By ETJ Life – helping PE-backed CEOs thrive in work and life.
You Don’t Have to Choose Between All-In and All-Out
For years the choice felt binary. You’re either all in at seventy hours a week, or all the way out at seven. The best next chapters live in the space between.
When you’ve run at full throttle your whole career, the two speeds you know best are on and off. So when the seat loosens, the imagination jumps straight to the extremes: keep grinding, or stop entirely. Both can feel wrong. Full throttle isn’t what this season is asking for, and a hard stop leaves a lot of good energy with nowhere to go.
The honeymoon of open time is real and worth enjoying, with the trips and the slow mornings and the long-postponed plans. It’s also, on its own, not a plan. Left undesigned, an open calendar eventually starts to feel like something’s missing, because the drive that built your career doesn’t disappear. It just goes looking for somewhere to point.
The good news is you get to pick the speed. Somewhere between seventy and seven is a gear that keeps you engaged and useful without running your life. Naming that you’re after the middle, not one of the extremes, is the first step to building it.
Designing the Middle Gear
The middle gear doesn’t appear on its own. Like everything else you’ve built, it works better when you design it.
Start with what genuinely fuels you, and size it to the time you actually want to give. For a lot of leaders that looks like a few board seats, where you add real value in a handful of focused hours without owning the day to day. For others it’s mentoring the next generation, advising a company or two, or finally building something of your own, on your own terms.
Then add back the parts of life the seat kept crowding out. The middle gear isn’t only about work at a lower volume, it’s about making room for the health, the relationships, and the interests that never fit on the old calendar. The aim isn’t less of a life, it’s a fuller one, with work sized to serve it rather than swallow it.
Design it with the same intention you brought to the business, and the in-between stops being a void to worry about and becomes the best chapter yet: enough challenge to stay sharp, and enough room to actually live. Same drive, better balance, and a gear that’s entirely yours to set.
ETJ Life is a community for CEOs in the Transition season. This perspective reflects ongoing member interactions and real leadership challenges in the next chapter.