Midline Monday: find your soil
Progress is not only about how hard you work, but where you decide to work.
Weekly Reflections
A friend of mine recently left a very good job. Senior title. Large company. First-class flights to Europe.
He walked away and joined a startup. Smaller team, smaller budget, much harder work. I asked him if he was happy.
I get to go build something.
He’s working harder than ever. But the work has a different texture. It pulls him forward instead of pinning him in place.
Author James Clear;
If you want a plant to grow, you can fuss over it every day—watering, weeding, moving it toward the sun. Or you can place it in the right soil and let nature do most of the work. A seed planted in the right location can thrive on its own.
Life is much the same. Progress is not only about how hard you work, but also about where you decide to work. Where is your energy better spent right now: pushing harder or planting yourself in better ground?
Progress is not only about how hard you work, but where you decide to work.
Jim Collins makes a similar observation about what he calls encodings: the durable, intrinsic traits that make up our psychological wiring. Our constellation of capacities. The idea is that we each carry a distinct internal architecture, and the degree to which that architecture aligns with our external environment determines whether we feel in frame — engaged, energized, alive — or out of frame — drained, restless, vaguely dissatisfied even when things look good on paper.
Most of us spend very little time understanding our own wiring. We know our job title. We know our salary.
But do we know what actually energizes us? What kind of problems light us up? What kind of environments make us better?
These are different questions. And they matter enormously.
A high performer in the wrong environment doesn’t just underperform. They suffer. They often can’t name what’s wrong, because on the surface, everything looks fine.
But the soil is wrong.
In respond, we tend to skip the inner work and move straight to the outer fix. New job, new city, new relationship. But the frame follows us unless we understand what we’re actually looking for.
Here are a few questions that might help:
When do you lose track of time? Work that pulls us into a state of absorption is a signal. It points toward our natural energies. Most people can name these moments if they pause long enough to notice them.
What would you do if the outcome wasn’t being watched? What kind of work would you still show up for? This question helps us understand out intrinsic motivations.
Where have you felt most yourself? There’s a version of you that exists when the environment is right. When the people, the pace, the mission, and the culture align with something deep in our wiring. We’ve probably felt it at least once. It’s worth trying to understand those conditions.
The soil matters.
This is worth taking seriously. Especially at midlife, when we have enough experience to know the difference between performing well and thriving.
The hard work isn’t going anywhere. The question is just whether we’re planting in the right soil.
Onward 🖤