the next-chapter circle · six weeks
You know this chapter is ending. You haven’t chosen the next one.
A next chapter is a decision. Most people treat it like weather.
Six weeks, a circle of at most ten, working on one question each of you brought: what comes next, chosen on purpose. Remote, live, around a table in the honest sense.
You’ve been here a while.
The résumé gets opened and closed. The recruiter messages sit marked unread, because answering them means knowing what you’d say yes to, and you don’t. Sunday night arrives with the same low hum it brought last month. In the car, alone, you’ve asked the question out loud once or twice: what do I actually want to do now? And then the garage door opens and the question goes back in its box.
It isn’t that you lack options. People like you are offered options constantly. It’s that no one ever taught you how to decide a life. You were taught to plan a career; plans assume the road ahead is known. Yours, right now, isn’t.
The problem isn’t effort. It’s the method.
You’ve been treating the next chapter as something that will happen to you once enough thinking accumulates. It won’t. Direction doesn’t arrive by accumulation; it gets designed, the way designers work: gather real data about what actually gives you energy, sketch more than one future, test the promising ones small and cheap before you commit big.
That approach has a name and a lineage. This circle is built on Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, the methodology taught in the Stanford course of the same name. I’ve used its mechanics in my own life and put them to work with others; they hold.
The honest math, before you read on: the usual alternative is another year in a chapter that has already ended. You know what that year costs you. This isn’t a scare tactic; it’s the math most people never do.
What becomes possible.
A chosen direction, not a drifted one. A working answer to what good means for you, in your words, on paper. Three sketched futures instead of one imagined cliff. Small, low-risk ways to test the next chapter before you leap into it. And the thing under all of it: the conviction to act, because you did the deciding yourself and can say why.
What this is.
Six weekly sessions of two hours, live on Zoom and Miro, in a circle of at most ten people. Small on purpose: everyone works on their own life, out loud, every week. I’m not at the front of the room presenting; I’m at the table with you, asking questions and working the tools alongside you.
- 1Where your energy actually goes. Two weeks of real data about your working life, not your assumptions about it.
- 2What good means to you. Your view of work and your view of life, written and reconciled.
- 3Three futures, sketched. The one you’re on, the one if that vanished, the one if money and image were quiet.
- 4The futures, interrogated. Which questions each future has to answer before it deserves you.
- 5Testing before leaping. Conversations designed to try a future on, with people already living it.
- 6The decision, spoken. Your next chapter named to the circle, with the first step owned and dated.
You’ll need your own copy of Designing Your Life (any edition, any bookstore). That and two hours a week of honesty are the materials.
The plan at 15.
I had my whole life planned out when I was 15. A thirty-five year route to a musician’s life. The auditions said no. A walk across campus into a design classroom said something else, and fifteen years at Apple, Wealthfront, Meta, and OKX followed, none of which appeared anywhere in the plan. I don’t distrust plans because they failed me; I distrust them because something better was findable the moment I stopped planning and started wayfinding. That’s the working method of this circle.
What’s included.
- Six live sessions, two hours each, in a circle capped at ten
- One private conversation with me, mid-circle, on your specific situation. Included, not sold
- Between-session prompts so the week’s work meets you where the week actually happens
- Your next-chapter plan, in your own words, with a first step you’ve dated. You write it; that’s the point
$1,250 per person, 10 people maximum. Payment reserves the seat; card or bank transfer. A separate rate exists for church and nonprofit staff; ask.
The next circle is being scheduled: evenings, Pacific time.
If this is your season.
This is for the person who already knows the chapter is ending; the circle doesn’t talk anyone into leaving anything. The readiness signal is simple: you’ve noticed that another six months of the same thinking will produce the same not-deciding.
Write to me at eugene@alngsd.com and tell me, in a few lines, what chapter is ending. I read every note personally; there is no automated sequence behind that address. If the circle isn’t the right room for what you’re carrying, I’ll say so and point you somewhere honest.
Ten seats. When they’re taken, the circle is full.