What would make you feel you had got somewhere?

Being the person people get sent to when it is genuinely hard.Being able to do a version of more or less anything that lands.Something existing that would not exist if you hadn't bothered.Being responsible for something large, with your name on it.

How you feel about a job title:

You have about three, and none of them quite fits.You would like one that means something outside the building.You would rather be judged by the work than by the title.It matters. A title is how your field says you were right.

Pick the thing you would find hardest:

Being moved onto something you are not yet any good at.A year in which nothing you did was your own decision.The same desk, the same people, the same month, repeatedly.Having to do it badly because somebody wants it by Thursday.

Security against freedom, honestly:

Enough of both, which is why you keep changing shape.Security, and then more responsibility, and then more.Security, plainly. A pension is not a moral failing.Freedom about the question. You will live with the salary.

How you want to learn something new:

Over ten years, properly, until you can feel when it is wrong.On the job, with somebody senior watching you do it.On a live project, for a client, at some actual risk.From the literature, thoroughly, arguments included.

What you would want a Monday to look like:

Different from last Monday.Chaotic, urgent, and entirely yours to sort out.Predictable, useful, and finished by six.Your hands, your tools, and nobody else in the room.

Pick the money you would actually choose:

Paid well for being rare rather than for being senior.Enough, for work you find interesting, indefinitely.Lumpy. Excellent one quarter, frightening the next.Modest, reliable, and never once dependent on charm.

How you feel about managing people:

You would hire them, but you would rather they got on with it.It is the actual job, and you happen to be good at it.You would take one apprentice. Not a department.You will supervise, grudgingly, in exchange for the freedom.

The thing you quietly want to be known for:

Knowing one thing further down than almost anybody.A team that carried on working long after you left it.Twenty years of a service that mattered and never made news.Work that outlives the job you originally did it for.

What would actually make you leave a good job?

Boredom. Straightforwardly.Somebody else deciding what the thing was going to be.Working out you could earn the same doing it your own way.Being asked to stop working on the actual question.

Pick a risk you would genuinely take:

Years spent on a niche that might never pay.Starting again in a field where nobody knows your name.Your own money, on your own idea.A job two sizes too big, in front of everybody.

Twenty years in, the thing you would want to be true:

That you never once had to ask permission for a Tuesday.That the thing you looked after is in better shape than you found it.That the work is good, and recognisably yours.That you were right about something before it was accepted.