I cheered for a middle set on a red-eye from SFO…
…before that, stopping felt like losing.
I can still tell you exactly what I was thinking, which was nothing useful. I was thinking about the next exit. There is a specific kind of leader who cannot stop, and I have been him, and if you are reading this on a Friday at 6 in the morning, so have you.
The strange part is what the not-stopping felt like from the inside: it felt like discipline. Momentum reads as virtue when you are the one generating it. It took me years, and 1 very long night, to understand that a tank you refuse to fill is not commitment… it is a decision you are making with your eyes closed.
The wonder question is: is this still where you want to be, and are you the best person for it? You cannot answer it in the middle of the night. Friday is about the price of the answer.
…while she was on the fastest ride in music…
Consider what her mid-1990s looked like from the inside. Jagged Little Pill did not just succeed… it swallowed her life. A 21-year-old, suddenly responsible for the biggest album of the decade, went straight onto a world tour that ran on and on as the record refused to stop selling. 5 Grammys, 17 million records in the United States, every stage in the world asking for more. The machine she had spent her whole childhood trying to board was finally moving at full speed, and she was the fuel.
And in 1997, at the top of all of it, Alanis Morissette stopped. She took roughly 18 months off and went to India, and what she said about it afterward is the line I keep: she had never stopped in her whole life, and had not taken a long breath.
…and the song only the stop could write
What came out of the stop was “Thank U,” released Oct 12, 1998, the first single of her follow-up album … a song that thanks the terror and the disillusionment, not the wins. It went to Number 1 in Canada and became her highest-charting single in the United Kingdom, and it earned a Grammy nomination of its own. The song lists its gratitudes by name, and they are all the wrong ones by resume logic… the frailty, the consequence, the silence. India gets thanked. The trophies do not.
You cannot write that song on tour. Not because there is no time… because there is no distance. Gratitude for the part that hurt requires standing far enough from it to see what it was for, and distance is exactly what momentum refuses to give you.
The stop is the price
That is wonder. Not curiosity as a workshop exercise. The actual state your Mind cannot reach at speed, where you get grateful for the part that hurt because you can finally see what it was for.
I meet leaders every week who are 3 promotions past the last time they asked the question. Their version of my blizzard is a calendar with no white space in it, kept full for the same reason I kept driving… because the stop feels like losing, and the next flight always feels like enough. It is not. You will not think your way into it on the drive to the airport. The stop is the price.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: block 90 minutes next week with no agenda and no output. Put it on the calendar like it is a board meeting, because it is.
Thank u, for the exit I finally took.
