Success as Avoidance

Achievement is extraordinarily good at keeping you moving. And moving fast is an effective way of not having to look at certain things.

This is not a criticism of ambition. I have always been ambitious, and ambition, when honest about what drives it, produces real things. What I am pointing at is this: the way the forward motion of building can function as a kind of permission structure. If I am busy enough, if the work is important enough, if there is always a next thing to move toward, I never quite have to stop and ask whether the direction is still mine.

Most of the leaders I work with are not struggling with visible problems. They are succeeding, by most measures, and they know it. What they are also carrying, usually quietly, is a sense that something beneath the surface has been asking for a different kind of attention. A subtle restlessness. The feeling that the life is working well, but something essential is still somewhere else.

Viktor Frankl wrote about this in 1946. He called it the existential vacuum: what happens when the search for meaning goes unanswered long enough. He was specific about what it looks like: a life that functions well by every visible measure and still feels hollow. He wrote this from inside Auschwitz. That the same description fits a successful founder in 2025 says something about how little this experience depends on external conditions.

Success does not answer the mattering question. Sometimes it postpones it.

I recognise this in my own years of building. The work was consuming and genuinely meaningful, and I did not stop very often. There was always a reason not to. What I understand now is that the pace had become load-bearing in ways I was not aware of. It was holding things in place that would have needed attention if I had slowed down enough to look.

When the pace stopped, not by choice, what I found was not the disaster I had unconsciously expected. It was clarifying in a way that years of momentum had never been.

The leaders who come to this work have started to notice the feeling. They take it seriously rather than finding something else to be busy with.

That feeling has something to tell you. The question is whether you are willing to stop long enough to hear it.