The movie you would produce and direct

You hold a good title at a large firm, and you have a reputation for being the person who knows where things really stand. Three roads lie in front of you. Stay, and run the department for ten more years. Climb, and take a vice president offer in another city with travel built in. Or start your own practice, which you have been describing to friends for six years. You have collected opinions on all three and you are no closer to deciding.

That was a forty-four-year-old director of project controls at a Houston engineering and construction firm, and he asked me what I would do three ways in one cup of coffee. His wife said she wanted him happy. His old teammate said take the VP seat, you don’t turn those down. His brother-in-law said start the company before you’re too old. Each opinion was sound, and each was that person’s picture of his life. He had no picture of his own to compare them against.

I told him I do not decide that for people. I hand over questions, tools and stories, and they go have the conversation with themselves and the people who ride with them.

Why do more opinions make the decision harder?

Because opinions answer “which road is best” before anyone has said where you are going.

Most pilots at an airport will tell you whether to fly a given route in a given weather. Few of them know your destination, your aircraft’s limits, your fuel, or who is in the back seat. A pilot files a flight plan in a set order: destination first, then the route, then a briefing for everyone on board before the engine starts. A route chosen before the destination is set is a guess, and a passenger who was not briefed learns the plan in the air.

That is the order I use with a career decision. Collecting opinions is route advice. It helps after you have said where you are going and who is coming with you, and it adds noise before.

What is the market already telling me?

Each road is a different buyer for the same judgment, so before the destination I asked him to read the buyers.

The company that employs you is a buyer. It trades a steady seat for what it knows you do. The climb is the same buyer offering a bigger seat, and the price is a larger share of his week and a different zip code. The start puts him in front of a new set of buyers, and they pay for a result on a date rather than for a seat.

Then I asked who had already tried to buy him. Three calls in twelve months, he said, none of them sought out. Each came from a mid-size operator with a late, over-budget project and no way to hire a full-time controls director. They wanted him by the month, for the one project.

That is the market voting early. It says there is a gap, a buyer for the gap, and a way to pay for it. Whether to start is a separate decision, and it goes in the picture as a fact.

How do I decide between stay, climb and start?

Write the movie you would produce and direct, then ask which road belongs in it. Pick the one you would wake up and make. Skip the one you think people want to see you in.

The tool is Chapter 15’s Movie of Your Life, which makes your Life Plan visible as a storyboard. Most of us have spent our lives as crew on somebody else’s production, building sets for a story we did not choose. Producing means deciding what gets made and what it costs. Directing means deciding how it looks and feels. You hold both jobs.

You make eight creative decisions: genre, characters, location, pace, theme, climax, finale and sequel. He wrote a line for each. His genre was a family saga with a builder in it. His location was Houston, close to his wife’s mother, who would need them. His pace was a slow, wide shot for four years, with a daughter in high school. His theme: build something that carries my judgment. His climax: a practice with a name on the door and a team that could run a month without him.

Underneath, the Life Plan priced each road in money, time, effort and energy, including what it would cost his wife and kids. The climb looked best on the first of those four and worst on the last two.

Then one question for each road: which scene does this belong to? Once the picture is set, it works as a filter, and opportunities arrive weekly once you start moving. The climb belonged to no scene. It was a script from another production, his teammate’s. The start belonged to a scene in year three. The stay belonged to years one and two, as a holding season with a date on it, which he had not allowed himself to call a plan until then.

He turned down the vice president seat in writing. He kept his director role for two years, with a date on the calendar to hand the department to his deputy. And he took the first of the three project calls as a small side engagement, cleared with his employer, to find out how the work felt when the buyer paid for a result.

What happens when my family sees it?

You find out whether the plan is shared or just signed. He drew his panels badly, on purpose, and screened them at the kitchen table. His wife stopped on panel three. “Where am I in this scene?” she asked.

That question showed up now, on paper, while the answer was cheap to change. She was supposed to be in the first customer scene, running the books for six months. She had said she wanted him happy. She also wanted a part in it.

A weak drawing is fine. A blank climax panel means the mission is not specific enough yet, so go back and sharpen it.

The move for this week

Write one line for each of the eight decisions in one sitting, two hours at most. If you have a Life Plan, use it. If you do not, rough numbers will do for now.

Then take your three roads and ask, for each, which scene it belongs to. Cross out the ones that fit none.

Sketch the climax with stick figures. Screen it within the week for the people who are in it, and watch their faces.

It costs a table and two hours, and it will do more for you than another round of opinions.