What Do You Actually Need Now?
I read a book over the holidays called Perfection. It tells the story of a young Italian, creative couple who move to Berlin to live a digital nomad life. At first, the experience is everything they imagined. This is the life! And it is—for a time. And then something shifts. What once felt novel and desired starts to feel... wrong. Not wrong like a mistake. Wrong like a piece of clothing you don’t like wearing anymore.
As a reader, you can see it clearly. You have perspective they don’t. But I’ve been careful not to be too quick to judge them, because I’ve experienced this too.
When I took my eight-month sabbatical, I wanted exactly one thing: space. To wake up each morning, linger over reading, let my mind wander, then move my body and use the day as I pleased. That routine was exactly what I needed at that moment in time. If I follow that every day now, it feels indulgent in the wrong way—like wearing a cozy sweater in the middle of a hot, steamy summer (not my San Francisco foggy ones!). It’s not wrong. It’s just not what I need at that level of frequency.
That’s the thing about living our lives. Our context evolves and circumstances change. What once was fresh and necessary becomes stale and superfluous. We moved through that stage, and now we need something different.
This is what I’ve been sitting with as I move through my own “Ambition In-Between” season, which I’ve been sharing in a podcast series (details below), and I explore further in my last episode.
I’m typically a goal-oriented person. I do well with structure and executing a plan. I’m focused, disciplined, and driven.
This year, I find myself wanting something different—or more precisely, wanting to live in two states at once. Making space for wonder and moving forward. More exploration, less execution. Following genuine curiosity, leaving room for what I don’t yet know, along with some consolidation and commitment, going deeper into the work I’ve already built. These two states exist in tension.
I’ve been feeling this pull and desire for space and wonder for over a year now. I’ve also noticed that it’s pretty typical for me to have a sense of what I need personally, professionally, or creatively a year or more before I can actually create it for myself. The yearning arrives before I can create conditions to honor it.
Just like the characters in Perfection, I’ve stayed in a state longer than it’s served me. This year, I'm working to correct this, striving (yes, this is my current ambition!) to create the space I need to connect the threads I’ve been following.
The philosopher Kieran Setiya offers useful language for what I’m experiencing. In his book Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, he draws a distinction between two kinds of activities:
Telic activities are goal-oriented. Getting a promotion. Finishing a book. Running a 10-K. They move toward a finish line, and once you cross it, the activity and its source of meaning ends.
Atelic activities are done for their own sake. Walking in nature. Spending time with people you love. Researching something because you’re curious to learn. The meaning is in the doing, not being done.
In these definitions, Setiya was inspired by Aristotle who distinguished between two types of action—one aimed toward an outcome and the other about the action itself.
Most of us organize our lives and careers primarily around telic work and activities. I’m no different, largely because I have a deep value around achievement. Goals give me direction and a sense of progress.
While that has served me well, I also know—through experience and my research on Sustainable Ambition—that I need both. I need stages of momentum against a clear goal, and I need time dedicated to research and play.
So, this is where I continue to find myself this year.
Some of what I’m doing is for something. I’m consolidating, bringing the Sustainable Ambition method more fully into my work with organizations, going deeper into the frameworks I’ve built. That’s telic. There’s a shape to it, a direction, an arc.
But some of what I’m doing is itself something. My “research as leisure activity,” as I’ve written about before. Reading because a thread is pulling at me. Letting ideas sit and breathe. Following curiosity without needing it to turn into a deliverable. That’s atelic. And I want more time for that.
Admittedly, despite longing for it, I’ve not always been successful in making the space. It’s easier to declare the desire than to practice it. In my most recent podcast episode, I shared the specific ways I’ve failed at creating space for myself (e.g., the calendar-blocking that didn’t hold, the “rest” that didn’t materialize, the atelic time that morphed into telic to do’s). I’m still figuring it out. But I’m committed to learning from what’s not worked and practicing with new structures to protect my time for being in the process, not focused on outputs and outcomes.
One step I’ve taken is to pause the podcast for a few months, a deliberate interlude. It’s not easy to put something I love on the backburner. But as I write about in my book, stepping back from something isn’t losing it. It can always return.
Going back to the couple in *Perfection—*their mistake wasn’t moving to Berlin. Their mistake, if we can even call it that, was being surprised that Berlin no longer provided them what they needed.
What sustains us over time can change. We’d be wise to have the willingness to ask: What do I actually need now?
I’m sitting with this question this year and carving out the space to hear the answer. I’ll admit—it’s not easy, but I’m in practice.
What might be your answer to what you need now in this season?
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Sustainable Ambition offers a strategic approach for pursuing our professional and personal goals in a way that is motivating, meaningful, and manageable from stage to stage, rather than be all consuming in a way that compromises other important aspects of our lives or sacrifices our well-being.