Are You Working Toward the Future You Actually Want?
In the quiet of the year’s end, a question about the ladders we climb.
We are in the thick of the “Quiet Week”—that strange, suspended time between the Solstice and the turning of the calendar year.
The days are short. The emails have slowed down. And if we are lucky, there is a little more silence than usual.
Culturally, this is the season where we are told to rev up. We are bombarded with messages about New Year’s resolutions, Q1 goals, and “crushing” the year ahead. We are trained to look forward and ask, “How can I do more?”
But in the quiet of this week, I want to invite you to ask a different question:
“Am I building a future I actually want to live in?”
The Ladder and the Wall
For most of our professional lives, success is defined for us. Get the stable job. Earn the title. Hit the salary milestone. Keep climbing .
We become experts at climbing. We get so good at the mechanics of ascent—working harder, optimizing our schedules, taking on more responsibility—that we rarely pause to look up.
And then, one day, we reach a plateau we worked desperately to get to, and we realize the view isn’t what we expected. The rewards don’t land the way they used to. The praise feels flat. The win feels heavy .
We realize, with a sinking feeling, that we have spent years climbing a ladder that is leaning against the wrong wall.
Redefining “Enough”
The trouble is, our lives change but our definitions of success often don’t. You can evolve into someone with new values, new needs, or a different energy capacity... yet still hold yourself to a scorecard you wrote ten years ago .
What if, for 2026, success didn’t mean “more”?
What if “enough” wasn’t a compromise, but a state of sufficiency—a balance between security, meaning, and rest? .
“Enough” might look like:
Doing smaller, deeper work instead of scaling up.
Earning steady income that leaves space for your health, rather than chasing a higher bracket that costs you your peace.
A season of slowing down, letting your ambition exhale.
A Solstice Reflection
Before you make a single plan for next year, try this.
Picture yourself three years from now. Don’t imagine your job title or your bank account. Imagine your Tuesday morning.
Where are you waking up? How does your body feel? Who are you talking to? What is the first work task you touch, and does it make you feel drained or curious? .
If that imagined future feels radically different from the path you are currently beating down... pay attention to that.
You don’t have to burn everything down today. You just have to notice. Awareness is the beginning of change.
Rethinking Work
If you are feeling that quiet tug—the sense that the old version of work no longer fits—I created a space to help you explore it.
Rethinking Work is a short, text-based course designed for this exact season. It isn’t about “hustling” or “optimizing.” It is a series of five reflections to help you pause, reconnect to what matters, and design a next step that feels like a choice, not a reaction .
You can read it in the quiet moments of this week.
If you are ready to move your ladder, we’re here to help you steady it.