The Exit I Didn’t Plan For
The pace becomes the identity before you notice its happening
The pandemic didn't end baseball for me. It just slowed everything down long enough that I could see what was already happening.
Before that, there was no breathing room. None. Front office life runs on an invisible urgency that never fully announces itself yet is always present. There's always another trade deadline, another scouting window, another series starting in two days that changes what you need. You don't feel the weight of it. You just move. And moving feels like living.
I've been in a version of that trap for the last few months. Head down, grinding. Building something that started as focused work and quietly became everything. I noticed it happening and let it happen anyway. If I'm being honest, I'm not sure I could have stopped it if I wanted to.
I've learned about myself in the process: while I don't always love how it feels--running at a frenetic pace all day most days-- I'm not ashamed of it. I'm building something, and building things demand real time. That's just the math. But it does remind me of something I think about often: the most powerful force shaping how you spend your time isn't your priorities list. It's the people around you.
In professional sports, you feel this in ways that are hard to describe from the outside.
If you're around guys who treat every late flight, every bad loss, every organizational leak like it's an existential crisis, you start living at that frequency. Not because you're weak. Because humans are built for social calibration. You read the room and your nervous system adjusts. That's not a personality flaw. It's wiring.
The flip side is just as true. Spend enough time around people who treat urgency as optional, and you'll find yourself softening thresholds you meant to hold. Not dramatically. Gradually. The way temperature shifts without you noticing until you realize you're cold.
The environment sets the baseline. Your choices operate within it.
This is what I realized when the pandemic forced the slowdown.
I wasn't necessarily failing at balance. I was in an environment that made imbalance the default state and had been for so long that I'd stopped feeling it as a cost. It just felt like the job. And the job felt like me.
The question that followed me out of baseball wasn't whether I could work hard. I knew I could. The question was: who do I want to be calibrated by?
That question was worth me sitting with for a while. Still is. Most people never ask it directly. They evaluate their habits, their systems, their morning routines. They don't look at the room they're standing in and ask whether the room is moving them toward the person they're trying to be, or away from them.
The irony is that this is one of the few things you actually control. There's a ton out of your control, but we choose our environment way more than you realize. The meetings you take, the people you keep close, the slack you allow in your own standards. These aren't neutral. They're all calibration inputs. They're all shaping what you treat as normal.
I keep grinding right now because the math on the trade makes sense to me. But I know the risk. When the pace becomes the identity and slowing down starts to feel like weakness. I've seen what happens when the environment wins.
The pandemic gave me a forced exit from that loop. Most people don't get one. And the few who do usually let the clarity fade before they act on it.
You don't have to wait for a forced exit. But you do have to be honest about what your environment is doing to you. Not what you tell yourself it's doing. What it's actually doing.
You're not just a product of your environment. You are someone's environment right now. Your team isn't just watching what you decide. They're calibrating off how you move, how you handle pressure, what you let slide without comment. Every standard you quietly drop is a data point. Every time you treat a fire drill like a fire drill, someone on your team updates their baseline. You don't have to say a word. The room is always reading.
Look at who you've spent the most time around in the last 90 days. Look at how you're moving. Look at what's gotten easier to let slide. Look at what you're becoming.