Your dream job might feel empty
Time to stop copying and start building your own plan
I’ve stepped into interim leadership twice in my career. Both times I wanted the bigger role before I had it. Both times, the moment it was actually mine, I understood what I’d asked for.
One of those roles, I walked into the room thinking I was stepping into the job I’d always wanted. The title was real. The room was real. Then I started looking for the things I assumed came with it. The team. The budget I could count on. The systems already running. The people who knew where everything was kept.
None of it was there. The dream job was empty.
So I did the only thing left to do. I started rebuilding what I thought had been there from the beginning, while running the budget, the legal side, the compliance side, every small logistical detail that suddenly had my name on it. Nobody warned me that the job under the job was going to be the real one.
Here’s what I couldn’t see while I was in it. I was measuring myself against the wrong thing.
When you get the title, you start comparing. Not on purpose. It just happens. You look at the leaders you admire, the ones who seem to have it handled, and you measure your first week against their tenth year. You hold your messy middle up next to their finished headline, and of course you come up short. The comparison was rigged before you started.
The headline was never the whole story anyway. Phil Knight built Nike over decades. Read Shoe Dog and you find years where he was scraping by month to month, one bad break from the whole thing folding. The version everyone remembers is the swoosh on every shelf. The version he actually lived was mostly doubt and debt.
Jason Feifer spent years interviewing cover-story founders for Entrepreneur, and he landed on something close to this: everyone carries the doubt, but the only thing that ever gets told is the success story, never the beginning of it. So if you spend your days comparing your beginning to someone else’s ending, you lose every time. The math doesn’t work.
You get overwhelmed, staring at a running list of everything you’re not doing well, everything you don’t measure up to. And the instinct is to fix it by doing more. Do what they’re doing. Add what they added. Match the leader in the headline, move for move.
What if the answer runs the other way? What if there’s a way to lead that’s actually yours, built on the skills you already have, and the move is to do less of what everyone else does and do your own part better?
For me, the shift was small, and it was quiet. I realized I could say no. I didn’t have to carry every detail. I didn’t have to run the job the way the person before me ran it, or the way the leader I admired would have run it. I had to find my own balance, dial it in, and keep a level head while I did. That was the turn. Not a new system. Permission I hadn’t given myself.
Copying someone else is the easier move. It always will be. But you don’t get to the place where you’re bringing your best by pasting in a path that belonged to someone else. You only get there by walking your own, which is slower, and quieter, and doesn’t have a headline yet.
That’s the part nobody puts in the story.
One thing to sit with this week:
What’s something you’re doing right now that you feel like you have to do, but you wish you didn’t have to?
