When I ask a new client to tell me about themselves, most of them start with their job: the title, the company, what they've built. I did the same thing for most of my career, and it took me years to see how much of who I thought I was depended on what I happened to be running at the time.

Most of us know what we're like when we're stretched too thin. The team is short-handed, the calendar is full, and every person who stops by with a question feels like one more thing to get through. I've been that leader more times than I'd like to admit, which is probably why a bartender in Madrid made such an impression on me. He was running a packed wine bar by himself, with people waiting at the door, and he still gave us his full attention like we were the only ones ther

When I'm not interested in something I can't make myself focus on it, and when I am I can go so deep that the afternoon is gone. For most of my life I took that as a flaw in me, because nobody ever diagnosed me and I had no other explanation. Looking back I'm pretty sure it was ADHD. October is ADHD Awareness Month, and what I've learned is that it feels completely different depending on whether I'm doing work that fits who I am.

If your team is capable but keeps waiting for you to tell them what to do, it may be because they're working under the same standard you hold yourself to, one where nothing is ever good enough. I know because I led that way at Kasina, the first company I started, and it took me years to see where it came from. I hired people because I believed in how they thought, then shut them down whenever they disagreed with me. I made it clear my thinking was right and we were moving

"I have always felt that I've needed to prove myself." That's Stephanie Unwin, who became the CEO of Veronica Beard this year after thirteen years as its president. Most of the leaders I coach feel the same way. They get the title or build the company, and a few weeks later they're already chasing the next thing. I did it too. I spent most of my career trying to show my parents, and then everyone else, that I was worth something, and I still catch myself doing it.

Most of the leaders I coach are somewhere between 45 and 60, and they've spent twenty-five years getting very good at pushing through. Everyone around them calls it dedication. It's the skill that built their careers, and it's why people still call them when something breaks. What they notice now, if they let themselves, is that the pushing costs more than it used to. They're more tired at the end of a normal week, shorter with the people at home, and the work that used to

Most of the executives I coach got where they are largely by reassuring their teams. They're good in a crisis and good at keeping people calm. What they don't always see is that calm has a cost when it isn't real, and I didn't see it for a long time either.

I caught my hand reaching for my phone before I'd even decided to check anything. I was in LA a few weeks ago visiting my daughter, having my morning coffee while Sienna and Kade were still asleep, and there was my thumb, already hovering over the mail icon. I've been trying to break this habit for years. I don't check email on vacation, that's been the rule for a long time, and mostly I keep it. But the pull is still there.

Saturday morning, I walk to the farmers market with a list in my head: salad, tomatoes, kale, cheese, sausage, enough food for the week. I'm moving fast, eyes scanning stalls the way I'd scan a grocery aisle, and I get everything on the list in about twelve minutes. It's efficient. I also walk right past a little New Orleans-style jazz ensemble playing near the entrance without really hearing them, and I don't see a single person the whole time. If you've spent years buildin

I was standing in the San Francisco airport when my left arm and neck went numb, my heart started racing, and I was sure I was having a heart attack. The EKG came back normal. My doctor told me that if I didn't learn to reduce my stress, the next one would be real. That was the cost of decades of working hard on terms I had never stopped to examine. Last week, a 22-year-old described what I was missing better than I ever have: "Our generation recognizes a bad deal when

When Thomas Droge realized he was having a heart attack, he drove himself to the hospital and left the car running in the parking lot. He's a doctor. About fifteen minutes into it, he understood that this could be the moment three generations of men in his family had gone through; he was six months from the age his father was when he died, and his grandfather before him. And he still drove himself. If you've built a career on being the person who handles things, that reflex p

You're probably not going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be slowly outvalued by it, one task at a time. Most of the senior people I coach don't worry about that, because a whole job rarely disappears at once, which makes the erosion easy to miss until it's well along.

"AI amplifies what the leader brings. If the leader brings confusion, you get confusion at speed. You get chaos. If the leader brings clarity, you get clarity and execution at speed." That's Jack Swift, back on the Midlife Remix this week. If a leader walks into Monday's meeting confused about what it's even for, everyone goes back to their desks, opens Claude or Copilot, and starts querying from that confusion. The leader's inner state has become a business variable.

I’m an immigrant which means I chose to call America home. This year I'm holding on two things that don't cancel each other out: I’ve been able to build a life and companies that I couldn't have built anywhere else, and I'm more worried about where this country is headed than I've ever been. These are the same concerns, I’ve been hearing from almost every executive I coach.

I see it in capable people who've spent a decade moving from one good job to the next, each taken in real hope it's finally the one that fits. For a while it is, and then the interest drains out of it again, and with it the fear that maybe the problem is you.

Simon Verhoeven spent years dreaming about a particular German Film Award, and the moment it was finally in his hand, the first thing he felt wasn't satisfaction, it was "okay, so what's next?" He's one of the most successful directors in Germany, with films that became hits and got remade across Europe. The film that won for him, Ach, diese Lücke, diese entsetzliche Lücke, roughly "this gap, this terrible gap," is about loss, and he made it during the same years he was lo

Last night, I almost turned off the game that became the biggest comeback in NBA Finals history. That urge to skip the hard part is one I know well at work and in my career, and one I watch the leaders I coach give in to all the time, usually right when it matters most.

Mike was 40, head of digital strategy and innovation at Bank of America, with a job that looked great on paper. He says that's the moment he realized he had become the corporate version of the person he'd spent his whole life saying he never wanted to be.

It’s a reasonable bet, and until this year it was a safe one. Then Meta cut about 8,000 jobs this May, a tenth of the company, and Groupon roughly a quarter of its workforce, both to move the money into AI, and the people cut were largely experienced, well-paid, and supposedly untouchable. Being competent but no longer engaged doesn’t protect you the way it once did.

The bonus clears, and for a few weeks, you can stop asking yourself if this is really what you want. Then the check settles into the account, time passes, and the question comes back.