You're Not the Main Character

I was walking through a field a few days ago, recording a video on my phone, when I reached for a sentence I couldn't quite remember. I'd been catching up on Alicia McKay's newsletters – she's a strategist in New Zealand I've followed for years, and she's writing a lot more lately, which has been a gift. I was several issues behind. And in one of the recent ones, she'd done something I keep thinking about: she'd written thousands of her own words circling an idea, and then she set them down and pointed at a single sentence from someone else that said it better.

I couldn't bring the sentence up on my phone without stopping the walk and breaking the whole recording, so I paraphrased it badly and kept going. Here it is, now that I'm at a keyboard and not in a field. It's from the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, in his book After Virtue:

"I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'"

MacIntyre does in twenty-eight words what most of us never get around to doing at all. And it lands on something I've experienced and feel deeply: if you're going to be a good leader, if you're going to make good decisions, you have to find your place in a story larger than yourself.

You're not the main character

I don't mean you need to go find an organization to submit yourself to. I mean two specific things.

First, you have to make peace with the fact that none of us are really the main character. Or if we are, it's for a chapter or two, and then the book keeps going. We're already part of a larger story whether we want to admit it or not. Most of the leaders I've watched struggle were quietly convinced the plot revolved around them, and it made every decision smaller than it needed to be.

Second, you have to find your why. Why are you doing what you're doing? Why are you making the decisions you're making? What's the actual motivation underneath them? That answer touches everything – every call you make for your team, for your org, for the work in front of you. McKay's whole argument, in a piece she titled "Can philosophy AI-proof your career?", is that judgment is the thing that lasts. The technical skill expires. The capacity to understand what your work means inside a life and a society is what holds. MacIntyre warned that we keep producing competent, powerful people who were never taught to ask the prior question. Hannah Arendt had a colder name for where that ends up: the banality of evil. Plenty of harm gets done by clever people who were only ever running the spreadsheet.

We've outsourced the decision for decades

That's the part I keep snagging on. A lot of decisions – for years, for decades – have been made on the basis of a spreadsheet. A budget. A P&L.

And look, there are real constraints in the world. If your company doesn't have the money to pay people, that's the situation, and sometimes you have to make cuts. I'm not pretending the numbers don't matter. They do.

But too often we hand the decision to the system so we don't have to own it. We outsource the call to a poorly designed spreadsheet, and increasingly we outsource it to AI – to large language models trained on an enormous corpus of data that carries a particular worldview baked into it. That worldview might not be the right one for your business. It might not even be yours. And maybe you don't know what your worldview is. For a long stretch I'm not sure I could have told you mine.

The point isn't that the tools are bad. The point is that the foundation has to exist before the tool gets a vote. You have to do the work of figuring out what matters to you and what you're going to base your decisions on – and you have to do it before you're standing in the moment where a decision is forcing your hand. If you're the one with the authority to decide, that work is yours.

My story is Christian contractualism

Here's mine, for whatever it's worth as an example.

I describe my own ethics as Christian contractualism. Contractualism comes from the philosopher T.M. Scanlon, in a book with a title that does a lot of work: What We Owe to Each Other. Scanlon's claim is that any action you take, any decision you make, ought to be justifiable on principles that no one could reasonably reject. So I spend a lot of time on exactly the question the title asks. What do I owe other people? What do I owe the members of my team?

I studied religious studies and poetry, not business, so I tend to reach for old language. I call it Christian contractualism because I hold all of it inside a larger question – what do I owe God, in exchange for what I've been given? There's a covenant there. The Hebrew Bible is soaked in that language of contract and covenant, promises made and kept on both sides.

Whether you're a Christian or not genuinely doesn't matter here. That's not the pitch. What's relevant is that I have a story, and disciplines, and values, and they sit underneath every decision I make and give the whole set of them an internal consistency. They don't make the decisions for me. They make me legible to myself when I make them. That's what I think you actually need to lead well.

Whether you have values matters more than which ones

Jim Collins landed near the same place from a completely different direction. In Great by Choice, the book he wrote with Morten Hansen about why some companies thrive through chaos and uncertainty while otherwise similar rivals come apart, he went looking for what separated the two groups.

One of his findings has stuck with me for years. The companies that made it through real turbulence weren't the boldest or the most visionary. They were the most disciplined. Collins calls it fanatic discipline, and he defines discipline as consistency of action – consistency with your values, your goals, your standards, held over time and held precisely when the world is handing you every reason to let go of them. The particular content of a company's values mattered far less than whether it had a real set of them and actually held the line. The adherence was the thing.

That's the same thing I'm trying to say: You need a set of values. You need a story bigger than yourself. You need a why that lives outside you and that you can actually hold to when it's hard.

Do the work before the decision finds you

So the work is to figure out what that foundation is. To codify it. To write it down, sit with it, meditate on it, steep yourself in it until it's load-bearing and not just a poster in the break room.

If that sounds abstract, here's the thing I'd point out: you already know how to do it. You do it for your product all the time. You write acceptance criteria. You define what "done" actually means before you ship. You set the principles a roadmap decision has to satisfy, so that when the trade-offs get ugly you're not relitigating your whole worldview at 4pm on a Friday. You've codified the criteria for the decision in advance – for the product. You just may not have done it for yourself, for your own leadership, for the calls only you can make.

That's the step before all the other steps. The becoming that has to happen before the doing. And when you work on this, the strange thing is that everything downstream gets easier, because most decisions stop being agonizing and start being applications of something you already settled.

This week, try the smallest version. Take one hard decision sitting on your desk, and before you make it, write down the single principle it has to satisfy. One sentence. See if the decision doesn't get clearer the moment the foundation is on the page.

Whatever your foundation turns out to be, you've got to have one.