The Loneliest Job

If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing, it would be this: the loneliness is a signal, not a weakness.

There was a stretch inside a product organisation that was trying to pivot everything at once when I felt more isolated than at any other point in my career. The team was good. The strategy was clear. And still, I was absorbing the complexity so the team didn’t have to.

Shielding them from the politics. Translating between what leadership wanted and what was actually possible. Running interference so the work could happen. And calling it leadership.

The system will let you do it for as long as you can stand it. Because it’s convenient. Because it works, until it doesn’t. Until you crash.

What I didn’t know then is that the isolation was itself a pattern. A signal that I was operating as a single point of failure in a system that should have been distributing that load across the network. I wish I’d known to look for that signal instead of pushing through it.

These days, when leaders describe that same loneliness, and they do often, I know what it means. The system has made them the bottleneck for complexity that should be visible to everyone.

That’s where the work starts.