“It’s amazing how much effort it takes to stay stuck.”
For a long stretch of my career, I built my sense of value around how hard I worked. It wasn’t intentional. It just became the default. If I was exhausted, I felt productive. If I was overwhelmed, I felt essential. Hours, output, late nights, early flights… that was the rhythm. And the more I took on, the more it reinforced the identity of being the person who could carry the load. The grind became both the job and the measure of my worth.
For years, that equation worked. It powered me through agency leadership, global roles, Promax. Toil and value were so tightly linked that I didn’t know where one ended and the other began. If something felt hard, it felt important.
But then my life started shifting. I began feeling pulled toward work that didn’t look anything like what I had trained myself to recognize as “real.” It wasn’t about churning or managing chaos or staying up until two in the morning tweaking something for the tenth time. The work that was calling me forward was quieter and more rooted. It looked like clarity. Pattern recognition. Perspective. Guidance. Value that came from experience, not output.
And I avoided it.
I wanted it, but it didn’t fit the definition of work I’d spent decades building my identity around. The grind was familiar and measurable. It let me point to my effort and say, “See, I’m still needed.” Meanwhile, the work that actually reflected who I’ve become, the deeper, cleaner, more aligned work, felt almost suspiciously easy. Too natural. Too intuitive.
So I stayed still. And it drained me more than moving forward ever would have.
That was the part I didn’t want to admit: standing still is its own form of labor. Avoidance takes effort. You spend your energy holding up a definition of work that no longer fits. You fight your own evolution, trying to stay in a chapter that’s already closed.
The real shift of Week 3, and the one I kept pushing aside, was recognizing that my value is no longer tied to how hard something feels. My value now comes from what the work unlocks, not how much effort it takes to produce.
Once I finally admitted that, the thing I’d been avoiding became the most obvious next step.
This Week’s Question:
Where are you holding onto an old definition of “real work,” and what truth is it keeping you from seeing?