When someone reaches a capstone position and there really isn’t anywhere up the ladder to go, one can still go from Q2 to Q3 and become doomed in that capstone role.

Often the remedy for this situation is to just go somewhere else in a similar kind of job. That means you leave one organization and go elsewhere and fill virtually the same sort of role.

But there are other things you can do, and here are a couple of examples.

The office manager of a medical practice was on the verge of quitting her job. She was extraordinarily good at what she did, but was obviously frustrated and bored in the job. I had a chance to sit and talk with her about the Doom Loop, and she immediately pointed out that she was in Q3. The solution we arrived at was to have her work only three days per week at the same level of pay. She wasn’t good at doing her job in a lesser amount of time, and this tactic (with which she agreed) was highly successful. She found herself motivated and happy again, and still is in that role doing a marvelous job.

Another individual was the CEO of a large commodity exchange. He had the habit of coming to work very early in the morning (sometimes at 4AM) and by 10:00AM found his work for the day completed. He was frustrated and bored in his job and didn’t know what to do. The solution in this case was to get him on the board of directors of a large beer company that was having problems as well as putting him in an active role as a trustee of a major university. The key here was that he wasn’t good at doing all of these things in the amount of time he had available, so it put him back in the lower part of Q2 and made him very happy. The time compression tactic using the Doom Loop worked.

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