I confused movement with growth. You’ve been sprinting in circles thinking it’s forward. Motion isn’t progress when you end where you started.
The cardiology fellow who sat across from me two years into her training was moving at a speed I recognized immediately, because I had moved at the same speed and mistaken it for the same thing. She had completed two research projects. She had gotten a paper accepted in a peer-reviewed journal. She was applying for a fellowship extension at a second institution because the first one had not taken her far enough. She was lean with purpose and exhausted in the way only people who confuse velocity with direction become exhausted: completely, and without understanding why.
“I feel like I’m not making progress,” she told me.
I looked at her list of achievements. I looked at her face. The achievements and the face were telling different stories.
“Progress toward what?” I asked.
She paused. It was not the pause of someone considering an answer. It was the pause of someone who had never been asked the question before.
This is the thing about sprinting. Sprinting feels good. The body is made for bursts of effort; the adrenal system rewards forward movement with a generous shot of norepinephrine, which is the neurotransmitter that makes effort feel like aliveness. The problem is that the same neurochemical response is triggered by circular movement as by linear progress. The body does not care whether you are moving toward something or simply moving. It rewards the motion.
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester have spent more than forty years mapping the difference between activity that feels alive and activity that depletes, and the central finding is durable: effort organized around external pressure produces performance and exhaustion in roughly equal measure, while effort organized around genuine interest produces performance and vitality (Deci and Ryan 1985, Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior, Springer). Honesty Scale: Solid (5/5). Self-determination theory is among the most replicated frameworks in psychology. The distinction between autonomous and controlled motivation has been replicated across cultures, ages, and domains.
Circular movement is not laziness. Circular movement is very often the opposite of laziness. The people who sprint in circles are working harder than almost everyone around them. That is part of why it is so difficult to see. The effort feels real. The sweat is real. The exhaustion is real. What is not real is the ground being covered.
I know this from the inside. In the early years of my American training, I moved at a speed that alarmed people around me, including people who loved me. Residency at the University of Kansas. Fellowship at the University of Oklahoma. Journal articles. Board certifications. CME credits stacked up like cords of firewood before winter. I was moving. I could feel myself moving. What I was less clear about was the question of where I was moving toward, or whether the movement was mine.
The honest answer, which I arrived at much later than I should have, was that a significant portion of that motion was circular. I was sprinting around the circumference of a wound that dated back to Sengera village. The ekerentane wound, the unwanted-child wound, the wound that said: you must move because if you stop, the verdict about your worth will arrive and find you standing still.
I was not running toward something. I was running to stay ahead of a verdict.
This is the specific texture of motion that masquerades as growth. It has a forward-facing quality. There are new cities, new titles, new rooms that you could not enter before. But the internal landscape does not change. The same anxiety that powered the sprint in year one is powering the sprint in year ten. The address has changed. The inside has not.
The research psychologist Carol Dweck at Stanford, whose work on the distinction between performance-oriented and learning-oriented approaches has been widely cited for twenty years, makes a related observation: people who define growth as external verification keep searching for the next external verification, while people who define growth as expanding capability tend to develop genuine mastery (Dweck 2006, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Random House). Honesty Scale: Promising (4/5). Dweck’s mindset research is extensively cited and replicated in educational contexts. Some large-scale intervention studies have shown weaker effects than initial research suggested, particularly the 2019 Yeager et al. meta-analysis, so the original claims require calibration.
There is a practical test for circular motion versus genuine progress. It is not a formal assessment. It is a question you ask yourself after a busy period, when the motion has paused enough to allow reflection: Do I feel more like myself now than I did a year ago? Has the interior changed, or only the exterior?
Growth that is real leaves you more at home in yourself, not less. It opens something rather than sealing something. It gives you more access to your own judgment, your own preferences, your own sense of what the next thing should be, rather than handing all of that over to the logic of what the situation demands.
The cardiology fellow went quiet for a long time after my question about progress toward what. Then she said something I have not forgotten: “I think I’ve been moving to avoid stopping.”
She was one of the finest physicians I knew. She had been using excellence as a treadmill.
Forward and fast are different words. You can be fast without being forward. You can accumulate velocity and discover, years later, that you are in the same emotional geography you were trying to leave.
The way out of circular motion is not to stop moving. It is to ask, with real seriousness and in a quiet place where the sprint cannot drown the answer, what you are moving toward. Not what you are running from. Toward. The answer to that question, honestly given, is often the beginning of the first genuine progress of a person’s adult life.
In my village the elders used a word when a river changed course after heavy rains: engako. The still water behind the rock. Not the stopping of the river, but the eddy, the calm pool where you can read the current clearly before you choose your direction. The circular sprint never finds the engako. It is too committed to forward to notice the still.
You are not lazy. You have not been failing. You have been working extraordinarily hard. The question is whether the hardness of the work has been earning progress toward the life you actually want, or simply keeping pace with the fear that stopping would cost you more than the sprint.
I have sat with this question long enough to know that it does not always produce a comfortable answer. For some people, the answer arrives quickly and with a specific address: this relationship, this institution, this role, this direction of effort has been circular for years. For others the answer is more ambiguous: some of the motion has been genuine progress and some of it has been running, and the two have been so intertwined that distinguishing them requires more patience than a single sitting allows.
Both are honest findings. The value of the question is not that it produces a clean verdict. The value is that it interrupts the automaticity of the sprint long enough to make direction visible. Most circular motion continues because nobody asked. The asking is the intervention.
There is a direction that belongs to you. It was there before the sprint began. The sprint has been covering it with noise.
The way back to it is not speed in a new direction. The way back is a pause honest enough that the original direction can make itself heard. It does not shout. The original direction never shouts. It waits in the engako, in the still water behind the rock, patient and quiet, available every time the sprinting stops long enough to allow a moment of genuine attention.
I had to stop moving long enough to hear it. I had to sit with a discomfort that felt, at first, like failure, the specific discomfort of a person who has organized their identity around motion and has finally been required to be still. The discomfort was not pleasant. It was also temporary. And on the other side of it was not certainty, which I want to be honest about, but a quality of clarity about what the next thing actually was, as opposed to what the logic of the situation was demanding I do next.
The next thing, for me, was walking away from a salary of $800,000 a year at Carle Foundation Hospital in September of 2024. I want to be accurate about what that decision felt like in the body. It felt like the first step of a person who had been running for a long time and had finally turned to face the direction they had been avoiding. Not triumph. Not relief, exactly. More like recognition. The way you recognize a street you grew up on after years away: nothing grand, just the exact quality of the light, which is exactly as you remember it.
I had been sprinting. The direction I turned toward was my own.
A Mirror
Name a project, role, or commitment you have maintained at high speed. When you slow down and look at it honestly, is it carrying you toward something you chose or away from something you fear? (Listening for: the distinction between driven and pulled. Most sprinters cannot name what they are moving toward with specificity.)
At the end of a very productive week, do you feel more yourself or less yourself? If less, what is the motion costing you? (Listening for: the gap between external output and internal depletion. High output with increasing depletion is the signature of circular motion.)
Where in your life have you been mistaking busyness for direction? Name the domain and the time period. (Listening for: specificity and honesty. The domain matters because the pattern shows up differently in career, in relationships, in spiritual life.)
If the sprint stopped tomorrow, what question would arrive in the silence? (Listening for: the avoided question. The sprint is very often organized around keeping that question from being heard.) ---
Letter from Dr. Job
Subject: Where you have been sprinting
I want to say something I could not have said to myself at thirty-two, because I was moving too fast to hear it.
Speed is not the same thing as direction. You already know this in theory. In practice, the feeling of momentum is so satisfying, so physiologically convincing, that it mimics the feeling of progress even when the ground is not changing.
You have been working hard. I am not questioning the work. I am asking one question about the work, and I want you to sit with it before you go back to the sprint.
Toward what?
Not away from what. Toward what. The toward is the thing that makes motion into progress. Without it, you are an athlete on a very impressive treadmill, and the treadmill will be there when you step off it, and so will the question you have been outrunning.
You have more to go to than you have to run from. That is where the real speed lives.
— Job