The pieces weren’t random. You just couldn’t see the picture yet.
I was catching up with someone this week whom I’ve known for a while.
She’s had one of those careers where, if you tried to explain the whole thing at a cocktail party, people would start looking around for a chair.
Not because it’s confusing.
Because it’s interesting. And there are a lot of pieces.
Different kinds of work, different areas of expertise, different chapters, and different people who know her for different things.
And as I listened to her talk about what she wants next, I found myself saying:
“You are the most incredible mosaic.”
Because that’s kind of what happens to us.
We spend years creating pieces without knowing they’re pieces. We build careers, develop expertise, start businesses, form relationships, follow ideas, take opportunities, make mistakes and occasionally become very good at things we later discover we don’t particularly want to do anymore.
At the time, we’re not thinking, Ah yes, another important tile in the magnificent mosaic of my life.
We’re just living. And sometimes questioning.
Which is why the pieces don’t necessarily look like they belong together while we’re creating them.
A puzzle is different.
It comes in a box. There’s a picture on the front. You already know what the finished thing is supposed to look like.
Our mosaic isn’t like that.
We create the pieces before we know the picture, and for a long time, we don’t even know which pieces are going to matter.
But something interesting happens when you get far enough into your career.
You finally have a pretty damn good view.
You can look back and start to recognize patterns that were impossible to see while you were busy living them. You know which decisions opened doors and which sent you down blind alleys. You have a much better sense of the work that energized you, the work that slowly sucked the life out of you, and the things people kept coming to you for whether you intended them to or not.
Even your definition of success has probably changed. Some of the things that once felt enormously important look smaller from here. And some of the detours you questioned at the time turn out to have given you exactly the experience, relationships or perspective you needed later.
The pieces haven’t changed. Your view of them has.
Things that seemed completely unrelated while you were living them can suddenly appear to belong in the same mosaic.
That’s a luxury you didn’t have twenty years ago.
And you can look forward, too.
Now you get to create the next pieces with everything you’ve learned from the ones already on the table. You know more, not because you’ve figured everything out, but because you’ve lived enough of it to have evidence. You’ve made good calls and bad ones, built things, lost things, changed your mind, surprised yourself, and developed instincts that only come from having actually been there.
You can look backward with evidence and forward with agency.
For perhaps the first time, you have enough pieces and enough perspective to see the larger picture.
That’s not a crisis.
That’s a pretty exciting place to be.
But it can also create something else.
Friction.
I’ve realized recently that my business runs on friction.
That probably doesn’t belong on a coffee mug, but it’s true.
I work with people who can sense that something is changing, but can’t quite make the pieces resolve.
Maybe they know they’re entering a new chapter but can’t see what the old and new pieces have to do with one another. Maybe other people keep understanding them according to one piece when they know there’s a much larger picture. Maybe several genuinely good opportunities are appearing, but they can’t tell which ones belong. Or maybe the work has simply evolved faster than the way they’ve learned to explain it.
They can almost see the mosaic.
Almost.
That’s friction.
And here’s the truth I’m selling today:
Not everyone who is changing feels it.
Someone can be moving into a new chapter and know exactly what they want. They can make the change themselves and happily start creating the next pieces.
Great.
Go do it.
I’m not interested in manufacturing friction so I can sell you a solution to a problem you don’t have.
But if you’re looking at the pieces of what you’ve built, what you’ve learned and what you want next, and you can almost see how they fit together, that’s the kind of friction I work with.
DM me “MOSAIC.”
Sometimes it takes another pair of eyes to see the picture that’s been forming all along.