Good intentions are not the same as impact.
That may be the thought I’m carrying into Yom Kippur this year.
Sunday night, the fast begins. And with it comes something harder than renewal.
An accounting.
Not only of the big things, but of the small ones.
The candidate I meant to call and didn’t. The old friend I kept meaning to see. The person I could have helped but was too busy to notice. The conversation I avoided. The thank you I thought but never said.
And then the bigger accounting:
What impact did I actually have?
On my children. My family. My friends. My community. My work. And, in whatever small way, on the world around me.
That question has felt particularly personal this year.
I have written more publicly about antisemitism, about being a refugee and an immigrant, about fear and courage, and about experiences I once might have kept to myself.
More importantly, I have tried to find the courage not to be silent or complacent when something matters. To educate. To explain. To challenge. And sometimes simply to help someone see something they hadn’t seen before.
Did it make a difference?
I hope so.
But I also look around and see how much work is still left to do.
Maybe that is part of the point of Yom Kippur.
The accounting isn’t there to make us feel good about what we did. It is there to make us more intentional about what we do next.
And this year, that word, impact, keeps following me back into my work.
I spent much of my career investing, where we underwrite almost everything. We build sensitivity tables. Study forward curves. Challenge assumptions. Try to understand what will drive an outcome and what could derail it.
Then I moved into talent.
And I became fascinated by a different question:
Who actually creates the impact?
Not who has the right title. Not who has the most impressive résumé. Not even who has done the job before.
What actually changed because this person was there?
How did they change it?
What around them made it possible?
And can they do it again somewhere else?
Those questions were part of why I started writing Leadership, Observed. I wanted to step back, watch, think, and get clearer about who creates impact and why.
But observing is only half of it.
I’ve built, stepped back, rebuilt, coached and been coached. I’ve changed my mind about some things and become much more certain about others.
Now I want to put that thinking into action.
To start not with the job description, but with the impact.
What does the business need?
Who can create it?
How?
And what needs to be true around them for that impact to happen?
That is the work I want Haskil to do next.
And after a year of reflection, perhaps it is time to bring a little more light to the work.
More on that soon.
G’mar chatima tova.