Why I Wrote GreenLight: And The Problem I Kept Watching People Get Wrong

I’ve watched a lot of talented people make the same mistake.

Not the same decision, the same kind of mistake. The pattern shows up in different forms, at different career stages, for people in wildly different circumstances. But underneath the surface details, it’s always the same thing: they are making a significant decision from a place that isn’t theirs. From pressure, or expectation, or exhaustion, or the accumulated weight of what success is supposed to look like at their stage of life. And they’re moving fast, because our culture rewards speed and treats deliberation as hesitation.

The results are predictable. Not always dramatic. Sometimes just the slow accumulation of misalignment. The career that looks successful and feels hollow. The role that seemed right and slowly reveals itself as wrong. The decision made in the right direction for the wrong reasons, which turns out to matter more than most people expect.

I started writing The GreenLight Factor because I kept seeing this happen to people who deserved better tools.

The Intersection Nobody Prepares You For

We spend enormous resources preparing people to lead forward. How to execute, how to manage, how to navigate complexity and build teams and drive results. These are real and valuable skills. They are not the skills that determine whether someone builds a career and a life that is actually theirs.

The skill that determines that is navigational. It’s the capacity to arrive at a crossroads. A genuine moment of decision about direction, commitment, and cost, and make a wise choice rather than a reactive one. To know when to stop, when to pause, and when to go. And to do that from a foundation of genuine self-knowledge and clear values rather than from whatever the moment is asking of you.

Most people were never taught this. Not formally, not systematically. They navigate by instinct and imitation, or they follow the path that generates the most external validation, or they make decisions the way they have always made them and wonder why the results keep feeling off. The framework was not available to them.

The Greenlight Factor is an attempt to make it available.

Why traffic lights

The metaphor came from real life. From noticing how often the language people use when they are at a decision point is already traffic language. They talk about things feeling like a red flag. About needing to pause. About the sense that they should be moving but can’t quite go.

The language was already there. What was missing was the framework.

Traffic signals work because they are universal and instantly understood. You don’t need to learn them. You internalized them as a child. Red means stop. Yellow means proceed with caution. Green means go. The framework translates that universal language into the territory of leadership transitions. The moments when you have to figure out whether to halt your current trajectory, pause for reflection and recalibration, or move forward with confidence.

Three signals. Infinite intersections. The same need at every one, to read what’s actually showing, and honor it.

What The Book Is And Isn’t

The GreenLight Factor is not a book about how to make faster decisions. It’s a book about how to make wiser ones, and those two things are not the same. Some of the most important moves in the book involve slowing down, pausing deliberately, and sitting with uncertainty long enough to understand what it’s actually telling you.

It’s not a book about career optimization in the conventional sense. The people in the book’s pages are not chasing maximum achievement. They are navigating toward lives that are genuinely theirs, aligned with their values, suited to their actual wiring, chosen from the part of them that knows what they need rather than the part that knows what looks impressive.

And it’s not a book about having all the answers. It’s a book about developing the capacity to sit with the questions long enough to find the ones that matter, and to trust what you find when you do.

Who It’s For

• It’s for the person who has everything they are supposed to want, yet can’t figure out why it doesn’t feel like enough.
• The person who is standing at an intersection they can’t name, feeling a signal they don’t have language for. The person who keeps almost moving and doesn’t know why they are still parked.
• It’s for the person watching someone they care about make a decision that doesn’t look right from the outside, and not knowing how to say so in a way that lands.
• It’s for anyone who has learned to lead forward and is still figuring out how to lead wisely.

That’s the problem I kept watching people get wrong. And this book is my best attempt at the framework that helps.

The traffic light doesn’t create the intersection. It just helps you navigate it safely. You’re already at an intersection. The question is whether you’re reading the signal.

The Greenlight Factor: Leading Through Transition is coming soon. Follow along here for more on the framework, the stories behind it, and the intersections that define how we lead our lives.

Cheers!