There is a Buddhist teaching that has survived centuries of translation, misquotation, and motivational poster formatting, and still manages to say something true.
If you want to clear muddy water, don't stir it. Put the stick down. The silt, left alone, settles to the bottom. The water clears on its own. No one did anything impressive.
I think about this a lot in my work with founders and senior executives navigating what I'd loosely call the second half of life. Not old age. The phase that arrives when the external markers of success have largely been achieved, and the question that surfaces — unbidden, inconvenient, vaguely embarrassing — is: now what?
The people I work with are not, as a rule, people who put sticks down. They are people who built things. Who ran things. Who made decisions that affected hundreds or thousands of other people's lives, often before 8am. The bias for action isn't just a habit for them. It's an identity.
Which makes the muddy water problem particularly cruel.
When the Wrong Tool Is the Only One You Trust
Every skill that carried a successful person to the top of their field is, in some important sense, a liability when the question becomes existential rather than operational.
You can't outwork a question about meaning. You can't optimize your way to a sense of direction. You can't schedule clarity. And the harder you push, the more the silt swirls, and the longer you spend staring into water that could have cleared itself if you'd just walked away for a while.
This isn't a new observation. Philosophers, theologians, therapists, and at least one Taoist farmer have been making some version of this argument for a long time. What's interesting is how little it seems to penetrate for people whose entire professional lives have rewarded the opposite behavior.
The achiever brain, confronted with uncertainty, does not say: perhaps I should wait and see what emerges. It says: I need more data, a better framework, a consultant, a mastermind group, a 90-day plan.
All of which is stirring.
What Curiosity Actually Is
I want to be careful here, because curiosity has become a self-help word, which means it's in danger of meaning nothing.
I'm not talking about journaling prompts or vision boards or asking yourself what your eight-year-old self would have wanted. I'm talking about something more rigorous and, frankly, more uncomfortable.
Genuine curiosity about your own life means tolerating not-knowing long enough to actually see what's there. It means sitting with a question — what do I want the next chapter to look like? — without immediately converting it into a to-do list. It means noticing what bores you, what lights something up, what you've been avoiding thinking about, without immediately deciding what to do about any of it.
For people trained to convert observation into action as fast as possible, this is genuinely difficult. Not because they lack self-awareness. Because the habit of resolution is so deeply grooved that the gap between noticing something and deciding what to do about it has essentially closed.
Curiosity requires that gap. It lives in that gap.
The Silt Knows Where to Go
Here's what I've observed over two decades and thousands of hours of coaching conversations. The people who arrive at genuine clarity about what they want in the second half of life almost never got there by thinking harder. They got there by paying a different quality of attention. By following what interested them without demanding that it be useful. By letting questions stay open long enough to reveal something.
The change, when it came, often surprised them. Not because it was random, but because it came from somewhere underneath the noise they'd been generating.
The silt, left alone, knows where to go.
The work, if you want to call it that, is learning to put the stick down. To resist the pull toward premature resolution. To let curiosity do what analysis can't.
That's harder than it sounds for someone who's spent thirty years being right about things. It's also, in my experience, the only thing that actually works.
The water clears. It just won't do it while you're watching it that way.
Paul Strobl, MBA, CPC
Owner of Confide Coaching, LLC
Paul Strobl is a Personal Coach for Founders and Executives navigating the space between what they've built and what comes next. Native Texan. Ten years in Argentina. Now based in the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria with his wife, adopted son, and a rescued Posavac Hound.
An Anthropology degree sparked a lifelong fascination with why people do what they do. A Thunderbird MBA and twenty years of private coaching later — he works one-on-one, by phone, with a small number of clients worldwide.
If anything here resonated, this is the logical next step.
The Second Half of Life Audit takes less than ten minutes and tends to surface things worth knowing.