The best thing I did for my career was stop thinking about it

What choreography, climbing and a friend who runs at dawn taught me about judgment.

I started doing hard things because they mattered to me. Not for advancement, not for a CV, not because somebody suggested that outside interests make you a more rounded candidate.

I’ve choreographed productions with thirty people in them. I train, I climb, I care a fair amount about how my body moves. None of it was ever meant to be useful.

It turned out to be the most useful thing I’ve done, and I want to be careful about how I say that, because the useful version arrived precisely because usefulness was never the objective.

What choreography teaches that a management course can’t

When you’re choreographing an end of year show, you’re coordinating thirty people toward a single artistic vision across months.

Those people gave you their time, their bodies, their effort, and they did it voluntarily. Nobody is being paid. Which changes the entire nature of the authority you’re operating with, because you have none. You can’t escalate. There’s no performance review. The only thing holding it together is that they believed you when you described what this could be, and that belief is renewable weekly and can be withdrawn without notice.

So you push yourself in ways you never would for a salary, because the currency isn’t money.

Meanwhile everything is failing in the ordinary way. The music doesn’t fit anymore. Somebody’s injured three weeks out. You’re holding lighting and formations and running order simultaneously. You want to push the group forward and you also want every individual in it to get the attention they deserve, and those two objectives pull against each other constantly, which is the actual content of leadership rather than the theory of it.

And through all of it you’re trying to keep your taste intact. Not compromising on what the thing should be simply because it got hard, which is when most creative projects lose the standard that made them worth doing.

That taught me more about leading people than any course I’ve sat through. Largely because I wasn’t trying to learn leadership. I was trying to make something good with people who trusted me.

What training teaches

I’ve been at this for years. Gym, climbing, movement.

The thing it keeps demonstrating is that real capability arrives slowly, in increments too small to perceive while they’re happening. On a climbing wall you’ll never reach the top by repeating the same mistake with more effort, which sounds obvious and takes most people a very long time to accept. You have to stop, read the problem again, and change the approach. Effort applied to the wrong method produces nothing but fatigue, and that lesson has a great deal of application outside a climbing gym.

Then there’s the moment where you realise you’re lifting weight today that would have flattened you six months ago. Not because you found a shortcut. Because you turned up every week and trusted that small effort accumulates into something real, on a timescale where you can’t feel the accumulation and have to proceed on faith.

The person who demonstrates this most clearly is somebody I know who runs long distances. She’ll do twenty miles on a Saturday morning when she could be asleep. No race coming, no medal, nobody watching. Just her and the road and a decision she made that this matters.

Then you watch her handle a brutal six month project with exactly that quiet relentlessness, staying steady while everyone else loses composure, and you know exactly where it came from. She learned it choosing hard things when nobody was looking, and trusting that showing up counts even when the reward is months out.

The part I want to say plainly

I’m not telling you to do these things for your career. That would ruin them, and it also wouldn’t work, which is the interesting bit.

Do them because a rich life outside work matters on its own terms. Because pushing yourself for meaning rather than money is a large part of what makes you feel alive. Because caring deeply about something alongside people who trust you is close to the centre of being a person.

Development and fulfilment don’t emerge from career optimisation. They emerge from living. Doing hard things that matter to you, building something you find beautiful, choosing difficulty because the difficulty itself is worth having.

And then it transfers anyway

All of it came back to work eventually.

The choreography taught me how to lead a group without losing my taste, and how to balance moving everyone forward with making sure individuals get what they need. The training taught me that capability can’t be forced and that consistency changes what you can do long before you can feel it. My friend showed me what steadiness looks like when the payoff is months away and nobody’s watching.

But it only worked because I wasn’t trying to make it work.

I think the mechanism is something like this. Optimising for transfer changes what you do. If you take on the choreography to build leadership skills, you’ll pick the production that showcases leadership, and you’ll bail when it stops looking good on paper, and you’ll never hit the point at four weeks out where everything is broken and the only thing keeping you there is that you care about the thing itself. That point is where the learning lives, and you only reach it if you’re not calculating.

Which is a genuinely awkward conclusion, because it means the advice can’t be followed directly. I can’t tell you to do hard things for their own sake in order to get the benefit, since doing them in order to get the benefit is what removes it.

The most I can say is that a life with real weight outside work tends to produce judgment that work desperately needs. It arrives as a side effect. And if you start monitoring it for career value, it’ll stop arriving,, and you probably won’t notice for a while.