It’s a totally legitimate reaction. It feels like a lot of work that will consume so much time and effort. It also feels too drastic and grave as if they would have to drop everything they are doing now to go through the Placeholder. I get it.

One Shade: “Going All The Way”

That version of Placeholder certainly exists. Take Roz Savage’s story. Roz Savage had spent 11 years working as a management consultant in London after graduating from a law school. In her mid-thirties, she was living a comfortable and conventional life with a successful career, steady income, a nice house in the suburbs with her husband. Then on a train trip in 2000, she did an exercise to write obituaries for the life she was living and the one she really wanted to live. This exercise changed everything.

The first version of the obituary reflected how things would turn out given her then current life trajectory, and the second version reflected a vision of the life she aspired to live. In the process of doing this exercise, she discovered something: writing the first version drained so much of her energy she couldn’t even finish it. However, while writing the second version, she was so energized she couldn’t stop. This disparity left such a strong impression in her mind and spurred her to leave everything she accumulated up to that point behind to pursue the “meaningful work” she wrote in the second version. It was about becoming the first woman to complete the Atlantic Rowing Race solo. Roz left her husband, prestigious job, steady income and invested all of her assets and time for this purpose.

On March 14th, 2006, she finished the Atlantic Rowing Race solo: one woman, one boat, and 103 days of rowing across three thousand miles of open ocean. Many things went against her original plan. All four of her oars broke and she had to row with patched-up oars for more than half the race. Her cooking stove failed after 20 days, then her navigation equipment and music player. But she made it. In 2010, Roz became the first woman to row solo across the Pacific Ocean, too. Since then, she continued to live following the vision of the obituary version 2 as an environmental advocate, writer, speaker and now a politician as the Member of Parliament of the United Kingdom.

This is the common understanding people have of the changes they think they need to make through the Placeholder. However, the Placeholder comes in many shades. The changes we create in the Placeholder don’t have to be so grandiose that transform our lives upside down and inside out. It can be a tiny change, like what Woojin Kim did.

Another Shade: “Making One Patch of the Quilt at a Time”

After working at an investment firm, tech companies, and a startup founder over the course of 20 years, he wanted to stop jumping from job to another job but create something truly meaningful for himself. So he started asking himself a question—What matters to me?

As he looked back his life and career, he understood what mattered to him was entrepreneurial spirit. In work, he valued entrepreneurship so much that he even started his own company once. He worked at AWS to help startup teams and founders as well. He also started teaching entrepreneurship at a local college.

The entrepreneurship was integrated in his parenting as well. To teach his kids the independence, scrappiness, creativity and resilience of entrepreneurs, he started a small business with his kids as a side hustle. His older son, sixth grader, became a CEO and his younger daughter, fourth grader, a CMO. He did everything from creating a business plan to doing a market research together with his “cofounders”. The product idea they had was so good that they could even secure a Pre-Seed fund from a startup contest, went to market and had good sales. His kids, who are now teenagers, are so natural in presenting themselves and their ideas. They are willing to experiment anytime, unafraid of failing, which is the essence of entrepreneurship Woojin hoped for his kids.

Thanks to these many small steps and experiments he took toward entrepreneurship, he was ready to invest 100% of his time as a catalyst for entrepreneurs of the present and the future. For current startup founders and teams, he wanted to help them out to become better leaders and stronger teams. For those who aspire to become entrepreneurs, he wanted to help them sprout the entrepreneurial seeds planted in them. As he envisioned this, he decided to leave his full-time work at AWS and started his own practice as an entrepreneur himself. On the surface, it doesn’t look that much different from what he was doing before; but it’s a meaningful change for Woojin that now he’s doing it on his own term.

The Placeholder is a spectrum. There are so many shades on this spectrum; some are so subtle and some are dramatic. However it looks, what those Placeholders in different shades have in common is that each Placeholder is a uniquely meaningful innovation to the career and life of the individual who’s taking it. As you cannot criticize one shade of blue is better or worse than the other shades, you can’t evaluate or compare different shades of Placeholder.

If you ever thought it’s all or nothing for you to enter the Placeholder, here are some questions for you to consider:

• What would feel more like you — even if it’s just a little bit more?

• What's the smallest version of the change you want to make — and would that still feel meaningful to you?

• What would you be doing more of if you stopped measuring your choices against someone else's bold leap?

Wanna Read The Placeholder?

In August 2022, I was getting ready to file for LLC and create my business officially. I needed a name for my business but couldn’t think of a good one.

Long before I thought about it as a business, I knew what I wanted to focus on after my time at Meta. It was going to be about people and the culture of organization, so I decided to call it simply “People+Culture,” without further consideration. The plus sign was intentional as I knew people and culture are always intertwined. I couldn’t think of one independent of another. Both were critical in the success of organizations. Hence, People+Culture was born.

I think of an organization as a mountain, people as trees and an organizational culture as the forest trees form together. Working in many organizations for 20 years from Apple (twice), Microsoft and Meta, this felt truer as time went on. Yet it was very odd to me that people, organization, and culture were often treated separately.

Many learning & development programs I went through at each company often just focused on individual people. They assumed that I’d be a good manage if I learn and develop various managerial capacities. It’s not entirely wrong but one healthy tree cannot survive if the entire mountain is infested with some vermin or burning with a fire. I couldn’t be an effective manager alone, if the team or organization I worked inside wasn’t effective.

The same was true for the organizational culture. Whenever there were cultural issues, they tried to implement it as a standalone project. The idea was that if they identify the root cause of the problem and take actions to address it, they could solve the cultural problems. But the culture is a living organism like a forest. There is no single factor to keep the forest thriving and healthy. Plus, it takes a long time to grow a forest, like it does for culture.

The biggest mystery to me was that companies didn’t connect the well-being of people and culture with organizational success. There were so many research work that proves the strong correlation between workplace culture and success of businesses. Companies I worked at always treated working on people and culture as a “good to have”, not a “must-have,” as if they didn’t believe in the research findings. It was like people attributing the healthy ecosystem of the mountain to the good weather only, without thinking about the exuberant trees that created a thick and beautiful forest.

Having suffered as one of the trees in those interdependent and intricate systems, what I hope to achieve with People+Culture is to help leaders and organizations be more thoughtful about their people and culture. I started with tech companies but recently focused my efforts on startups, since I experienced firsthand that reactive tendencies around people and culture were formed earlier when big tech firms were startups.

Here are three questions I’d like to invite all of us to ask in the organizations we lead or belong:

1. Are we developing people in isolation, or in context? Even the most capable person struggles in a dysfunctional team or organization. Are your investments in people also accounting for the system they operate within?

2. Is our organizational structure enabling or constraining the people within it? The mountain shapes what trees can grow and where. Are the design choices in your organization actively supporting the people and culture you’re trying to build?

3. Are we treating the well-being of people and culture as a “must-have” driver of success, or still a “good to have”? Is your leadership team making decisions — about budget, priorities, and strategy — as if the health of your people and culture directly determines organizational success?

What are your answers?

I wonder how everyone is doing with their own Placeholder exploration. One of my latest experiments was to re-write The Placeholder book in Korean, which was both strange and wonderful.

Last August in 2025 when I was in Korea, I got a book deal with the Korean publisher Sigongsa to publish The Placeholder. Their response to the original Placeholder book was positive. They thought it would offer very refreshing perspectives on work for Korean audience.

At first, I thought it’d be a pretty straightforward and simple process—because I was simply “translating” the book. But I was deadly wrong with my assumptions in two ways.

Two Wrong Assumptions

First of all, translation wasn’t easy nor simple. As a bilingual speaker/writer in both English and Korean, I liked the fact I could translate my own book from English to Korean. However, translation was basically another version of creation. I probably sound ignorant as I completely didn’t understand the art of translation, but it was true. It wasn’t just about replacing one English word or sentence into Korean. Due to the vast difference between two language systems, I had to put a lot more thoughts into how to re”create” each English word and sentence into Korean to convey what I really meant.

At this point, you might ask: “Umm, have you tried AI?” Of course, I tried getting help from ChatGPT to Claude and Gemini and other AI tools specialized for translation. While these tools helped creating an okay first draft of translation, they weren’t effective at all in understanding nuances and intention of my original writing. They simply didn’t get me, the original author; therefore, I ended up “recreating” most of it. I now see why we would still need human translators for both fictions and nonfictions, even in the age of AI.

Secondly, I ended up re-writing 60% of the original Placeholder to relate to the Korean audience. This was a conscious decision. In discussion with the publisher, Sigongsa, I realized some stories from people I interviewed in The Placeholder wouldn’t be relatable to Korean audience due to cultural differences. Therefore, I decided to swap the original interviews of six people in the original Placeholder with interviews of Korean people.

The schedule was tight; the Korean manuscript was due December 22, 2025. After the book deal was signed in September, I had only three months left to recruit six Korean people who had experiences of placeholders and weave their stories into the book, on top of translation of the original book. It was anxiety inducing three months. Yet all the stars were aligned and I could find six amazing Korean Placeholder way finders and their stories were just perfect; I couldn’t have asked for better.

On Dec 22, 2025, I finally submitted the Korean manuscript to my editor at Sigongsa and we went through the revision process twice as I write this now. The Korean title will be different from The Placeholder, as there is no equivalent and relatable word for “placeholder” in Korean. It’s likely to be published in May in Korea. The Placeholder will get to have the second life in Korea.

What Writing a Book in Two Different Languages Taught Me

Working on this Korean edition was such a strange and wonderful experience at the same time. This experience of writing a book in two different languages taught me a couple of things:

1. Perspective Taking: Although it was my thesis I thought deeply about and wrote about last year, I had to re-evaluate everything from a very different cultural background when I was re-writing in Korean. Through this experience, I realized how much “westernized” or “Americanized” my belief system has become. This is understandable given that I lived in the U.S. for the past 20 years; yet it made me culturally more aware.

2. Appreciation of Different Cultures through Different Languages: Translating from one language to another is the quickest way to understand cultural differences for sure. However, it not only points out the differences at the technical and superficial level but also unravels the ontological differences between cultures.

   English is a language of description, optimized for expression from inside out. You can describe almost anything by combining various words and phrases and the clear communication is prized. Korean is a language of implication, with a white space or grey area. Each word has their own meaning but it can be understood differently depending on the context, tone or the speaker. It leaves a lot of rooms for interpretation intentionally, which can feel confusing or destined for misunderstanding from the POV of English speakers. Learning more deeply about these subtle nuances between these two languages helped me appreciate both even more!

   At times, being a bilingual felt like a disadvantage, especially when I notice that I am not being “perfect” with either language after all. There is always 10-20% of me feeling I am not explaining myself nor understood clearly in either language. Yet, this experience made me further appreciate my bilingual inner world, albeit imperfect. After all, I get to play with great aspects of both languages!

3. The Universality of Placeholder Experiences: Discovering stories of placeholder among Koreans was another wonderful thing. At first, I was concerned what if some elements of Placeholder experiences doesn’t apply to Korean audience, especially the perspective to “experiment like a mad scientist”. However, as I interviewed Korean interviewees for their placeholder experiences, I discovered so many amazing daring out of the world experiments. Their stories were so amazing that support the theme of the book extremely well. Plus, by expressing such deep longings for “creating the work that matters to them,” Korean stories made the Placeholder even more compelling and universal.

Reliving the writing process of The Placeholder in Korean after English was a very unique experience. Not many writers get to do that. It was a lot of work, but my conviction about the Placeholder became even stronger thanks to it.

Like I learned in the first round with The Placeholder, once it’s done, this book will have its own life. I am definitely curious to see what kind of life it gets to live but I let go of the rest.

I’ll share more about this book in the future - the new title (in Korean) and the book cover. Stay tuned!

With Metta

Miroo

• Martin Ford, known for his book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, raised the possibility of significant disruption in employment as robotics and AI move into roles historically held by humans.

• Betsey Stevenson, an economist, provided a perspective grounded in labor-economics and policy: the effects will vary by occupation, by skill level, and by how quickly adaptation happens.

Despite differences in their views and where they come from, they shared some similar observations in the conversation as follows:

• The transition people experience with their work will not be uniform to everyone: some roles may be transformed or made more productive rather than eliminated outright. However, whether it’s a blue-collar job or knowledge work, any roles involving routine physical or repetitive “algorithmic tasks” (data processing, pattern recognition, documenting, etc.) may face increased automation and replacement via robotics and AI.

• If work is transformed, policy will need to adapt accordingly to support people and society. For example: support for displaced workers, retraining/reskilling programs, and possibly more radical ideas like a universal basic income (UBI) or digital dividends.

• Education and lifelong learning become vital: as tasks shift, the nature of skills valued will shift. Human skills will matter more, but what they are will shift: Skills like empathy, oversight, judgment, creativity, liaising between machines and humans may become relatively more important; routine execution perhaps less so.

This conversation prompted me to think about what are the right questions to contemplate with regard to our work in the age of AI.

The Right Questions to Ask

1. “Will I lose my job?” (X) => “How will my job change?” (O)

Most frequently asked questions about our work with the advent of AI are “Which jobs will AI and robotics replace humans?” or “Will I lose my job?”. But the right question to ask is “How will my job change?”

Surely, some jobs will be replaced by AI and robotics outright. I don’t deny that. As both Ford and Stevenson mentioned above, humans will most likely lose many jobs centered around algorithmic tasks, as they will be replaced by AI and robotics. Yet, it doesn’t mean AI and robotics will replace 100% of every jobs humans do.

For many people, the immediate question isn’t just elimination of their role, but transformation of the role: more oversight of AI, more human judgement, and more collaboration with machines. Therefore, the right question to ask is “How will my job change in the context of AI and robotics?” and contemplate how to adapt to such changes.

2. What does “work” mean?

Beyond just jobs and tasks, what does it mean to “go to work” in a world where much can be automated? What do you define as “work?” On any given work day in your job, what do you do? When I look back on my 20 years of career, I spent most of the time in meetings (if not commuting). Is that work? If not, what can we call “work”?

One way to contemplate this question is to reflect how much of your work is composed of pseudowork. In the book, <Pseudowork: How We Ended Up Being Busy Doing Nothing>, coauthors Dennis Nørmark and Anders Fogh Jensen, define “pseudowork” as follows:

Pseudowork is meaningless, bears no significant fruit and has no real impact, no matter whether the person doing it thinks so or not. Empty work is pseudowork. Slacking is intentional pseudowork. But the concept also covers making up things to do that aren’t necessarily instances of deliberate work avoidance, nor absolutely devoid of content, but are nonetheless pseudo, because they ultimately don’t matter. It is work that affects nobody else, or at least nobody who is engaged in real work. Without it, the world will go on undeterred, as if nothing had happened.

Pseudowork is the meeting at which you’re told lots of stuff you already know. It’s the PowerPoint presentation that you forget as soon as the projector is turned off. It’s supervision or monitoring that doesn’t prevent things from going off the rails.

Pseudowork isn’t just empty work. It also refers to bullshit jobs, pretending to be busy, activities that resemble work (but are not), and meaningless tasks, i.e. the big project that everybody knows is a waste of time.

Doing pseudowork has a serious implications on the well-being of workers. The authors discovered the disengagement from the lack of meaning at work became a widespread cause of serious health issues. “In Sweden, the number of people suffering stress has exploded, just as it has in Denmark and the rest of Europe; almost 10 percent of the population are on some kind of antidepressant.” Roland Paulsen, the sociologist well known for his research on empty work, corroborates this. “Work that is so relentlessly meaningless definitely contributes to a lack of mental well-being. People ask themselves: Is this really how I want to spend my time?”

Raise your hand if this question, “Is this really how I want to spend my time?”, never sneaked in your mind. Probably very few. In a way, one clearly positive impact that AI and automation will make to humans is that we’ll become free from many pseudowork jobs. But that’s the half of the story. We will want to spend our time working on a “real” work, something valuable and meaningful for life of ours and others, when we don’t have to do pseudowork anymore. We’ll want to find or even create the “real” work.

This pursuit for a “real” work begs us to ask the next question.

3. Fundamentally, what makes “work” meaningful to me?

What would make your work meaningful to you? More money or higher social status? Okay, but why does that matter? What makes a work meaningful after you accumulate more wealth and fancier status?

You might care deeply about helping stray dogs in India to survive, because you care about the livelihoods of animals. You might find it meaningful to write and talk about the modern day mystics across all religious traditions because you appreciate their wisdom in the universal messages they deliver to people. Or you want to dedicate as much your time as possible to making beautiful ceramics, because you feel so blissful whenever you put your hands on clays. Whatever it is, what makes work meaningful to you is very personal. It’s not contingent on what others value.

So, where do these questions bring us?

Be More Human to Create Your Real Work

There are a lot of fear-mongering narratives in terms of the future of work in the age of AI. But the more I listen to such arguments, debates, or discussions, I come down to the same conclusions over and over, which are:

1. Don’t be afraid, and

2. Try to be more human, not a better version of AI.

The second point, “be more human,” seems ironic or counterintuitive in the age of AI. But what it promises is that we come to create the real work that’s truly meaningful to us by delving into who we are.

That’s what The Placeholder is for. Studying yourself like an anthropologist doing a longitudinal research on certain species of human (in this case, it’s you researching yourself); ideating like a designer, generating out of the box ideas you never tried; and experimenting them like a mad scientist. Doing this on repeat, you come to create the work that you feel aligned with. That’s what the “real” work is.

By learning what it means to be more human and be more like YOU with your own lived experiences, you come to create the meaningful work, the real work for yourself. Instead of living in fear of when some new technologies like AI or robotics will take your job away, you will have agency for your own work to adapt and regenerate, no matter what happens.

Last but not least, going through the Placeholder myself and observing what other people experience in their own Placeholders, I come to truly appreciate the unique human capabilities and qualities that are innate to us but are hard to codify into AI. They are our own intuition, imagination, emotions, and commonsense—called “Primal Intelligence”, according to Angus Fletcher, the professor at Ohio State University. In his book, he shares a method for activating our brain’s primal power to create many possibilities that work. He writes,

With that method, you can adapt to change and win in chaos. You can create the future by seeing the possible faster. You can carry on the mission when the unexpected bullet comes.

An Invitation

So, here’s the prompt I’d like to leave you with:

Contemplate the following three questions. Have conversations about this with your friend, or maybe write a journal about these.

1. How will my job change?

2. What does “work” mean?

3. Fundamentally, what makes “work” meaningful to me?

Then observe what kind of “urges” or “aspirations” spring up in your mind. Perhaps it comes up in the form of “I want to do XYZ” or a certain feeling/emotion. What are they?

If you feel like it, share with me either via comment to this post or send me an email! 😉

========

Books📚 | Conversations🎙️That Influenced This Post:

• [Listen] On with Kara Swisher: How AI will impact the future of work

• [Read] Pseudowork: How We Ended Up Being Busy Doing Nothing by Dennis Nørmark and Anders Fogh Jensen

• [Read] Primal Intelligence by Angus Fletcher

• [Read] The Placeholder: The Place To Go To Create Your Noble Work by Miroo Kim

Want to Learn about The Placeholder?

I met Lenn at Meta (then Facebook) when I joined the mobile partnership team in 2013. For me, it was a golden opportunity to join Facebook after working at Apple and Microsoft.

Facebook was growing fast yet their main growth came from desktop users (I mind you, it was 2013). The growth rate of mobile users was exploding and they desperately needed to grow users on iOS, Android, and other mobile platforms. Like everything is about AI now, it was mobile then.

A cool job at a fast growing company, traveling around the world working on the growth of mobile users of FB with smart and passionate coworkers—everything looked perfect for my career and life. Yet I started noticing growing uneasiness inside me. I couldn’t name what it was though.

About four years passed. My career was going well but that internal uneasiness kept growing like a cancer. Empty, incongruent, feeling lost, meaningless - these were adjectives I’d use to describe how I felt but I could never talk about it.

“Come on, it’s a cool job at a respected company! Look at your resume - Apple, Microsoft, and now Meta! You dreamed of this! Don’t blow it. Just be grateful for it and keep going. You are on track!” This voice held me back, until the moment of truth came, urging me to do something about the deep incongruence I felt about my career and my life.

Career of Alignment over Achievement

Now I know clearly what that empty hollow was about. It was misalignment, quoting Lenn‘s words from his first book, Breaking Asphalt. Reading his book, I felt a sense of camaraderie that I wasn’t alone in suffering from misalignment. We didn’t talk about it then, but he also suffered from it. And he didn’t stop there. He realized he was trapped in the grand illusion of safety. He writes,

“Comfort feels pleasant momentarily but often disguises itself as safety, creating a false sense of security that discourages exploration.”

This discernment of comfort and security propelled him to get off the “clear path to lesser goals” and instead chose to step into the journey of uncertainty, searching for alignment in his work. In this process, he discovered a simple truth: alignment matters more than achievement for us to claim that we lived a good life.

This journey isn’t easy or straightforward. It’s a big Placeholder phase in your career and life; there are no maps or guideposts. It seems super chaotic and at times scary, making us hesitate to enter it. The paths you end up walking through this phase might be much steeper and harder than the one you walked so far, like seedlings peeking out through hard asphalt. Yet it will reward you with the sense of alignment between yourself and your work, which will add momentum beyond just movement to your life.

This book is not a memoir but an impressive culmination of his own growth and transformation through alignment. He shares not only his own stories but also other examples of lives well-lived with alignment. Through his original SEPARATE framework, he also walks you through how to make this possible for yourself.

Reading this book, you will feel as if you are taking a long walk with Lenn in dialogue of stories and reflections to contemplate the alignment in life. Finishing the book, you will feel empowered to work on defining your own alignment.

“What holds you back from your greatest potential isn’t insurmountable challenges but the comfortable allure of clearer paths toward lesser goals. True success doesn’t lie in external validation; it lies in living in alignment with your unique gifts, deepest values, and authentic passions. When you break through the asphalt of external validations and societal norms, you create a life of overflowing with meaning, joy, and creativity.” - <Breaking Asphalt>, Lenn Pryor

Two Authors, Two Journeys, and One Question

When I reconnected with Lenn many years later, we found each other in a similar situation. We both left our decades-long careers in tech and went on different journeys to reclaim the authorship of our stories of career and life. Although our journeys looked different, it was about the same question: How do we rethink work so it actually works for us?

This synchronicity, which is so marvelous in itself, also led us to write each of our books: The Placeholder and Breaking Asphalt. While The Placeholder goes deeper in the beginning phase of finding alignment, Breaking Asphalt guides you how to walk on the steeper path beyond the beginning toward alignment.

Do you feel anxious and threatened with your career because of the surge of AI? Do you ever feel that you are at an important junction in your career? Have you been feeling that you are “missing” something, although your career looks good on paper? Are you rethinking what success means to you and ready to explore deeper questions about work and life?

If so, Lenn and I are here for you. Let’s walk together from The Placeholder to Breaking Asphalt.

Join the Live Book Talk in Person

Dear Angus,

It’s an understatement to say I love your book, Primal Intelligence. I am having a hard time to come up with the right words to express my admiration and gratitude for your work and this book. 

Since I was little, I always felt conflicted between the stories I believed in about myself and the stories I was told to believe at school and in society. My childhood hero was Anne of Green Gables. She went through so many painful events in her life but she always dealt with them with ultimate optimism in herself and other people around her. When I shared my love for Anne, my mom cautiously warned me that I couldn’t live like Anne in the real world. She called her “unrealistic.”

In turbulent teenage years and early 20s going through my parents’ divorce, and my family’s financial difficulties and many other unfortunate events, I escaped to the world of stories created by so many great writers: Herman Hesse, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, Karen Blixen, Thomas Pinchon, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Pak Kyungni, etc. They were great comfort for me and also dared to imagine different stories I could live.

However, in school and society, the most popular version of stories was “Be an A student, go to a great college, get a good job, and everything will be fine.” Although I loved and wanted to believe so much in the unlimited possibilities told by those great writers, I bought into this version and became an A student, went to great schools and got good jobs at respectable companies. 

Only in my mid 30s, I realized the promise that this story made was empty. Sure, it drove me to achieve a lot, but it was at the cost of negating my own innate abilities, which you call Primal Intelligence: intuition, imagination, emotions, and commonsense.

• We perceive the world’s hidden rules through intuition. 

• We make the future with imagination.

• We know the path of personal growth through emotion.

• We discern and decide wisely in uncertainty with commonsense. 

Instead, what I was told to capitalize on was my logic and rationality. I excelled at it and got “successful” by the society’s standard but I was utterly miserable. “Miserable” because I was always anxious and worrying, constantly comparing myself to others or kept measuring my current self to the hypothetical future self. According to the “success” narrative that emphasized logic and rationality as the way to go, the theme of life was nonstop competition and self-improvement. It was exhausting and I found it empty of any meaning. I started asking myself “For what am I working and living?”

That’s what prompted me to explore many ideas and experiment with them too. I started reading a lot of books on neuroscience, contemplative practices and psychology. I started practicing meditation seriously. I interacted with many people who shared the same curiosity with me. And eventually it was that curiosity led me to enter my own Placeholder period to create my own Noble Work. 

It was not about just “finding” the next great job but “creating” the work that I found truly meaningful. In the context of Primal Intelligence, this was about “being aware of what kind of stories we are telling about our life now and being able to freely imagine a different story guided by our intuition, emotion and commonsense.” Going through my own Placeholder and writing a book about it was a process of restoring the hidden path to my primal intelligence. The sincere and deep trust in myself was a great bonus that came along with it.  

Reading your book, I realized what everyone I interviewed for The Placeholder shared in common was their access to their intuition, imagination, emotion, and commonsense. That primal intelligence was what made them possible to be “naturalists” to observe themselves, synthesize critical insights about themselves and create their own meaningful works.

This restoration of trust in ourselves is particularly critical now, in the age of AI. There are so many debates and discussions now that compare human intelligence to AI, spewing out so much pessimism about humanity. Your book guides us with what it means to be human with primal intelligence, because it is uniquely human and not programmable in AI. Instead of the futile comparison between humans and AI, we get to reclaim our humanness through Primal Intelligence. 

What also fascinated me so much was how you showed the extensive application of primal intelligence in various areas such as innovation, resilience, decision-making, communication, coaching, and even leadership. Not only the depth of your research on narrative cognition but also your actual experience of applying primal intelligence with US Army Special Operations, corporations, education institutions, and creators of the world got me so excited about the unlimited possibilities of human potential. 

In the last chapter of Primal Intelligence, you shared how Primal Intelligence helped you grow through your own personal stories of painful experiences. You wrote, 

“I stopped being a fake savant and became a true teacher. I learned, at last, to do for others what Shakespeare had done for me: pass on a method for activating the brain’s primal power to create new plans that work. With that method, you can adapt to change and win in chaos. You can create the future by seeing the possible faster. You can carry on the mission when the unexpected bullet comes.”

In Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote, “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.” Primal Intelligence is such a gift for all of us, as you are reminding us of the innate potential we always carry in ourselves, which guides us to uncover what we may be. I am forever grateful that you took a chance on yourself to pursue PhD in Shakespeare instead of neurophysiology intuitively 25 years ago and kept marching on this path of studying how we think in stories.

THANK YOU SO MUCH for bringing this book to the world and reminding us to tell so many untold stories we have in ourselves.

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To learn more about Angus Fletcher’s work, visit Operation Human and his home page.

Well, it didn’t work out as I expected. 

Now it felt like a big problem. I had so many work projects I wanted to do well. However, instead of marching toward those works, I was not taking actions, like an elephant sitting in the mud. This elephant had no desire whatsoever to get out of this mud. Rather, it wanted to stay in the mud, feeling too comfortable to stand up for now. Soon, my inner saboteur launched a tirade, “You lazy ass elephant! What the hell are you doing?!” like a very loud parrot yapping at the elephant in the mud.  

Why the inaction and low motivation? I reflected on this by going through my “Done” list. (Instead of keeping the “to-do” list and checking it off, I keep a “Done” list for all the things I did, following the advice of Oliver Burkeman). Turns out my first half of this year has been very full. My first book The Placeholder was published and I spent a lot of time launching the book, hosting four Placeholder Conversations. I had taken 10+ new coaching clients, two corporate projects, and one government agency project. I completed a meditation teacher certification training with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. I planned and went on two big family trips to Seoul and Virginia. 

It was a lot of work with a lot of people and different parties. Sure, it was my choice to engage in all those works and activities and I enjoyed them all thoroughly. Yet it was also exhausting. This elephant had been moving a long distance for a while. No wonder it walked into this mud voluntarily and just wanted to be still, enjoying some solitude in the mud bath. It didn’t get stuck in mud by accident; it was a choice. 

In Buddhism, there are two terms for desire: Tanhā and Chanda. Tanhā is an unwholesome form of desire associated with craving, clinging and fear. When you act out of Tanhā, it leads to suffering. On the other hand, Chanda means “intention” or “desire to act.” It’s the motivational drive toward an action. While Chanda is not inherently positive or negative, it can be a wholesome desire that propels one towards positive actions.  

Chanda is what the elephant in me was looking for. The elephant doesn’t want to force itself to be productive out of fear that it will be a loser and the world will be over if it doesn’t get out of the mud right now. Rather than driven by this fear-mongering story that the parrot habitually yaps out of Tanhā, the elephant wants to be motivated by Chanda, the wholesome desire to act. 

So how do we create Chanda? Are there any actions or conditions that can naturally lead us to Chanda? In Buddhism, they say it’s fueled by wisdom, which recognizes what is truly valuable and conducive to well-being. This understanding allows us to develop a sincere aspiration for positive actions. 

Upon further reflection, I realized that this act of compulsively pushing the elephant out of the mud was equivalent of not allowing myself to rest. Why? Because I didn’t get to meet the goals I set for myself and business. It’s the belief that I can’t justify rest until I achieve everything (especially in entrepreneurship). But rest isn’t contingent on results; it’s naturally ensued after hard work. Even though results might not be satisfying, I did pour myself into the process. That’s a good enough condition for rest.

What I really needed was rest after exhausting six months of nonstop working and doing; that was the wisdom. Something needs to take the time it needs to take and we shouldn’t rush it, especially if we’re serious about sustainability of our work. Resting after working hard is one of them, regardless of the outcome of the work. We don’t need to justify rest based on the results. The efforts with hard work are good enough reasons to rest.  

So how is this elephant doing now? It’s still sitting in the mud, without the parrot yapping criticism at it. The elephant knows the world will not end by staying in the mud for now. It is also aware that it needs to get out of the mud bath before the mud on its skin and legs dries up and hardens, making it more difficult to get out. It’s now gazing into the horizon of a savanna, checking out what’s out there. It’s daydreaming and musing on what to do next after this mud bath. It feels calm, relaxed and hopeful.

It’s wholesome.

Jason Shen is a writer and executive coach. Helping out many startup founders as a coach is one of many experiments he has run so far. Previously, he founded three venture-backed startups & led product teams at Etsy and Meta. He is a Y Combinator alum (S11), and NCAA mens gymnastics national champion. You can tell he likes trying new stuff, but it’s not that he was born with it.

Jason and I met at Meta while we’re both in each of our own Placeholder phases, which we didn’t know back then 😂. In one of the courses I taught at Meta, he shared his experiences of failure with his startup Ride Joy. He and his cofounders were once features in the Vanity Fair as one of the rising startups of the Y-Combinator along with Dropbox cofounders and Paul Graham of the Y-Combinator. But in the month this Vanity Fair spread hit newsstands, his company was falling apart. Soon after this, they had to discontinue Ride Joy.

Closing the door of Ride Joy was painful but didn’t stop Jason from evolving. Through this evolution, he learned how to synthesize insights of himself, create the next new ideas for himself based on such insights, and experiment those ideas constantly. In a nutshell, Jason’s story embodies every Placeholder perspective so well that his story has become a part of the book, The Placeholder (Chapter 9).

In July 2025, he shared his further contemplations with me on how he sees the Placeholder, not just as an inflection point in career but as an adaptive way of being—across business, relationships, identity, and self-worth. Below is the six key points from this Placeholder Interview.

Six Placeholder Insights from Jason Shen

1. The Placeholder Is Not a One-Time Phase—It’s Ongoing and Multi-Dimensional

For Jason, the Placeholder is not a phase you are simply “in” or “out” of. It can exist in different areas of life simultaneously. He describes some stable phases of life and work, in which you might feel you are not in the Placeholder. Yet there are also more uncertain and exploratory phases, which coexist with the stable parts. His reflection points out that the Placeholder is not a pit stop but a continual practice of reinvention and responsiveness to change.

2. Is the Change Tolerance is a Skill or a Trait?

Are we born with change tolerance? Or can we learn to become better at it? While Jason acknowledges that openness to experience is partially temperamental, he stresses that the capacity to handle uncertainty grows through experience. And that’s how we build confidence - by doing, not just preparing.

“You can never build real confidence just through preparation… It’s only by going through change and not having everything figured out that you build the belief that you can handle it.”

This insight resonates so well with the third perspective of the Placeholder: a “Mad Scientist”—where experiments, rather than mastery, leads to forward motion.

3. Fear of Looking Wrong or Foolish: Why We Resist the Placeholder

Jason frames much of resistance to change as a fear of being wrong, not dumb. Many would rather be “right” in a safe but unfulfilling career than risk trying something new and possibly failing publicly.

“It’s not just fear of failure. It’s fear of looking like you failed.”

This fear makes the initial threshold into the Placeholder so high. It’s not just because of external risks, but because of internalized perfectionism and social conditioning.

4. Quitting is an Underrated Skill

Jason reframes quitting not as giving up but as “making space for what could be,” Using the film Up as a metaphor for letting go of the past to move forward, we can resonate with the difficulty and emotional complexity of quitting. Jason reflects on his startup failure with nuance—acknowledging how abrupt decisions, lack of emotional support, and discomfort with ambiguity made quitting harder than necessary.

“You quit a job, it doesn’t mean that you never had it… That was a period of time in your life and now you’re in a new period.”

The element of “quitting” is essential in the Placeholder. We get to truly have a mental and physical space and time for us to create the work truly meaningful to us only by letting go of what we used to work on. Yet this is often challenged by many cognitive biases such as loss aversion and sunk cost bias.

5. Being Seen During Change is a Vulnerable but Necessary Part of Growth

Many people want to change “in secret” and only re-emerge once they’ve succeeded. But true growth, Jason says, happens when others witness your uncertainty and still believe in you. Jason reflects on the failure of his startup and why it was hard to let others see him in an uncertain state.

“We want to disappear, transform, and then come back perfect. But the real trust is built when people see you evolving.”

The Placeholder is a communal experience; it’s never about individual ideation and success, but about holding space—for yourself and others—as messy and work-in-progress humans.

6. You Cannot Change Alone.

A lot of people misunderstand that the changes they are making through the Placeholder are solitary projects. It’s not. You can’t change alone. You need so much social support. Jason also points out that it’s not about how much social support you have but about the perception that there is social support for you, which keeps you going. He takes the endurance sports as an example. It’s so difficult you need someone who could help you with mental management of pain, expectations and holding you accountable for gradual progress.

Creating your own meaningful work in the Placeholder requires the same social support. You can seek out such supports from your friends, coworkers and mentors. Also, professional coaches exist to give you more structured and professional support from coaches. If you aren’t sure of what kind of supports you need the most, you can start with reading The Placeholder.

Read The Placeholder

Hope you enjoyed watching these six great insights from Jason about the Placeholder. If you want to learn more about Jason and his work, visit the following links! ❤️

• 👉The Outlier Coach

• 👉The Outlier Advantage (Newsletter)

"𝘼𝙡𝙡 𝙢𝙚𝙣 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙘𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙚𝙦𝙪𝙖𝙡...𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝙘𝙚𝙧𝙩𝙖𝙞𝙣 𝙪𝙣𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙚 𝙧𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙨...
𝙒𝙝𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙖𝙣𝙮 𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙢 𝙤𝙛 𝙜𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙣𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙗𝙚𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙨 𝙙𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙪𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙨,
𝙄𝙩 𝙞𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙧𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙥𝙚𝙤𝙥𝙡𝙚 𝙩𝙤 𝙖𝙡𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙤𝙧 𝙩𝙤 𝙖𝙗𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙝 𝙞𝙩."
(Declaration of Independence, 1776)

Two weeks ago in DC, seeing this at the National Museum of African American History Museum, I felt deeply conflicted.

That sense of conflict was palpable in the public library at McLean, VA, where I held 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 on June 26, 2025. Teachers, nonprofit workers, and government agency workers who were affected by DOGE joined the conversation about creating their own meaningful work.

𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆. One former USAID staff said: "𝙄 𝙠𝙣𝙤𝙬 𝙄 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙡𝙙 𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙩 𝙙𝙤𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙨𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙖 𝙘𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙜𝙚 𝙣𝙤𝙬 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙢𝙮 𝙘𝙖𝙧𝙚𝙚𝙧, 𝙗𝙪𝙩 𝙝𝙤𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙡𝙮 𝙞𝙩'𝙨 𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙛 𝙝𝙖𝙧𝙙 𝙩𝙤 𝙜𝙚𝙩 𝙢𝙤𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙤 𝙙𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙣𝙤𝙬..." The room felt silent.

𝗦𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱, 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝟮𝟭𝟲,𝟬𝟬𝟬 𝗳𝗲𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗱 𝗼𝗳𝗳 𝗱𝘂𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗯𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲 "𝗗𝗢𝗚𝗘." As it was unfolding, it felt like a deja vu: the mass layoff in the tech industry between 2022 and 2024. 𝗢𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝟱𝟴𝟭,𝟬𝟬𝟬 𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗱 𝗼𝗳𝗳 for financial efficiency by small and big tech firms. In a way, this series of mass layoffs became a huge wake-up call for many people.

Nothing was constant and everything could change. They acknowledged they didn't want to keep doing what they were doing. Some of them had to face the reality that they were conflating their identities with their jobs. 𝗦𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗮𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝘄𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗻𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝗲𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲. 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀.

Albeit so many political and systemic issues with DOGE, the lesson is clear once again: 𝘄𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗹𝗲𝘁 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗼𝗿 𝗷𝗼𝗯 𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝘂𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗹𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗹 𝗯𝘆 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗳𝘂𝗹 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗹𝘃𝗲𝘀. 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗜 𝗵𝗼𝗽𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿.

𝗙𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗗𝗢𝗚𝗘 𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗼𝗳𝗳𝘀, 𝗽𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗗𝗠 𝗺𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝘀𝗶𝘅 𝗰𝗼𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗻𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿. If you know someone in your life affected by DOGE layoffs and they need help to navigate how to reset their career, please share this with them.

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝗻𝗱. 𝗪𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗱𝗼 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿.

Join The Placeholder Conversation

Recently I ran into this amazing interview clip of David Whyte on Thinking Allowed. One of the books that helped me navigate my “Placeholder” period was The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship by David Whyte. The book was great to contemplate my commitments to work, relationship and my life.

In this interview, David Whyte talks about people dying on their feet in the Corporate America and their desperate longing for more satisfying and real work that makes them come alive. Instead of “how to find more meaningful work,” he recites poems to his audiences in the corporates so they can experience a way out, starting with The Divine Comedy by Dante.

“In the middle of the journey of my life

I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.”

— Dante, The Divine Comedy: Inferno — Purgatorio — Paradiso

I had such a moment sometime in 2016. I called this The Moment of Truth in my book The Placeholder. The next natural question was “How do I find my way back?” But once I got back on the track I was on before, I felt lost again. It meant that wasn’t the right path to be on. I had to look for a new path. Or create one for myself. This was even more confusing. So, how do you know that you are on your path?

David Whyte says: “Because it disappears.” That’s how you know. How do you know that you’re really doing something radical? Because you can’t see where you’re going. That’s how you know.

But everything you have lent on for your identity has gone. So you are going to enter the black contemplative splendors of self-doubt at the same time as you’re setting out on this radical new path. That first stage of entering the dark wood — that was the beginning of the Placeholder for me.

Then David Whyte leads us with another marvelous poem, Lost by David Wagoner who used to be a chair of poetry at the University of Washington. It’s based on a teaching story from the Northwest Native American tradition. This teaching was given to a young person who would ask the question “What do I do when I’m lost in the forest?” Here’s the answer that the elder gives.

Lost (by David Wagoner)

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

In David Whyte’s words,

the elder is teaching that you cannot sleepwalk your way into your destiny. You must wake up and pay attention. Stand still. You know the trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost. You must pay attention. That means paying attention to the shadow of your existence, too. You must pay attention to everything you’ve given away in order to make yourself safe in your position at work. All the games you play in order to remain safe and untouched, as well as your creative gifts, too. You must pay attention to those.

Entering the Placeholder required a lot of attention. It was like being an anthropologist, observing attentively everything that was happening inside and outside of myself. I wouldn’t call it a destiny for what I was trying to create in my Placeholder period. Yet it was something more fundamentally meaningful and deeply aligned with my values. To understand what truly mattered to me, I had to pay attention. Paying attention required a lot of mental and physical stillness.

Another teaching in this poem is silence, according to David Whyte:

The second stage is that in this teaching, there is this incredible feeling of silence. I think what the elder is saying is that, unless you have an ability for silence in your body to do that, you will get too frightened. Because all the voices inside you will drown out any real change. You’ll have hundred reasons not to do to make any real change you long for. And you’ve got all the voices and all the reasons not to do it. And so the ability for profound silence is being called on here. And then that attention can flower into something else.

Leonard Cohen, the singer who turned Zen monk, spoke of stillness and silence in a matter-of-fact manner that it was simply the most practical way he’d found of working through the confusion and terror that had long been his bedfellows. I had to face a cacophony of so many messages coming at me as I tried different ideas and experimenting them; “You should’t do that — it’s not helping your career!” “What about that job at Google? That should be a good change!” It was so easy to miss the real signal from within, surrounded by all those noises from outside.

I desperately needed stillness and silence. Yet it wasn’t about finding a quiet place where I can just be still. I had to build an internal and external systems to create the sense of stillness and silence. Internally, it meant more time in meditation and learning Dharma for me. Externally, it was about finding the right community of people who are like-minded or inspiring for what I was trying to create. This process of building the system of stillness and silence became a foundation for my own resilience.

In the Placeholder, I left my deadening corporate job and created my own Noble Work to help teams and organizations build healthy work culture. It’s so fulfilling and meaningful to me, yet it doesn’t mean there are no problems. The biggest difference now, though, is that I don’t feel depleted or burned out because of those problems. Whenever I encounter those moments of problems, I find my own tools of standing still in silence. There may be problems, but there are no difficulties.

Question: What is your version of standing still in silence?

Watch the Excerpt of the Interview of David Whyte below.

‘What if no one shows up?’

These thoughts were floating in my mind nonstop since I was preparing for a series of The Placeholder Conversations. Two days before the event in San Francisco, these thoughts became so louder in my head I was thinking about cancelling it.

Then my husband said, “I think it's worth doing. It's worth celebrating your work and it's not about you; it's about the conversation. Why don't you try it and see what happens?" 🤷🏼‍♂️

His gentle remark made me smile, because it was basically what I encourage people to do in The Placeholder. ‘Yeah, why not try it? If no one shows up, I can just go home.’

So I went ahead with the plan. I am glad I did.

A group of beautiful people showed up in both occasions for virtual and in-person gatherings. Some of them have gone through their own Placeholders, some are going through one now, and some are simply curious about The Placeholder.

Together we talked about

• What the Placeholder meant to us

• How we know we are ready to enter the Placeholder

• Our doubts and fears about entering the Placeholder

• Whether we’d feel “nirvana” once we create our Noble Work

• Whether we become habituated to our Noble Work and it becomes like any other “job”

• If the Placeholder is about solving a real problem or simply creating a solution

• If mindfulness and meditation is helpful for the Placeholder

• How we feel different after going through the Placeholder

And many other questions, reflections, and discussions ensued.

I didn't know what to expect or how it'd go. Yet after all, it was exactly what it was supposed to be: the genuine and intimate conversation about the Placeholder experiences. I couldn't have hoped for better.

Preparing for the very first in-person conversation in San Francisco, I wanted to give a special gift to participants. I thought about it for days and decided: A TOY!

Why? Because the divergent and playful mindset is so essential to ideate and experiment in the Placeholder. I chose every toy they could play with their hands, hoping it would spark fun & creativity. Playing with those toys, they would lose themselves and stop worrying about the outcome for a moment. Experimenting in the Placeholder can often put us in the flow state like that.

Toward the end of the Conversation in SF, one of the participants and the person I admire so much, Dr. Philippe Goldin, mentioned the importance of “willingness" to experiment. His comment reminded me of what Matthew Brensilver, my meditation teacher, once talked about the discernment between willingness and willfulness.

Willingness is a conscious choice to be open, receptive, and experimental — even in discomfort or uncertainty. Willfulness is a rigid insistence on personal control, often in defiance or resistance to what is happening. When we are willing, we let go of control and being present with what is. When we are willful, we hold on tightly, needing things to go a certain way. With willingness, we are curious, adaptive, and humble. With willfulness, we are controlling, stubborn, and self-protective.

This is a crucial discernment in the Placeholder. Just be willing to try out whatever we find meaningful without controlling for a certain outcome and see what happens. If we start evaluating our experiments by trying to control the outcome, we become "willful." Willfulness in the Placeholder usually stops us from ideating and experimenting. There is no Noble Work.

Transitioning from one type of work mode to a different way of working that’s more meaningful and significant is challenging. We can easily become “willful” instead of “willing”. If you are at the verge of the Placeholder or going through one, my hope is that you could feel more “willing”, encouraged by this Placeholder Conversation.

Interested? Come join us every 2nd Friday at 8 a.m. PT for The Virtual Placeholder Conversation. RSVP for The Placeholder Conversation in July!

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Huge gratitude to all the Placeholder Creators, everyone who joined these very first two Placeholder Conversations. 🙏🏻❤️

I am looking forward to the next Placeholder Conversation in McLean, VA!

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“There lies the longing to know and be known by another fully and humanly, and that beneath that there lies a longing, closer to the heart of the matter still, which is the longing to be at long last where you fully belong.

- Frederick Buechner, The Longing for Home

This is the epigraph in the masterpiece work, “Reunion”, by Jerry Colonna. This quote was also what he opened our circle with at the recent Reboot retreat in May.

In that circle, I realized everything I did in my life was an active pursuit of belonging.

For a long time, what I thought I longed to belong was the "right" job, the "right" company or the "right" status. It was about being accepted by others, in the circle THEY created or in the way THEY designed. But at the Reboot retreat, I finally realized it was about acknowledging I belonged where I stood, no matter what.

This belonging was possible not because of the status or rights other people have endowed with me. It was only possible because of the meaning I discovered by delving into Radical Self-Inquiry and taking actions accordingly in the Placeholder. At times, it felt like I was going against what was "right" for me - the familiar career path and comfortable life. Yet it was the status quo to break, not to stay in.

That Buechner’s quote has been ringing in my mind louder and louder this week as I observed what was unfolding in LA and SF recently. Although I was not literally being taken off the street by ICE, I suddenly noticed the fear inside, which whispered to me, 'Keep your head down so you don’t get noticed.'

In Reunion, Jerry wrote, “Like my ancestors before me, far too often we remain silent when our friends and peers denigrate anyone who doesn’t look, talk, walk like them. Or anyone who doesn’t fit the model of who or what we were supposed to be….To belong, I chose not to see things. We chose to remain silent.”

Like this, the fearful self in me was telling me to stay quiet, because "I don't belong here unless they let me in." The familiar old story.

But I know now the sense of belonging doesn't just depend on others. It's what WE CREATE for ourselves.

Understanding what truly mattered to me in the Placeholder, I came to see my wholeness, although that might not be what was expected of me. As a result, I got to create this work I am doing now which feels genuinely true to myself. As Michel de Montaigne said "The greatest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself," I belong to myself.

By reuniting with stories of my ancestors, looking into things I did not want to see and truly accepting them as part of myself, I got to show up in my own wholeness with more courage. "I belong here and no one has to vouch for it." As soon as I tell this to that fear in me, it became silent.

And this is what we can do now for one another. To foster systemic Belonging, Jerry Colonna invites us to ask ourselves the following questions:

“How have we been complicit in, and benefited from, the conditions in the world, in our communities, and among the people we claim to love that we say we do not want to exist? And, more, what do we have to give up that we love and value—including perceptions of ourselves as descended from princes—to create the systems of Belonging we want?”

I will walk in protest on June 14 in San Francisco and this will be just a beginning.

I hope you find your own way of speaking up and showing up, for the true belonging we long, not only for ourselves and but also for all of us.

I'd like to invite you to celebrate the launch of The Placeholder in person in San Francisco! This is a great opportunity if you’d like to learn more about The Placeholder and listen to the Placeholder stories of others. Plus, every participant will receive a surprise gift.😉

Please join me to celebrate the launch of The Placeholder virtually on Zoom. For those who can't join in person, this is a great opportunity! RSVP below!

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The tween didn’t get formally recognized as a distinct developmental stage in developmental psychology, unlike childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood. Instead, it just got a cute nickname “tween”, a blend of “teen” and “between”. Not quite children, yet not teenagers, tweens are in the liminal space to adolescence and no one (including themselves and their parents) exactly knows what to do.  

I’d say the life stage between the age 30 and 45 is equivalent to this tween phase in adulthood. Broadly termed as “middle age”, we are expected to know what we ought to do for our career, relationships, or any other major life decisions. Way past early adulthood, we cannot be “immature” nor “naive” anymore. Although labeled as a middle age, we don’t feel quite “established” or “wise enough” yet to claim the full maturity. It’s also too early to expect a midlife crisis. We are in a liminal space in our midlife.

However, like tweens, we start experiencing significant blows from the wind of transitions in this equivocal adulthood. That’s what happened to me and many people I interviewed in The Placeholder.

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The Placeholder: Liminal Stage in Adulthood to Midlife

Nine years ago when I felt the sense of uneasiness growing in my mind like cancer around my thirty seventh birthday, I didn’t know what to do. Knowing that I was no longer twenty something and I couldn’t be having a midlife crisis yet, I just oscillated between ‘I shouldn’t feel this way; I should have my shi* together.’ and ‘What’s wrong with me?’

It was confusing like hell.

Having consumed all the old strategies and tactics to get me out of this funk, I had to part ways from the familiar and approach it in a completely different way. That was the beginning of my Placeholder.

What is a placeholder? Imagine a digital sign-up form, where placeholders appear inside input fields or text areas as faint text to provide an example of the type of information required (e.g., “Enter your name”). This text disappears once we start typing in the field. 

The “Placeholder” phase in life serves the same purposes. It’s the phase of our life we enter to experiment new ideas because the old scripts and manuals no longer serve us or we don’t feel connected to it anymore.

This may apply to relationships, work, lifestyle, and communities we belong to. Particularly for work, it calls for a different kind of change. It’s not about finding a new job, moving to a new company or getting a promotion but about learning how to create the work that we truly find meaningful. The change with our work in the Placeholder is not something we find and strive to fit into. Rather, it’s a totally new approach we create that fits us. 

As the tween stage is like an introduction to adolescence, this Placeholder stage is the liminal adulthood that introduces us to the midlife. We are called to pause what we’ve been doing, reflect and warm up to the idea of breaking apart from old patterns. Then start trying completely new ideas. This is a necessary step for us, if we want to coagulate the midlife chrysalis, rather than crash into midlife crisis.

The Beginning of the Metamorphic Process

Chip Conley, the author and founder of Modern Elder Academy, describes the midlife as the chrysalis, the pupal stage of butterflies. Within this chrysalis, the transformational magic of metamorphosis occurs. He writes, “It is a bit dark and gooey, but it’s not a crisis but a transition. And, of course, on the other side is a beautiful, winged creature of elder hood.”

What’s worth noting is that the transformation begins even before a caterpillar becomes a chrysalis. A caterpillar stops eating and starts making a button of silk to fasten its body to a leaf or a twig. Then it sheds its skin and spins itself a silky cocoon, finally making itself into a shiny chrysalis.

That’s what happens in the Placeholder phase. Something feels off. It’s hard to pinpoint what is wrong, but we know subconsciously we cannot keep doing what we’ve been doing. Like a caterpillar stopping eating, we feel the urge to disrupt and start something anew. This seems counterintuitive at times, because we believe we have been on “the right track” for our career, relationships, and life in general. We start wondering what is “right” and questioning all the layers of identity we built about ourselves. It’s unsettling, scary, and debilitating. It’s the “Nigredo” time, the first stage of alchemy.

The general principle of alchemy is Solvey et Coagula, which means to dissolve and coagulate or to have things fall apart and reform. Alchemists believed that the core of the material was essentially perfect. However, around this pure and perfect core, all the constructs and wrong stuff have encrusted. So the idea in alchemy is to break apart those false qualities that’s built around the core in order to dissolve them. As a result, eventually the “Philosopher’s Stone” is created out of the little pieces that are fallen apart from the old “self”.

Nigredo is the very first stage of this entire alchemical process. It means “blackening”, symbolizing the process of breaking down the old self or material to its most pure and basic state. Psychologically, this suggests facing the shadow, confronting inner darkness, and the disintegration of all the egos we constructed in our life so far.

Like what caterpillars do to turn itself into a chrysalis and what alchemists do to let the substance drop all kinds of impurities in the Nigredo stage, it seems inevitable to go through the painstaking process of the Placeholder so we can mature into our midlife.

But You Don’t Have to Suffer

It’s unarguably full of uncertainties to drop our old identities and try new ideas. This can be painful financially, emotionally, and cognitively. But the reason I wrote The Placeholder started from this question, “Do we need to suffer from going through this liminal stage?” In my own experience and through the cases of others, the answer was, “Not really.” Suffering could be optional if we are willing to approach this phase with new perspectives of an anthropologist, a creative designer, and a mad scientist.

Like an anthropologist, we observe and learn more about the new need of ourselves patiently. Like a creative designer, we ideate, ideate, and ideate without putting limits on ourselves. And like a mad scientist, we experiment those ideas, learn from them, and repeat.

It’s definitely easier said than done and the process is much messier than what we can imagine but the stories of people whom I call “Placeholder Wayfinders” are proofs that we can save ourselves from suffering in the Placeholder.

Restoring the Agency in the Placeholder

To my confusion not knowing how to treat my tween daughter, a wise person advised recently, “Let her know in which life stage she’s in and ask her, ‘How would you like to be treated? What would serve you best?’” This was such a great advice because not only I could get some guidance from her but also it would empower her with a sense of agency. As much as I am confused as a parent, I am sure she’s equally or even more puzzled about her transition toward adolescence. It is critical for her to restore the agency.

This also applies to us in the Placeholder, too. By simply acknowledging that we are entering a significant metamorphic process in our adulthood, we stop berating ourselves, asking “What’s wrong with me?” Instead, we glide into this beginning process of alchemy and metamorphosis called “midlife” with curiosity, creativity, and courage by being an anthropologist, designer, and mad scientist. Then we can finally feel at ease and peace with every transition to come.

What else could be more gratifying than being able to go through change with ease and peace in life? As the psychologist Carl Rogers wrote, “The good life is a process, not a state of being,” this is how we can live a good life.

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These types of questions were constantly cycling through Amit’s brain for a while, as he shared in the interview with me. Sometimes he couldn’t sleep because it was bothering him so much, and it was actually impacting his personal life too. Amit would continue to think about this, half listening to his wife over dinner. He also got cynical and found himself complaining to other people about his work much more often than ever.

Amit worked in the finance department of a big tech firm. It had been a good career for him—interesting and innovative problems to solve, smart people to work with, and great compensation. Yet, internally, he started noticing conflicts. What used to matter to him—the brand name of the workplace, the big bold missions to change the world, and the financial reward that came with it—no longer did. He felt uneasy and somewhat lost, even. How would he measure the success of his career now? More fundamentally, what did he work for? These questions kicked off a whole series of personal investigations for Amit in many conversations. He was stepping into the Placeholder.

One of the influential books Amit read during this time was Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, in which he documented his own experiences at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. Viktor Frankl observed firsthand how crucial it was for him and other camp prisoners to be clearly aware of the meaning of their lives even in the utmost suffering. Those prisoners who understood what they existed for could survive the horror of the Holocaust better than those who merely had hopes of survival.

This initiated Amit asking himself an instrumental question: Which work is worth putting myself through so much stress, anxiety, and so on for? The problem wasn’t finding another job that could satisfy him but understanding what mattered to him.

A more vigorous and winding process of investigation, conversations, and reflection went on over a couple of years. Through this process, Amit gained higher clarity on what mattered to him. He said, “Beyond the basic sustenance, I came down to three things that mattered to me: building meaningful relationships with other people, continuing to learn with a curious mind, and developing the ability to navigate any ups and downs at work, which are inevitable.” He hadn’t deliberately thought about these three things in the past, but now, he wanted to focus on shaping his work around these fundamentals.

Like a designer, he started searching for ideas aligned with these three principles. Per a suggestion by one of his friends, Amit started documenting all the insights he learned from working on those wide range of ideas. He named it “Amit’s Reflections.” What he wanted to check was how each idea would align with his three fundamental values.

Then he invited a group of close friends and previous coworkers he trusted—namely, his thought partners—to review his reflections and asked them to share their feedback and insights. Basically, this made the document a live virtual lab to evolve his ideas by sharing, vetting, questioning, clarifying, and expanding together with his thought partners. This ideation system helped Amit develop his ideas to align his future work with what mattered to him. Amit shared of this ideation process:

“A lot of the questions early in our career have much easier answers. You know, things like you want to go to business school or you want to go work at Google. You don’t need that much crazy advice, and the decision process is pretty straightforward. But the type of questions I am thinking about now requires a totally different approach. For me, going to a bunch of people to figure out new ideas and have conversations to help me vet them is important. Then I test ideas. Once I write things down, having someone to run through my ideas is great for me.”

Ideate Like a Designer for Your Career

If you have identified what matters to you for your next career, you are ready to ideate. But how? You might think, I am not creative enough to generate so many ideas. It could feel like facing a big wall, not knowing what to do with a pretty important insight about what truly matters to you.

This sense of paralysis could happen because of our misunderstanding about creativity. What kind of images come to your mind when you think of “creativity”? A wretched painter finally getting an inspiration for a masterpiece after agonizing for years? A mad scientist suddenly having an enlightening moment and discovering a revolutionary solution for humanity?

This view on creativity was common until the mid-twentieth century; creativity was considered inexplicable and nebulous. Since then, many scientists and psychologists have discovered that creativity is not an inherent quality but a way of operating, which we can practice in our daily life, as John Cleese mentioned in his famous lecture in 1991.

Creativity is not a talent or ability we either have or not, according to John Cleese, based on the seminal research in 1959 by Dr. Donald MacKinnon at UC Berkeley. In the research, MacKinnon and his colleagues concluded that the creative people had “simply acquired a facility for getting themselves into a particular mood—‘a way of operating’—which allowed their creativity to function.”

So how can we develop this way of operating to be creative? Developing creativity is about choosing open versus closed mode, Cleese said. He pointed out that closed mode was how we are most of the time when at work. We have a lot on our mind; so many tasks to complete with competing priorities in a tight schedule. The closed mode is an active and a slightly anxious mode in which we’re a little impatient with ourselves, others, or both. Tension is in the closed mode and not so much humor. Creativity is not possible in this closed mode.

By contrast, the open mode is relaxed, expansive, and perhaps less purposeful. We become more contemplative, more inclined to humor, and more playful as a result. In this mode, we are more curious, as we’re not fixated on finding the right answer or solution quickly. As a result, we can play and welcome any ideas to float to the surface.

In the Placeholder, operating in the open mode—generating ideas as freely as possible and challenging old assumptions—is critical to uncovering what we find truly meaningful. This approach is similar to the ideation process in design thinking, which is all about creating as many ideas as possible and narrowing down to the best ideas to move forward with prototyping and further experiments. In the perspective of a designer, we are now ideating as many potential inputs as possible for our Placeholder.

We make two common mistakes with ideation in the Placeholder. First, we may think we need to come up with radical ideas only from the get-go. Second, we may shun certain ideas from even considering based on habitual patterns or old assumptions.

For example, as I was getting more interested in organizational culture, I thought perhaps I should quit my job and go get a PhD in organizational development first to start a new career for it. The idea was drastic but also overwhelming as it involved big decisions. The idea was also based on my old assumptions of how to make a change in career. “First, prove yourself with the most prestigious credentials.”

Making such mistakes is understandable, but this is exactly why we need to operate in the open mode. We can start from familiar and mundane ideas and move to more unusual and bold ones. We get to develop bigger ideas by trying small ones constantly too.

Instead of quitting my job and pursuing academic degrees, I got certified to teach an emotional intelligence course called Search Inside Yourself and started facilitating it for teams at Meta. When I met some other like-minded folks, I started running a community to practice mindfulness at work. A collection of every small idea that was easy to do led me to bigger, bolder, and more unconventional ones.

In conclusion, we don’t need a specific talent to generate creative ideas for our Placeholder. We just need to remember to operate in an open mode like a designer. We have nothing to get stressed out about. In fact, you most likely already have some ideas you want to start with. You just need to warm up your mind a little to let them emerge.

Curious about How to Ideate Like a Designer for Your Career?

It’s all in my upcoming 📕, The Placeholder-coming soon in May 2025! If you are interested 👀 in checking out the Early Reviewer’s Version before others and share your review with me, please click the button below.

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In the 1939 original story, James Thurber satirizes how Walter Mitty escapes to the hypermasculine fantasies of his secret life from his humdrum days. He remains largely static in reality, not doing anything beyond daydreaming. Walter Mitty’s desire to try different things and adventures in life is palpable throughout his active daydreaming. Reading the book, I couldn’t stop wondering how it could have been different had he tried something, as it ended with yet another daydream and no action.

The 2013 movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, played and directed by Ben Stiller, expands on the original story. Walter Mitty works at Life magazine, which is expected to publish the last print issue before it goes digital 100 percent. Like in the original story, Mitty’s life is monotonous and dull. As a negative asset manager of all the photography films for Life, his job is about to become extinct in the new era of digital media. He daydreams a lot about different lives he admired but assumed unreachable for himself.

For example, he dreams of becoming those daring photographers who captured incredible moments in the wild for the magazine, even risking their lives. But in reality, he cannot even sign up for an online dating service because he couldn’t fill out the “Been There” and “Done That” sections of his dating profile. Up to this point, it feels quite similar to the original story, but the 2013 movie takes quite a creative spin into a very different direction from the original. When Mitty has to find the missing negative for the magazine’s final cover, he embarks on the unexpected adventures for it. His daydreams come to life, and Walter Mitty undergoes significant self-transformation as a result.

The biggest difference between these two versions of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is the actions Walter Mitty takes based on his daydreams in the film. In one scene of the movie, Mitty imagines the photographer waves to him to join his adventure. Dramatically, as it should be for a movie, Mitty walks out the door from his office without hesitation and flies straight to Greenland, where his first adventure begins. For the rest of the film, no more division is present between his daydreams and reality. Daydreams become reality, and reality embodies daydreams. Many things go wrong and way too many unexpected things happen against his expectation, but he tries them all. When he comes back to his seemingly uneventful life again from his adventures, he is no longer the same Walter Mitty.

He changed forever.

While James Thurber’s Walter Mitty daydreamed only throughout his life and stayed miserable in reality, Ben Stiller’s Walter Mitty did not stop with daydreaming only; he engaged in his daydreams by testing them out. Thurber’s Walter Mitty felt trapped in the humdrum of his life because he had just daydreamed about different identities. That would explain the satirical and unhappy tone of the story. Stiller’s Walter Mitty could have been stuck with his mundane job, but he tried out things he was daydreaming about—searching for the photographer using bits of clues on the road in spite of many accidents, meeting all kinds of interesting people he wouldn’t have met, and daring to go to dangerous places such as the Himalayas or Iceland with erupting volcanoes.

For Stiller’s Walter Mitty, daydreaming worked as a divergent thinking to ideate, and his active engagement with different adventures were his experiments. That made his daydreaming a positive experience.

In the Placeholder, it doesn’t mean you have to quit your job now and get on the boldest adventures right away, as Stiller’s Mitty did. The call to action here is to experiment your ideas like a mad scientist, however small they might be. You can start by experimenting with the smallest ideas and move on with more novel and bolder ideas as you keep going on.

As you iterate these experiments, you will learn something new and bring those insights back into learning for your next experiments. This process will help you filter out an idea or two as a prototype that you really want to pursue as your new career. Unlike in the movie, this process of experiments doesn’t happen overnight or over a few days. It may take a couple of months or years to create a prototype you feel so aligned with based on values that matter to you and you are excited about.

Yet, it can happen.

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Almost a half century later, now I use ChatGPT as my research tools. My works are mostly online, via Zoom meetings with clients and partners. I don’t remember the last time I went to the theater but I recently finished watching 16 episodes of When Life Gives You Tangerines and 4 episodes of Adolescence on Netflix.

Thinking of so many other examples of transformation Gen X experienced between 1990s and now, I can’t help but wonder: What happened to those who used to print and sell encyclopedia? What about the jobs of people who used to work in theaters?

The recent New York Times Article, “The Gen X Career Meltdown,” describes this drastic change that Gen X experiences with their work, focusing on careers in the advertising and media industry.

Gen Xers who started working in media or content production in the 90s such as magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, and TV, it’s likely they are doing something else for work now. These industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically due to the technological changes and no longer need to hire as many people as they used to.

The media landscape Gen Xers experienced in their early adult years was similar to that of the 1950s: “a tactile analog environment of landline telephones, tube TV sets, vinyl records, glossy magazines and newspapers that left ink on your hands.” Nothing seemed too concerning when digital technology started dominating their lives with AOL email accounts, Myspace pages and Napster downloads.

But by the time they entered the primes of their careers in their 40s and 50s, they faced that much of their expertise or lifelong career skills had become mostly obsolete. Music or fashion magazines editors have to compete against so many “influencers” writing or talking about music or fashion on Instagram and Youtube.

Economically and culturally shut out, these Gen X creatives are struggling. One Gen X photographer who used to work with Anna Wintour of Vogue said in the article, “There’s no way you can survive anymore being strong at one thing.” Instead of grieving the loss of their heyday or resenting at what’s happening, some of them really try to reinvent themselves. But it’s trickier to do it in your 50s, especially after living with the idea of “one career for one life” to be successful and happy.

This story of drastic changes in relevant skills and careers doesn’t apply to the creative professions or Gen X only. This has been always happening across all jobs in various degrees and it will continue for future generations as well. The World Economic Forum reported in their 2025 Future of Jobs Report that workers can expect that 39% of their existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated over the 2025-2030 period on average.

With the advent of the Generative Artificial Intelligence tools integrated in every part of our work activities—analyzing, writing, creating, coding, etc—it can feel extra scary and threatening. Hence, we see so many posts on social media about the extreme doomsday scenarios that all humans will become obsolete, as AIs and robots replaces all human jobs.

So what shall we do now?

Audit Your Work Tasks: Algorithmic? Or Heuristic?

The US Bureau of Labor and McKinsey worked on a research together about the nature of job tasks. They learned most jobs could be categorized into two types: algorithmic tasks and heuristic tasks.

An algorithmic task is a simple one where you follow a set of instructions to complete. Like computer code, an algorithmic task has a certain rule—“algorithm”—to follow to carry out a task, and it can be scripted. Algorithmic work usually involves transactional interactions. Cashiers at the department store and ride-share drivers are both algorithmic. The details of the job can be manualized, and anybody can do it as long as they follow the manual. Cashiers and drivers get paid for doing the job, over and over.

A heuristic task is the opposite. Codifying such tasks is hard; hence, it cannot be scripted. A heuristic task is more complex with many unexpected factors and nuanced contexts. Heuristic work involves tacit interactions and a high level of emotional intelligence. For example, coaching an executive who wants to reinvent themselves in a challenging time, pioneering a new category of industry, and creating a new virtual reality game are all heuristic. You have to test various options and create a new solution based on your experience and intuition every time.

In reality, all our jobs contain tasks of both categories. There are rarely jobs that are 100% algorithmic or heuristic. For example, take a look at medicine. In the US, doctors spend a lot of time on documenting and diagnosing and little time on building relationship with their patients. Documentation and diagnosis are algorithmic tasks; they can be more easily scripted and automated. However, relating to a patient and understanding their need as they go through the next round of chemotherapy requires more emotional engagement different for each patient. It’s a heuristic task. AI and mechanization won’t replace doctors; it’ll make doctors focus on heuristic side of their jobs.

Take another example of leadership coaching. As a coach, I see there are so many algorithmic tasks in coaching, too, from the initial onboarding of clients to helping clients to follow through their actions. During a coaching session, it’s a different story. Even though two clients might be in a similar situation, the coaching approach can be so different between these two clients. There is no “formula” in coaching. This part is absolutely heuristic. Unlike some claims that AI will replace human coaches, coaches can be better at their work to help clients learn how to lead themselves by delegating a lot of algorithmic tasks to AI tools.

So now, how about applying this to your work? Which part of your work are repetitive and routine algorithmic tasks? Which part requires you to be more creative and think deeply? If 80% of your work is heuristic, that’s great news. You must find it so meaningful as heuristic tasks speak to your intrinsic motivation. You find it challenging but deeply engaging.

But if 80% of your work is algorithmic, perhaps it’s worth thinking about whether you want to keep doing it. Algorithmic tasks tend to be boring and transactional, speaking to the extrinsic motivations; what makes us look good from the perspective of others. Perhaps you have been longing to do something else but you aren’t sure if you could do anything else.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 1998 and 2004, only 30% of job growth came from algorithmic work, while 70% came from heuristic work in the US. Companies have already been streamlining and automating algorithmic work.

For those in the mid-career, this means it’s worth auditing our work regularly, like every five year or so, to see how much is algorithmic vs. heuristic. It’ll change from time to time. When the result of this audit shows that our work is more skewed toward algorithmic, we can take it as a signal that it’s time to develop ourselves or up-skill. Or perhaps it might mean that it’s time to delve into a new area that truly interests us, as the old work doesn’t interest us anymore.

Impermanence of Work

There are a couple of obvious truths; time goes by, human constantly develops new technologies, and we change too. From this perspective of pervasive impermanence, isn’t it actually odd to expect that our works will be the same?

Because impermanence is stressful for human mind, it’s understandable to be in a fight or flight mode with so many changes in the landscape of works, too. However, we don’t have to think of it as a crisis or have a meltdown about it, either. Rather, we can think of it as an opportunity to rethink of our work in various ways. Reviewing our work in the lens of algorithmic and heuristic tasks helps us pause and reflect on what we find meaningful. Ultimately, this will free ourselves from repetitive and mind-numbing tasks we find meaningless and work on more heuristic tasks, which require creativity and in-depth insights from our own experiences.

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My 📕, The Placeholder, can help you. The Placeholder is going to be published and available in May, 2025. But here’s a great limited offer for you!

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Particularly, I think the show is practically a psychological allegory for both quiet quitting and the Great Resignation, two symptoms of disengagement at workplace. Without spoiling the story too much, I reflected on many allegories of the modern workplaces in Severance.

Disconnection between Work Self & Real Self

The lousiest year in my career was 2016. “Lousy” because I was not at all engaged with my work. I looked busy at work, and my performance was okay. But in reality, I was slacking off, doing the bare minimum with detachment.

My disengagement at work in 2016 would be a perfect example of “quiet quitting.” What is quiet quitting? It’s a term that first appeared in 2022. Gallup defines it as follows:

Quiet quitting: Employees are filling a seat and watching the clock. They put in the minimum effort required, and they are psychologically disconnected from their employer. Although they are minimally productive, they are more likely to be stressed and burned out than engaged workers because they feel lost and disconnected from their workplace.

This “quiet quitting” created a chasm in me. I kept the façade of my “work self” when I went to work. Most of the days at work, I was either daydreaming in endless meetings, aimlessly browsing for other potential jobs, or scrolling through Instagram. Subconsciously, the notion I didn’t find my career meaningful sneaked up on me, but I pretended I didn’t see it and kept going as was.

Working on an “interesting” job at a respected company like Meta; everything must be fine, right? No. My “real self” was utterly miserable and grew impatient with this pretense. My career had gone stale, but I feigned it until that day of the tantrum on the shuttle.

Severance literally created this separation between work self and real self with the “innie” and “outie” selves of characters. Innie exists only at work and the outie never knows what happens at the office. The writer of the show, Dan Erickson, said it was based on his own experience working in the office job for a door company when he was still an aspiring screenwriter. Although he was grateful for the job that he could support himself for writing career, he detested the mind-numbing dullness and exhaustion from his day job. He wondered “What if I could just completely forget about what happened at work when I go home?” This idea planted a seed for Severance.

While quiet quitting is about emotional detachment from work while still physically showing up, “Great Resignation” is about choosing to integrate their whole selves by walking away from work that doesn’t align with who they are.

The term was coined in May 2021 by Anthony Klots, an associate professor at Texas A&M Mays Business School at the time, to explain the mass exodus of people from work during the pandemic. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2021, over 47 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs, and in 2022, it rose to 51 million.

At the time, most scholars attributed this mass exit of the workforce mostly to COVID-19 and reasoned it was a temporary phenomenon. However, over the last four years, further research studies by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, universities, and consulting firms revealed that there were more nuanced underlying reasons for individuals to participate in the Great Resignation. Plus, it continued even after pandemic.

Harvard researchers found out more people quit their jobs these days mainly because they aren’t making the progress they seek in their careers and lives. The progress here doesn’t mean a steady, linear climb up the corporate ladder, as we used to define it in the past. It’s not the job title, how much money you make, or what kind of perks you get. Even though you might be promoted at work, if it doesn’t mean anything for your personal development, you don’t progress.

The progression that matters now is at the intersection of what each individual seeks in professional and personal life. This means the progress is unique to each individual. If the traditional progression meant quantity and security, people today are looking for quality and autonomy, which is more personal.

On the surface, Severance seems to promise a perfect solution for work-life balance—keep the work and real self separate. You won’t suffer from work stress in your life; problem solved! But it also shows it’s not that simple.

The show asks, “What if our inner self is begging us to quit because the work doesn’t align with who we are?” Compartmentalization may work only in a short-term. We can pretend we don’t hear the voice of inner self for a while but eventually we reach a point when we cannot ignore anymore, even with a perfect severed brain.

Conflicts between Work, Self, and Meaning

A CEO of a startup once told me, “My new hire is amazing; he’s so savvy with all the technology and full of new ideas.” She wanted to help this new employee maximize his potential at work, but doing so was not easy. “He always asks me to clarify why his project is worth doing. I appreciate his purpose-driven attitude, and I know that matters to Gen Z. But at the end of the day, what matters to me is whether he gets the job done as expected,” she said. She was skeptical if it was really necessary to impose meaning on everything.

It’s not just Gen Zs who want to be seen as a whole person and work on something meaningful. It’s an innate need for everyone. In Severance, we can see what happens to our identities when we identify ourselves with work, and when our work is the only world we know.

With severed brain, innies don’t have any ideas about the life of their outies. Their entire world is just their workplace. They long for any opportunities to learn about their outies’ lives and Lumon manipulates innies to behave and do better with their jobs by offering such opportunities as “perks.” So every day, innies work on their mind-numbing jobs without knowing what they are doing or what their jobs mean, until they couldn’t do it anymore. Eventually, they cannot endure the damage on their souls from the meaningless and monotonous work.

People become quiet quitters when they are just seen as their jobs or roles. Also, quiet quitting emerges when people lose meaning in their work. The Great Resignation is an expression of people to reclaim their identities by leaving misaligned jobs, too. People who participate in the Great Resignation, in part, are saying “I can’t do meaningless work anymore.”

The show asks, “What’s left of you when work consumes your identity?” In a way, the Great Resignation was a collective answer to this question: ‘Not enough.’ And when the work has no meaning, no wonder we “sever” our souls, a.k.a., quiet quitting, just to get through the day.

Three Questions to Contemplate from Severance

Severance asks us three important questions to contemplate.

• What if quiet quitting is just our inner self whispering, “this isn’t it” — and the Great Resignation was when we finally listened?

• How far are we willing to go to protect ourselves from work — and at what cost?

• What would it look like to reunite the “innie” and “outie” — to be our whole self at work?

Interestingly, people I interviewed for The Placeholder also raised similar questions for themselves as they embarked on the Placeholder journey. They couldn’t ignore the desperate whisper of their inner selves and had to stretch out themselves to experiment new ideas. This was an act of protecting themselves from meaningless work. As they create their own Noble Work through the Placeholder experiments, they became congruent, whole.

The real villain of Severance isn’t the technology or evil management. It’s the lack of empathy for humans. Lumon treats innies like robots, showing zero empathy for them. People often label quiet quitting as being lazy, but it could actually be just self-preservation from further emotional, mental, and physical damages. The Great Resignation could simply be people demanding to be treated like humans, not like a cog in the machine.

My Placeholder experience started by empathizing with myself, by admitting the fact that the career I once thought meaningful was no longer valuable to me anymore. Through constant ideation and experiments, I could finally honor my own longing for the new meaningful work. I was no longer disengaged or languishing; instead, I created my own path to thrive through the Placeholder.

Lumon isn’t real but the world is full of its manifestation. For me and many people I interviewed, we got out of the Lumon-like situations with our innies. Then we entered the Placeholder, the place where we no longer feel the chasm inside.

This is possible for you, too.

About The Placeholder

The Placeholder📕 is going to be published and available in May, 2025.

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Find a job that you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

—Anonymous

You have probably read or heard this phrase in many self-help books, on Instagram posts, or in graduation commencement speeches. When I first heard this, it seemed like a great idea. I just need to know what I enjoy doing and find a job for it, right? But this idea doesn’t really work well for various reasons. Often, you cannot make a living with what you enjoy doing or it’s so hard to find a job, as the intersection between what you enjoy doing and your job is too narrow.

Another popular version of this career advice is “Follow your passion.” It also sounds like great advice on the surface. Yet Carol S. Dweck and her colleagues at Stanford University have discovered in their research it can hold back your life satisfaction due to its narrow-mindedness and dedication to a single passion. This seemingly helpful advice is actually loaded with so many unhelpful assumptions.

                                                      (Image by Miroo Kim)

1. One, it presumes you already know what your passion is. Your passions and interests are preformed, so you simply need to discover them. However, most people need to learn and expose themselves to different jobs and companies over time in order to develop their interests and passions. In other words, your passions are what you get to learn about only after you go through different experiences. It can be a source of tremendous stress and anxiety in case you believe you need to define your passion first.

2. Two, it assumes you will have only one passion in life. You are multidimensional and evolving as you go through different experiences in many life stages. You will have more than one interest and passion in life. Also, your passion might change too. Therefore, if you focus on a single career based on one passion or interest, you will leave no room for other passions and interests to be discovered and developed.

3. And three, it makes you less resilient at work. “Follow your passion” creates the illusion that a “dream job” is waiting for you somewhere, and once you find it, everything will be easy. In their research, Dweck and her colleagues discovered that the level of engagement at work tanked significantly more for those who strongly believed in “Follow your passion” when they encountered issues at work. They concluded that “Urging people to find their passion may lead them to put all their eggs in one basket but then to drop that basket when it becomes difficult to carry.”

In one way, the “Follow your passion” mantra makes sense on the surface. It restates the main purpose of work as to satisfy individuals, not to treat them like a cog in a wheel to maximize profits, as it was for factory workers in the nineteenth century. But can you say things got better if you continue to feel stuck with your career under the name of “the passion?”

The peculiar point in the way we think about our career is that it’s all deductive. Rather than discovering and creating through many empirical examples, we start with a conclusion. The classic question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a great example. By declaring what we want to be first, we naturally conclude our future in a singular way.

The underlying assumptions our college major would determine our career, and we would never want to change from it pressure us to hold onto that conclusion. Then another catchphrase, “Follow your passion,” only reinforces this overly deductive way of thinking about career—and makes it even more limiting.

When I first toying with many random ideas in the beginning of my Placeholder, a dear friend of mine recommended me to read Working Identity by Herminia Ibarra, the Professor of London Business School. This book was an eye-opener for me, because it helped me immediately drop the idea I had to redefine my passion and rediscover what I enjoy doing in order to create a new path in my career. Ibarra wrote:

“Research on how adults learn shows that the logical sequence—reflect, then act; plan, then implement—is reversed in transformation processes like making a career change. Why? Because the kind of knowledge we need to make change in our lives is tacit, not textbook clear; it is implicit, not explicit; it consists of knowing-in-doing, not just knowing. Such self-knowledge has a personal and situational quality; it comes from social interaction and involvement in a specific context and with specific people, not from solitary introspection or abstract information gleaned from theoretical, general-purpose personality profiles. It can be acquired only in the process of making change.” - Working Identity, Herminia Ibarra

As you go through your Placeholder, you are working on launching yourselves anew. Doing so is as if you are sculpting a shape out of a big piece of amorphous marble or painting a picture of your future. The inspiration for what you’d like to create doesn’t suddenly strike you like a thunder, but you come to know it little by little through countless chiseling or sketches, like “flesh and blood examples, concrete experiments,” as told by Ibarra. Through three perspectives of the Placeholder, you need to get curious, envision, explore, and experiment.

Ibarra writes, “Working identity is above all a practice: a never-ending process of putting ourselves through a set of knowable steps that creates and reveals our possible selves.”

A truly action-oriented mindset is what’s waiting for you in the Placeholder. With this mindset, you become more flexible, ready, and unafraid to experiment, whether it’s small or big.

The Placeholder is going to be published and available in May, 2025. If you are interested in reading the Early Reviewer Version before others and share your review with me, please click the button below!

Get Early Reviewer Version