Nobody Knows When to Quit When things don't work, you try to figure out a way through. You've invested time. You've invested resources. And at some point a question arrives that you can't answer cleanly: should I invest more, or am I just dealing with sunk cost? The...

Ground There's a thing I've been calling ground. It's the internal surface you stand on when you decide to act. To take a risk. To sacrifice something for what you want, or for what you believe in. It's made of trust, hope, and expectation — not grand versions of...

How to Improve Quality of Life There's no shortage of advice on this. Most of it circles the same territory — exercise more, sleep better, invest wisely, nurture your relationships. The advice isn't wrong. But it tends to treat each domain in isolation, as if...

Absolute freedom can be an illusion. I spent a long time chasing the version that lives outside — in outcomes, in recognition, in circumstances finally arranging themselves the way I needed them to. There is always a next thing that will deliver it. A contract signed....

The Way We Treat People in Their Downs Ups and downs are part of life. Most of us accept this intellectually. Two sides of the same coin, we say. Natural rhythm. Inevitable. What we don't say — but what most of us have experienced — is that we treat people very...

Most leaders, when something goes wrong, look for a person to blame or a decision to reverse. The project is over budget — find the project manager who missed the signals. The system went live and users hate it — blame the vendor. The team keeps failing despite...

Nothing Personal Why leadership gets lonely — and what that loneliness is actually telling you Notice what happens to your calendar when a major program is funded and moving. People reach out. Stakeholders who were hard to pin down suddenly have availability. Vendors...