Case Study 1 — Jordan: Is This It?

The Question

Jordan wrote three words in his journal on a Tuesday evening in June and then closed it.

Is this it?

He didn't analyze them. He poured himself a glass of water, sat on the couch, and watched the city out the window until Dev came home. He didn't mention the question. It felt too large and too vague and too ungrateful for the conversation he thought he could have.

The question was not: "Am I unhappy?" He was not unhappy.

It was not: "Is my work bad?" The work was, by any measure, going well.

It was something closer to: "Is this sufficient? Is doing this well — doing this as well as I can — the fullest version of what I could be doing with the time I have?"

He put it in the journal and hoped it would become smaller if he ignored it.

It didn't.

The Inventory

Jordan had developed the habit of the decision journal in Chapter 24. He'd also developed the habit of the learning journal in Chapter 26. In June, prompted partly by a team development session he'd run on meaningful work, he turned the inquiry on himself.

He ran the gap analysis exercise from the chapter on himself. He was careful about this — he'd learned, in the deliberate practice work, that honest self-assessment was harder than it appeared.

What he was spending the most time on: - Strategy and analytical work: time-intensive, high engagement (4–5 on the meaning scale) - People management and team development: moderate time, high meaning (5) - Organizational navigation and stakeholder management: high time, moderate to low meaning (2–3) - Administrative work: moderate time, low meaning (1–2) - Customer Journey Council development: low time so far, high meaning (5)

The gap was visible immediately. The organizational navigation — the meetings about meetings, the political management, the careful calibration of which idea to surface to which person in which sequence — was consuming a significant portion of his week and providing the least meaning. It was necessary. It was not nothing. But it was not why he was here.

The high-meaning categories were the analytical work, the people development, and the CJC.

He ran the Wrzesniewski orientation exercise.

His career scores were high. His calling scores were moderate. His job scores were low.

He stared at this for a while.

He was career-oriented in a role that offered genuine calling-level meaning in some dimensions. He was spending the highest proportion of time in the lowest-meaning activities. The meaningful work was being crowded out by the necessary work.

The Five Whys

Jordan ran the five-why exercise in his journal.

I am a marketing analytics director.

Why does that matter? Because good analytics enable better decisions about customers.

Why does that matter? Because better decisions about customers mean the company serves them better — not just better for revenue, but actually better.

Why does that matter? Because the people who use this product are real people, and whether they find it useful is not neutral.

Why does that matter? Because I believe that work should make things better for real people — not just for shareholders or for the system — and if I'm not doing that, I'm just optimizing metrics.

Why does that matter? Because otherwise what is this for?

He read the last line back. Because otherwise what is this for.

He had arrived somewhere he hadn't planned to go. Underneath the career orientation — underneath the advancement and achievement satisfaction — there was something that sounded, when he put it into words, like a genuine calling: the belief that analytical work should connect to human benefit. Not abstractly. Specifically.

The question "is this it?" was not, he realized, a question about whether the work was good enough. It was a question about whether he was doing enough of the part of the work that was connected to the five-why answer.

The Conversation He Almost Didn't Have

Jordan had been circling the children question for four months. He and Dev had opened it in Chapter 24 — Dev had said "I think I'm closer to knowing than you are. I want to know if that's a problem" — and they had not returned to it directly. It sat between them, acknowledged but unlocked.

On a Saturday morning in July, Jordan asked for the conversation.

Not the decision. He made this explicit. Not "let's decide" but "let's actually talk about it."

What came out over two hours surprised him.

Dev wanted to be a parent. Had known this for longer than they had said. Was not going to be willing to wait indefinitely, and they were going to need Jordan to do some work on finding out what he actually wanted — not what he feared, but what he wanted.

Jordan's answer to the five-why question surfaced here: Because otherwise what is this for? He hadn't meant work. Or not only work.

He said: "I think I've been afraid of wanting it, because wanting it would mean being vulnerable to losing it."

Dev said: "That's what you do with everything you care about."

Jordan didn't argue.

The conversation didn't produce a decision. It produced a direction: both of them working, seriously and specifically, on the question — not as something to be managed, but as something worth wanting well.

Jordan wrote in his journal afterward: I've been optimizing against loss rather than toward what I actually value. That's not self-protection. It's just a smaller life.

The Crafting Moves

Over the following months, Jordan made several visible and several invisible changes.

Visible: - He restructured his week to protect 25% of his time for the CJC development work, which he had been treating as a side project. This was the highest-meaning work. It needed to be treated accordingly. - He delegated two categories of stakeholder management to Rivera, who found this work more naturally engaging and was ready to develop in that direction. - He initiated direct monthly conversations with three enterprise clients — not for relationship management, but specifically to hear how the company's products were affecting their teams. This was relational crafting with a purpose: he wanted to close the gap between the analytical work and the actual people the work reached.

Invisible: - He rewrote his cognitive framing of the role. He had been thinking of himself as "head of marketing analytics." He started thinking of himself as "the person who builds the evidence that allows the company to understand whether it's actually helping the people it says it's helping." This was not a job description. It was a purpose statement. The framing changed what he noticed, what he prioritized, and what he said in meetings.

None of these changes required leaving. None required a radical rupture. They required honest assessment of where meaning was and wasn't, and deliberate movement toward the former.

The Meaning That Was Already There

Something else happened, quieter than the crafting moves.

Jordan had been developing Priya for eight months. In September, Priya led her first full presentation to the senior leadership team. The methodology was hers. The framing was hers. The questions she fielded without help were hers.

Jordan sat in the back of the room and watched. He had not planned to feel anything in particular.

The CFO asked Priya a question about the churn model's sensitivity assumptions. Priya answered it — cleanly, specifically, with full awareness of the limitations. The same kind of question that had floored Jordan a year earlier. Priya had it.

Walking back to the office afterward, Priya said: "I thought I'd be more nervous."

Jordan said: "You were ready."

Priya said: "You made me ready."

Jordan almost deflected this — his usual move, the compliment converted to a shared effort or a practical next step. He didn't. He let it land.

He wrote in his journal that evening: I think I've been missing the meaning that's been here. Not because it wasn't present. Because I wasn't looking for it in the right places.

What Jordan Learned About Meaning

Jordan had entered the meaning inquiry with the implicit assumption that meaning was something he would find by adjusting the contents of his work — different tasks, higher-purpose projects, a cleaner connection between what he did and why it mattered.

What the inquiry actually revealed was more nuanced:

The meaning was partly about content — the CJC work, the methodological craft, the direct connection to customer experience. He needed more of the high-meaning work and less of the low-meaning administrative overhead.

But the meaning was also substantially about how he related to the work he was already doing. The Priya moment was the same work he'd been doing for months. The cognitive reframe — from "metrics director" to "person who builds honest evidence about human impact" — applied to the same role. The relational crafting with enterprise clients was within his existing authority.

The question "is this it?" had, implicitly, been asking for something to be added. What the inquiry produced was a different orientation to what was already there — and a set of changes that made the already-there more visible.

That, and the beginnings of a real conversation about what came next. Not just in work.

Discussion Questions

1. Jordan's five-why analysis revealed a calling-level aspiration — that analytical work should connect to human benefit — that his career orientation had been partially obscuring. What does this suggest about the relationship between career and calling orientations? Can someone hold both simultaneously?

2. Jordan's crafting moves were relatively modest — restructuring his week, delegating specific categories, initiating client conversations. What does this tell you about the relationship between dramatic role change and meaningful work? When is crafting sufficient, and when is it not?

3. Jordan nearly deflected Priya's "you made me ready" — his habitual move. He chose not to. The chapter describes relational visibility (seeing the impact of your work on specific people) as a primary source of meaning. What would it take for Jordan to make this kind of meaning more consistently available to himself?

4. The children conversation produced "a direction, not a decision." How does this connect to the chapter's argument that purpose is discovered through engagement rather than resolved through analysis?

5. Jordan's invisible crafting move — rewriting his cognitive framing of his role — required no external permission or resource. What made it difficult to do anyway? What barriers tend to prevent cognitive crafting even when it is accessible?