What Would You Still Want to Do If Nobody Was Keeping Score?

Last Updated on October 4, 2026 by Michelle

I asked myself an interesting question recently.

What work would I still want to do if nobody was keeping score?

No promotion.

No title.

No salary increase.

No likes.

No followers.

No applause.

No prestigious invitation.

Nobody telling me I was successful.

What would I still want to spend my time doing?

The answer came surprisingly easily.

I would still work on Be Your Own Role Model.

I would still share.

I would still read about psychology, aging, health, neuroscience, longevity and human behaviour.

I would still think about why some people seem to become more alive as they age while others slowly make their worlds smaller.

I would still explore what makes a good second half of life.

I would still have conversations with women navigating midlife and listen to the questions they are asking themselves.

I would still try to make sense of what I was learning.

And I would still share it.

Even if nobody was keeping score. Because I get value and happiness out of sharing what I have found out and be excited for someone else to benefit exactly like I benefited.

That answer made me think differently about the kind of work I want to do in the second half of my life.

For Most of Our Career, Someone Has Been Keeping Score

I have spent most of my adult life in a corporate career.

And corporate life comes with a very clear scoreboard.

Titles.

Promotions.

Compensation.

Performance reviews.

Responsibilities.

Recognition.

There is always another level.

I recently stepped into a more senior role, and if I am completely honest with myself, a large part of my motivation at work today still comes from achievement.

I want to prove myself at this level.

I want to do the job well.

If I had to put a number on it, perhaps 70% of my current motivation comes from some combination of achievement, proving myself and the fact that this is simply what I am supposed to do.

Maybe 30% comes from genuine enjoyment, curiosity and contribution.

But that 30% is interesting.

Because when I look closely at the work I actually enjoy, there is a pattern.

I still dig deeply into risk issues.

At my level, I don’t necessarily need to.

I could ask more junior people to investigate, receive the conclusion, understand the implications and make the appropriate senior-level decision and be accountable.

But often I want to understand what actually happened.

Why did it happen?

What was the root cause?

Is this really an isolated problem or evidence of something structural?

What would we need to change so that the same problem doesn’t appear again in a different form?

I like going underneath the surface.

I like understanding.

I particularly like connecting dots.

And I like coming up with strategic solutions that could improve what happens in the future.

Nobody is forcing me to dig that deeply. In fact, it often takes up more of my precious time to dig in than if I were to fully delegate that portion.

I do it because that part of the work genuinely interests me.

That made me realise something else.

Maybe We Shouldn’t Divide Work Into Work We Love and Work We Don’t

For a long time, I think I mentally placed my work into two categories.

My corporate career was something I was supposed to do.

BYORM was something I chose to do.

But perhaps that’s too simplistic.

My career has given me far more than an income.

It has taught me how to think logically.

How to solve problems.

How to work with people.

How to make decisions with incomplete information.

How to look for root causes rather than symptoms.

How to think strategically about what happens next.

And when I look at how I approach BYORM, I can see the same mind at work.

I don’t just want to share about aging well.

I want to understand why some people seem excited about their lives at 70 while others don’t.

When I noticed that I occasionally felt bored despite having a life I genuinely liked, I wanted to understand why.

Was I ungrateful?

Did I need more travel?

More hobbies?

More goals?

The more I thought about it, the more I realised I was craving something else.

Anticipation.

Possibility.

A sense that something interesting was still unfolding.

That led me to think about how I want my life to feel at 58.

Then about how I want my world to continue getting bigger as I get older.

Then about how we might intentionally design the second half of our lives.

One question led to another.

I kept digging.

Perhaps the subject changed.

But the person doing the thinking didn’t.

So What Changes in the Second Half?

Maybe the biggest change isn’t necessarily what we do.

Maybe it is why we do it.

In the first half of adulthood, work has a lot of jobs to perform.

It needs to pay us.

It may need to support a family.

It helps us build financial security.

It gives us skills.

It gives us identity.

It can give us status.

It offers progression.

And for many of us, achievement is powerful fuel.

There is nothing wrong with that.

Achievement has been powerful fuel for me.

It has taken me places I probably wouldn’t have reached without it.

But I wonder whether, as we enter the second half of life, the mixture can begin to change.

Perhaps work doesn’t have to stop.

Perhaps proving can gradually become less important.

And other things can become more important.

Curiosity.

Expression.

Contribution.

Connection.

Aliveness.

Curiosity

The first question I would ask myself when thinking about second-half work is:

What could I happily keep learning about for the next 10 or 20 years?

Not:

What am I already an expert in?

That’s a very different question.

At midlife, we have accumulated decades of expertise. It is tempting to assume our second career should simply monetise what we already know.

Sometimes that will be exactly right.

But perhaps our next chapter could also begin with what we don’t know.

What subject makes you keep asking questions?

What do you read about when nobody has assigned you the reading?

What podcast makes you stop halfway through because you want to write something down?

What conversation makes you forget to look at your phone?

What are you curious enough about to be a beginner again?

For me, increasingly, it is the question of how we live well for longer.

I don’t know where that curiosity will take me.

That’s partly why I like it.

Expression

Then I would ask:

How do I naturally enjoy expressing what I know?

Some people love writing.

Some love speaking.

Some teach.

Some mentor.

Some build things.

Some create businesses.

Some advise.

Some bring interesting people together.

Some take complicated ideas and make them understandable.

Some prefer a conversation with one person to a stage with a thousand.

There is no right form.

For me, writing has become one of mine.

This is my 89th blog.

Nobody asked me to write 89 blogs.

There was no promotion waiting for me at Blog 50.

Nobody increased my compensation at Blog 75.

Most of these blogs were written quietly, often on weekends, sometimes while travelling, simply because I had something I wanted to think through.

Writing helps me understand what I think.

And then it allows me to share that thinking with someone else.

Which leads to the third piece.

Contribution

Who might be better off because I did this work?

This matters to me.

I don’t think I would enjoy BYORM nearly as much if it existed purely as a private intellectual exercise.

What makes the work meaningful is knowing that something I learn or articulate might positively influence another person.

Perhaps a woman reads something I’ve written and starts exercising because she begins thinking about the body she wants at 70.

Perhaps someone starts investing because she understands that financial freedom is not just about money. It is about having choices later.

Perhaps someone looks at her marriage differently.

Perhaps someone realises that her life isn’t bad—it has simply become too predictable.

Perhaps she opens a new door.

Perhaps something I write simply makes someone stop for five minutes and ask herself a question she hadn’t considered before.

That is enough to make the work feel worthwhile.

Curiosity. Expression. Contribution.

I’m beginning to think that the intersection of these three things may offer clues to the work we choose in our second half.

What am I genuinely curious about?

How do I enjoy expressing or using what I learn?

How could that be useful to someone else?

Where those three overlap, perhaps there is something worth following.

Not necessarily a new career.

Not necessarily a business.

Certainly not an instruction to resign from your job tomorrow.

Just a thread.

Something worth pulling.

Financial Freedom Changes the Question

I also think we need to be realistic.

“Do what you love” is easy advice to give when somebody else is paying the mortgage.

Work has economic responsibilities.

Children need educating.

Parents may need support.

Retirement needs funding.

Life costs money.

I would never suggest that someone abandon financial security in pursuit of an undefined purpose.

In fact, I believe the opposite.

Financial freedom is what eventually gives us greater freedom to choose the work we want to do.

My corporate career is helping make my future BYORM career possible.

The work I was supposed to do is creating the freedom to eventually do more of the work I choose to do.

There is something beautiful about that.

It means we don’t necessarily have to leap from one life into another.

We can build a bridge.

We can continue earning.

Continue investing.

Continue building financial security.

And at the same time, quietly begin developing another part of ourselves.

Read.

Write.

Study.

Experiment.

Volunteer.

Teach.

Meet people.

Take an action.

Start something small.

Become a beginner.

Follow the thread.

Eventually, perhaps the balance shifts.

Be Careful Not to Build Another Scoreboard

There is one thing I am already watching in myself.

BYORM currently feels incredibly free.

I write because I want to write.

I explore because I want to understand.

I share because I hope it helps.

But I also want BYORM to become a real business.

And businesses come with their own scoreboards.

Revenue.

Followers.

Subscribers.

Conversion.

Downloads.

Speaking invitations.

Podcast appearances.

Growth.

Those things matter.

A business that doesn’t create economic value isn’t much of a business.

But I don’t want the metrics to eventually become the reason I do the work.

I don’t want to escape one performance system only to build myself another.

Maybe that will be one of my challenges in the next decade:

How do I create economic value around work I love without allowing economic value to become the reason I love the work?

I don’t know the answer yet.

But I’m glad I’m asking the question now.

What Would You Still Do?

As we enter the second half of life, perhaps we don’t need to immediately ask:

What is my purpose?

That’s such a big question.

It can make us feel as though there is one perfect answer somewhere and we have somehow failed if we haven’t found it.

Maybe we can begin somewhere smaller.

Ask yourself:

What would I still want to do if nobody was keeping score?

If nobody could promote you for it.

If nobody was impressed.

If you couldn’t put the title on LinkedIn.

If there were no likes.

If there were no applause.

What would you still want to learn?

What would you still want to make?

What conversations would you still want to have?

What problems would you still want to solve?

Who would you still want to help?

And what would you happily spend the next decade becoming better at simply because becoming better at it would make your life more interesting?

You don’t need to know where it leads.

Maybe that’s the point.

Follow the curiosity.

Find the way you like to express it.

See whether it can contribute to somebody else’s life.

And if you discover something you would happily keep doing even when nobody is keeping score, perhaps you’ve found a clue.

Not necessarily to your one grand purpose.

But perhaps to the work that belongs in the next chapter of your life.