Do I Want to Be Doing This Right Now?

https://youtu.be/DHNeEnFr0-U

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 probably lives in you too, and what follows is what I learned from putting ten of these wake-up calls side by side, including a question you can start asking today that gets you the lesson without needing the emergency.

What got me about that story is the car, still running outside the emergency room while he walked in to save his own life. Even in that moment, he was handling it the way he'd handled everything for decades, alone and capably, without asking anyone for help.

The stories come from a compilation episode I just put together from six months of Midlife Remix conversations. Simon Verhoeven, a German filmmaker, finally held the award he'd dreamt about for years and felt nothing, just a flat "okay, so what's next." Molly Carroll, a therapist and author, collapsed on her kitchen floor one ordinary afternoon, and two and a half hours later pulled herself up by the countertop and drove to pick up her kids from school, because nobody else was going to.

They came from different lives and different kinds of work, but every one of them hit a moment where the life they'd built stopped making sense.

I recognize the pattern because turning 50 did a version of this to me. I didn't collapse - I just couldn't pretend anymore that most of my life was still in front of me. And I see the earlier stages of it constantly in the executives I coach, people performing at a high level who can't explain why hitting the number doesn't feel like anything anymore. That matters beyond their personal lives, because when you're leading from inside a life that has stopped making sense, it shapes what you say yes to, how patient you are with your people, and how long you sit on the hard conversations.

The wake-up call doesn't bring new information

Not one of these people learned something new from their crisis. That's the part I didn't expect.

Thomas spent his career in medicine. He knew exactly what chronic stress does to a body, and he knew his family history down to the month. Molly is a therapist who spends her days helping people with the very thing that put her on that floor. The signals had been there for years. Being good at their work is what let them keep overriding the signals.

So the heart attack and the kitchen floor didn't deliver new information, they took away the option of ignoring what was already there.

Most of the leaders I work with believe on some level that when it's time to change, they'll know that some piece of clarity will arrive and make the decision for them. Listening to these ten people, that's not how it went for any of them. The clarity had been available for years. What was missing was the willingness to look at it, and it took an emergency to force the issue. Closing that gap is most of what I do with clients, helping capable people look honestly at what they already know while it's still a choice.

The body knows first

Jack Swift, who ran Janus Henderson's institutional business before co-founding companies well outside finance, described the mechanics of this better than I've heard anywhere. Feelings are faster, he told me. Thoughts arrive on what he calls a three-second tape delay, because the brain is taking experiences from the past and probability-weighting what's likely to happen next, with a built-in negativity bias. That system keeps us alive, but it's slow.

So the body registers that something is off long before the mind will say it. And then the mind gets to work explaining the feeling away, usually with very good arguments. You should like this job, look what it pays. You should be happy, look what you built. Jack's point was that the first feeling, the fast one, is usually the honest one. As he put it: your body knew. It knew right away.

I lived that for years. The restlessness I felt in my last corporate years wasn't subtle; I just kept busy enough not to feel it, and I had excellent explanations for staying: the team needed me, the timing was wrong, one more year would set us up. My body wasn't confused - I just wasn't listening yet.

It doesn't always arrive as an emergency

Not every moment in the compilation is a heart attack. Mike Ma was running digital innovation at Bank of America when his 10-year-old looked at him and said,

"Daddy, I think you just fly in planes and swear at people".

Joel Hempel spent 28 years at the same firm and called what kept him there corporate heroin: the bonus arrives and cures everything, and then the check clears and reality sets back in.

João Perre Viana walked away from a very sharp, very professional version of himself and then found himself staring at his own LinkedIn profile with no idea what to write under his name. The guy in the suit and tie was gone, and backpacker didn't seem like something you could put there.

None of those are emergencies. They're moments where pretending got harder. And I think that's the more useful category for most of us, because these moments are available all the time if we're willing to notice them, and they cost far less than the other kind.

The question Thomas asks all day

Thomas had built a whole practice around slowing down, his studio t-shirts read "Slow is the fast way." Cardiac rehab turned out to be another layer of slow entirely, exercising as gently as possible under supervision, and somewhere in that slowness a question came to him that never left: do I want to be doing this right now?

Not as a life philosophy but as a check-in about ordinary things: a meeting, a project, a show he's watching. He also started sleeping two more hours a night, every night, for the rest of his life. That was one of his answers.

What I like about the question is that it doesn't ask you to blow up your whole life. It isn't asking whether you should quit your job or whether this is the right life, it's small enough to answer honestly in the moment. I've been asking it since we recorded, and I've started offering it to my clients as well. Most of the time the answer is yes, which is its own kind of reassurance. The interesting moments are when the answer is no, and I notice I'm about to keep doing the thing anyway. I don't always change course. But at least I know it's a choice now, which wasn't true before.

The compilation episode is live now, ten people describing the moment they stopped pretending and what they did after. Nobody in it tells you what to do, which is part of why I wanted to make it. I put it together because I don't think this question should have to wait for an emergency, and because hearing ten versions of the same turning point makes it harder to believe your own restlessness is nothing.

And if you recognized yourself in any of it, that's the conversation I have with leaders every day. You don't have to wait for your own version of the parking lot to start it.

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