Rick told me he got the call last week. The CEO of a regional logistics company where he had run operations for six years was making the biggest bet in the company’s history: a western expansion with three new distribution centers. She wanted him to lead it, with a seat on the executive team.
He’d said all the right things on the phone, then walked out to the parking lot and called his wife. “They want me,” he said, and they both started laughing. That night they opened a bottle of wine they’d been saving.
It was a great offer. And a real affirmation of his capacity. He’d worked hard, earned it, and he knew he could do it.
The next morning was Friday, which meant breakfast. For almost three years Rick had kept a standing table at a diner near the warehouse for any young manager who wanted to come. They brought him conversations they were dreading and promotions they weren’t sure they’d earned. Once, someone brought a resignation letter and left without sending it.
Two regulars now ran sites of their own. One had started on the loading dock after eight years in the Army, hired by Rick after others had passed him over. Rick was prouder of those two than of any quarterly number he’d ever hit.
That Friday, a shift supervisor named Aisha told him she’d been asked to manage a team of forty and wasn’t sure she could. They talked for an hour. He left more alive than he’d felt since the call, and on the drive back he did the math. The western role meant three time zones and near-constant travel. It also meant no more Friday breakfasts.
The offer was still a great one. But a question had slipped in beside it: Is this what I want everything I’ve built to be for?
Most of us ask questions like that when friction forces us to: when a boss becomes impossible or a role disappears. Rick had no such push. Things were going well, which is exactly when the question is easiest to skip.
For capable people, opportunity is a reliable engine. Someone sees a need and believes you can meet it, and one good role leads to the next. Much of what we value in our lives began this way.
But the momentum can make it difficult to consider where we’re going. Each next step brings challenges, rewards, and people counting on us. Even our reflection stays inside the frame: How can I lead this team better? How do I keep up with everything I’ve promised? Answering those questions can absorb nearly everything we have.
The larger question waits: What do I want these commitments, taken together, to create?
You can choose each one thoughtfully and still rarely consider the life they are building together. It can be a very good life, assembled largely from opportunities others have conceived.
Authoring a Life
While you’ve been doing the work, your capacity has been growing. Experience has given you judgment that early enthusiasm never could. You know where efforts stall and when a problem needs patience or better process instead of another push. Years of excellent work have earned you relationships and credibility. Together, these allow you to see possibilities, and gather people to pursue them, in ways you couldn’t have ten years ago.
Has your sense of what you might create grown along with your ability to create it?
And what is worthy of what you now have?
The default answer is bigger: more scope, a larger stage. Sometimes bigger is exactly right. But capable people are routinely offered greater responsibility before they’ve considered what they want that responsibility to serve.
For Rick, the western region was bigger. The breakfasts pointed toward a purpose he hadn’t fully recognized. For fifteen years he had seen promising people promoted and left to sink, and capable ones never given a first chance. He had been addressing those failures one breakfast, and one hire, at a time. He’d never thought of it as his work. It was something he did around his work because he cared about it.
Your aim may be different. Perhaps you’ve seen your industry from the inside long enough to know how it could do less harm, and you could help lead that change. Perhaps a relationship has waited years for your full attention.
You don’t need a finished vision to begin. Often, involvement helps you discover what you want to create. But an aim needs enough attention to start shaping your decisions. Alongside Can I do this? comes another question: What could this make possible for what I care about?
A few days after the call, Rick phoned the CEO. He wanted the role but proposed a different shape. He would hire a strong deputy to run daily operations while he established a leadership academy to prepare the managers the expansion needed. It would also recruit people the industry overlooked, including veterans and people returning to work after prison.
The region would be the pilot. If it worked, he wanted to take the academy company-wide and lead it. In three years, he told her, he wanted to be building the company’s leaders, not just running its warehouses.
“Nobody has ever pitched me an expansion plan like that,” she said. Then she asked him to put it in writing.
He's drafting it now. There are costs to work through, responsibilities to negotiate, and no guarantee she’ll agree. But he is authoring what the opportunity could become.
This week, before you weigh the next opportunity, ask what is worthy of what you have. Write down one thing you'd love to bring into being that nobody is likely to offer you. Then give it a beginning, however small.
Some of what matters most will never arrive as a request, not even inside a great offer. You'll have to give it a place in your life.
And that's the Gist of it.
Thank you for reading.
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Marilyn Gist