Have To vs. Get To: The Two-Word Reframe That Changes How Your Career Reads in the Room You're Not In

Take a second before you answer this. Don't rush it.

Is rain a good thing, or a bad thing?

If you're a farmer who hasn't had a soaking in three weeks — rain is salvation. If you're a bride who picked an outdoor venue eight months ago — rain is a disaster. If you're a kid in rubber boots — rain is just Tuesday afternoon at its absolute best.

Same rain. Same drops, same temperature, same Tuesday. Three completely different experiences.

That's the whole episode. Or really, that's the whole career. Most of us never realize that the events landing on us at work — the deadline, the reorg, the missed promotion, the tough review — are the rain. Neutral. Unassigned. The frame we carry into them is what makes them salvation or disaster. And the frame we carry leaks. It leaks into our face when the meeting invite shows up. It leaks into our tone in chat. It leaks into the three-second pause before we say "sure, I can take that on" in a 1:1.

Your manager reads it before you finish the sentence. Sometimes before you start it.

This essay is the long-form companion to the latest episode of Managing A Career — Have To vs. Get To. The episode argues two things. First, that the smallest possible reframe — swapping "have to" for "get to" in the sentences you tell yourself — has the largest compounding return on your career. Second, that the same reframe principle, applied to the harder cases (the missed promotion, the bad review, the layoff, the reorg), is what separates people who recover from setbacks in months from people who spend years grieving the path that closed.

A quick note on who this is for. If you're an individual contributor or a new manager — in finance, marketing, operations, HR, product, sales, design, project management, engineering, or anywhere adjacent to those — you've almost certainly been told some version of "shift your mindset" by someone who couldn't tell you exactly what to do on Monday morning. This is the episode that gives you the exact thing to do on Monday morning, and the research that says it actually moves the needle on the metrics your manager uses to decide who gets the next move. Skeptics welcome. Especially skeptics.

Here's how it lands.

Section 1: The Rain Doesn't Change

I was listening to a recent episode of Hidden Brain — Shankar Vedantam was talking with Dave Evans, a behavioral scientist out of Stanford. The episode is called Designing a Life That Matters. Evans makes a point in there that I haven't been able to put down. He says most people are looking for the one right path — the one passion, the one purpose, the one career destination — and that hunt itself is what leaves them unfulfilled.

The thing they're searching for isn't outside them. It's the lens they're carrying.

The rain doesn't change. The farmer, the bride, and the kid in boots aren't seeing different weather. They're carrying different frames into the same Tuesday.

Now think about your last hard week at work. The Friday afternoon report that's coming around again. The 1:1 you've been dreading. The reorg announcement that landed in your inbox. The stretch project that got dropped on your desk because someone else passed on it.

Quick question. Was that week bad? Or did you assign it that meaning?

I'm not asking you to pretend the report is fun. I'm asking you to notice that the report itself — the words on the page, the spreadsheet, the slide deck — is just data. The exhaustion you feel before you open it is a frame you brought.

That distinction is everything.

Section 2: The Two-Word Swap

Most of us narrate our day in the language of obligation. I have to finish this report. I have to sit through this meeting. I have to deal with my manager's feedback. I have to figure out what to do about the reorg.

Try the swap. I get to finish this report. I get to be in this meeting. I get to hear my manager's feedback. I get to navigate this reorg.

Same task. Different sentence. Different posture.

I want to be careful here, because I know some of you are about to roll your eyes. You've seen this on LinkedIn. Some influencer with a ring light is going to tell you to be grateful for your inbox. That's not what this is.

There's a piece on Substack — The Power of Reframing: From "I Have to" to "I Get to" — that walks through this swap on everyday tasks. The commute. The grocery run. The hard conversation. And the author frames it as a deliberate practice, not a personality trait. You're not being asked to feel differently. You're being asked to say it differently. The feeling follows.

Why does the feeling follow? Because the brain doesn't store the task and the framing separately. They get encoded together. Have to travels with resentment. Get to travels with agency. Run that loop a hundred times — which you do, because you say one of those phrases to yourself a hundred times a week — and you've trained your nervous system to either resist your own work or lean into it.

This isn't soft. There's a study from Alia Crum, Shawn Achor, and Peter Salovey — Yale and Harvard researchers. They took employees at a financial firm and showed half of them a video framing stress as enhancing — sharpens focus, boosts immunity, improves performance under pressure. The other half got a video framing stress as debilitating. Same employees. Same jobs. Same stressors. Different frame.

The group with the enhancing frame had better mental health, better job performance, and — this is the part that should make any skeptic in the audience pay attention — different cortisol responses. The body's chemistry shifted. Same stressor, different mindset, different physiological response.

So when I say "have to" versus "get to" is the smallest reframe with the largest compounding return, I don't mean that as a slogan. I mean that as a description of what your nervous system is actually doing while you talk to yourself on the way to a meeting.

We covered some of the language angle back in MAC-087, *Language Matters*. The frame I'm giving you today builds on it.

Section 3: Why Your Manager Reads "Have To" Before You Speak

Here's where it sharpens.

People at work can hear which sentence you're running. Not the words you say out loud — the posture you walked in with. Have to leaks. It leaks into your face when the meeting invite shows up. It leaks into your tone in chat. It leaks into the three-second pause before you say "sure, I can take that on" in a 1:1. Your manager registers all of it before you finish the sentence. Sometimes before you start it.

I read a Fortune piece last fall. The CEO of Workday, Carl Eschenbach, was asked what changed when his career took off. He said — and this is close to a quote — your altitude in life is completely determined by your attitude in life. I'm not in the habit of citing CEOs as career oracles, but the sentence stuck because I've watched it play out in twenty years of talent reviews.

Two people. Same role. Same output. One walks in carrying obligation. The other walks in carrying agency. When the calibration meeting happens — the one you're not in, the one where your name and your peers' names get put on a wall and the room argues about who gets the next move — that posture difference is what tips the conversation.

Not the project. The posture.

That's not a failure on your manager's part. Structurally — that is a description of how the room works. People sponsor agency. People tolerate obligation.

So if the language audit feels small, remember what it's actually moving. It's not your feelings. It's the leak.

Section 4: The Rain Question — A Field Guide to Setbacks

Now I want to take this somewhere harder. Because the easy version is the recurring report. The hard version is the setback.

You missed the promotion. The review came back worse than you expected. The reorg moved you under someone you didn't want. You got laid off.

What's the rain question on those?

Three frames. Try them on, in order.

Setback as feedback. The first frame. The system told you something. Maybe you don't agree with the message, maybe the messenger is flawed — fine. There's still information in there. Most people skip this step entirely. They go straight to defense. The review is wrong. The promotion was political. The reorg is a mistake. Sometimes those things are even true. They're also not the whole story. Setback as feedback asks: what did this just tell me about how the system sees me, regardless of whether the...