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Not long ago, a contract I had for effectively full-time work came to a sudden end. And I’d been waiting for this. I’d been building my coaching business in parallel, but the two were at odds. There wasn’t enough time and not enough bandwidth to do both well. So when the contract ended faster than I expected, it was exactly the trigger I’d built everything around.

I reached out to start tearing down that scaffolding that I’d built.

Then the phone rang. A new contract landed. Not coaching, more industrial work. And I climbed right back up without noticing I’d decided anything. I went back to the well and kept doing what I’ve always done. Even though I’d built the scaffolding for exactly this moment.

Last episode, I talked about how I wrote my exit criteria and never aimed at them. Today is talking about the why. And it turns out that it’s not that I didn’t aim. I aimed at a target almost anything could satisfy.

Here’s the thing. When you’re stuck in a state you mean to leave, you build scaffolding to survive it. Workarounds, a patch, a source of income that keeps the lights on while you plan your exit. And the scaffolding works. That’s the trap. It pays down the exact pain your exit criteria were watching for.

So the alarm never trips.

You didn’t stay because leaving got harder. You stayed because staying got tolerable and you never noticed the moment it did.

I’m figuring out some of these lessons on the fly. And this is one that I’m still inside of. Because here’s what I finally saw. My exit criteria was money shaped. Part of that is a scarcity mindset I’ve carried a long time. And that’s probably why the wiring got set the way it did. But the mechanism isn’t the scarcity. The mechanism is what the scarcity made me write.

I wrote I’ll leave when I can afford to.

But that’s the flaw. Not that it’s about money, it’s that it never specified what kind of money. It just said income. And the criteria I should have written was different. What it should have been was, I’ll leave when my coaching revenue covers my baseline. That’s a target only the pivot can hit. An industrial contract can’t satisfy that.

Coaching income is the only thing that trips that alarm. But I didn’t write that one. I wrote the generic version. So any incoming work satisfied a target that was supposed to be about funding the pivot. The scaffolding wasn’t a workaround process I could dismantle. The scaffolding was the income itself. More work is scaffolding that feeds the exact variable I was measuring. And a little more is always a little better, isn’t it?

So I never recalculated because there was no alarm. It was wired to the one thing that just kept showing up.

And this isn’t only about contracts. It’s the same when you’re in a role you’ve outgrown. A role that isn’t stretching you or growing you anymore, but you stay. I’ve done that too. I was in a role that had quietly turned into a sales seat, past the point where it was doing anything for me. But it paid. So I stayed comfortable on the same money-shaped criteria.

The alarm never tripped there either, for the exact same reason.

Now the part that really hits for engineers. When I started this, I priced the pivot once, against my original plan, and I never repriced it after the runway landed. The numbers that justified leaving were still true. I just stopped reading the gauge because the needle wasn’t screaming anymore. You trust your instruments. That is the job.

But this instrument was measuring the wrong quantity quietly for a long time. And a gauge reading the wrong variable will sit calm while the thing you actually care about drifts.

So, this is the awkward part. The scaffolding I built to cope is now the thing keeping me stuck. It’s not sabotage and it’s not fear. It’s a well-functioning system doing exactly what I designed it to do, which was make the bad state survivable. It succeeded, and that’s the problem. So if the alarm is wired to a variable your scaffolding can always feed.

The fix isn’t trying harder to leave. It’s rewiring the alarm to something the scaffolding can’t pay down. What signal survives a new contract landing in your laptop? That’s the next episode.