There is a transition that happens, or fails to happen, somewhere in the second half of a career. For a long time the organising question is what you can accumulate: the results, the recognition, the position, the record. But at some point it stops delivering, and the question that replaces it is a different one: what will be left, and in whom.

I have watched people arrive at this in two very different ways. Some are forced into it, usually by circumstance; the role that does not come, the health event, the realisation at sixty that the accumulation has reached whatever level it is going to reach. Others make the shift deliberately, while still at full strength, and in my observation they do markedly better. Not because they are more virtuous, but because contribution turns out to be a more durable source of satisfaction than achievement. A result is finished when it is finished. A person you helped build goes on building.

The part I find most interesting is that the two are not in conflict during the overlap. The most generous senior people I know are not doing less significant work; they are doing the same work with the deliberate addition of bringing others through it. What changes is the measure of success, from what the work did for them to what it left behind. And the test is reasonably concrete: look at what you are currently building and ask how much of it survives your involvement ending. So, as a reflection for today: what are you building that will outlast you being in the room?