I Had Everything I Was Supposed to Want
At 51, I had succeeded. At least that's what everybody told me. I was a senior executive at a global consumer company. I earned more money than my parents could have imagined. My husband, David, was successful too. We had a beautiful home, investments, two children finishing college and friends scattered around the world. My résumé told a very coherent story. My life didn't feel coherent at all. I woke one morning in a hotel room in Singapore and couldn't remember what city I had been in two nights earlier. I stared at the ceiling and thought: Is this really what I'm going to do for the next fifteen years?
Then I got dressed and went downstairs to give a presentation about our company's future. I didn't have a problem That was part of the problem. Nothing was obviously wrong. My marriage wasn't failing. I wasn't sick. I didn't hate my job. I wasn't financially insecure. So what exactly was I complaining about? A friend recommended HOS. I almost didn't try it because it sounded like something for people who needed help. I didn't need help. I needed clarity. It turned out those aren't very different. HOS asked a question I couldn't answer “What are you trying to create now?” I had answers. Increase shareholder value. Develop my team. Get our children launched. Retire comfortably.
Contribute to the community. HOS kept helping me examine them. Eventually I realized most of my answers were descriptions of responsibilities or goals. They weren't an answer to the question. What did I want the next part of my life to become? I genuinely didn't know. For thirty years, the next step had usually been obvious. Do well. Take more responsibility. Earn the promotion. Solve the next problem. Now I had enough money. Enough status. Enough responsibility. And no idea what “enough” meant. So I made a dramatic decision I quit. It was a mistake. Not quitting eventually. Quitting then.
I had spent months thinking about what I wanted to leave and almost no time thinking about what I wanted to move toward. For the first few weeks, freedom was exhilarating. Then everyone else went to work. David went to work. My friends went to work. My children had their own lives. My calendar became empty. For the first time since college, nobody needed me to be anywhere on Monday morning. I had thought that would feel wonderful. It terrified me. I went back to HOS angry. “Why didn't you tell me this would happen?” The answer, essentially, was that we had discussed it. I just hadn't believed it. That became humbling.
HOS could help me understand possibilities and consequences. It couldn't experience them for me. And it couldn't make the decision mine while simultaneously guaranteeing the outcome. I almost solved the problem by recreating it Within six months I was considering another executive role. Bigger company. More money. Familiar territory. HOS helped me explore why I wanted it. Part of the answer was simple: I knew how to be that person. I didn't yet know how to be the person I was becoming. So I didn't take it. Instead, I gave myself a year. Not to “find my purpose.” I had come to hate that phrase. I experimented. I mentored young executives.
I volunteered with a workforce-development organization. David and I traveled without my laptop. I took a class because I was interested in the subject rather than because it improved my career. Some things bored me. Some failed. One nonprofit board was a disaster. I learned as much from what I didn't want as from what I did. Then our marriage changed For years David and I had been two highly competent people efficiently managing a shared life. Without my career consuming me, I began noticing how far apart we had drifted. My first instinct was to fix the marriage. David didn't appreciate becoming my newest strategic initiative. That was another failure.
HOS helped me recognize something embarrassing. At work, I was rewarded for identifying problems and driving solutions. Relationships weren't organizations. David had his own agency, his own disappointments and his own idea of what our marriage should become. We started talking differently. Eventually we worked with a human counselor. That mattered too. HOS wasn't always the answer. Sometimes its most useful role was helping me recognize when another human being needed to enter the conversation. Our marriage changed. Not back to what it had been. Into something different. Better, I think. David would have to answer for himself. My second career didn't look like one
Eventually I began helping organizations deal with the human consequences of AI transformation. That wasn't my plan. It emerged from dozens of smaller choices. Companies were becoming extraordinarily capable technologically while their employees were often frightened, confused or simply ignored. I understood organizations. Now I understood something about disorientation too. I began working with leaders on the human side of change. I made much less money. I also stopped measuring whether the work was worthwhile primarily by what it paid. That wasn't because money stopped mattering. It was because I finally had enough freedom to decide how much it mattered to me. Then money became complicated in a different way Our children were adults.
We could make their lives much easier financially. Should we? How much? Would helping expand their choices or reduce their need to create choices themselves? There wasn't a formula. HOS helped David and me examine consequences, values, fairness and our assumptions. Then we talked with our children. That conversation changed our thinking. Again, the people affected by our decisions had something to say about them. That sounds obvious. Successful people sometimes become accustomed to believing that because we're capable of making decisions, we're entitled to make them. I had to unlearn some of that.
Looking back
For the first half of my life, agency looked like achievement. More responsibility. More influence. More money. More choices. Those things gave me enormous freedom, and I remain grateful for them. But they weren't the same as knowing what I wanted that freedom for. HOS never answered that question. That's why it mattered. It kept returning the question to me. Sometimes I wanted it to tell me what to do. Sometimes I ignored what I learned. Sometimes I made decisions that failed. And sometimes failure opened a door that success would have kept closed. I eventually understood that creating your life isn't only something people do when they are struggling.
Success can create its own kind of momentum. You can become extraordinarily good at creating a life you never consciously chose. At 51, I had almost everything I once thought I wanted. At 75, I had something different. I understood much better why I wanted what I wanted. My second half was less impressive on a résumé. It was richer in friendships. Closer to my children. More honest with David. More useful to some people. Less hurried. More curious. Still imperfect. Still changing. I once thought HOS would help me figure out what to do with the rest of my life. Instead, it helped me understand that there wasn't one answer waiting to be discovered.
There would keep being choices. And I would keep becoming the person who made them. I didn't abandon the successful life I had created. I learned how to choose what success would mean next. That made the second half of my life truly mine. And I am glad I lived both halves.
Agency is not only a response to hardship. This executive has money, education, status and an extraordinary range of choices, yet she has spent much of her life following a path whose next step was usually defined for her. HOS therefore does something very different from helping her become more successful. It helps her examine what success means to her now. When she leaves her career too quickly, HOS does not disguise the mistake or claim that every failure was somehow meant to happen. It helps her learn from the experience and experiment more deliberately with what might come next. The same principle appears in her marriage and in decisions involving her adult children: capability, wealth and good intentions do not give her authority to design other people's lives. As AI becomes increasingly able to model life outcomes and recommend apparently optimal paths, HOS could use that intelligence to illuminate possibilities and consequences. But it should not answer the most personal question for her: What do I want my life to become? HOS succeeds when greater intelligence produces greater human understanding and choice—not when the individual becomes increasingly dependent upon the system to tell her what to want or what to do.