On Becoming a Lighthouse

Some ships find you. Some don't. And being okay with that.

Three years ago, I was on fire.

I had a point of view sharp enough to cut. A plan. An updated professional brand that finally said out loud what I’d spent two decades saying in conference rooms to people who nodded, took notes, and changed nothing. I had that specific energy that comes from finally deciding to stop being the dog they hire to bark and then punish for biting.

Twenty years. That’s how long I’d been inside organizations trying to turn the ship. Working within systems I could see were broken, making the case in the language those systems understood—data, frameworks, business outcomes—and watching the argument land and then get quietly absorbed into the very dysfunction I was diagnosing. You learn, after enough of those moments, that the ship doesn’t want to turn. The ship has decided that staying the course is safer than admitting how far off course it already is.

So I stopped trying to turn it from the inside.

I was hanging out my own shingle. Looking for leaders who already knew something was wrong—who’d felt it in the attrition numbers, in the exit interviews nobody acted on, in the meetings where everyone performed alignment and then went back to their desks and did whatever they were going to do anyway. I wanted the ones who were done with the performance. Who wanted someone to come in, call it what it was, and help them build something that actually worked for the humans inside it.

Yesterday, I caught up with a friend for the first time since. After the pleasantries burned off, she asked: “What happened to all that?”

Here’s what I told her.

I lost the desire for a fight that felt like only I was showing up to.

The systems are broken—profoundly, expensively, quietly broken in ways that cost people their careers, their confidence, their willingness to care. I knew that then. I know it now. But knowing a building is on fire while everyone else adjusts their chair and asks about the agenda—that’s not a mission. That’s a slow erosion.

The problem wasn’t the caring. The problem was the echo.

Comfort is not a logic problem. You can’t out-data someone’s survival strategy. The workplace doesn’t resist change because it’s stupid. It resists change because it’s terrified. And terrified people don’t want a visionary—they want reassurance that the thing they’ve always done is still good enough.

I couldn’t give them that. It would have been a lie.

* * *

Her question cracked something else open.

Not what happened to my fire. But why I’d handed the definition of meaningful work over to the very systems I was trying to fix.

Somewhere between genuine and gospel, purpose got repackaged. It got put in job postings and annual reports, stitched into company values and keynote slides. It became the thing organizations use to ask more of you while offering less in return.

“We’re mission-driven” became the professional version of exposure pays the bills.

Purpose stopped being something you discovered. It became something you owed. And when the chase exhausted you, the myth made it personal—told you the emptiness was a signal to keep searching, not a signal to question the premise.

The premise being: that your employment and your meaning should be the same thing.

They were never meant to be.

* * *

So I write here.

I put the work out there—how to lead differently, how to stop participating in systems that are costing everyone something. I publish it and let it move however it moves. Maybe one reader sends it to someone. Maybe that someone passes it to a leader who reads it at 6am with coffee going cold and thinks, yes, finally, this—and picks up the phone.

Maybe not. That’s fine too.

I’m not fighting for a room that doesn’t want to be rattled. I’m building something for the people who are already rattled—who feel the dysfunction but don’t yet have the language for it, who know something is broken but have been told so many times it’s normal that they’ve started to believe it.

They’re not in every boardroom. They’re not always the loudest voice. But they exist. And when they find this work, they know it’s for them.

A lighthouse doesn’t go looking for ships to guide. It just stands there, steady, shining—whether anything is coming or not. The ships that need it find it. The ones that don’t, don’t.

That’s enough. That’s always been enough.