I'm navigating my own midlife transition whilst helping others do the same. My newsletter community includes professionals who are questioning whether there's more to work than ticking boxes. We explore practical questions like: What if that Monday morning energy dip isn't inevitable? How do we navigate professional decline with dignity? When is "enough" actually enough? If you're approaching 50 (or already there), feeling professionally restless, or simply curious about creating more intentional work, this is for you. I write for people who understand that meaningful change happens gradually, one decision at a time.
If you can’t do what you long to do, go do something else
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Hello, Last week, I shared the uncomfortable truth about my corporate work: after 20 years, the systems I help build catch only 1% of the problem they’re meant to solve. Some of you might be asking the same question yourself: how do I keep showing up to work when I suspect my expertise isn’t actually making the world better? Here's my answer to you. It isn't about finding more meaning within the systems or pretending the limitations don’t exist. It is about doing something completely different. If you can't do what you long to do, go do something else. In Elizabeth Gilbert's book "Big Magic", she tells the story of a gifted baseball player who lost his nerve and his game fell apart. So he quit baseball and took up soccer for a year. He wasn’t the greatest soccer player, but he liked it, and it didn’t break his spirit when he failed, because his ego knew: “Hey, I never claimed it was my game.” After a year of kicking around a soccer ball for laughs, he went back to baseball, and suddenly he could play again, better and more lightly than ever. What happened when I stopped trying to fix it When I realised my corporate work would never stop the money laundering from the drug trafficking crisis, no matter how sophisticated our systems became, I decided to do something else. So I started writing. Not writing about compliance. Not about regulations or risk management or the systems I navigate daily. I started exploring questions about work, meaning, and midlife transitions. I began building this newsletter. I started working on a book about reconnecting with purpose. None of it was about escaping my day job. It was about creating space to think differently, engage creatively, and contribute to conversations that felt more meaningful. The fascinating thing is that doing something else didn’t make my corporate work feel more meaningless. It made it more bearable. I’d stopped asking my day job to provide all my sense of purpose. I’d stopped expecting the job to feel sufficient. I’d stopped trying to simulate meaning from systems that were fundamentally limited. Instead, I accepted that my corporate work serves something even if it’s not the transformative impact I once imagined. Those regulatory reports I file, those training sessions I conduct, that guidance I provide? They still matter. Just not in the way I needed them to when work was my only source of purpose. Find your own “something else” If you’re reading this and recognising yourself, and if you’re feeling that same pull to explore ideas and build purpose outside your day job, I’ve created something that might help. It’s a 4-week course called “Renew Your Spark,” and it’s designed to help you discover what your “something else” could be. It’s completely free, and it starts where you are, with real constraints, real responsibilities, and real questions about what’s possible. What’s the “something else” you’ve been wanting to try? Hit reply and tell me. I’m genuinely curious what would refresh your energy. Inès P.S. I still show up for my compliance work every day. The bureaucracy hasn’t changed. But I’m no longer trying to find all my purpose there, and that’s made all the difference. |
Inès Yong's Newsletter Archive
I'm navigating my own midlife transition whilst helping others do the same. My newsletter community includes professionals who are questioning whether there's more to work than ticking boxes. We explore practical questions like: What if that Monday morning energy dip isn't inevitable? How do we navigate professional decline with dignity? When is "enough" actually enough? If you're approaching 50 (or already there), feeling professionally restless, or simply curious about creating more intentional work, this is for you. I write for people who understand that meaningful change happens gradually, one decision at a time.
Hello, A 27-year-old bride was shot dead at 4:30 AM on a Sunday morning, just hours after her wedding in Goult, a village in southern France. Her husband critically wounded. A 13-year-old boy fighting for his life. The cause? A drug-related settling of accounts. I live hours away. I don’t know these people. This tragedy is completely unrelated to my life. Yet I can’t stop thinking about it. The uncomfortable conflict The bride was innocent. No criminal record, no connection to drug...
Hello, I’m back in France after four weeks in Malaysia, feeling a bit like I’m operating in slow motion whilst everyone else has already shifted into September gear. It’s strange how returning to your birth country can feel both like coming home and discovering somewhere entirely new—especially when you’re seeing it through your children’s eyes for the first time. Watching them smell durian and wrinkle their noses, then light up over roti canai, reminded me how much of who we are gets passed...
Hello lovely readers, After two decades in compliance, I've collected quite a few stories about how our corporate systems create their special brand of chaos. These aren't fictional tales—they're real experiences that show how well-meaning processes can sometimes defeat their purpose. 15 Anecdotes from the Corporate Theatre 1. The Annual Copy-Paste Ritual Every year, I spend hundreds of hours recreating identical regulatory forms with exact information for approval that never changes. It's...