From Private Equity to Mahjong Teacher

“Wait. Show me again.”

Margaret leans across her aunt Diane’s coffee table, Chanel bracelet sliding down her wrist. “Just this part. Because I’m telling you, the second you leave this house, I am going to forget every single one of these rules.”

The three women — Diane, Margaret, and a friend named Lisa — are arranged on the white slipcovered sofa in stocking feet, no makeup, half a bottle of Pinot Noir among them in Riedel glasses too good for the casualness of the afternoon. Outside, Wellesley is doing what Wellesley does in October. Inside, four women are trying to learn mahjong.

“It’s bamboo,” Tina says, holding the tile up between two fingers so the pale green character catches the light. “One bam. There are nine of these — one through nine — four of each. Thirty-six tiles in this suit alone. You don’t have to memorize them. You just have to start seeing them.”

“Honey,” Margaret says, “I can barely remember my Wi-Fi password. And you want me to start seeing tiles?”

“You’ll see them.”

“I’m fifty-eight, Tina.”

“Diane is sixty-two.”

“Diane was always smarter than me.”

Diane laughs without looking up. She is sorting her tiles into a careful rack — the kind of organization Tina has watched her aunt apply to dinner parties, charity boards, and her younger sister’s life when no one else would. “I just don’t drink as much during instruction.”

Tina watches from the head of the table, where she has been quietly setting up the wall. Golden Goose sneakers, sweatshirt she has owned since college, hair pulled back the way she always wears it when she is not at work. The room smells faintly of perfume and the rosemary chicken Diane is keeping warm for after the lesson.

This is the third time she has come to teach.

The first time, two months ago, she thought she was here because Diane had asked her — come show the girls how to play, they’re curious, we’ll feed you — and because Tina had said yes the way you say yes to your favorite aunt. She’d brought her best instruction set. She’d planned out the lesson.

She is not entirely sure that’s why she’s here anymore.

“All right,” Margaret says, holding up the bamboo tile and squinting at it like it is a foreign menu. “Walk me through it again. Slowly. Because I want to understand this — but mostly I want to understand it with my friends.”

Tina has been telling me about these afternoons for several months.

She started teaching her aunt’s circle while she still had the job — the one she eventually left, the one with the brand name on the résumé and the leadership that kept reorganizing the floor underneath her. Mahjong was a weekend thing. Then a Sunday afternoon thing. Then a thing she was driving out to Diane’s for with the instruction set in a tote bag, Pinot Noir uncorked by the time the wall was built.

By the time she gave notice, she had not decided what came next. She is keeping one foot in the job-search world — the LinkedIn updates, the recruiter calls, the quiet conversations with people who know people in branding — and one foot in a different kind of search-world. A mahjong website. A working name. The question of whether to list herself as “instructor” or “teacher” or something else. The small early decisions of someone who is building something on her own terms but is not yet calling it that.

She has not decided whether mahjong is a side hustle, a venture, or a way of waiting out her next corporate role. The not-knowing is part of the work.

What I know — and what she is beginning to know — is that the corporate environment was not just frustrating. It was misaligned. Tina is a high-functioning person with exceptional abilities in brand and marketing. She is also someone whose excellence depends on conditions: clear hierarchy, coherent structure, real interpersonal relatedness, the kind of support that makes a person feel held rather than scrutinized. In a workplace that offered none of these, she performed at extraordinary cost. What looked from the outside like someone barely coping was something else — a person trying to harness her own gifts inside a system that gave her nothing to push against and no one to push with.

She is not a generalist who blooms anywhere. She is the kind of person who blooms biggest when she is creating the room she is working in.

That is the dark horse insight at the center of this.

Todd Rose, the educational scientist whose earlier book The End of Average critiqued how modern institutions flatten human variability into a fictional norm, co-founded with neuroscientist Ogi Ogas what they called the Dark Horse Project at Harvard’s Laboratory for the Science of Individuality. Over more than a decade they conducted in-depth interviews with hundreds of high achievers in fields where the conventional path had never existed or had been abandoned — opera singers, sommeliers, dog trainers, hairstylists, embalmers, astronomers, midwives. People no one had seen coming.

What Rose and Ogas found ran counter to most achievement research. The dark horses had not succeeded by adapting themselves to standardized systems. They had succeeded by refusing what Rose calls the standardization covenant — the implicit social contract most of us inherited without ever signing: follow the straight path, hit the prescribed marks, and in exchange society will deliver employment, status, and security. The dark horses had broken that covenant, often without naming it. Each had located what Rose calls their micro-motives — not generic preferences but the granular specifics of what actually energized them. From those motives they had made decisions on their own terms, ignored the destination someone else had set for them, and pursued fulfillment as the engine rather than the reward. The achievement that followed was something they could not have produced inside the standardized path.

Fulfillment leads. Achievement follows. That is the inversion at the heart of the work.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi arrived at the same finding from a different angle. Studying what happens inside people fully absorbed in what they are doing, he named the state flow: the experience that arises when challenge meets capacity, when an activity asks for exactly what the person can give. Flow does not arise in conditions that are too easy, too hard, or generically standardized. It arises in fit. The dark horse path is the path to flow.

Tina is doing this in real time. The mahjong room is not just a hobby. It is a prototype.

There is something else Tina has been noticing.

She wandered into a needlepoint store in Back Bay a few weeks ago, expecting the kind of quiet dustiness that usually accompanies places out of step with the times. Instead, it was full. Younger people, mostly. People with jobs, with calendars, with every reason to be somewhere else. Choosing, deliberately, to be there.

She wasn’t surprised. She recognized something in it. And it offered a kind of go-off-the-beaten-path reassurance.

The data confirms what she saw. Etsy searches for beginner needlepoint items rose 208% year over year. Eventbrite is tracking triple-digit growth in mahjong nights, knitting circles, and baking workshops in major American cities — gatherings, not solo hobbies. Mahjong searches alone are up 365%. 73% of Gen Z report digital exhaustion. These are not people abandoning ambition. They are choosing, in increasing numbers, to spend some portion of their time doing something slow, tactile, communal, and unmeasurable — together.

Not Retreat. Reset.

What I observe clinically is not that high performers are stepping away from their ambition. They are reaching — often urgently and not always consciously — for something that returns them to themselves before the performance resumes.

The screen does not do this. The screen is almost exclusively outward-facing. It delivers information, demands, comparisons, stimulation. It is extraordinarily good at pulling attention toward the external world and extraordinarily poor at helping us locate our interior one. That is not a moral failing of technology. It is what it was built for.

What mahjong does — what needlepoint does — is different. It requires sustained, focused attention on something tactile, in the same room as the people doing it. It produces a regulated state of attention — neither idle nor overwhelmed, but absorbed. Present. Located.

Critically — it is not optimizable. You cannot hack your way to a better mahjong game in ten minutes. You cannot outsource your needlepoint. The tile is in your hand or it isn’t. The stitch is yours or it doesn’t exist. The irreducibility of the task is the point.

For people who have spent years — sometimes entire careers — in environments where everything is measurable, reportable, and subject to improvement, this irreducibility is not a limitation. It is a relief.

This is what I call an anchor — distinct from a motivation. A motivation moves you forward. An anchor returns you to you. In the high-performance cultures I work inside, motivation is everywhere. Anchors are rare. The difference matters.

What Tina Is Actually Building

What Tina is doing in Diane’s living room is not just teaching mahjong.

She is setting a table — providing a reason, concrete and tactile and structured, for three women in their fifties to sit on a sofa with their shoes off, drink wine, and stay for three hours. The mahjong is the scaffolding. The room is the point.

The women have begun to want her in their lives, not just at their table. They text her between sessions — do you want to come for dinner Saturday, no agenda, just hang out. They ask her opinion on things that have nothing to do with the game.

This surprised her. She is thirty-five. Most of these women are old enough to be her mother. The transactional logic of the lesson has dissolved into something else: people genuinely glad to see her, on a Sunday afternoon, for no reason other than the room itself.

What Tina is learning is not how to teach a game. She is learning what it feels like to be the person who makes the room. The way other people’s gladness becomes part of her own steadiness. What parts of herself were waiting, underneath the years of trying to perform inside a system that could not hold her, to do exactly this kind of work.

Last week she went on a job interview at a small PE firm. Almost all of the right components: people she could connect with, work that would use her branding skills, the kind of environment that would hold her rather than scrutinize her. There was a lack of specificity she could not put her finger on. She was not sure she was the right fit. They were not sure either.

This week she is teaching four hundred female CEOs at a spa in the Berkshires how to play mahjong at an offsite.

This girl may have found her calling.

—

The Quiet Tension Journal Prompt

This is where it becomes yours.

Find a quiet moment, open your notebook, and write what comes.

Is there a room in your life — an actual room, or a kind of gathering, or a circle of people — where presence is the actual point?

Where you go not to produce something measurable but to be with people in a way that has no résumé line?

If you have one, what is it making in you that you might not have found another way?

If you don’t have one yet, what would it look like to begin building one — not waiting until you have the time, not framing it as recovery, just making the room?