The Difference Between Wanting More and Running From Something

Kevin applied for every general manager opening in our district for a year and a half. I counted five. He was my assistant manager, he was good, and every time a store came open he'd catch me in the back office with the posting printed out and ask if I'd put in a word.

I did, every time. I meant it, too. He could run a store.

On the fourth one, the district manager asked me to sit in on his interview. Somewhere in the middle she asked him what he'd do in his first ninety days. He talked for about four minutes. He talked about the schedule at our store, and about a shift lead he couldn't stand, and about how tired he was of covering for the morning crew. He never said one thing about the store he was applying to run.

He didn't get it. Walking out to the lot afterward, I realized I'd heard the same answer four times before and never noticed what was missing from it.

Wanting more and wanting out can fill in the exact same application. The form doesn't ask which one you're carrying. Healthy ambition faces forward, toward something it wants to build. The other kind is facing backward, even while it's moving fast.

From the outside you usually can't tell the difference. Pew Research Center surveyed workers who quit a job in 2021 and found that 63% left partly because they saw no opportunities for advancement. Nearly as many, 57%, said they felt disrespected at work. Those are separate boxes on a survey. In real life they often get checked by the same person, and the second one tends to travel under the name of the first. In exit interviews I heard "I'm looking for growth" a lot more often than "I can't stand my shift lead." I don't think people were lying to me. I think the growth line was the one they could say out loud, and some of them had started to believe it.

Two questions at a well

The clearest picture of this I know is a short scene in Genesis 16. Hagar has been treated harshly by Sarai, and she runs. The angel of the LORD finds her "by a fountain of water in the wilderness," on the road toward Shur, and asks her two questions: "whence camest thou? and whither wilt thou go?" (16:8).

She answers the first one right away. "I flee from the face of my mistress Sarai." She never answers the second. She knows exactly what she's leaving. She has no idea where she's going.

I want to be careful with this passage, because the angel sends her back (16:9), and I don't read that as a rule that anyone mistreated at work has to stay and take it. Some jobs you should leave. Some managers shouldn't be managing anyone. Hagar's story is its own story, with promises attached that aren't mine to hand out.

What I do take from it is the order of the questions. God asks where she came from before He asks where she's going. And before she goes anywhere, Hagar names Him: "Thou God seest me" (16:13). The one who's running gets seen before she's figured out her destination. That matters to me, because most people I know who are running feel unseen, which is often why they started running.

Paul gives the forward-facing version in Philippians 3:13–14: "forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark." It's easy to read that as permission to put the past behind you and keep moving. But a few verses earlier, Paul lists his past out loud, including the line "concerning zeal, persecuting the church" (3:6). He named what was behind him before he turned his back on it. He didn't skip that step.

Four questions I ask myself now

These are the questions I wish I'd asked Kevin a year earlier. I've turned them on myself more than I've asked them of anyone else, and they don't always come back clean.

1. Can I describe where I'm going without describing what I'm leaving?

This was Kevin's interview. Try it with whatever you want next. Explain what you'd build there, who you'd serve, what the work would actually be, without mentioning a single thing you're glad to be rid of.

If you can only describe it as the absence of your current problem, you aren't looking at a destination yet. You're looking at an exit.

2. Would I still want it if the thing I'm escaping fixed itself tomorrow?

Say the shift lead transferred. Say the difficult boss retired. Say the schedule finally worked. Do you still want the bigger job?

I've watched people get the answer to this question without asking it. A district manager left, and three applications on my desk quietly disappeared. Nobody withdrew anything in writing. They just stopped asking about it. The ambition had been real, but it had been pointed at a person, not a calling.

3. Which feeling is underneath this: fear, boredom, or shame?

Each one runs differently, so it's worth knowing which one you've got.

Fear usually sounds like falling behind: everyone your age is further along, and if you don't move now you never will. Boredom is trickier, because sometimes it's the honest signal that you've outgrown a role and sometimes it's resistance to the slow, unglamorous faithfulness a season is asking of you. Shame is the one that hides best. It wants a fresh start somewhere nobody knows what happened.

Kevin's was shame. It took me most of a year to find that out. Two years before I'd met him, he'd run a store inventory that came up badly short on his watch. Nobody accused him of anything. Everybody knew about it anyway. Every GM posting looked to him like a building where nobody had heard.

4. What am I going to have to bring with me?

Jonah "rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD" (Jonah 1:3), and the storm got on the ship with him. Whatever you're running from has a habit of packing itself in your luggage. A new title doesn't settle an old inventory audit. A new boss doesn't fix the way you take correction.

So before you go, ask what's coming along. Some of it is good: skill, experience, the people who'll still pick up when you call. Some of it you'd rather leave behind and can't. Better to know that before you move than to find it unpacked in your new office.

What happened with Kevin

After that fourth interview, I asked him the second question, roughly. Would he still want out if the morning crew straightened up? He didn't answer it that day. A couple of weeks later he told me about the audit.

He stayed another fourteen months. He was not always pleasant about it. We had one argument in the walk-in that I'm still not proud of. But he stopped printing out postings, and he started fixing what he'd been complaining about instead of describing it to me.

The next time he applied, he talked about the store he wanted. He'd driven by it twice and eaten there on his day off. He knew which of their crew had been there longest. He got that one. His first six months were hard, and he called me more than once to say so. The difference was that he was calling about his crew, not about getting away from mine.

Turning it around

I've had my own Kevin seasons. There was a stretch when I badly wanted out of restaurants and into full-time ministry, and I told myself, and anybody who asked, that it was calling. Some of it was. Some of it was that I was tired of a district manager who called me at eleven at night about drive-thru times. I still can't give you the exact ratio. I'm not sure I'm supposed to be able to.

What I know is that the questions above would have helped me sort it out sooner, and that God was asking both of Hagar's questions the whole time, whether I was answering them or not.

Quick recap

Describe where you're going without describing what you're leaving. Ask whether you'd still want it if the problem behind you fixed itself. Name the feeling underneath, whether fear, boredom, or shame. And count what's coming with you before you go.

Closing

None of this means ambition is suspect, or that every wish to move on is secretly flight. This whole series has argued the opposite. Wanting more is allowed, and refusing to want anything isn't the humble option. But ambition is a direction before it's a feeling, and the same restlessness can point either way.

That's what The Habit of Thinking Big is built around. It isn't a book about wanting less. It's about learning to want on purpose: knowing what your ambition is facing, and building the habits that keep it pointed there after the restlessness wears off.

Hagar never answered the second question at the well. Most of us haven't either. So here it is, the way it was asked of her.

Where did you come from, and where are you going?

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