You’re good at the job.

You’re paid well for it.

It helps people. You can see that it does.

And you are tired in a way that sleep does not fix.

If that’s you, I want to give you a word for it — because the moment you can name a condition, you stop treating it as a character flaw and start treating it as a diagnosis. Diagnoses have treatments.

The diagram with the blind spot

You have seen the four circles. What you love. What you’re good at. What the world needs. What you can be paid for. Purpose lives where all four overlap.

It goes around under the name IKIGAI, though the diagram itself was drawn by a Spanish author in 2011 and only got attached to the Japanese word later. Doesn’t matter. It’s a useful picture.

But it has a blind spot, and it’s a big one.

The diagram tells you what to aim for. It says nothing about what’s wrong when you’re close. When you have three of the four and the fourth is missing.

And three of four is where almost every senior person I coach actually lives.

The four ways to be almost there

Each way of missing one circle has its own feel. I’ve given each one a name.

Drive. You love it, you’re good at it, it matters — and it doesn’t pay. Or doesn’t pay enough. So you’re always driving toward the day it will. Founders before revenue. The exec who left to “do the thing” and is two years in. Anyone whose best work is a side project. The tell: you get animated describing the work and change the subject when money comes up.

Grind. You’re skilled, you’re useful, you’re paid — and it’s joyless. Every day is executed, not lived. Nothing is wrong on paper, which is exactly why you can’t justify changing anything. This is the most common state among people who’ve made it, and the hardest to admit to, because from the outside it looks like winning. The tell: you can’t remember the last time the job was fun, and you daydream about a completely different life rather than a better version of this one.

Strain. You enjoy it, it matters, you’re paid — and you’re over your head. You’re doing it, but everything takes longer and costs more than it should. Newly promoted managers. Engineers who became founders. Anyone six months into a stretch role. The tell: you work harder than everyone around you for results that look average, and you quietly avoid the parts of the job where the gap would show.

Craft. You love it, you’re excellent at it, you’re paid — and you’ve lost track of who it’s for. The work became an end in itself. The principal engineer optimizing what nobody asked to be optimized. The consultant whose deliverables are beautiful and unread. The tell: you’d struggle to name one specific person whose week was better because of what you did.

Read those again. One of them is closer than the others.

The mistake everyone makes next

Here is what people do when they finally admit they’re in one of these states.

They start over.

New job. New company. New career. Sometimes a new country. The logic is: if it feels this wrong, everything must be wrong.

But three out of four means three things are right. Starting over throws them away to fix one.

The better move is to look at the four circles as two axes.

Enjoying and Earning are the two ends of one axis — inner reward and outer reward.

Skill and Service are the two ends of the other — inner impact and outer impact.

Every one of the four states is just a drift toward one end of an axis and away from the other. Grind is drift toward Earning, away from Enjoying. Craft is drift toward Skill, away from Service. And so on.

Which means the fix is never “start over.” The fix is: find the neglected end and add something there.

Small. Specific. On the calendar.

Grind? Find the 20% of the role you actually like and engineer more of it before you consider leaving. Craft? Pick one real person and make the next month’s work about them. Strain? Get help on the one specific gap — this is the most fixable state of the four, because skill is the thing most under your control. Drive? Ask what in this work someone is already paying for, and do a narrower, more expensive version of that.

Then check again in thirty days.

That’s the whole instrument. Four names, two axes, one rule. It takes fifteen minutes a month and it will save you from at least one unnecessary resignation.

Where this fits

In Leadership Superpowers I call the ability to see your own situation clearly, before it forces itself on you, Acuity. Most leaders have plenty of it for their teams and their P&L and almost none for themselves. This is one way to point it inward.

One word

Here is what I’d like from you, and it takes five seconds.

Reply to this email with one word: Drive, Grind, Strain, or Craft.

That’s it. No explanation needed. I read every reply, and I want to know where this list actually lives, because what I build next depends on it.

If enough of you answer, I’ll tell you what I found — and I’ll send you the full version of this tool.

Best,

—Gregor

P.S. Acuity is one of thirteen Leadership Superpowers in the book, and the other twelve are how you act on what you see. Get it at gplead.com/book — buy the print edition direct and the ebook comes bundled, so you can start tonight.