It Started at 3am

She woke me up in the middle of the night with something I couldn’t name yet. Just a pull. An insistence. I didn’t question it — I got up, grabbed a stack of flip chart pages, and started covering the walls of my home office. Then the hallway. Wherever I found room.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. So I just started listing. Peaks. Valleys. Professionally. Personally. Ten years back. Then twenty. I even mapped the world alongside my own story — elections, economic shifts, innovation breakthroughs — because I had a hunch my journey wasn’t happening in a vacuum.

For weeks, nothing clicked. The pages just stared back at me.

And then, slowly — not all at once, but creeping — a pattern emerged.

Peaks arrived in roughly two-year windows. So did the valleys. And the more I looked, the more I could see what was happening inside those windows — the behaviors, the energy, the feelings.

In the first year: curiosity, creation, excitement. I loved my work. I loved learning something new. I was building something.

Somewhere in the middle of year two, something shifted. The mastery was still there but the edge had quieted. A restlessness started surfacing that I couldn’t quite name.

By the time I reached that two-year mark, I knew what it was.

Boredom.

Not burnout. Not dissatisfaction. Just a quiet, creeping signal that I’d learned what this chapter had to teach me.

Here’s what I discovered: every time I listened to that restlessness and reinvented myself at or near the two-year mark, I moved into another peak. New energy. New creation. New excitement.

And every time I ignored it — pushed through, stayed comfortable, told myself it would pass — the risk compounded. The further I drifted past my inflection point, the more vulnerable I became to sabotaging my own efforts or missing the people and situations that could derail me, ones I would have seen clearly if I hadn’t already been running past empty.

The boredom wasn’t the problem. The boredom was the signal.

At professional events, I began asking individuals who had experienced a layoff one simple question:

“Using your last professional setback as a starting point — when did you know you had stayed too long?”

More than 90% knew instantly. Not after thinking about it. Instantly.

Then I’d ask: “When did you first feel curious about exploring something new — and ignore it?”

And finally: “Looking back, do you wish you had followed that feeling when it first arrived?”

Nobody ever said no.

Here’s what that confirmed: we almost always know. The signal arrives. The curiosity sparks. The restlessness whispers. And most of us override it — because we’ve been conditioned to push through, not pivot.

A layoff forces our hand. But reinventing after you’ve passed your inflection point, when the curve is already moving downward — that’s the harder, more painful path. I’ve lived it. I’ve watched hundreds of others live it.

You don’t have to.

Here’s my own curve — right now, in real time.

September 2024: Funding dried up for a consulting role. I hadn’t seen it coming, or more honestly, I had, and ignored it. I’d passed my own inflection point by two years without a reinvention. The curve doesn’t wait.

January 2025: I launched my Substack. A new chapter, a new creative container, a new audience to build.

July 2025: Pink Slip Pivot. I ran 60+ one-on-one transition sessions with people who had been laid off across multiple industries — and what I heard in those conversations sharpened everything I thought I knew about reinvention timing. I built a free toolkit that mirrors the PSP sessions.

August through November 2025: I continued building. Four premium toolkits. Tools designed to help people navigate exactly the friction I’d been researching for years.

January 2026 — the midpoint of my current two-year cycle — I made a decision. Not to coast. Not to consolidate. To build the thing I’d been workshopping manually for fifteen years: the Personal Inflection Curve™ Diagnostic.

That decision kept me in front of my own curve. And that’s the whole point.

I’m happiest—and most effective—when I stay ahead of my inflection point through ongoing iteration. Frequent stepping stones. Smaller reinventions that keep the creative energy moving without requiring a full stop and restart. The risk of not doing this isn’t stagnation. It’s the downward slope. I’ve been there. And I’ve mapped it too many times in other people’s stories to let it happen (again) in my own.

January 2027 is my next decision point. Bigger reinvention or another iteration — I haven’t decided yet. What I know is that either choice keeps me energized, as long as I’m making it consciously and making it before the curve makes it for me.

That’s the whole framework, lived out loud.

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What I built from those flip chart pages is called the Personal Inflection Curve™.

It’s not a theory. It’s a pattern — one that emerged from twenty years of my own data, field-tested across hundreds of conversations with people at every level of every kind of organization.

The question it answers isn’t “what should I do next?”

It’s “where are you right now, and what does this moment actually require of you?”

That answer looks different for everyone. Which is exactly why it took a diagnostic to surface it.

The pattern was always there. The technology just finally caught up. Tomorrow, how I tested it, and the testers who made it real.

Dee McCrorey is the publisher of AB2AI on Substack. The Personal Inflection Curve™ is her original research framework, decades in the making.