Personal Stategy Compass May 2026

The Echo in the White Space

In April, I wrote about the sonic stage. This involved clearing away the “speaker stacks” of inherited obligations on the concert stage to hear the acoustic reality of your life.

Once the stage is clear, the silence often feels heavy. Most of us treat “white space” as a vacuum that needs to be filled with new projects or sharper plans. We rely on visible excess to signal our relevance.

I am noticing this spring that the urge to fill the stage is often a flight from infinite tasks toward more manageable finite tasks. A good Personal Quarterly Offsite (PQO) reveals that the most important things on your stage, such as health, family, and legacy, don’t have a finish line. These aren’t finite tasks, to-dos, and projects.

The Machine Shop and the Steward

My father worked in a machine shop where the “real work” was the maintenance of the machines that made the parts.

In a machine shop, you see two types of people. The fixer waits for the lathe to smoke before rushing in with a wrench. The fixer gets the adrenaline and the hero moment of a problem solved. Unfortunately, sometimes the problem they are solving was of their own creation.

Stewards listen to the pitch of the motor. They notice the slight vibration that signals a bearing is wearing thin. They value the “low-status” work of lubrication and calibration that prevents the emergency from ever happening.

I have recently been reading Stewart Brand’s new book on maintenance, which has shifted my thinking on this identity. Brand argues that maintenance is the most important part of any system, yet the least celebrated. I am learning to trade the fixer identity for the strategic steward.

The fixer tries to “solve” a family transition or “cure” a difficult season. The steward focuses on maintaining stability and preserving the health of the living system. This is the operational heart of addition by subtraction. You subtract the “heroic” emergencies to make room for the quiet, high-stakes maintenance of the core.

The Riffle Rasp and the Inheritable Standard

There is a riffle rasp hanging on the wall near my computer monitor. It’s a tool for detail, a double-ended file used to reach into the curves of a carving. It doesn’t remove mass like a saw. Instead, it refines shape. It requires patience.

As stewards, we aren’t looking for the sledgehammer change. We use the riffle rasp to smooth the friction in our wicked systems, those ongoing realities like health or family baselines that require constant, steady attention.

The goal of this refinement is the inheritable standard.

A PQO is a fixed block of time to look at the arrangement of your life rather than working inside it. In your next offsite, look at your core systems and ask:

“Is this system, including my health, my family’s safety, or my financial structure, durable enough to be inherited by a fatigued version of myself, or by my successor, without a manual?”

If the system requires you to be at 100% brilliance to function, with no help from others, it’s a speaker stack you are still cluttering the stage with because you are used to seeing it there.

Joules Over Output

Standard planning measures output like how many items did you cross off? The strategic steward knows that activity can mask crowding.

The new metric is joules, the vitality and biological carrying capacity you have left at the end of the day. You measure success by the spaciousness of your stage set-up.

A Question for Your Next PQO

Before you rank priorities, look at what you are carrying.

The Steward’s Question: “What am I trying to ‘fix’ (a finite task) that actually requires me to ‘steward’ (an infinite system)?”

The white space that appears when you stop “fixing” can feel unfamiliar. It allows the real signal to travel. That is the craft.

- Dennis Kennedy