Greg Stevenson says the one thing he'd change early in his career is starting interior work—personal and psychological development—twenty years sooner. Technical skill rarely limits senior leadership; mental patterns and blind-spot awareness do. Interior work alongside technical effort raises the ceiling for what's possible.
If I could go back to the early years of my career and do one thing differently, it would not be a different strategy, it would not be a different qualification, it would be to start the interior work 20 years earlier, not instead of everything else, but alongside it. Because here is what I know now. The ceiling in any senior career is almost never about capability. It is almost always about the interior game. The patterns that show up in high-pressure decisions, the blind spots that become visible to everyone except the person who has them, the cost of performing at a high level without doing the work that makes it sustainable.
