For most of my career, I followed what I’d call career logic.
Build skills. Stay useful. Keep moving forward. It worked. I had a good career across tech, design, teaching, and consulting. I wasn’t stuck. I kept progressing.
But somewhere along the way, a quieter question started surfacing. Not what’s next for me? but when do I actually feel alive doing this?
Those aren’t the same question. And the gap between them turned out to matter more than I expected.
Two Ways of Measuring Work #
Writer and social commentator David Brooks describes this gap well. He calls it the difference between career logic and gift logic.
Career logic is about achievement, efficiency, advancement. It asks: How do I build? How do I climb? How do I stay relevant? It’s the logic most of us are raised inside, and it’s genuinely useful. It gets things done.
Gift logic asks something different. It asks: Where do I contribute in a way that feels like it’s drawing on something real in me? Where does the work feel less like output and more like expression? Where, as Brooks puts it, do you give yourself to something larger than yourself?
Most career advice is built entirely on career logic, even when the people receiving it are hungry for something else. The result is that a lot of capable, self-aware professionals spend years optimizing a path that doesn’t actually fit who they are.
The Signals I Kept Missing #
Looking back at my own career, the pattern is obvious now. The work that mattered most was always relational and creative. Teaching in classrooms. Training professionals so they could do their jobs with confidence. Helping people understand something that once felt out of reach. Coaching career changers toward clarity.
The roles that looked most impressive on paper, programming, certain instructional design work done in isolation, content produced without real interaction, often felt hollow. Not because the work was bad, but because what mattered most to me was missing.
The signal was consistent: I came alive when someone else did. When a concept clicked for a learner. When a career changer’s doubt gave way to direction. When a piece of writing or a well-designed lesson helped someone see something they couldn’t see before.
Those were the moments. And for years, I treated them as nice byproducts of the real work rather than the signal they actually were.
The moments you treat as nice byproducts of the real work are often the most important signal you have.
Why We Miss the Signal #
Part of why these signals are so easy to miss is cultural.
We live inside a system that rewards achievement, not alignment. From an early age, we’re taught to chase grades, titles, promotions. If something can’t be measured or put on a resume, it barely counts. So when meaningful signals show up, the energy, the ease, the sense of creative flow, we tend to dismiss them. They don’t fit the system. We tell ourselves they’re nice but not practical.
This is where a lot of people get stuck. Not because they lack options, but because they’re asking the wrong questions. They keep running career-logic calculations. What role fits me next? How do I position myself? How do I stay relevant? While the discomfort they’re feeling is coming from a deeper place entirely.
The creative and relational parts of us don’t speak in titles and deliverables. They speak in moments — in energy and the absence of it.
What Creativity Actually Looks Like #
Here’s something worth saying plainly: creativity isn’t just painting or writing.
It’s making something from nothing. It’s taking complexity and finding the shape inside it. It’s designing a course that helps someone learn. It’s finding the right words for an idea that’s been stuck in someone’s head. It’s building a conversation that opens a door.
Teaching is a creative act. Coaching is a creative act. Designing something useful is a creative act. So is writing, problem-solving, making something clearer than it was before.
For most of my career, I was doing creative work without naming it that. And when I wasn’t doing it, when the work was purely technical or isolated or just about output, I could feel the absence. That feeling was information. I just didn’t always know how to read it.
The Moments That Repeat #
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: the moments that make you come alive are not random. They repeat.
They show up across different roles, different seasons, different contexts. A pattern runs through them. And that pattern, if you’re willing to look at it honestly, points toward something real about who you are and what you’re meant to contribute.
The question isn’t whether those moments exist in your history. They do. The question is whether you’ve been paying attention to them, and whether you’re willing to trust what they’re telling you.
So here’s what I’d ask you to sit with. When in your work do you forget about yourself because someone else is learning, growing, or moving forward? When does the thing you’re making feel like more than output? When do you finish a piece of work, whether a lesson, a conversation, a design, a piece of writing, and feel more yourself rather than less?
Those moments aren’t distractions from the real work. They may be the most important information you have.
What I Would Have Done Differently #
If I had understood gift logic earlier, not in place of career logic but alongside it, I would have leaned into teaching and training sooner. I would have trusted the signal that showed up every time a learner moved forward. I would have spent less time translating what made me come alive into career-logic terms, trying to make it efficient, scalable, measurable, and more time simply doing the work that lit me up and trusting that it had value.
I also would have taken my creative work more seriously, not as a tool in service of a job, but as a thing worth doing for its own sake. Writing. Designing. Making things that didn’t exist before.
The moments that feel meaningful aren’t random. They repeat. They show up in different roles and formats and seasons. We’re just not taught to see them, or trust them. In a culture obsessed with winning, those signals look small.
When in your work do you forget about yourself because someone else is learning or moving forward? When do you finish something and feel more yourself rather than less? Those moments aren’t distractions. They’re the signal.
They are not small. They are directional.
If you’re ready to get honest about what makes you come alive and what’s been standing in the way, the Career Freedom Framework is a good place to start.