The invisible game

Every CEO plays two games.

The first game is visible. It shows up in revenue numbers, headcount, market share, and press coverage. It's the game investors track, competitors watch, and LinkedIn celebrates. When people ask how your company is doing, they're asking about the visible game.

The second game is invisible. It happens in the space between your alarm going off and your feet hitting the floor. It's what you do with fear. How you respond when a key executive quits. Whether you tell the truth in a board meeting when a comfortable half-truth would suffice. It's the conversation you have with yourself at 2 AM when the company's future feels uncertain, and you're not sure you're the right person to lead it.

The invisible game is where leadership actually lives.

Most CEO content focuses exclusively on the visible game. Strategy frameworks. Growth tactics. Fundraising playbooks. Management systems. That content has its place. But it misses something essential: the visible game is downstream of the invisible game. How you lead yourself determines how you lead everything else.

This is personal leadership.

I learned this the hard way.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when no one knew what was happening, what to do, or what the future held, I convinced myself that the future of Utah rested on my shoulders and those of Silicon Slopes, the nonprofit I lead. It obviously didn't. But somehow I believed it did.

I brought together the top leaders in Utah to develop a plan to ensure the state not only met this challenge but also emerged stronger. COVID-19 became Silicon Slopes' sole mission for the next 18 months.

We were the first to launch testing in Utah County. We sent private planes to China to get PPE equipment to Utah hospitals and first responders. We worked closely with the state's top government officials, held press conferences with the governor, and fought political battles we had no business being part of. It felt like I was on the home page of The Salt Lake Tribune every day. Those stories were never positive, which was awkward because I was also on The Salt Lake Tribune's board at the time. Every story they wrote about me required a disclaimer at the bottom.

From the outside, it probably looked like leadership. Decisive action. Visible impact. The kind of thing that gets celebrated and criticized. I experienced plenty of both.

From the inside, I was lost.

I had lost my sense of purpose. Not just the organization's purpose, but my personal purpose. I was careening from crisis to crisis, battle to battle, without ever taking the time to ask myself the questions that actually mattered: Why am I doing this? Should I be doing this? What's my purpose?

This affected my personal life profoundly. Ways I won't get into here, as they're still too painful to publicly confront. My physical health deteriorated. I started having heart problems. I spent three weeks in the hospital and never told anyone outside of my immediate family.

I'm proud of the work Silicon Slopes did during this time. I genuinely believe Utah came out better because of it. But I'm not proud of the leader I was during this period. I was winning the visible game while losing the invisible one.

It's taken me years to get my physical and mental health back from that time. Years. And I attribute all of it to an overall lack of purpose, clarity, and personal leadership.

There's a John Hartford song called "In Tall Buildings" that I think about often.

It traces the arc of a life lived on autopilot. A young person is taught by others, shaped by expectations, given a suit, and sent off to work. The song's narrator says goodbye to sunshine, to flowers, to everything that matters, because he must not be late. He has somewhere to be. Then retirement comes, and he wonders what happened in all those years between. Where did the life part go?

Hartford wrote it as a folk song, but it's really a warning. It's about the quiet tragedy of drifting through decades without ever asking whether you're going where you actually want to go. Of being so busy making payments and keeping schedules that you never notice you've traded your life for something you never consciously chose.

Every time I hear it, I think about how many CEOs are living some version of this story. Not in tall buildings, necessarily. Maybe in corner offices or on Zoom calls or in first-class seats crossing time zones. But the same drift. The same surrender of agency. The same slow accumulation of years spent optimizing for metrics that someone else defined.

And then one day, wondering what happened.

I’ve chosen the word "personal" deliberately. Not self-leadership. Not self-improvement. Personal leadership.

The distinction matters.

"Self" implies a universal standard. A checklist of habits and practices that work for everyone. Wake up at 5 AM. Meditate for twenty minutes. Journal three pages. Exercise before breakfast. Batch your email. Optimize your calendar. If you do these things, you will become an effective leader.

That's not how leadership works. That's not how people work.

Personal leadership starts from a different premise: there is no single right way to lead yourself, just as there is no single right way to lead a company. What works for one person may not work for another. The morning routine that transforms one CEO might leave another depleted. The decision-making framework that brings clarity to one leader might create confusion for another.

But this doesn't mean anything goes. There is no single right way to be a leader, but there are wrong ways. Ways that compromise your integrity. Ways that burn out the people around you. Ways that achieve external success while hollowing out internal meaning. Ways that get you somewhere you never actually wanted to go.

Personal leadership is about finding your way. Not the way. Your way.

That requires knowing something most people never slow down long enough to discover: what you actually value, and what you're actually trying to build with your life.

Clayton Christensen spent his career studying disruption and innovation at Harvard Business School. But his most enduring work might be a short book called "How Will You Measure Your Life?"

It began as a lecture he gave to graduating students. Christensen noticed something troubling: many of his former classmates had become wealthy and professionally successful by every conventional measure. But they were also unhappy, divorced, or ethically compromised. A few were in prison.

These were brilliant people. They could analyze markets, build companies, and create shareholder value. But they had never applied that same rigor to the most important question: what would make their lives meaningful?

Christensen's argument was simple but devastating. If you don't consciously decide what matters most, you will unconsciously drift into living by someone else's values. You'll optimize for metrics that feel important in the moment but don't add up to anything you actually want.

You'll achieve success after success after success, and then one day you'll look around and wonder how you ended up here. You'll have built a career that looks impressive from the outside but feels hollow from the inside. You'll have climbed a ladder leaning against the wrong wall.

This is the trap. And CEOs are particularly susceptible to it.

During COVID, I fell into that trap completely.

I was optimizing for metrics that seemed important. Testing sites launched. PPE delivered. Press conferences held. Problems solved. Each day brought new crises, and I showed up to meet them. I was doing things that mattered. Important things.

But I had never stopped to ask the deeper questions. What was I actually trying to build with my life? What did success mean to me, not to the press, not to my peers, but to me? What would make all of this effort worth it?

Without those answers, I had no foundation. No way to decide what deserved my energy and what didn't. No way to know when to push forward and when to step back. No filter for the endless demands competing for my attention.

So I said yes to everything. I fought every battle. I treated every crisis as equally urgent. And I slowly destroyed my health, some relationships, and my sense of self in the process.

It's hard to be physically and mentally well if you don't have any reason to be so.

Running a company generates tremendous pressure to optimize for legible outcomes. Revenue. Growth rate. Valuation. These numbers are visible and comparable. They let you measure yourself against peers. They give you something concrete to point to when someone asks how you're doing.

The danger is that these metrics become the goal rather than a byproduct. You start making decisions to improve the numbers rather than to build something you believe in. You hire people who will make the board happy rather than people who share your values. You take the company in directions that maximize valuation but minimize meaning.

And because everyone around you is measuring success the same way, no one questions it. The drift happens gradually. The compromise is incremental. Each individual decision seems rational, even responsible.

Then you achieve everything you thought you wanted, and you feel nothing.

Hartford's narrator makes all the payments and then wonders what happened. Most CEOs I know are making their own version of those payments. Board expectations. Investor demands. Market pressures. The relentless need to grow, to scale, to win. They're so focused on not being late that they never ask where they're actually going.

Christensen suggested that your life needs a purpose as clear as a company's mission. Not a vague sense of wanting to do good or be successful. A real articulation of what you're trying to accomplish with your finite time on earth.

Most companies, even mediocre ones, can tell you what they're trying to do. They have mission statements, strategic plans, and quarterly objectives. There's clarity about what success looks like.

Most people, even exceptional ones, cannot answer the same question about their own lives. They have never defined what success means to them personally. They have absorbed definitions from their parents, their culture, their industry, their peers. They are running hard toward finish lines they never chose.

Personal leadership begins with a different kind of work. Before you can lead yourself effectively, you have to know where you're trying to go. Before you can make good decisions, you have to know what you're deciding for. Before you can resist the drift toward someone else's values, you have to know your own.

This isn't easy work. It's not the kind of thing you can knock out in an afternoon strategic planning session. It requires honest examination of what you actually care about, not what you think you should care about. It requires separating your own ambitions from the expectations you've absorbed from others. It requires admitting that some of the goals you've been chasing might not be yours at all.

Personal leadership is personal because the answers are different for everyone.

One CEO's purpose might be building generational wealth for their family. Another's might be solving a problem they find genuinely important. Another's might be proving something to themselves. Another's might be creating an environment where talented people can do their best work. None of these is inherently better than the others. But each implies a different set of decisions, trade-offs, and definitions of success.

The work is figuring out which one is yours.

Once you know that, everything else gets simpler. Not easier, but simpler. Decisions that seemed complicated become clearer when you know what you're optimizing for. Opportunities that seemed attractive become less tempting when they don't align with your actual purpose. The visible game becomes something you play with intention rather than desperation.

This is the invisible game. It doesn't show up in your pitch deck or your annual report. No one will ask you about it at conferences. Your investors don't care about it, at least not directly.

But it determines everything else.

If you can't lead yourself, you can't lead others. And you can't lead yourself until you know where you're going.

This is why I've decided that CEO.com should focus its content, events, and platform on personal leadership.

There are plenty of magazines, podcasts, and influencers you can follow that offer business models, strategies, and insights. That content exists. It's everywhere.

What doesn't exist, at least not in a way I've found meaningful, is a resource dedicated to the invisible game. The inner work that makes the outer work sustainable. The questions that actually matter but rarely get asked.

I wish a resource like this had existed when I was going through my own purpose crisis. It would have changed everything for me and for the organization I led.

That's why we're building it now. Not to give you a formula or a system or a set of best practices that work for everyone. To help you find your way.

That means asking questions most business content avoids. What do you actually value? What are you willing to sacrifice, and what isn't negotiable? How do you want to feel about your life when you look back on it? What would make all the hard work worth it?

The goal is to help you avoid Hartford's lament. To make sure that when you look back on the years between, you know exactly what happened. Because you chose it. Because it was yours.

These are personal questions. The answers are personal too.

That's the point. That's why we call it personal leadership.