SMASHING THE PLATEAU

Expanded Notes

Clarifying the ideas that move too fast in conversation.

Podcasts reward breadth over depth. My conversation with David covered ground from identity formation to success inflation, but ideas had to move fast. You know the experience: something lands, you think "I wish they'd stayed there longer", but the conversation moves on.

One concept that deserved more room is what I call Motion vs Direction, and I want to stay with it here because it names a pattern I see in many of the executive transitions I encounter. It sits underneath much of what people mistakenly call burnout, midlife crisis, or strategic indecision.
The distinction is simple and the consequences are not. Motion is movement. Direction is movement with intention. The leaders who fail in transition are rarely the ones who did not act. They are usually the ones who never named what the action was for. The "how" question arrived before the "what for" one.

This is hard to detect from inside, because motion looks productive. It generates emails, meetings, decisions, and the appearance of progress. In the beginning it feels good, rewarding. But it soon exhausts people. Many of the leaders who arrive at coaching describing themselves as burned out are exhausted by something more specific than overwork. The depletion comes from movement that has lost its anchor: three months of activity in service of nothing in particular produces a fatigue that no vacation resets. In these circumstances, it is not unusual that the body knows the difference long before the cognitive machinery does.

Why does this happen? Because the old narrative used to do the orientation work for them. Inside the corporation, the structure pointed: this quarter, this number, this team, this account. The direction was a given. When the structure dissolves (through merger, exit, retirement, founding), the orientation has to be rebuilt internally, and most leaders never had to do that work explicitly before. They were the kind of people who knew what to do next, because the system told them. Now the system is silent, and they confuse the volume of their own activity for an answer.

There is a clean diagnostic I use with clients in this position. I ask them, in plain language, what they are moving toward. They usually answer with a strategy or a job title. I push past those, because both are answers to the how-question. I want what is underneath them. If a client cannot answer in two sentences without abstraction, they are in motion without direction, and no amount of additional motion will resolve it. The work, in that moment, is to stop and to find the question that has been waiting for them.

Direction comes first. This is not a moral claim. It is a structural one. You cannot optimize a route without knowing where you are going, and you cannot make decisions about how to spend a year without knowing what you want the year to make of you. Productivity, the central virtue of the optimization industry, does not solve this. It accelerates it. Bernie Madoff was extraordinarily productive. Elizabeth Holmes was extraordinarily productive. The question is what your productivity is in service of, and whether you would still be doing it if no one were watching.

Most of the executives I work with already do enough. The work is to know why they are doing it, in language they could defend at the kitchen table. Once the direction is named, the motion almost takes care of itself.

The downloadable Direction vs Motion Diagnostic below is a short reflection designed to help you sit with the question before deciding what, if anything, to do about it.

Direction vs Motion Diagnostic

A reflection for leaders who suspect they are in motion without orientation.

This is not a personality test. There is no score, no profile, no quadrant waiting to land you in. It is a small set of questions designed to surface, in your own language, what you have been moving toward, and whether the motion still belongs to a story you would still write today.