What I Don't Want to Do Anymore

After 30 years of building capability, I'm learning that what we can do isn't the same as what we should do.

I’ve spent a surprising amount of time over the past few years thinking about what I want to do next.

Much less time thinking about what I don’t. That has started to change.

There are parts of my working life I have no desire to recreate. Not because I was bad at them. Not because something went terribly wrong. In fact, some of them are things I’m exceptionally good at.

And I think that’s what makes them harder to leave behind.

For most of my working life, being good at something was a perfectly good reason to keep doing it. You become capable, people notice, they trust you with more, the problems become bigger and the responsibility grows. Eventually, a significant part of your professional identity is built around the things you know how to do well.

That’s how much of a career gets built.

But I’m beginning to think that building what comes next requires a different question.

Not simply What am I good at?

But Which of the things I’m good at do I actually want to keep doing?

It’s easier when something has gone wrong

We have a familiar story about change. Something stops working. You become unhappy. The job becomes unbearable. The business fails. You burn out, or someone makes the decision for you.

There is a reason to leave. But what if nothing is particularly wrong?

What if you’re still good at the work? People still value you. You can still solve the problems. You can walk into a complicated situation and know that, one way or another, you’ll probably find your way through it.

You may even still enjoy parts of it.

There is no dramatic ending and no obvious reason to walk away. You simply know that you don’t want to spend another ten years doing more of the same.

I think that’s a much harder feeling to trust.

When something is broken, you have evidence that it needs to change. When something still works perfectly well, all the evidence seems to be telling you to carry on.

The problem with all that evidence

After more than 30 years of work, I have plenty of evidence about what I can do. I know the environments I can operate in, the problems I can solve and where people tend to trust my judgement. I have results, experience and a track record.

I’ve earned that evidence, and I value it enormously. But most of it tells me something about the past.

Of course it does. I have evidence that I can do what I’ve already done. I know people value skills I’ve already demonstrated. I know someone will pay me to solve problems I’ve already solved. I know I can succeed in environments I’ve already learned to navigate.

Then I look towards something new and the evidence becomes much thinner.

There may be an idea I can’t quite leave alone, a curiosity I keep returning to or simply a growing sense that I want to work differently. But I haven’t spent twenty years proving any of that yet.

On one side are decades of evidence. On the other is: I think I want something different.

For someone who has spent much of her career making decisions based on evidence, that’s an interesting imbalance.

It is also one I’m learning to take much more seriously.

Because perhaps one of the difficulties of deciding what comes next after a long career is that the strongest evidence you possess naturally points towards the life you’ve already built.

That doesn’t necessarily make it evidence for the life you should build next.

Competence has a way of recruiting you back

There is another problem with being good at something. Other people keep asking you to do it.

You become the person who can handle the difficult situation, the person who knows how to fix it, the person people call when something has become complicated.

There’s real satisfaction in that. I like being useful. I like solving difficult problems. I like knowing that someone can put something complicated in front of me and trust me to find the structure inside it.

I recognise that part of myself very clearly.

Put a complicated business problem in front of me and my brain immediately starts pulling it apart:

• What’s actually happening here?

• What’s missing?

• What hasn’t been said?

• What decision is everyone avoiding?

I don’t have to force myself to do that. After decades of working that way, it’s simply part of how I think.

I have no desire to lose it.

But I have had to learn the difference between being able to solve a problem and wanting to own that problem.

For a long time, I’m not sure I made that distinction.

If I could help, I helped. If I knew how to solve something, I solved it. If something needed doing and I was capable of doing it, that capability itself became a reason to step in.

Perhaps you recognise some version of that too.

The trouble is that competence creates its own momentum. Other people continue to see you through the things you’ve already proved you can do, and unless you’re careful, you can continue to see yourself that way too.

You can become so good at an old role that it keeps recruiting you back.

Just because you can build it

I’ve been thinking about this particularly in relation to my own business.

When you have decades of experience and decide to build something of your own, one of the obvious questions is: What could I sell?

It’s a sensible commercial question.

Look at your career. Look at your expertise. Identify what you’re unusually good at. Find the problem someone will pay you to solve.

I could do that.

In fact, I could probably build several businesses that way. And that is precisely the problem.

At this stage, lack of capability isn’t the constraint. There are plenty of things I could do and plenty of ways I could make money from what I know.

But I could also build a perfectly viable business around work I no longer particularly want to do.

I could take the most marketable parts of my previous working life, package them neatly, put my own name above the door and recreate much of the work I wanted to move away from.

I would technically have built my own business. But I wouldn’t have built the life I wanted. That distinction has become much more important to me.

Freedom isn’t simply getting to choose who pays you. It also has to include some choice about what you spend your time doing once they have.

So What could I sell? is no longer enough for me.

I’m increasingly interested in another question: Which problems do I still care enough about to spend the next five or ten years solving?

That is a much harder filter. And a much more useful one.

Experience doesn’t disappear when you stop doing the work

There is something else I’ve had to reconsider.

For a long time, leaving valuable capabilities unused seemed slightly wasteful to me. If you’ve spent years learning how to do something and become very good at it, surely you should do something with it.

But experience doesn’t disappear because you stop repeating the work that created it.

It becomes part of how you think.

It changes what you notice, the questions you ask and how quickly you recognise a pattern. It changes how you respond under pressure, how you make decisions and what you can see in a situation that someone with less experience may not see yet.

There are things from my corporate career that I may never do again in the form in which I learned them.

That doesn’t mean those years were wasted. Quite the opposite. They built judgement I use every day.

I don’t have to keep performing every capability I’ve accumulated in order to benefit from having acquired it.

That has been a vital realisation for me.

Some things can simply have served their purpose. They were valuable. I was good at them. They taught me something. They helped build the person making the next decision.

And they can still end there.

What deserves another decade?

Once I stopped asking only what I could do, I found myself asking different questions.

Which parts of my experience still feel alive when I use them? Which problems do I genuinely care about? Where does what I’m unusually good at meet work I still want to become better at? What creates real value for someone else without requiring me to recreate a working life I no longer want?

These aren’t questions about abandoning experience. They’re questions about becoming more selective with it. And perhaps the most uncomfortable one is this:

What am I prepared to stop being known for so that something else has room to develop?

I think that’s particularly difficult after a successful career.

We spend decades building professional identities. Other people come to understand what we do and what we’re good at. We understand ourselves through some of those things too.

Walking away from something because you’ve failed at it is one thing. Choosing not to build your future around something you’ve succeeded at is quite another.

There may be no applause for that decision. It may not even look particularly sensible from the outside. But perhaps not every good decision about the next chapter can be justified by evidence from the last one.

The past gets a vote

I have no interest in abandoning the person I’ve spent decades becoming.

No, she comes with me.

Her judgement, standards and experience come with me. Everything she’s learned about people, decisions, mistakes, successes, pressure, responsibility and building things comes with me too.

I’m very proud of her.

But she doesn’t get to make every decision about what happens next.

The past gets a vote. It doesn’t get a veto.

There are things I’m very good at that I don’t want to do anymore.

A few years ago, I think I would have found that sentence uncomfortable. It would have sounded wasteful somehow, perhaps even a little ungrateful. Now I find it clarifying.

Because maybe the privilege of having accumulated all this experience isn’t that I have to keep using every part of it. Maybe the privilege is finally having enough of it to choose. The past comes with proof. The future usually doesn’t.

At some point, we have to decide whether all that evidence is there to tell us where we’ve been, or whether we’re going to let it decide where we’re allowed to go next.

Pia 🤍

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