Every morning my daughter takes her scooter and I walk beside her. Twenty minutes to school. It is the best part of my day.
In those twenty minutes she will ask me about why cats purr, whether fish have feelings, what happens when people stop being friends, how rockets stay up in space, and whether the cartoon villain was actually bad or just misunderstood. Sometimes all of this before we reach the end of the street.
She is six. She has not yet learned which questions are appropriate to ask out loud. She has not yet been taught which topics belong to which category, which curiosities are worth pursuing and which ones to quietly set aside. Everything is equally interesting. Everything connects to everything else.
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"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." — Pablo Picasso |
I think about this every morning. At what point did I stop asking questions like that? At what point did the curiosity narrow down into the things that were useful, relevant, productive — and everything else got quietly filed away as interesting but not important enough to pursue?
I am naturally a curious person. It is one of the things I actually like about myself. But even I have felt the narrowing. Twenty-five years in corporate will do that. The questions that get rewarded in meetings are not the ones that connect fish feelings to rocket science. They are the ones that solve the problem on the agenda and nothing else. The curiosity gets shaped, trimmed, directed. It does not disappear. It just learns which rooms it is welcome in.
My daughter has not learned that yet. I hope it takes a long time.
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The thing I noticed most consistently across twenty-five years of managing people is that the real differentiator was never the CV, the degree, or the title. It was whether the person could actually think.
Critical thinking sounds obvious when you say it out loud. Of course you want people who can think. But the reality of most organisations is that thinking — genuine, uncomfortable, questioning thinking — is not always welcome. The meeting culture, the consensus pressure, the performance of alignment. These are not environments that reward the person who asks why we are doing this at all. They reward the person who executes what has already been decided and makes everyone feel good about it.
There is a concept I have always believed in — the line manager as talent spotter. Not the HR system, not the performance review framework, not the leadership competency matrix. A specific person, close to the work, who sees something in someone before anyone else does and creates the conditions for it to develop. The best thing that can happen to your career is being seen clearly by someone with the judgment and the authority to do something about it. That is rarer than it should be.
The people who made the real difference in every team I managed were not the ones who managed relationships upward most effectively. They were the ones who could not help but think about the problem differently. They were sometimes inconvenient. They were almost always worth it.
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There are four things that most people spend the majority of their working lives chasing. Money. Power. Fame. Pleasure. These are not wrong desires — they are human ones. But they share a quality that is worth noticing: they are all comparative. You have more money than someone, more power than someone, more recognition than someone. The metric requires someone else to measure against. The satisfaction, if it arrives, is always relative and therefore always temporary. Someone else always has more.
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"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not." — Epicurus |
Epicurus wrote this more than two thousand years ago. The four idols are older than corporate life, older than capitalism, older than LinkedIn. The chase is not new. What is new is how efficiently the modern world has built an infrastructure to keep you in it — the metrics, the rankings, the follower counts, the salary benchmarks, the neighbourhood comparisons. The comparative trap has never been better designed or more inescapable.
I have a small number of friends from my years in corporate. Not many — but the ones I have share something specific. Not industry, not title, not income level. Values. The way they treat people who cannot do anything for them. The things they talk about when there is nothing to perform. I have watched people collect hundreds of professional contacts and have nobody to call at 2am. I have watched others have three real friends and never feel alone. The number is not the point. The quality of what is underneath is.
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I sometimes watch the "this is my day" videos that younger people post online. The morning routine, the coffee, the gym, the aesthetic breakfast, the commute, the work desk, the evening wind-down. Documented in careful detail. And I always think: twenty years from now, what will they remember from that period of their life?
Not the morning routine. Not the desk setup. The conversation they had with a friend at midnight that changed how they thought about something. The moment their relationship became real rather than comfortable. The project that terrified them and worked anyway. The small ordinary Tuesday that felt unremarkable and turned out to be one of the good ones.
Last weekend my daughter and I played Lego City Undercover on the PS4. Her approach to the game is creative in ways the designers did not anticipate. We played for two hours and I was completely present in a way I am not always able to be. That will not be in any "this is my day" video. It will be in my memory for a long time.
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"When you wake up in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." — Marcus Aurelius |
The morning walk takes twenty minutes. She asks about cats and rockets and cartoon villains and why people stop being friends. I walk beside her and I answer as honestly as I can and sometimes I do not know the answer and I say so and she finds that interesting too.
Twenty minutes. A scooter. The best part of my day.
Some things do not require a framework.
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This week's insight The four idols — money, power, fame, pleasure — are comparative by nature. Someone always has more. The things that are not comparative: a six year old asking why cats purr, a friend who picks up when you call, two hours of Lego City on a Saturday, the twenty minutes every morning that nobody can take from you. These do not require a framework. They require presence. |
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