The application was ready.
Claire had written it the night before, read it twice this morning, and changed one word.
She knew it was good.
Still, Claire did not hit send.
She pushed back in the chair and reached for her coffee.
It had gone cold twenty minutes ago.
The clock on her laptop said 7:14.
Claire snapped her attention to the laptop. There was a spreadsheet open in a second window.
She glanced at the data:
One hundred ninety applications.
Eleven callbacks.
Five first-round interviews.
Two second rounds.
Zero offers.
Oof. There it is. The data doesn’t lie.
Claire Mattson isn’t real.
Her spreadsheet is.
* * *
Two decades in this work. I built and sold two search firms. I started Career Attraction in 2008. There, I was privy to conversation with more than 17,000 accomplished professionals working out what comes next.
The people we served were as different as they were the same. CXOs, SVPs and GMs. Twenty-plus years behind them. A title gone. A search producing numbers like Claire’s. Organized. Decisive. Precise. And stuck.
The work worked. The frameworks, exercises and training delivered. People landed roles they wanted and built businesses they owned. A decade and a half of results.
But the moments doing the heaviest lifting never lived in a module. They happened in conversation.
A former client called years after we worked together. He didn’t want interview prep. He didn’t want help with his compensation negotiation . He wanted a thought partner for a question he hadn’t said out loud. We spent the call getting curious about what he wanted to create next. Near the end he said, “I like how you think.”
No title. No program. A conversation.
Every turning point I’ve witnessed in this work looked like some version of the same thing. Two people at a table. One of them getting curious out loud, until the true thing surfaced.
A story is the closest form to a conversation. It doesn’t lecture and it doesn’t ask to be evaluated. You watch someone else at the table, and somewhere in the second conversation you stop watching her and start watching yourself. The Go-Giver did this to me as a reader. I bought copies for my team over the years. I handed it to clients. One idea in the pocket of a story. Read in an afternoon. Remembered for years.
A parable also gives me license the real stories never allowed. The most impactful moments of this work belong to real people. Telling them straight means asking a former client to approve a chapter they closed, and pins their name to a moment they would rather keep in the rear view. I’m not sharing testimonials in hopes of making a sale. I’m sharing stories to support a reader’s transformation. Fiction protects the person and keeps the truth.
And I am writing more fiction these days. The scenes help me build that muscle.
The vocabulary that’s become vernacular pushed me too.
Pivot. Reinvention. Career transition.
Borrowed words, on loan from the system doing the choosing. They make the move sound like a product relaunch with you at the center. Nobody at Cal’s table uses them. The words there are smaller and heavier. Create. Aligned. Mine.
So I started writing scenes.
* * *
Cal Reeves works out of his house in St. Petersburg, on a canal off the bay.
No office. No wall of credentials. No desk positioned for authority. A lanai on the water, a round table, a short stack of books, a coffee pot and two mugs. People park in the driveway and follow the path around the right side of the house.
They often arrive with a resume in the bag. Two copies. Printed.
Cal never asks for them.
He asks other questions. At first, they first sound simple. The answers take weeks.
People find his table by referral, and the referrer is always the same kind of person. The colleague who left without a goodbye party or a LinkedIn post. The one who went quiet. The one who now, when asked what she does, pauses and says, “Something that’s mine.”
You probably know someone like this. Someone who came out the other side of a separation package in a better place they they’ve ever been before.
That’s what happens at Cal’s table on the lanai. They work to support true transformation.
Each piece stands alone. A client arrives with a specific problem. The package running out. A board seat pitched as a favor. The phone going quiet after decades of ringing. Over coffee, the problem underneath comes into the open.
The clients are fictional. Composites. The conversations aren’t invented. They come from twenty years of real ones, names and details changed, the substance kept.
* * *
The Problem Seeker is my first book. A business parable. Publishing October 2026.
It opens with the scene you read at the top, then follows Claire through seven conversations over nine weeks on Cal’s lanai. She arrives with a legal pad of prepared questions and the posture of someone ready to argue. She leaves with something else.
I ‘m not going to tell you what happens in those conversations. Those belong to the book.
I will tell you what the book is not. Not a resume method. Not networking scripts. Not a program with modules. Claire’s search was disciplined and produced zero offers, and the reason has nothing to do with her age, her tenure, or her gap.
The question underneath is one you might recognize. After twenty-plus years of being chosen for roles and handed architecture someone else drew, what do you create now.
The book holds Claire at her fork. It doesn’t shove her through a door. What she builds is hers.
One pattern I will give away, because the opening pages show it anyway. Nobody finds Cal through marketing. Every client arrives the way Claire does. Referred by someone who sat at the table first. The shape is the point.
The last scene belongs to a Tuesday morning in March, six months on, and a LinkedIn message Claire almost misses.
I wrote the whole book to earn those two pages.
* * *
I’ve written under a few banners. Career Attraction. The Quietly Ambitious. Creating What’s Next.
This publication now runs under my own name because the work kept outgrowing the labels. Stories about second acts. The Cal Reeves Series is the spine, and The Problem Seeker is where it goes deeper.
Some version of Claire’s morning has arrived for you or sits out ahead. Someone asks what you do now. You reach for the old answer. Then you stop.
The scenes are for the person in the pause.
Between now and October: new Cal Reeves scenes, free excerpts from the book, and my Saturday email rounding everything up. One email a week.
Subscribe free and you get all of it.
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