Welcome back to Edition 13 of The Moat, and this one's close to my heart. It's about a question I don't ask myself enough, and one I think most of us avoid on purpose because the answer takes longer than we'd like it to. A friend's telescope finally forced me to look deeper.
TL;DR
A friend of mine, I'll call him M, spent three years building an eleven-and-a-half-inch telescope while running a company.
Not three focused years. The grabbed-from-evenings kind. He sourced the parts by writing emails to astronomers and hobbyists in other countries, one component at a time, because what he needed didn't exist in one place. He told me about it the way people describe something that required real patience and no deadline. Something that asked him to stay persistent without any guarantee of outcome and to find that worthwhile anyway.
He said something about scale. Looking at something so far away that the light reaching his lens had been traveling since before he was born. He found it hard to stay anxious about a difficult quarter while doing that.
Building anything at scale is lonely in a way that is hard to describe to people who haven't done it. Not lonely for company, you are rarely alone. Lonely in the sense that the work pulls everything toward itself. Every conversation becomes somehow relevant to it. Every book maps onto a current problem. Every holiday has a part of your brain that never fully left the building. After enough years of this, you look up and realize you have become very legible as a professional and somewhat difficult to locate as a person.
Most founders and senior leaders I know made the same sequence of choices. Career first, which made sense. Then a partner, children, the career at a larger scale. The hobbies and curiosities sat in a queue that never moved because there was always a more urgent reason to defer them. "When things settle" is the most expensive sentence in a founder's vocabulary. It is almost always a sentence that never ends.
The identity you spend fifteen years building only holds as long as the job holds. Sell the company, leave the role, step back for any reason, and the thing that made you legible in every room becomes history. The meeting invites stop. The headline updates. If nothing exists underneath it, nothing that was ever yours and not the job's, the adjustment is brutal. Most people can't talk about it, because there's no vocabulary for losing something that was never supposed to define you in the first place.
The leaders who come through that transition intact are not the ones with better advisors or more money. They are the ones who had been building something parallel all along. A version of themselves that didn't need the company to justify it.
If the company disappeared tomorrow, who would you be? Not what would you do next. Who would you be. What would you have that existed before the company and doesn't depend on it to survive.
If the answer takes longer than thirty seconds, everything that follows is worth reading.
Because there are two things that happen when you build a life genuinely outside your work, and neither of them is about wellness or balance.
The first is mental agility, and it has a specific mechanism. The decisions that determine outcomes at a senior level are not the ones with clean feedback. They are the slow, ambiguous ones where the variables keep shifting and the result takes years to become readable. The skill those decisions require is not developed by doing more work. It is developed by doing different kinds of hard things, with nothing attached to them.
M spent three years sourcing telescope parts from strangers in other countries. Three years of caring about something with no deadline, no board, no client, and no performance review attached to it. That is training, though he never called it that, for exactly the quality of attention the hardest decisions require. Most senior people are not building that muscle anywhere. They are working in environments where feedback arrives fast enough to act on, and they are quietly losing the capacity to sit with a problem when it doesn't.
You become more interesting to be around. Not as a personality bonus. As a leadership reality.
My father came home from work every evening and sat in front of the television. Not because he was lazy. Because there was genuinely nothing else in him by the time he got through the door. The work had taken everything, and what remained when you removed it was a person with very little to say. He wasn't unhappy. He just wasn't particularly there.
I say this without judgment because I think most people in demanding careers are closer to my father than to M, and most of them don't realize it until something forces the question.
M walks into a room and has something going on that has nothing to do with his company. It makes him more curious, less repetitive, easier to be around in a way that people feel before they can name it. Your team spends real time with you. Your clients, your peers, the people you are trying to convince of something.
If all you are is the work, there is eventually nothing there beyond the transactional.
That is not a soft observation. It affects whether people want to work for you, stay near you, and tell you the truth.
M finished the telescope last year. He then built a star tracker so he could actually photograph the galaxy with it. He is now working seriously on his golf game, the kind of seriousness that involves understanding why the swing fails rather than just repeating it until it doesn't.
He mentioned the company was doing fine.
That wasn't the part of the sentence I kept thinking about.
