Playing the Long Game

There’s a version of excellence most of us never consciously define.

It arrives long before we question it.

We absorb it.

From the cultures we rise inside.
From the leaders we admire.
From the people who seem able to carry more than everyone else.

It has its own markers.

The early arrival.
The late-night email.
The call taken on vacation.
The meeting added to an already impossible day.
The problem everyone knows you can handle.
The ability to keep going long after you’re tired.

None of these things is inherently wrong.

There are moments when extraordinary work requires extraordinary effort.

Sometimes you push because the work deeply matters.
Sometimes you carry more because there is no one else to carry it.
Sometimes the sprint is exactly what the moment asks of you.

Many of the women I work with are exceptionally good in those moments.
It’s part of what has made them exceptional at what they do.

But lately, our conversations have been moving toward a different question.

Not whether they can do extraordinary work.
They’ve answered that.

How do you keep doing extraordinary work over a long life?

That asks something different of us.

And I think we’re beginning to understand that it requires
more than talent, stamina or ambition.

I’ve been thinking about the image of a tennis player during a match.

We tend to notice the obvious displays of excellence.

The great serve.
The impossible return.
The backhand down the line.
The point won at the net.

But lately, I’ve found myself paying attention to a different part of the match.

The moment when she sits down.

She slows her breathing.
Drinks water.
Adjusts her grip.
Looks back at the court.

Nothing spectacular is happening.
And yet, this is part of the performance, too.

No one watching thinks she has left the game.
No one thinks she has become less competitive.

The pause is part of the game.

Recovery isn’t the opposite of performance.
It belongs inside performance.

And once you begin paying attention to what happens between the points,
you start to see how much of extraordinary performance is built beyond them.

The coach.
The trainer.
The equipment.
The nutrition.
The physical conditioning.
The data.
The schedule.

An entire infrastructure exists around one person’s
ability to perform at an extraordinary level.

Elite sport understands something the rest of us sometimes forget:

Talent is precious precisely because it isn’t infinite.

You don’t protect the athlete because the performance matters less.
You build around her because the performance matters so much.

The same is true of extraordinary work.

Sustaining it over a long horizon requires three kinds of capacity.

1. Personal capacity.
   The physical, cognitive, emotional and creative capacity of the woman herself.

2. Distributed capacity.
   The people, expertise, relationships and support around her—at work and at home.

3. System capacity.
   The structures, priorities, norms and ways of working that determine whether extraordinary outcomes require extraordinary human effort every time.

None of these replaces the others.
They work together.

And here is the part I think matters most:

When distributed capacity or system capacity is underbuilt,
personal capacity tends to absorb the difference.

Often almost invisibly.

The extraordinarily capable woman becomes the flex.

She has the judgment to make the call.
The experience to steady the room.
The relationships to get something unstuck.
The stamina to get everyone through the quarter.
The love to be the person her family needs during a difficult chapter.

Sometimes that is exactly what the moment requires.

That is part of being a leader.
And part of being a human being whose life is intertwined with other people’s lives.

But personal capacity was never meant to be the permanent subsidy
for capacity the larger system has yet to build.

That, I think, is where sustainable excellence becomes a much more serious proposition.

It isn’t simply about preserving ourselves.
It’s about continually asking:

Where does capacity need to be built next?

In me?
Around me?
Or in the system itself?

Because the answer will change across a career.
And across a life.

Once you start thinking about performance this way,
the time horizon changes too.

That happened recently in a group I lead.

We were talking about what this next chapter of work might ask of us
when one woman shared that she expects to work until she is 70.

Maybe longer.

She is 59 now.

Eleven more years.

And suddenly the conversation wasn’t about getting through
the next demanding quarter.

It was about designing for a decade.

Eleven more years of ideas.
Decisions.
Travel.
Learning.
Leading.
Creating.

And eleven more years of a life unfolding alongside all of it.

Parents getting older.
Bodies changing.
Relationships evolving.
Children becoming adults.
New interests.
New ambitions.
New chapters none of us can see yet.

The math changes when you think that way.

If there are another ten or twenty years of extraordinary work ahead,
the question is no longer simply how much capacity you have today.

It’s:

What capacity will the life and work you still want require you to build?

One executive I work with told me that twenty years ago, getting to the office early mattered to her.

Being seen mattered.

She was building a career, and those signals were part of the environment she was navigating.

Today, some mornings she arrives at 10:00.

She works out first.

She makes herself a proper breakfast.

She gives herself enough time to get organized before stepping into a day that will ask a lot of her.

More broadly, she’s become more intentional about health—because she understands far more about what her body and mind require to remain sharp throughout a demanding day.

When we talked about why she protects that time now,
she said something I haven’t stopped thinking about:

I perform better when I take this time.

There it is.

Her ambition didn’t change.

Her understanding of performance did.

The workout belongs inside the performance system.

So does sleep.
So does thinking time.
So does recovery.

And perhaps one of the gifts of experience is that we begin to understand the downstream effects of our choices more clearly.

I hear some version of this from women all the time.

Of course I can push through.

I can take the late dinner, sleep five hours, get on the early flight and
perform the next morning.

The question is no longer simply whether I can.
It’s what that choice costs across the next day.

Maybe I don’t sleep as well the following night.
Maybe I don’t work out.
Maybe I’m less patient.
Less creative.
Foggy by four.

One demanding night can begin borrowing capacity from tomorrow.

There will absolutely be times when the trade is worth making.
But knowing the full price changes how deliberately you make it.

That’s not becoming less capable.
It’s knowing your instrument better.

And using it accordingly.

Then there is everything no extraordinary person was ever meant
to know, manage or carry alone.

This is where I see another shift happening.

Earlier in a career, capability can feel very personal: Look what I can do.

Later, the more interesting question becomes:
What becomes possible because of what I’ve built around me?

A physician with expertise I don’t have.
A trainer who makes my body stronger.
An advisor who helps me see around a corner.
A leadership team whose judgment I trust.
A colleague whose strengths are different from mine.
Someone who makes the house work.
A sibling who carries a different weight during a season with an aging parent.

Expertise.
Judgment.
Care.
Time.

All forms of capacity.

I’ve watched women become increasingly thoughtful about
spending money this way, too.

Not simply acquiring more.

Buying back capacity.

An hour.
A decision.
A piece of expertise.
A responsibility someone else can carry beautifully.

And sometimes the architecture has to change because life has changed.

A child needs more presence.
A role gets bigger.
A company enters another stage.

The support system that worked beautifully five years ago
may no longer be sufficient for the life she is living now.

The life got bigger.
And the infrastructure around it has to grow, too.

Perhaps that’s one of the quiet evolutions of a long career:
moving from proving what you can do yourself to
becoming exceptionally thoughtful about what deserves to be done by you.

And then there is something no amount of personal capacity or support can solve.

A system designed to consume whatever capacity people give it.

I know this kind of system well.

When I was at Meta, there was always a reason for the intensity.

We were growing extraordinarily quickly.
Then we were preparing for an IPO.
Then we were a newly public company.
Then came the next stage of growth.

Each chapter had a perfectly credible reason why this was the moment
that required everything.

Until eventually you realize: this isn’t a moment anymore.
It’s the operating model.

I see leaders wrestling with versions of this now.

A CEO can sleep well, exercise, have excellent support at home
and build a strong team around her.

But if the organization has fifteen priorities, treats everything as urgent, concentrates too many decisions at the top and fills nearly every open space with meetings, there is a limit to what another morning routine can solve.

At some point, we have to look at the work itself.

What deserves urgency?
What doesn’t?

What pace of growth are we actually choosing—
and what does that pace require from human beings?

What are we continuing because it matters, and what are we continuing
because no one has decided to stop?

Where does authority need to move?
Where is expertise missing?

What does the leader’s own behavior teach everyone else
about what commitment looks like?

And this is where I think leaders have more agency than we sometimes acknowledge.

Because at a certain level, we aren’t simply subject to the system.
We’re among the people designing it.

That doesn’t mean creating an organization without pressure.

Extraordinary companies will have extraordinary moments.

A launch may require more.
A crisis certainly will.
A transformational opportunity may be worth a period of enormous intensity.

But if everyone has to be firing on all cylinders all the time,
eventually there is nowhere left to go when the truly consequential moment arrives.

At some point, a system that continually depends on extraordinary human effort
has to become more capable itself.

Playing the long game isn’t primarily about conserving ourselves.
It’s about building capacity as our ambitions—and our lives—evolve.

The answer will keep changing because our lives will keep changing.

The company gets bigger.
The role becomes more complex.
The family changes.
The body changes.
The stakes change.

There will be seasons when the work asks almost everything of us.

We can meet those moments.
We have spent entire careers proving that.

The point is to make extraordinary effort available for extraordinary moments—not routinely necessary for ordinary life.

That is the distinction I think we’ve been reaching for all along.

Because for the women I know, there is still so much left to play for.

The idea she’ll have at 63 that she couldn’t possibly have had at 43.
The younger woman whose life she will change.
The work that will surprise her.
The place she hasn’t seen.
The people she wants enough time—and enough of herself left—to love well.
The version of herself she hasn’t met yet.

And maybe that’s what playing the long game asks of us.

Not less ambition. More architecture around it.

The capacity to know what allows us to perform at our best.
The people and expertise that make more possible around us.
The systems that make extraordinary work more sustainable.

So we can keep doing the work that matters to us—
without making ourselves the price of doing it.