I've written about this shack before. I built it in the woods as a teenager from leftover construction scraps, things I found, and whatever I could get my hands on. Looking at it now, there is something almost too fitting about it. A lot of my childhood worked the same way:

Take what is available. Figure it out. Make it work.

At the time, I thought I was building somewhere to escape. Looking back, I got pretty good at building walls. Around my mind. Around my heart. Some of them lasted a lot longer than the shack did. But when I found these old pictures again, that wasn't what caught my attention.

I barely noticed them when I took the photo more than twenty years ago. Now they're almost all I see. Some are still whole. Others are rusted metal skeletons surrounding the fire pit where I spent more cold nights than I can remember. We used to burn tires. And for the record, tires burn incredibly well. And that's also the problem.

They catch fast. Burn hot. Throw off a ridiculous amount of heat. And once one really gets going, you're probably not winning that argument. You wait. Black smoke rises. Soot lands on everything nearby. Including you.

Great fuel. Terrible fire. Also, terrible for marshmallows.

I think people do this too. There are certain things that make excellent fuel for a life:

I've burned most of them. You probably have too. The annoying part is that they work.

Achievement is like that delicious JP-8 jet fuel that use to drench my uniform back on the flight line. Give me a deadline and tell me something can’t be done and suddenly I have enough energy to reorganize an entire organization before lunch.

Urgency works. Being needed really works. There is an oddly satisfying feeling in knowing someone is counting on you. Until being needed stops feeling like a compliment and starts feeling like a requirement for knowing who you are.

Winning works too. Right up until you have to keep winning to feel like yourself. And none of these things are bad. That's important. Ambition isn't bad. Service isn't bad. Duty isn't bad. Achievement isn't bad. Comparison isn’t bad. (Last week I wrote about comparison - see below).

I think the problem is simpler:

I've spent most of my adult life inside institutions built around service where duty matters, responsibility matters and doing difficult things because other people depend on you matters. But sometimes the organization doesn't hold up its end.

Sometimes a leader doesn't. Sometimes the thing you believed you were serving turns out to operate very differently from the thing you thought you joined. And for people who organize a lot of their identity around service, that can do something strange to you.

There is language for some of it: moral injury. (I'll write more about that another time.)

What interests me here is what often happens next. High-performing, always-on people rarely respond to betrayal by doing less. We usually do more. Work harder. Collect more evidence. Make the better argument. Become even more useful. Try to fix the system.

Basically, build a giant signal fire in broad daylight and accidentally burn down half the island. (Lord of the Flies, anyone?)

Now, sometimes they do. More often, everyone just stands a little farther back and warms their hands. That's the part I missed for a long time.

Fire does not care why you started it. (Cue Billy Joel insisting he didn’t.)

It only cares what you keep feeding it. And eventually, it starts consuming things you never intended to burn. Your health. Your relationships. Your family. Your team. People who had absolutely nothing to do with whatever hurt you in the first place. Sometimes even the thing you thought you were protecting.

There is a flame in the center of the Wayward Purpose logo. I like it because fire isn't static. It moves. It responds. Sometimes it roars. Sometimes it barely hangs on. But every fire need tending. That idea has become increasingly important to how I think about this work. And strangely enough, four ideas people have been talking about for a few thousand years provide a pretty good starting point. Not as rules, but as four questions I ask:

Here is an infographic NotebookLM helped me create to visualize it even more:

I now look at those old rims differently. The tires did exactly what tires do. They burned: hot, bright, messy. Then they were gone. Only the skeletons remained, and I know I have got a few of those lying around my life too.

Decisions made without enough prudence. Endurance I mistook for fortitude. Times I knew something was enough and kept going anyway. Moments when my sense of justice became so focused on what had happened to me that I stopped paying attention to what my reaction was doing to the people around me.

I've broadcast pain and called it vulnerability. I've handed people pieces of grief they never volunteered to carry. I've wanted someone to understand what hurt so badly that I didn't always stop to ask:

That's not especially comfortable to admit. But it has become important for me to admit it. Because the person tending an unhealthy fire is rarely the only person breathing that sometimes toxic smoke.

I've seen that in organizations too. Pain becomes anger. Anger becomes urgency. Urgency becomes certainty. Certainty becomes righteousness.
And when the person carrying it is talented, respected, powerful, or simply loud enough, everyone around them starts breathing something they didn't create.

Sometimes we call that passion.
Sometimes leadership.
Sometimes vulnerability.
Sometimes authenticity.
Names don't change the air quality.

This is one reason I keep coming back to those four virtues. And not because they make someone good, or because they prevent mistakes. Trust me, I’ve failed that experiment plenty of times.

But, because they are useful and they create a pause between having fuel and throwing it on the fire. And sometimes that pause is enough. I can't put the rubber back on those rims. I can't unburn what has already burned.

None of us can.

But we can look at what remains and learn something. And maybe some of the old rims become the boundary around a better fire. That's what interests me now. Not whether someone can burn brightly. Most of the people I work with already know how to do that. It's usually why everyone depends on them.

The better question is: What are you burning to keep the fire alive?
And maybe more importantly: What's left standing when it moves on?

I'm not interested in teaching people to care less. Or serve less. Or stop achieving. Or suddenly pretend they don't like winning. I certainly wouldn't be very convincing. This work is more about learning how to tend the fire intentionally, deliberately, and with discipline. With:

Enough prudence to know what deserves your energy.
Enough justice to remember who else is standing nearby.
Enough fortitude to endure what matters and stop enduring what doesn't.
Enough temperance to know when the fire has enough.

A well-tended fire doesn't need to prove how hot it can burn. It gives enough light to see clearly. Enough warmth for people to move closer. And enough space that everyone around it can still breathe. And that's the practice I'm interested in.

Until next time, take care of yourself. And thanks for spending a few minutes here with me.

As this newsletter grows, please feel free to share with anyone you think this might help. And if you'd like the next piece sent your way, join the practice below.

The best HR advice comes from those in the trenches. That’s what this is: real-world HR insights delivered in a newsletter from Hebba Youssef, a Chief People Officer who’s been there. Practical, real strategies with a dash of humor. Because HR shouldn’t be thankless—and you shouldn’t be alone in it.

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