Know Your North Star

Someone asked me recently, "what does it matter whether we all agree on a north star? We've changed our mission and vision so many times," they went on, "and my work is the same."

There's a moment that arrives in every leader's life — usually uninvited, often in the middle of something urgent — when the question lands: Why am I doing this?

Not the polished answer you give in interviews. Not the mission statement on the wall. The real one. The answer that lives somewhere beneath strategy decks and quarterly planning and the endless cascade of decisions that fill your days.

I've watched organizations transform and, occasionally, tear themselves apart. I've seen talented people burn out chasing goals that were never really theirs. And through all of it, I've noticed a pattern: the leaders who endure — the ones who build things that last and stay whole while doing it — tend to be the ones who know their North Star.

The Thread That Doesn't Break

For me, the answer has been the same since before I knew to name it: helping people bring their ideas to life.

That's it. That's the thread that runs through twenty-odd years of work — through startups that didn't make it and ones that did, through open source communities and large engineering organizations. It's why developer experience matters so much to me. It's why I'll spend an hour helping a junior engineer untangle a problem that could probably wait. It's why the React Foundation exists.

The strange thing about a North Star is that you don't choose it. You discover it. Usually by looking backward at the moments that mattered most — the work that didn't feel like work, the decisions that felt inevitable even when they were hard, the hills you kept climbing back up no matter how many times you slid down.

Your North Star is already there. It's been guiding you all along. The only question is whether you've stopped long enough to see it.

When Everything Collides

Leadership is collision management. Timelines crash into quality. Ambition crashes into capacity. What the market wants crashes into what your team can build. Every day brings choices between imperfect options, and most of the time there's no obviously right answer — just trade-offs, consequences, and the weight of knowing that people's livelihoods depend on what you decide.

This is where a North Star earns its keep.

When I'm caught between competing priorities, I ask one question: Which path helps more people do their best work and bring their ideas to life?

The answer isn't always the easy path. Often it's the opposite. But it cuts through the noise. It gives me something to stand on when the ground is shifting. And over time, it builds something that matters more than any single decision: trust.

People can feel when your choices come from conviction. They can tell when you're optimizing for something real versus playing politics or chasing metrics. That consistency — more than charisma, more than strategy — is what earns the kind of trust that holds teams together when things get hard.

The Speed of Now

This industry moves at a pace that borders on absurd. Frameworks rise and fall. Companies reorganize quarterly. The technology that was cutting-edge eighteen months ago is now a legacy migration project. If you try to orient yourself by external landmarks, you'll spend your whole career dizzy.

A North Star doesn't slow anything down. It steadies you inside the motion.

When a new opportunity appears — a role, a project, a pivot — I run it through a simple filter: Does this help me help others build? If the answer is no, it's not my path, no matter how impressive it looks on paper. If the answer is yes, I'm in. Fully. Even if the path is unclear.

This isn't about being rigid. Tactics change. Strategies evolve. The specific shape of the work has varied enormously across my career. But the direction? The direction stays true. And that consistency creates a kind of compound interest — relationships deepen, reputation clarifies, opportunities align with who you actually are rather than who you're pretending to be.

Leading with a Fixed Point

Here's what I've learned about leading people: it's simultaneously simpler and harder than anyone tells you.

Simpler because what people want from leaders isn't complicated. They want to know what you stand for. They want to understand the logic beneath your decisions. They want to trust that when things get hard, you won't abandon the principles you claimed to hold.

Harder because actually doing that — being consistent when consistency is costly, being transparent when opacity would be easier, being human when professionalism would let you hide — requires something more than skill. It requires knowing who you are.

A North Star makes you legible. When your team understands what guides you, they stop spending energy trying to predict your reactions. They stop hedging and start building. They bring you problems earlier because they trust how you'll respond. That's when the magic happens — when the team relaxes into focus, when individual brilliance starts compounding, when you stop being a manager and start being a multiplier.

Finding Yours

Your North Star won't emerge from a strategic planning session. It won't come from asking yourself what you should care about, or what would look good on a leadership bio, or what the market currently values.

It's already there. It's the thing that keeps showing up in your life, whether you've named it or not.

Pay attention to what energizes you on the days when everything else is draining. Notice the work that feels like alignment rather than effort. Remember the moments — maybe from years ago — that still feel important, even if you can't fully explain why.

The North Star isn't something you invent. It's something you recognize.

The Work Ahead

Twenty-some years in, the thread hasn't changed: helping people bring their ideas to life. It shows up in how I think about tooling, documentation, the thousand small frictions that separate "possible" from "actually built." It shows up in conversations with founders who have more ambition than resources, and with engineers who are just starting to see what they're capable of.

That's my North Star. I didn't choose it so much as finally recognize it.

If you haven't found yours yet, look backward. It's probably been there the whole time.

Not because naming it makes the work easier — it doesn't. But because it makes the work yours. And that's the only way any of this is sustainable.