I spent fifteen years in enterprise sales. I was good at it. Made the numbers, built the teams, ran the playbooks. The whole thing was clean enough that I didn't have to ask myself why I was doing it.
Then the labels stopped sticking. Success, achievement, leadership potential. Words that had seemed sufficient started to feel like abbreviations for something nobody was willing to say out loud.
On the surface, nothing had changed. Same job, same targets, same conversations. But underneath, a different question was forming. Not how do I win, but why am I here. Not the motivational speaker version. The actual one.
I'd sit in sales meetings and feel like I was in two places at once. Executing the strategy while watching myself execute it. Wondering what part of me cared about quota and what part was just along for the ride.
It didn't feel spiritual yet. It felt desperate. Like I was missing something obvious and everybody else had agreed to pretend it wasn't there.
I asked different kinds of questions in one-on-ones. Not about the quarter. About why people had chosen the work. What they wanted from their lives. Most people didn't know how to answer. I realized the whole ecosystem was built on a specific kind of performance, and I was making it dangerous to be honest inside of it.
Sales leadership gets built on extraction. Quota from the market. Performance from the team. Value, efficiency, the last inch of productivity. It's not malicious. It's just the game. But living inside the game, I could feel what it cost. The obvious stuff, sure. But also a gap between who I was at work and who I was everywhere else.
The tension between quotas and ancient wisdom traditions sounds like a cliché. It felt urgent when I was living it. I wasn't looking for wisdom I could apply to sales. I was looking for evidence that there was more to this than the sales floor.
I wrote to track what I was sensing. How the machine of sales could make a person feel like they were winning even when they were empty. How people confuse the promotion with the purpose and then find themselves at the top with no answer to the original question.
That writing became a book. Not a business book. A book about what it looks like to lead when you're aware of something the leadership literature doesn't speak to. Park Street Press, spring 2027.
At first it looked like I was trying to escape the work. What shifted was understanding I wasn't trying to get out. I was trying to get all the way in. To bring the whole person to the work, not just the performing version.
On the sales floor, this kind of conversation is still taboo. Meditation is fine if it's about optimization. But asking deeper questions about why you're here gets read as checked out. Not committed. Soft.
The opposite is true. The person willing to face that question is the person who can actually lead. Because leadership requires knowing what you're asking people to do and why. Not just that it moves the number, but that it lines up with who you are and what you're actually trying to build.
The search isn't over. It won't be. But it's honest now. I'm not trying to escape anything. I'm trying to do it from a different place, one where I'm aware of what's at stake for the people, including myself.