He'd been pointed at one prize his whole life — a particular seat his family had circled since he was a boy, proof that he was who they'd always said he was. He spent twenty years climbing toward it, and he got it. Then, a few years later, he admitted something during the assessment that surprised us both: now that he was in the chair, he felt almost nothing. Everything he'd organized himself around had arrived, and all it came to was his name and a fancy title on the office door. That was what made him dizzy — if the prize at the center of it all meant this little once it was his, what had he actually been moving toward?
I keep meeting some version of him.
The Silicon Valley founder convinced that his hunger to build was the most personal thing about him — until you saw it matched, to the letter, the gospel of the place he worked: found your own company, raise, scale, exit, and anything less — joining one, running someone else's — is a story about having settled.
The executive everyone calls the steady one — the one the team brings its panic to, who never lets anyone see her rattled — built a whole way of leading on being unshakeable and never once asked whether she wanted to be, or whether "steady" had become a role she couldn't put down without feeling like she'd failed everyone.
And one of them was me. I went to Stanford, and the path out was already laid: a couple of years of consulting, then a manager title, maybe a move into industry, and eventually enough money to make the degree feel like it had paid for itself. I followed it. It worked — though mostly what I mean is that it got me here. It just never quite felt like mine.
Leaders steering hard toward a destination, with all the conviction of a personal dream — until the seam shows, and the dream turns out to have been handed to them. A story told often enough by people they trusted that it stopped sounding like anyone else's voice. Sometimes no one told them at all; they absorbed it from the air around them, out of what a serious leader is supposed to want.
It can work for years. It gives direction without ever asking you to choose, and you develop a whole identity on top of that narrative — and it holds, right up until you question it. Then what's left isn't clarity. It's a strange vertigo: direction stops meaning much once you notice it was being supplied by a story you didn't write.
The unsettling part isn't discovering that one ambition was borrowed. It's realizing you can't yet tell which of the others are yours.
Discovering what you truly believe — and working toward that — is what holds the center of how you lead. Most effortlessly, and without fear of heights.
Names and identifying details have been changed or combined to protect client confidentiality. The diagnostic patterns are real.