What Brought You Here Might Kill You There
Yesterday, I spent a quiet Sunday afternoon with a younger friend.
As always, our conversation wandered through life, careers, and how we make sense of our choices. One idea he shared caught me off guard—and it’s still lingering in my head this Monday morning: “What brought you here might kill you there.”
It hit me—not just as a clever phrase, but as a truth I’ve lived through.
So many of the traits that helped me succeed early on became the very things that drained me later. They didn’t just stress me out. At some point, they nearly broke me.
This post is a reflection on that paradox—on how growth sometimes means not adding more, but learning what to leave behind.
When Strengths Start to Hurt
At first, it just feels like you’re tired.
- Maybe you’re not sleeping well, but blame the project deadline.
- You stop replying to messages quickly, but tell yourself you’re “focusing.”
- You feel a little numb in meetings, a little more impatient, a little less curious.
And then, you start to dread Sundays—not because Monday is busy, but because you know you’ll have to put on that mask again: the sharp one, the composed one, the one who always has answers.
You’re doing everything right—the same things that brought you success—and yet somehow you feel worse: Less alive. Less in control. Maybe even less yourself.
Here’s what that can look like in practice:
"The Strength" | Why It Worked | How It Hurts (Later) |
|---|---|---|
Perfectionism | Helped you ship high-quality work, earn trust early on | Creates self-doubt, delays decisions, drains energy |
Being the Steward of Everything | Built your reputation, opened doors | Leads to overcommitment, scattered focus, eventual burnout |
Doing Everything Yourself | Showed initiative and ownership | Prevents delegation, caps your impact, signals lack of trust |
People-Pleasing | Helped you build rapport and fit in | Silences your voice, breeds resentment, makes you feel inauthentic |
Letting Go
Once you recognize the pattern, the hard part isn’t admitting something’s wrong—it’s accepting that your old strengths might not serve you anymore. And that’s uncomfortable. Yes, I know.
But you don’t need to erase the perfectionist in you—you just need to turn down the volume. You don’t need to stop preparing—you just need to know when “good enough” is truly enough.
The goal isn’t to become someone else. It’s to expand who you are, so your old tools don’t become your only tools.
Takeaways
Every new stage of life asks for a different version of you. Not because the old version was wrong—but because it’s done its job.
