JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN DOESN’T MEAN YOU SHOULD.
A HowWhy-To Guide to Getting Your Career Unstuck
COMING LATE 2026
FOUR DANGEROUS WORDS
Early in our careers, capabilities open doors. We learn, prove ourselves, and build an ever-growing list of things we can do. For a while, that feels great.
If it still does, congratulations. You’re also probably not reading this page.
Everything we’re capable of. With experience, that list only gets longer, and the world is very good at noticing it. It hires it, promotes it, and rewards it.
A much shorter list. When we ask what we should do next, the world mostly recommends more of the same. But what if more of the same is the problem?
This book is for people whose careers look reasonably successful from the outside and increasingly wrong from the inside.
HOW THE BOOK WORKS
There’s an order to the questions. And there isn’t one right answer.
Shouldology follows the whole problem of getting unstuck, including the awkward stuff after we finally understand ourselves.
We start with the problem: how reasonable choices, borrowed identities, and an ever-growing list of things we can do lead somewhere we never meant to go.
Then we turn inward. Start with Energy. Add Purpose. Assess Strengths last. The overlap gives us a better direction for who we are now, not a permanent answer for who we’re supposed to be forever.
Unfortunately, the world did not attend our self-discovery. Knowing ourselves is mostly private information. We still have to translate it into language and evidence that people outside our heads can understand.
Stability is temporary. We change. Work changes. Luck intervenes. The goal isn’t to solve our career once. It’s to get better at reorienting when the answer inevitably changes.
Shouldology provides the guide. We can ask better questions. No one outside of you can provide your answer.
THE CENTRAL IDEA
Your Should sits at the overlap of three things. And the order matters.
Start with Strengths and your past gets first dibs on deciding your future. Start with Energy and Purpose, and Strengths become what they should have been all along: capabilities in service of a direction.
The result isn’t your forever answer. It’s your Should for now.
THE COVER
WHILE YOU WAIT
WHO WROTE THIS
Chemistry Ph.D. from Duke. Fourteen years in corporate R&D and innovation. A startup he co-founded and eventually had to close. An MBA. Somewhere in there he noticed that being able to do something is a terrible reason to keep doing it.
GET THE BOOK
Paperback, hardcover, ebook, and an audiobook I’m recording myself, which is either a feature or a warning. The ebook and audiobook start on Kindle and Audible.
There’s no preorder link yet, because there’s no date yet. The newsletter is where I’ll say so first, along with everything I’m thinking about in the meantime.
Tell me when it’s outNo countdown emails. No launch sequence. I’ll tell you when there’s something to tell you.