: people pay attention when they pay. It’s not really about the money; it’s about the stakes. When something costs you, whether that’s time, money, reputation, or comfort, you show up differently. You stop playing small ball.
Three Simple Questions
All three of these questions sound simple: What do you want? How will you know? What’s at stake? And almost nobody is used to answering them.
Every time, without fail, I watch smart, accomplished people who help others for a living get stopped cold by these basic questions. That’s not a criticism. That’s the observation that changed how I work.
Trust Speed
I’m not surprised anymore when I hear that AI implementations fail. The research says somewhere between 70 and 95 percent of them do, depending on who’s counting. And it’s not because the technology is wrong. It’s because nobody did this work first. Organizations bought tools before they knew what they’re trying to accomplish, and consultants deployed systems before anyone had defined success. Everyone was moving at tech speed when they should have been moving at trust speed.
So I built a system. Thirty-five specialized AI agents, each with a specific job: one researches, one guards my voice, one catches AI-sounding language, one enforces quality. They work together like an orchestra, which is why I call it Orchestrated Intelligence. The system even extracts what I call Voice DNA, the patterns and rhythms that make my writing sound like me and not like a machine.
But here’s what nobody expects: the system doesn’t start with technology. It starts with a conversation. The same conversation I just described.
Objectives. Metrics. Value. What’s your mountain? How will you know you’re climbing it? What happens if you don’t?
Everything else is the climb, but you can’t orchestrate intelligence in service of nothing. You have to know where you’re going first.
Who This Is For
I’m not for everyone, and I know that.
I’m most useful to people who are already in the arena: coaches who’ve never had a coach, consultants who spend all day asking other people hard questions but freeze when someone turns it around on them, leaders who are good (actually good) but sense there’s another level they haven’t reached yet.
If you’re just getting started, there are better resources for you. If you’re looking for someone to hand you a playbook, I’m not your guy. But if you’ve been at this long enough to know that the real work isn’t the frameworks but the clarity that comes before the frameworks, then let’s talk.
Fifty Years Later
The Tubes were joking. A Ginsu knife won’t answer the question, and neither will a trip to Tahiti or a kewpie doll or any of the stuff we pile up thinking it’ll fill the gap.
But the question is real. It’s been real for fifty years, probably longer.
What do you want from life?
If you can’t answer that right now, that’s worth noticing. Not as a failure, but as a starting point. That’s not a problem. That’s the work.
Your Mountain
If you want to try answering those three questions out loud, I’m game.
What’s your mountain? How will you know you’re climbing it? What happens if you don’t?
Tell me about your mountain. I read every response.
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Postscript: Hat tip to author Alan Weiss, whose book was introduced to us many years ago and who originated the OMV concept, which we (Kymberlee and I) have molded into our own way of working.
