Michael Easter, the writer behind The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain, likes to quote a small, almost throwaway statistic: only about two percent of people take the stairs when an escalator is available. It is a tiny observation about behavior in airports and shopping malls. It is also, on closer look, a précis of an entire human pattern. When an easier option exists beside a harder one that would actually serve us, almost no one chooses the harder one.
In leadership, the escalator is everywhere. The stairs are the inward adventure most leaders never take.
The Escalator Has a Thousand Forms
The escalator is not lazy. It is intelligent, well-marketed, and, more often than not, sincerely recommended by people you respect. In a leader’s life it tends to look like this:
- The new productivity system that promises to give you back your week.
- The executive coach hired to fix a specific behavior without touching what causes it.
- The off-site, the book summary, the keynote insight, the framework with the memorable acronym.
- The cultural appetite for shortcuts, repackaged as cleverness.
The pattern beneath the variety is the same. Each of these promises change without requiring the leader to actually change. They move the furniture. They do not address who is sitting in the room.
This is the seduction of optimization. It feels productive because it is productive, in a narrow sense. Calendars get tighter. Workflows get cleaner. Meetings get shorter. Meanwhile the leader at the center of it all remains exactly the same person, with the same reactions under pressure, the same blind spots, the same patterns that brought them to whatever moment of overwhelm they are trying to solve. The escalator delivered them, on time and efficiently, to the same floor.
Why the Inward Stairs Are Steeper Than the Literal Ones
Easter’s two percent figure describes physical effort, where the cost is small and the benefit is visible. The inward version of the same choice is harder than the literal one, and the percentage is almost certainly lower. Three things make it so.
First, the terrain is invisible. Stairs have a top floor. You can count them, time them, watch your legs do the work. Inner work has no visible landings. You are working with feelings, somatic responses, default reactions under pressure, the gap between who you say you are and who you become when the quarter is bad. None of that has a step count. None of it advertises progress.
Second, there is no audience. Physical hard things have a finisher’s medal and a crowd at the end. The inward adventure is, by design, mostly unwitnessed. The only person who knows whether you actually did the work is you, and you are usually the last to know. The work pays out in private, in moments no one applauds: the conversation you would have torched a year ago and instead navigated cleanly; the team member whose feedback you actually heard; the Tuesday morning when nothing was on fire and you noticed you were no longer waiting for it to be.
Third, and this is the one most leaders sense and step around, the stairs are made of you. The escalator is not just an easier route. It is a route that lets you avoid the actual content of the climb.
The escalator is not just an easier route. It is a route that lets you avoid the actual content of the climb, which is you.
That is the part that does not show up in any framework or off-site agenda. It is also why the work, when it is done seriously, requires more than a weekend and more than a workbook. It requires a setting in which the avoidance becomes harder than the looking.
The Adventure Hidden Inside the Word “Work”
It would be easy to read all of this as a case for grimness. It is not. The reason most people choose the escalator is not that the harder path is bleak. It is that the rewards of the harder path do not advertise themselves the way the escalator’s do.
The escalator promises efficiency, comfort, and a known outcome. The stairs promise something subtler and, in the end, much larger. Capacity. Presence. The kind of authority that comes from having actually integrated something rather than learned about it. A different relationship to pressure, to people, to your own life. None of that fits on a slide.
The accurate word for this kind of climb is not work. It is adventure. Challenging terrain, unknown outcomes, things you cannot solve from the comfortable seat. The leaders who choose it tend to discover, sometimes to their surprise, that the climb is not punishment. It is the most alive they have felt in years.
The other thing worth naming: the climb gets navigable in company. Done alone, the inward stairs feel infinite, and most people quit somewhere on the third landing. Done alongside a small group of leaders climbing the same stairs at the same time, the climb has shape. There are witnesses for the moments no one else would notice. There is the quiet correction of seeing your own pattern in someone else and recognizing it before they do. The escalator is built for one. The stairs were always meant to be climbed with others.
A Different Floor
The leader you are becoming on the stairs is not a more optimized version of the one who got on the escalator. It is a different person. Someone with a different relationship to their own reactions, to the people in their care, to the question of what their leadership is actually for. The escalator could never have delivered that, because the escalator was never going to that floor.
There is no shortage of escalators. They will continue to be invented, named, sold, and recommended. They are not the enemy. They are simply not the thing that changes you.
The question is not whether you can find an escalator. They are everywhere. The question is whether, on a Tuesday morning no one is watching, you choose the stairs.
Which climb is yours?
Most leaders know something needs to change long before they can name what it is. The Leader Type Assessment takes about three minutes. It names the pattern you are most likely leading from right now — and the one thing worth looking at first.
Ron Hill is the Co-Founder, Guide, and Managing Partner of Conscious Leaders Quest, where he serves as Holistic Integration Mentor. CLQ is a transformational leadership program for leaders ready to integrate mind, body, and business. The next cohort gathers in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Learn more at clquest.com.
Conscious Leaders Quest guides leaders through the inward journey of personal transformation that integrates mind, body, and business so they can become the leaders the world truly needs them to be.
