Terminal
A role can be a destination, a transit, or an airport you forgot to leave.
Most of us have seen The Terminal at some point. Tom Hanks lands in New York, his country collapses while he is in transit, his passport stops working, and he ends up living for years inside the international zone of JFK. What was meant to be a layover becomes a life.
Watching the film with a few more years of corporate experience changes what you see. He is making the terminal habitable in ways that should not feel as natural as they do, and by the time he realises what has happened, too much of his life has unfolded inside a space that was never meant to be permanent.
I have seen versions of this play out in careers many times.
The transit role that became permanent
A specific kind of career move slips past most professionals without being properly examined. You accept a role that you frame in your own mind as temporary. Something to bridge the gap, build a skill, reposition yourself before the real move. You give yourself one year, two at most, and you treat it as a strategic decision rather than a destination.
The framing is intelligent. What often happens next is that you stop holding yourself to it. The work absorbs you, the relationships build, and by the time you look up, two years have stretched into something else entirely.
The shift is visible in the language you use about your own role, often before you notice it consciously. You stop saying “when I leave this position” and start saying “next year, when I get promoted.” You stop describing yourself as someone who is passing through and start describing yourself by the title you currently hold. You stop tracking what you came here to learn and start tracking the next bonus cycle. None of these shifts feel like a decision. They feel like growing up, settling in, becoming professional. But each one is a brick in a wall you did not plan to build.
How I managed my layovers
I had several transit roles in my corporate career and I never let one stretch beyond what I had planned. The discipline was straightforward: I treated the framing seriously from the first week. When I joined a position thinking I would stay up to three years max, I tracked it the way you track a project with a delivery date. I tracked what I needed to extract from the role and what would tell me the time was up.
The pull to let that framing slide is real once you are inside the job. Every part of the environment quietly encourages you to stay, and maintaining the original clarity requires returning to it deliberately.
The last corporate role I held was the only one I would have stayed in longer because I genuinely loved it. Even then, I knew the only move that would pull me out was launching my own business. That kind of clarity is something you maintain, not something you receive.
How to know if you have built a life in the terminal
☐ I joined this role thinking it would be temporary, and I have been here longer than I planned
☐ I cannot articulate what I am still extracting from this position that I was not extracting two years ago
☐ The reasons I give myself for staying have shifted over time without me consciously updating my career strategy
☐ I would struggle to explain to someone external what specifically is happening between now and my next move
☐ My day to day feels comfortable in a way that might be something other than stability
0 to 1: You are in the right place for the right reasons. 2 to 3: You are starting to settle into a role that was meant to be transit. Worth examining whether the original plan still holds. 4 to 5: The terminal has become home. The question is whether that was a conscious choice or one you allowed by default.
The work behind work
A role becomes permanent in the absence of any active decision to leave. The day to day continues, the routines hold, and the strategic reason you took the position fades into the background. By the time you remember, the original plan exists only in the version of you who first took the job.
Tom Hanks gets out of the terminal at the end of the film because the story requires it. In a career, nothing forces the equivalent moment. You have to make it happen yourself.
The work behind work is enforcing the deadlines you set for yourself before the role enforces them for you.
This is the work behind work.
Kenza
One test down. 21 more in the Playbook. See where you stand.