Eight hours alone in the car coming home from a leadership conference. Which is about four hours too many to be thinking about leadership.
I keep coming back to the quiet ones. The most regulated, most actually present people in that room — the ones who could hold a conversation, stay in the energy, take up exactly the right amount of space. They barely said a word. And they were the ones who made the whole room feel safe to be in.
Nobody built an industry around that. We built one around telling people how to lead.
In this episode I get into the contradiction nobody names out loud: you're told everything is about you — your brand, your vision, your path — and in the same breath, you're told to be responsible for other people. Show them where to go. I don't know how you hold both of those at once. I'm not sure I've ever seen it done cleanly.
I also talk about my friend Milly, who lives on an island with 191 people and walks for hours every day, and who thinks nothing needs to be hard to be worth doing. Which I agree with completely. And also can argue against completely. Both at once.
And I get into the specific tax on people who see things before other people see them — the visionaries, the ones a half step ahead of the room — and the choice between spending your life translating for everyone else or trusting the right people to catch up on their own.
By the end I land somewhere I didn't expect to land, which is usually how I know an episode is done.
What are you actually optimizing for. Proof that you worked hard. Or your life feeling like your life.
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