The Current
Why leaders drift from purpose to motion and how to find your way back
Through years of building, leading, and scaling teams, I’ve learned that leadership has a strange duality.
Sometimes the dashboards stay green, the milestones land, and from the outside it all looks like progress. But inside, leaders can still feel the drift, not from any single role or company, but from the nature of the work itself.
You step into a role because you want to build. To scale something. Not just to lead, but to shape it with your own hands. To give it meaning, or perhaps to let it give meaning to your life.
In the beginning, it feels alive. Ideas turn into action. Action into progress.
But then the pace takes over. The weeks blur. The work becomes a current that carries you whether you want to move or not.
On paper, it looks like progress. In your chest, it feels like absence.
Team growth that multiplies your meetings but divides your impact
A calendar so full it looks like importance, but feels like imprisonment
Your team shipping faster than ever, even though you're not sure what you're shipping toward
Promotions that expand your influence but narrow your impact
Back-to-back successful quarters that somehow feel identical
Momentum is seductive like that. It whispers: Keep going. You’re moving fast. That must mean you’re going somewhere. But momentum lies. Well, sometimes. It conflates motion with meaning, speed with significance. It mistakes the dashboard for the destination.
And there are moments that cut through the momentum that remind you why you started:
A strategic decision where you can see the long-term impact, not just the quarterly numbers
An unexpected hour with no meetings where you make something real
Watching someone you developed tackle a challenge that would have stumped them a year ago
A moment when your architecture choice from months ago enables something beautiful you never anticipated
A team retrospective where everyone's talking about the work, not the process
But they’re flashes, not fire. Brief reminders of purpose in an ocean of motion. But you keep moving, afraid that if you slow down, you’ll see what’s missing. Afraid that stopping will push you out of the comfort of always being on the run.
Over time, I’ve learned that meaning doesn’t wait at the end of a milestone. It lives in the middle. In the reason you said yes in the first place. And if you don’t tend to it, the motion will hollow you out.
That’s why it matters to pause. To step outside the rush and ask yourself:
Why did I say yes to this role?
Am I still walking in that direction?
Or have I been drifting and letting the work define me instead of the other way around?
Because the truth is, the job will never stop taking. It’s on you to decide what you’ll give and what you’ll keep. The real measure of leadership isn’t just whether you deliver for the company. It’s whether you can deliver for yourself, too.
So every now and then, pull yourself out of the current.
Remind yourself not to confuse velocity with direction, or metrics with meaning.
And when you feel yourself slipping out of your own story, stop. Find your way back to the reason you started.
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