What happens when being needed stops being what you do and turns into who you are.
What happens when being needed stops being what you do and turns into who you are.
My kids are in their late twenties and early thirties now. When they were small, Thomas the Tank Engine was on constantly in our house. If you never had that show running in the background of your life, the thing to know about it is that the highest praise available to any engine on the island is to be called a very useful engine.
I absorbed more of that than I understood at the time.
I built a career out of being the one who solved other people’s problems. Private practice first. Then in-house, where I got into every part of the business — marketing, finance, HR, technology, whatever was broken that week. Teaching in an MBA program. A stretch spent trying to rescue a bar association. A major jeweler. I walked into hard situations on purpose, because being the person who could fix the hard situation was the thing I was good at.
Somewhere along the way it stopped being what I did and turned into who I was. If I hadn’t been useful, I couldn’t have told you what I was.
The Real Estate Lawyer
I’ve been thinking about this again because of a lawyer I worked with. Late fifties, real estate, genuinely at the top of his game. Referrals coming in faster than he could take them. Turning away more work than he accepted.
And in his office at seven on a Friday night, missing dinner again.
His grown daughter had asked him whether he was ever planning to slow down. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been ten days away from the practice without checking in.
What matters about him is that he wasn’t unhappy. That’s the part people get wrong about this. He wasn’t burned out or resentful or looking for a way out. By his own measure and everyone else’s, he was winning. The firm depended on him and he was good at being depended on.
What he told me, when we finally got to it, was that he needed something to move toward, and not just something to leave behind.
Eight Januaries
Succession planning had gone onto his January list eight years running. Every year it got pushed down the page by March, and every January it came back.
He wasn’t short on information. He’d read the books, been to the programs, knew the terminology. He was drowning in information and had no idea where to start.
That gets diagnosed as a time management problem about ninety percent of the time, including by the person it’s happening to. It usually isn’t one. If it were a time problem it would have been solved in year two, because this is a man who solves things.
The Cage
What actually happened is that he made himself irreplaceable, and the achievement turned into the problem.
When you’re starting out, being indispensable is the goal. It’s how you get hired, promoted, trusted with the difficult client. Nobody tells you there’s a version of that success where you build a cage out of your own expertise, your own work ethic, and the fact that nobody else in the building works as hard as you do.
The bars go up one good decision at a time. You take the hard file because you’re better at it. You handle the difficult client because you have the relationship. You stay late because the work has to go out. Every one of those is correct in the moment and the accumulation is a firm that stops functioning when you leave the room.
Less Needed
There’s a part of this that people don’t say out loud, and I’ll say it because I’ve felt it.
Some of the resistance to planning your exit is a quiet fear that the planning itself makes you less relevant. Less needed. If the firm can run without you, then what exactly are you for?
My kids had Thomas. Other people have some other version of the same message, and most of us got it early enough that we never examined it. Being needed became the proof that we were worth something, and anything that reduces how much we’re needed feels like a subtraction.
I know this from the inside, not from a book. Building a career on solving other people’s problems means that when the problems stop arriving, something in you goes looking for more.
The Question I’d Actually Ask
Here is the version of this I put to a room of lawyers last year, and it landed harder than I expected.
When did you last take thirty days away from your practice?
One of them laughed at me. Out loud, in the room. Not because it was a stupid question — because the answer was so far outside anything he could picture that the question read as a joke.
That laugh is the whole diagnosis. Not the number of hours you’re working. Whether thirty days is even conceivable, and what specifically falls over if it happens.
Because the answer to that is a list. It’s a real, specific, nameable list of things that only run through you, and every item on it is something that can be fixed. Not easily and not this month. But you can’t fix a list you’ve never written down.
What Changes
The lawyer I mentioned is still working on it. This is always a work in progress and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
What changed for him first wasn’t structural. It was that he stopped treating the whole thing as a retirement question. Succession planning isn’t about retirement, or it doesn’t have to be. It’s about whether the thing you built can run without you standing in the middle of it, which matters just as much at fifty-two as at sixty-eight, and matters whether you plan to leave in three years or twenty.
You can want the success you have now and also want to not be the single point of failure. Those two things are compatible. Most people never separate them.
One Question
What would fall over if you were out for thirty days?
Write the list. That’s the whole assignment.