I came in expecting to talk about my career. We ended up talking about my life.
It was a coaching session, my first. I'd expected the usual: positioning, recruiting timelines, strategy. Instead my coach asked bigger questions, the ones I'd been thinking about for a while but hadn't really said out loud.
Why here, why now
The honest answer to why GSB is almost embarrassingly simple: I fell for the place the first time I walked onto campus, fourteen years ago. Not the buildings, but what it seemed to stand for: a whole community of people genuinely trying to make the world a little better.
Why now is harder. I've spent the last few years in product, and I loved it. Coming here is a chance to build on that: to zoom out, sharpen how I lead, and spend a year around people thinking about every kind of problem. I want to be intentional about what comes next, whatever it turns out to be.
A story about a rabbi
She told me about someone she knows: a long, decorated career in medicine, an executive at a major institution, who later became a rabbi.
It stuck with me more than I expected. I've had a feeling for a while that the second half of my life won't be about money, that at some point the question stops being how much and starts being for what.
The question I'm carrying
Her real advice for a year with this many options: before you choose any of them, get clear on who you are and who you want to become.
Keep those two questions close. The calendar always fills up, and when it does, they help you decide where your attention should go.
She pointed me back to an old idea I'd half-forgotten: Ikigai. It's the reason for being that sits where four circles overlap: what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Most of life sits in two or three of them. The hard part is finding the small spot in the middle where all four meet.
Every beginning starts with an ending
One framework stuck with me more than the rest. Every real transition, it turns out, starts with an ending, not a beginning. First you let go of an old identity and the old way of doing things. Then comes an awkward in-between, where you're figuring out the new patterns before they fully set in. Only after that does the new beginning actually show up.
First you let go. Then you begin.
Which means the in-between I'm in right now, with one chapter closed and the next not quite open, isn't a detour. It is the work.
Approaching it all with curiosity
The last thing I'm taking with me is the simplest. Approach the year, and the people in it, with curiosity. Get genuinely interested: in the ideas, in the classes, and most of all in the people I'll be spending it with. Ask questions. Stay open. Assume everyone in the room knows something I don't.
What I'm reading
She sent me off with two books:
- Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
- The Culture Map by Erin Meyer