At some point in life, a hard truth shows up unannounced and refuses to leave: nobody is coming to design your life for you.
You can’t outsource meaning.
You can’t delegate direction.
And you definitely can’t expect clarity to arrive fully formed from someone else’s priorities.
Yet, many people spend years waiting — waiting for a parent, a spouse, a boss, an investor, or a system to tell them what they should do next. They mistake proximity for ownership and support for leadership. And in that waiting, life quietly slips into autopilot.
The Illusion of Being “Led”
If you are expecting a parent or a spouse to do the ideation, the planning, the funding, and the heavy lifting — while you merely step into the role — you’re not leading your life. You’re renting it.
In that setup, you may carry the title, but someone else holds the steering wheel.
They are not empowering you; they are remotely controlling you.
Unless you exercise your own judgement — unless you can articulate what you want now and where you are headed next — the initiative is not really yours. And when things go wrong, you won’t have the authority to correct course, because you never owned the direction to begin with.
Clarity is not a luxury.
It is the minimum requirement for ownership.
Ownership Without Clarity Is a Fiction
This mistake shows up very clearly in business.
If you are an owner, you cannot expect your employees to run marketing, product development, or growth for you — especially when you haven’t made your own thinking explicit.
People can’t execute what they don’t understand.
If your team doesn’t know:
- what you are willing to spend,
- which trade-offs you are prepared to make,
- where you are positioning the business,
- and what the long-term vision actually is,
then they are not lacking initiative — you are lacking clarity.
Leadership isn’t about demanding outcomes. It’s about providing context, resources, and direction. Without those, your people will either freeze, make defensive decisions, or optimise for something entirely different from what you intended.
And none of that is their fault.
Don’t Expect Your Employer to Lead You
The same principle applies if you are an employee.
Your employer is not obligated to design your growth, your career arc, or your sense of fulfillment. They are building toward outcomes they value, in ways that benefit them.
Sometimes, your goals will align with that plan. Often, they won’t.
And if you don’t have clarity on what you want to learn, where you want to grow, and how this role fits into your larger life strategy, you will wake up one day realising you’ve been executing someone else’s vision flawlessly — while slowly drifting away from your own.
No employer can lead you where you haven’t decided to go.
The Franchise Fallacy
Franchises often fall into the same trap.
Many franchisees assume the franchisor is “looking after them.” In reality, the franchisor is optimising for the system, the brand, and their own scalability.
That doesn’t make them wrong.
It makes them rational.
But if you confuse alignment with guardianship, disappointment is inevitable. The moment incentives diverge, clarity becomes the only protection you have.
The same pattern repeats everywhere:
- co-founders optimising for different endgames,
- investors pushing for exits that suit their fund cycles,
- politicians optimising for elections, not citizens,
- military generals planning for strategic objectives, not individual lives.
None of this is malicious.
It’s structural.
Clarity Is the Price of Agency
Here’s the uncomfortable conclusion:
if you don’t define your direction, someone else’s priorities will define it for you.
That’s how systems work.
Leading with clarity doesn’t mean having all the answers. It means being honest about your intent, your constraints, and your trajectory. It means saying:
This is where I am going.
This is what I am willing to commit.
This is what I am not.
Only then can people choose to support you meaningfully.
Only then can collaboration be real.
Only then does responsibility truly belong to you.
Nobody will do it for you.
And once you accept that — not as a burden, but as freedom — you stop waiting to be led and start leading with clarity.