The Four Questions
For senior leaders at the mid-career inflection point
Nobody warns you what happens at mid-career. You're on a great trajectory—and then "What's my next move?" stops working. So you drift. Delay. Become more dependent on your employer for direction you should be generating yourself.
The shift is to ask a different question: "What are you here to build?" These four questions help you find your answer.
When you're at your absolute best, what kind of impact do you make on others?
Not your title. Not your function. The actual way you think, challenge, or build that creates something nobody else can quite replicate. The mark you want to make on the world. If you can't name it in two sentences, it's working invisibly. Which means it's not working as hard as it could.
Can you speak from your edge—the unpolished, confident part of you that actually changes things?
Most of us don't realize how much our edge gets sanded down—by professional norms, by years of optimizing for credibility. But polish doesn't create. Edge does. The voice that moves rooms and shifts thinking is not your professional voice. It's the one underneath it.
Is there anything you're building right now that would still exist if you left your company today?
A framework. A body of work. A publication or project that's yours. This is how your purpose and voice become visible outside the walls of any organization. If the answer is no, your leverage lives entirely inside someone else's structure. Most people at this level haven't built one yet. That's exactly why it's worth asking.
Beyond your next role—what other shapes could your purpose take?
The mistake is to focus on the role only. The leaders who keep building momentum build an ecosystem—multiple pathways that reinforce each other like a flywheel. A role that feeds a body of thinking. A community that opens new rooms. A few pursued with intention become something that compounds in ways a single move never could.
