Who you are when you are no longer the one responsible

I’m stepping down after twenty years; who am I when I’m no longer the one responsible?

Question 22 of the Index

The date is set, or nearly. People keep congratulating you and the congratulations land oddly, because what is in front of you is not a holiday. It is the first Monday in twenty years on which nothing arrives that only you can decide.

A long role does something quiet. Every day it answers the question of who you are, and it answers so continuously that you stop hearing the question being asked. Handing the role on does not create that question. It uncovers one that has been running underneath the whole time, at whatever volume you left it, and it comes back at full size rather than at the size you last dealt with it.

The advice you will get is structural. Fill the calendar, take a board seat, write the book. Some of it is sound and all of it is early, because a calendar filled in the first month tends to get filled in the shape of the old one, and the shape was the thing you were leaving. It is worth staying unstructured for longer than is comfortable, and comfortable runs out at about six weeks.

There is a harder part that people rarely say out loud. Some of what you will miss is not the work. It is being consulted, being the one the call comes to, being near the middle of something. That is not vanity, and treating it as vanity is what keeps it powerful. Said plainly, it becomes a thing you can meet on its own terms instead of a low unease you keep explaining to yourself as the transition.