What if You're Not the Problem?

There is a particular kind of advice we have become very good at giving people who are struggling at work.

Manage your time better. Build resilience. Set firmer boundaries. Learn to switch off. Try meditation.

None of those things are inherently bad advice. In fact, some of them are useful.

But taken together, they reveal something about the way we tend to think about work: when someone is struggling, our first instinct is usually to ask what that person should do differently.

I have been thinking about that a lot lately, especially as I edited a conversation with organizational psychologist and author Dr. Kathryn Page for this week’s podcast episode of The Wider Measure.

Kat has spent years studying what makes work good for human beings, and one of the ideas we kept coming back to was surprisingly simple:

Sometimes the answer is not to keep fixing the worker. Sometimes the work itself needs to change.

That distinction matters because the conditions around us shape us more than we like to admit.

Long hours, excessive workload, poor management, lack of control, constant urgency and unclear expectations are not just inconveniences to be managed more efficiently. Over time, they affect the way people feel, think and perform.

Kat made the point that when the same patterns of fatigue, stress or frustration are showing up across multiple people, that is usually a clue that the issue is not simply individual coping. It may be something in the environment itself.

For ambitious people, this gets even more complicated.

High performers are often very good at adapting. Give us more and we reorganize. Raise the expectations and we stretch. Add a difficult deadline and, somehow, we find a way.

There is pride in that. There is also a quiet danger.

When we repeatedly prove that we can absorb more, the extraordinary has a way of becoming ordinary. Yesterday’s stretch becomes tomorrow’s baseline, and what once felt unsustainable becomes simply “how we work.”

Kat spoke candidly about that dynamic from her own career. She described how ambitious people can be drawn into environments that reward overwork and striving, not necessarily because someone is explicitly pushing them, but because the culture itself sends strong signals about what high performance is supposed to look like.

We watch the people around us. We notice what gets rewarded. We internalize those cues.

Eventually, the external expectation and the internal drive start to reinforce each other.

I recognize that pattern.

I have spent much of my career in complex, high-pressure environments where the stakes are real and the work matters. I am proud of that. I like hard problems. I like responsibility. I like knowing that the work I do contributes to something bigger than me.

I do not want to lose that ambition, and I do not think ambition is the villain in this story.

But I am increasingly interested in the difference between ambition and constant acceleration.

We tend to talk about performance as though more activity naturally produces better results.

More meetings. More messages. More output. Faster turnaround. Greater responsiveness.

But much of modern work does not depend on how quickly we can complete a repetitive task. It depends on judgment, collaboration, creativity, risk management, integration and the ability to solve problems we have not seen before.

Those things require space.

That was one of my favorite parts of my conversation with Kat. She challenged the assumption that slowing down means lowering standards.

In complex work, slowing down can actually be the process that produces a better outcome. It gives people time to ask questions, align with each other, think more holistically and understand the larger problem before rushing into execution.

What looks slower on the surface may ultimately help a team move faster because people are moving in the same direction and making better decisions.

I find that idea particularly relevant right now because technology is accelerating almost everything around us.

AI is giving many of us the ability to do things faster than we could have imagined a few years ago. Drafting, research, analysis, synthesis and administrative work can all happen more quickly.

That creates enormous potential.

But it also creates a choice that I am not sure we are talking about enough:

What do we do with the time we save?

Kat pointed out that productivity gains do not automatically translate into more leisure or more space. Often, the saved time simply gets absorbed by more output.

We finish one task faster, so another task arrives. The capacity gets filled. The expectation moves again.

AI can make us more productive, but unless we are intentional, it can also make the hamster wheel spin faster.

That feels like an important question for leaders and individuals alike.

If technology creates capacity, does every minute of that capacity need to be reinvested into doing more?

Or could some of it be reinvested into thinking better, making stronger decisions, developing people, improving the work itself or simply creating enough space for people to sustain performance over time?

There is another layer to all of this that I think is harder to talk about, particularly for high achievers.

Work does not just take our time.

It can become part of our identity.

When Kat and I talked about why work matters so much to us, she described all the things it gives us beyond a paycheck: status, contribution, structure, purpose, community and a sense of who we are.

That is why questions about work can feel so personal.

When we ask whether we are happy with the way we are working, we are sometimes really asking something much bigger.

Who am I if I am not achieving at the same pace?

What happens if I choose differently?

What if the next version of success does not look like the last one?

That part of the conversation landed with me.

There comes a point, I think, when many of us realize that becoming more capable does not automatically make life feel lighter.

You can become excellent at carrying a lot and still wonder whether you should be carrying all of it.

You can be grateful for your career and still question parts of the way you work.

You can be ambitious and still want a life with more room in it.

Kat offered a practical way to think about that.

Rather than rushing straight into fixing the feeling, first name it. Then look at the balance between the demands in your life and the resources available to you.

Demands are the things consuming energy: workload, cognitive load, responsibility, deadlines, parenting, commitments.

Resources are the things that protect or replenish you: autonomy, support, clarity, connection, purpose, time and recovery.

The goal is not to remove every demand. A life with no challenge would not necessarily be a fulfilling one.

The question is whether the balance still works.

I like that because it resists our instinct to immediately optimize ourselves.

Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is notice.

Notice where the pressure is coming from. Notice what we have normalized. Notice whether we are solving the right problem. Notice whether we need more resilience, or whether resilience is being used to help us tolerate something that could actually be changed.

I do not think the answer is to reject ambition. I certainly have not.

I still care about doing meaningful work, growing, contributing and performing at a high level.

But I am becoming more interested in a wider definition of performance.

One that includes judgment, not just speed. Recovery, not just effort. Thoughtfulness, not just responsiveness. Contribution, not just achievement.

And enough space to ask whether the way we are working is actually helping us build the life we want.

So this is the question I am taking into this week:

Is there something you keep trying to become better at tolerating when what it really needs is to change?

Hit reply and tell me. I genuinely want to know.

This Thursday, I’ll share my full conversation with Dr. Kat Page, organizational psychologist and author of Good Work: Transform Your Work from the Inside Out.

We talk about ambition, burnout, AI, resilience, work as identity, why slowing down can sometimes improve performance, and what sustainable high performance might actually require.

At the very end of our conversation, I asked Kat if she had any final words for listeners.

Her answer was only four words:

Permission to be human.

I think that may be the idea underneath all of it.

— Nikki

The Wider Measure

Success is bigger than what fits on a résumé.