The Move Only You Can Make

Every threshold comes with an obvious next move. And often, the threshold is yours before it's your business's: you've changed, what you want from your work has changed. You want to reach for something more or different, but the way things run now won't get you there.

The obvious move rarely takes any of that into account. When things are working but each year of growth takes more effort than the last, it usually means more: another senior hire, a new product line, a new market, a funding round, the tools everyone else seems to be buying. It's the move that makes sense the moment you say it out loud, the one your board, your peers and your LinkedIn feed would all nod at.

Sometimes the obvious move is right. But if your next move is easy to explain, it's worth being a little suspicious of it. The moves that matter most are often the ones that don't fit a template yet: the business model nobody in your industry has tried, the offering you can't quite name but know would be a breakthrough, the direction that seems like a complete pivot, the smaller, sharper company hiding inside the one you've built. They're hard to explain because they're new, and that makes them hard to trust, including for you.

This Field Guide is for that moment. It walks you through how to tell the move that's easy to explain apart from the move only you can make, and how to act on the second without waiting for the world to approve it first.

You'll need about an hour, a notebook, and one real decision you're facing. It works best on your own first, then with one or two people you trust.

How it works:

The obvious move has three things going for it, and none of them is that it's right for you.

The move only you can make has none of these. It's often illegible, even to you. There's no template, because nobody has quite been where you are, with your combination of experience, business, values and timing.

In an earlier Field Note, I wrote about what happens when we wait for legitimacy to arrive before we act: legitimacy is usually defined by existing norms, so anything genuinely new looks illegitimate at first (There is a cost to waiting for legitimacy to arrive). The absence of a template isn't proof that a move is wrong. Sometimes it means you need a different lens to see it.

This guide gives you that lens, and some practical ways to use it.

Start by writing down the move you'd make if your only goal were for it to make sense to everyone else. Be specific and honest. Then answer four questions about it:

Then write down the other move: the one you keep circling back to, even if it's half-formed. Don't defend it yet. Just describe it in a few lines.

When a decision feels stuck, it's usually because several parts of you are speaking at once. Fear. Ambition. Responsibility. Loyalty. Curiosity. Each one carries real information, and none of them should be making the decision alone.

I find it helpful to distinguish between two kinds of will:

Try this. Draw two columns. For each move, write down every reason you have for it, then label each reason: R for reactive or C for creative. Then ask, for the obvious move and the other one: who is doing the choosing here?

The point isn't to silence the reactive voices. Security matters. Reputation matters. The point is to hear them as information, so they stop making the decision for you.

To judge a move that has no template, you need a standard of your own. That's what a Flourishing Thesis gives you.

Your Flourishing Thesis is your working theory of the highest good: what your life and work are ultimately for, and what it takes to get there. It names what can and cannot be sacrificed along the way, what the journey demands of you, and who you might become if you stay true to it. Everyone holds one. Few of us have examined ours. We absorb it from family, schooling, industries and institutions, each with its own picture of success built in. It's a thesis because it's a working theory: firm enough to hold you to account, open enough to be tested and revised as you learn.

It isn't a values list. Values describe the traveller. A Flourishing Thesis describes the journey: what it's reaching for, what it's worth, and what it must not cost.

You don't need a finished thesis for this guide. A first draft is enough. Answer the four questions at its heart in a sentence or two each:

Before you keep it, check two things: does it rule something out, and would someone who knows you well recognise you in it?

If you want to go deeper, the free Flourishing Thesis workbook takes you through it in full.

Now put the two moves side by side, and judge them by your standard instead of the world's. Answer each question for both:

Two things usually happen at this point. The obvious move looks less inevitable. And a third option starts to appear: a version of the move only you can make that's smaller, safer and easier to start. That's what the next two steps are for.

The move only you can make doesn't need to be legible to everyone. It needs to be legible enough to the few people whose input will actually help you, and to yourself.

Write one paragraph. Describe the move as if to a thoughtful friend: what it is, why it matters to you, and what you'd need to learn to know whether it's working. Leave out the defence. This is a first draft of a new story, and it's allowed to be unfinished.

Choose three people. Pick:

Ask sharper questions. "What do you think?" invites people to judge your move by their own template. Try these instead:

That last question matters. Every adviser has their own thesis about what a good move looks like. Their input is information about the move, and also about their lens. Notice whose standards you're applying when you weigh what they say.

Look for examples, not templates. Find two or three people who made a move with a similar shape. You're not looking for a path to copy, just evidence that the shape is possible.

The move only you can make rarely needs a leap. It needs a bridge: a small, reversible experiment that lets you learn whether the move is real before you bet everything on it. Waiting for certainty is just another way of waiting for legitimacy. An experiment lets you create your own evidence.

Design yours with these six lines: