I genuinely love what I do. I love my role, especially because it sits right in the middle of so many things that fascinate me: technology, AI, people, leadership, change and figuring out how all of those pieces actually work together. I love that there isn’t always an obvious answer. I love building something that is still taking shape, working with people who see possibilities, having conversations that make me rethink something and trying to turn big ideas into something that actually works. Add to that the communities, speaking, writing, meeting new people and the slightly dangerous moment when someone says, “I have an idea…” and my brain immediately goes into build mode and honestly, there is a lot about this phase of my life that I absolutely love.
Maybe that is also why what I am about to write is difficult to explain. This isn’t a story about wanting out, slowing everything down or deciding that ambition isn’t important anymore. Quite the opposite. I want to keep building, learning, leading, helping people and doing work that challenges me. I am incredibly grateful for the world that has grown around me over the last few years. The people, opportunities, communities and conversations are not things I want to get rid of. I just can’t keep up with all of it anymore.
That sounds much more negative than I mean it. What I am starting to realize is that my world has become bigger, while in many ways I am still trying to manage it with the rules of the Femke from a few years ago. Answer everyone. Help when I can. Make the introduction. Say yes when something sounds interesting. Fit it in. Work it out. Those rules got me here, and I still love the person behind them. They just don’t always work at this scale anymore.
My LinkedIn inbox is probably the most obvious example. It explodes every day with questions about AI, speaking requests, people looking for jobs, people asking for introductions, students asking for advice, women sharing something about their careers, invitations for podcasts, events and coffees and sometimes just someone who read something I wrote and wants to tell me their story. The frustrating part is that I genuinely want to answer. Behind every little profile picture is an actual person. Sometimes someone is looking for work and I immediately think of someone they should speak to. Sometimes someone asks a question I know I could help with. Sometimes someone sends me an idea and my brain immediately goes: yes, we should do something with this. Sometimes replying would take only two minutes, but two minutes multiplied by hundreds of people is no longer two minutes. So messages stay unanswered, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks and, if I am completely honest, some forever.
I don’t like that, because a lot of what I have built came from being accessible, sharing what I know, answering questions, connecting people and believing that if I can help someone, I should. For years that rule worked beautifully, but there is an uncomfortable mathematical reality to growth: at some point accessibility doesn’t scale in exactly the same form. Not because you care less, but because there is still only one of you. LinkedIn is also only the easiest place to see it. There is WhatsApp, email, Teams, meetings, events, work, communities, friends, family, ideas, things I promised someone and things I promised myself. “I’ll look at that tonight. I’ll reply tomorrow. I’ll introduce you two. I’ll call you this week. I’ll read that this weekend.” Each promise is tiny, but together they create what I have started thinking of as my invisible second calendar. It isn’t in Outlook, but somehow it is always there.
My instinct when things become too much is very predictable: organize harder. Better planning, better priorities, better systems, better tools, maybe an agent and probably another notebook. Give me a messy process and I will happily try to redesign it. Recently, though, I have started questioning that instinct, because if my answer to every increase in opportunity is becoming more efficient, where does that end? Do I become 20% more productive so I can fit 20% more into my life, and then repeat the exercise when that fills up too? At some point I am essentially trying to squeeze more Femke out of the same 24 hours, which, when I write it down, doesn’t sound like a particularly sophisticated transformation strategy.
Maybe I have simply been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking how I personally keep up with everything, perhaps I should be asking why I think I personally have to.
The funny thing is that I already know part of the answer because my communities have taught me this lesson over and over again. Some of the things I am most proud of today grew because other people stepped in. People believed in an idea, organized things, shared their knowledge, opened their networks, helped other people and took something that might originally have started in my head much further than I could ever have taken it alone. I have had to learn to let that happen, because when you start something it is incredibly easy to believe that being responsible for it means being involved in everything. You know the story, you know the people, you care deeply about the outcome and quite often you can probably do something faster yourself. But if everything continues to need you, you haven’t really built something that can grow. You have built something with yourself as the bottleneck.
Some of the moments I love most now are actually the ones where something happens without me. Someone connects two people, someone comes up with an idea I hadn’t thought of, someone takes ownership or someone helps someone else. Something that once felt like my idea becomes our thing, and I am learning that this isn’t losing control at all. It is what growth is supposed to look like. Perhaps I need to apply that lesson much more broadly to my own life too, because helping doesn’t always have to mean that I personally do the helping. Maybe sometimes the best thing I can build is a place where people help each other. Maybe instead of answering the same question twenty times, I can write about it once. Maybe instead of making every introduction myself, I can create a network where those introductions start happening naturally. Maybe instead of owning every idea I care about, I can create the conditions for someone else to take it further. That doesn’t make the connection less personal. In many cases it makes the impact much bigger.
There is another part of this that I find harder to explain, though, and maybe this is actually the part I have been thinking about most lately. Some things simply don’t give me what they used to. I don’t mean that I suddenly dislike them, that I have become ungrateful or that the things I once wanted no longer matter. It is much more subtle than that. Something happens that a few years ago would have given me an enormous rush of excitement and now I notice myself thinking, “That’s really nice,” before simply continuing with my day.
That has surprised me because for a long time I assumed that growth meant getting more of the things you had worked towards. The bigger opportunity, the bigger stage, the recognition, the invitation, the milestone. You imagine that reaching those things will feel a certain way, and often it does, especially the first time. But what was once extraordinary can become normal surprisingly quickly. A stage that once terrified you becomes a place where you feel comfortable. An invitation you once dreamed about becomes another decision in your calendar. A milestone that once felt impossible becomes something you are happy about for a moment before life simply continues.
I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing, and I certainly don’t think the answer is to keep chasing something bigger just to recreate the feeling. Maybe it is simply information. Maybe growth isn’t only visible in the things you start wanting. Perhaps it is also visible in the things that stop having the same hold over you.
That thought has made me pay much more attention to what still does give me something, and interestingly it isn’t always the biggest thing. Sometimes it is a conversation with someone that completely changes how I see a problem. Sometimes it is watching someone in a community step forward because they finally feel confident enough to do it. Sometimes it is building something from nothing with people who are equally excited about the idea. Sometimes it is learning something that sends my brain in ten different directions, or someone challenging me instead of agreeing with me. Sometimes it is much simpler and it is being at home and realizing that I am actually there, not physically sitting in the room while mentally answering three emails.
Those moments have started to feel like useful data points. They aren’t dramatic signs that I need a completely different life. They are little signals about what I value now. Maybe that is one of the strange things about getting older and further into a career. You spend years climbing towards things and then somewhere along the way you realize that the interesting question is no longer only how high you can climb, but which mountains are actually interesting to you.
I am still ambitious, very much so. I still want difficult problems, new ideas, rooms where I have to stretch myself, leadership, writing, speaking and building things that make my brain light up. When someone says, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” there is still a dangerous chance that I have mentally built half of it before they finish the sentence. I don’t think that part of me is going anywhere. What I am questioning is the idea that ambition has to mean personally carrying more and more, or that the things that once felt like success automatically have to remain my definition of success forever.
Perhaps ambition changes shape as you grow. At first it might be about proving to yourself that you can do something, while later it becomes more about deciding which things are worth doing. At first it might be about what you can build yourself, while later it becomes about what you can make possible around you. At first you might measure progress by the opportunities coming towards you, while later you start paying much more attention to which opportunities still make you curious. I think curiosity matters to me more than it used to. Not just achievement, but what makes me want to learn more, which conversation I am still thinking about the next morning, which problem makes me grab a notebook, which people make me rethink something I thought I understood, and where I feel that slightly uncomfortable feeling that usually means I am growing again. Maybe those are better signals for whatever comes next than simply asking what the next impressive thing should be.
There is something funny about becoming more visible too, because people sometimes assume that means you know exactly where you are going. I understand why. People mostly see the output: the stage, the podcast, the article, the event, the new idea or the confident opinion online. They don’t see you sitting in your car thinking about a conversation for twenty minutes or wondering why something you thought would make you incredibly happy somehow just feels normal now. I do the same when I look at other people. We fill in the gaps and assume they have a plan.
But confidence and certainty are not the same thing. You can confidently walk onto a stage and still be curious about what you want the next five years to look like. You can love your work while questioning how you want to work. You can be incredibly grateful for what you have built while noticing that your definition of growth is changing. Apparently, strategy is easier when you’re not the strategy.
Perhaps it isn’t surprising that I keep connecting all of this to my work around AI and transformation. One of the mistakes I see organizations make is constantly adding another technology, another Copilot, another agent, another workflow or another initiative and then wondering why transformation feels exhausting. Adding is relatively easy compared with redesigning. At some point you have to ask what work should disappear, what needs to change, what another person can own, what technology can take over and where humans actually add the most value. You don’t transform an organization by asking every employee to simply do 20% more, yet sometimes that is exactly what I have been asking of myself. More opportunities means becoming more efficient. More people means answering faster. More ideas means organizing better. More responsibility means working smarter.
Maybe personal growth needs redesign too. Not because I want less, but because I want what I love to be sustainable and because I want enough space left to notice when what I love changes. I think that might be what I am thinking about most right now. Not what should I stop doing, but what do I want to make more room for? Not how do I become less ambitious, but what does ambition look like for me now? Not how do I personally help more people, but how do we create something where more people can help each other?
For a long time growth in my head was very personal: what can I learn, what can I build, who can I help, what can I contribute and how far can I go? I don’t want to stop asking those questions, but I want to add some new ones. What can we build together? What can I make possible without needing to own every part of it? Which things still make me genuinely curious? What deserves my attention now? What can other people carry better than I can? And which things am I holding onto simply because an earlier version of me wanted them very badly?
That last question is probably the one I find most uncomfortable, because maybe growing also means giving yourself permission to change what success feels like. I don’t have the answer yet. I am still going to reply to messages. I am still going to say yes to things I probably don’t have time for. I am still going to get ridiculously excited about ideas and there will almost certainly be another notebook. I am not trying to become
