Three years into a consulting career that looked successful on paper, I was staring out a plane window at nothing in particular, asking, What is this actually for?
Alabama on Tuesday. Ohio on Thursday. Good firm with good people to work with, meaningful and intellectually stimulating work, satisfied and not-overly-obnoxious clients. By all measures, things were going well. And yet, I was profoundly unsatisfied.
It wasn't the only time I've felt that. Whether it was securing a fully funded scholarship for my PhD or landing my dream job, I just could not find sustained satisfaction. The signs pointed back to me and what I was valuing in those situations. I knew what the next step for my career was, but none of it felt meaningful. As a behavioral scientist, I started asking questions and running experiments to see if I could change it. I eventually found that I could.
That's what this newsletter is about: understanding what's happening beneath the surface in moments like that, and practical things you can try the next time you're in one.
In my day job, I design leadership programs, facilitate leadership development with high-performing teams, and coach executives at Fortune 100 companies. Over the past year, I've also been focusing on writing, both on Substack and on Big Think, interviewing thinkers like poker player and decision scientist Annie Duke, behavioral scientist Arthur Brooks, and social psychologist Emily Balcetis.
Whether interviewing someone for an article or coaching executives, one question I often come back to is What is this for? It's confronting. And it's the entry point for almost every meaningful change I've seen in leadership, in my own life, and in the executives and teams I've spent the past decade working with. Most people hear that question and wait — maybe until it forces something: a burnout, a resignation, or a promotion that feels like a finish line, if only for a moment.
You don't have to wait that long.
THE REFRAME
Finding an honest answer to What is this for? takes wisdom, something we spend our whole lives earning, often in humbling ways. Accumulating knowledge, skills, and credentials does not guarantee you'll make wise decisions. Knowledge is what you've learned; wisdom is what you've extracted from that knowledge: patterns you can name, biases you can catch, predictions you can make, and the judgment to know how to act in the crazy situations you find yourself in.
Wisdom in professional life can show up in four different ways. Almost all of us are severely underdeveloped in at least one.
There's knowing what actually matters to you: the values and priorities underneath the goals you're pursuing. That kind of clarity usually requires slowing down in ways that can feel uncomfortable, and doing the self-examination to know which goals are genuine and which are status games you've drifted into without quite realizing it.
There's the ability to see how your own thinking gets distorted under pressure: The sunk costs you protect. The confirmation bias shaping how you read your team. The emotional reactivity that narrows your thinking at exactly the moment it needs to be at its broadest and most creative. (A leader I coach once described his communication style under pressure as "direct." His team, on the other hand, described it as "being an ass." Both could be true, but you can't lead well from patterns you can't see.)
There's understanding how your patterns land on other people. You can be reasonably self-aware, values-aligned, and a strong decision-maker in isolation, and still be a destructive leader if you don't understand how your presence ripples outward and affects others.
And there's judgment — knowing when to act, when to wait, and what action actually fits the situation. This is the hardest to teach and the easiest to overlook.
In my day job, I work with people who are, by every measurable standard, at the top of their game. Most of what the industry offers them is more knowledge: better research, sharper models, cleaner frameworks. Those matter and they can help. But Work Wise is interested in a harder question: who you're becoming through the choices you make at work, and how to make more of those choices aligned with the wisdom of who you already are and who you want to be going forward.