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The Atmosphere Changed: On Strategies That Worked Until They Didn’t

A conversation with Amy Schutte, TEDx speaker and brand strategist, on the Kármán line, identity transformation, and what to do when your strategies stop working.

Summary

Wings work by pushing against air. Climb high enough and there is no longer enough air to push against, and the machine that carried you everywhere you have ever been cannot go on, however hard the engines work. The scientist Theodore von Kármán gave his name to that altitude, conventionally set at about a hundred kilometers above sea level. Past the Kármán line you do not fly. You need a different kind of machine, one that carries its own fuel and asks nothing of the atmosphere.

Most of us reach our own version of that altitude without a name for it. We call it a plateau, a slump, burnout, a midlife crisis, a marriage that went flat. Each name arrives with a verdict attached. Amy Schutte offers a name that carries only a measurement: the Kármán line.

Amy began as a newspaper reporter, which is an education in noticing people. One day she interviewed the governor, the next day the man on the street corner. From there she moved into brand strategy and then into her own firm, Hudson & Co., where she advises founders, executives, and organizations on high-stakes communication. Across more than a decade of messaging, website copy, and crisis PR, she kept watching the same scene. A client would commission a rebrand, certain it would change everything, and the business would come out the other side exactly the same, because the founder had not changed. A new logo on the fuselage of the same airplane. Her work now treats branding as less a marketing problem and more an identity transformation, an idea she has carried to a TEDx stage at Cambridge University.

We spend this first half of a two-part conversation at the line itself. Amy’s proposal is that when your strategies stop working, nothing is broken. I came to the table as the clinician who meets people on the far side of that moment, usually holding on with both hands.

The Voice as Altimeter

Adults, Amy points out, tend to take the stall personally. Teenagers cross thresholds all day and we expect it of them. An adult who reaches a Kármán line asks whether they are insufficiently grateful, insufficiently disciplined, simply broken. Her practical offer for the moment when your strategies stop working is a signal. When she wants something badly, a stage, a book, more time with her kids, a voice arrives to ask who she thinks she is. She has learned to read that voice as an altimeter. The air is thinning because the want will require a different person, and a different person is a frightening proposition for a brain organized around the one it has. Recognition comes first. Taking responsibility for actually going forward comes second, and she is candid that the second step is the harder one.

Twenty Years of Evidence

That second step is where my side of the table gets busy. It is easier to move a person whose strategies stop working outright, who is two and a half inches from rock bottom, because there is less distraction. The harder room belongs to the person who reaches the Kármán line carrying twenty years of strategies that worked: the revenue, the accolades, the standing in the community, all of it traceable to one way of operating. Ask that person to loosen their grip and you will hear the sentence I have learned to expect: don’t you know this is how I got here? Yes. That is exactly what will keep you here.

In my field the grip has a specific shape. Ask a couple what they fear will happen if they stop doing it this way, and the answer is catastrophic: we will never have sex again, the marriage will fall apart. Of course they cling. My answer is scaffolding, a path of pebbles in place of a leap. One small thing, and then the next.

Proportionate Change

Change also has a rate, and couples rarely discuss theirs. My working version of the seven-year itch runs somewhere between five and eight years, depending on growth. Each stretch brings different demands, different schedules, a different mental load, and a person no longer quite who they were when it began. Entrepreneurs, in my experience, are good at adapting, which makes personal growth for entrepreneurs close to a permanent condition, and that raises a question partnerships seldom ask: change at what rate, relative to whom? Trouble begins when the growth is lopsided, one partner funded and coached into the next version of themselves while the other, loyal and kind and holding down the fort, is offered nothing comparable. Both people need developing. They do not have to develop the same way or in the same arena. They do need a similar rate, so that one does not outpace the other. (I will die on the hill that business masterminds need a track for spouses. I will even consult on it, provided it is somebody else’s baby.)

Amy works in stories, so I offered her mine: couples sometimes stop investing in plot, and a story needs plot.

What the Vow is Made of

Near the end of this half, Amy names the thing that runs her: a vow she made herself years ago, I will figure this out, which she has kept ever since, white-knuckled, to the point of breaking. It has been driving more of her decisions than she knew, until she looked. I recognized it at once, from my own side of the conversation as much as from my office. The conversation ends on the question that Part Two picks up: if the refusal to stop is what got you to the Kármán line, is it also what carries you across?

If you have ever been called driven, capable, the one who figures things out, and have started to suspect that what you are best at is holding the ceiling in place, this conversation is for you. If you share a life with someone on a different trajectory, it is for both of you.

Amy’s TEDx talk, her firm Hudson & Co., and her writing are linked below, and they are worth your time. Before Part Two, three questions worth carrying:

• Which of your strategies has worked for so long that you no longer think of it as a strategy?
• What do you want right now that makes a small, sneaky voice ask who you think you are?
• In your household, whose development is being funded, and whose is being assumed?

And the one to carry out the door: when the air thins and you hear yourself say I’ll figure it out, is that sentence a wing, which needs the air to work, or a rocket, which brings its own?

Moments Worth Noting

What if nothing’s broken? What if you’re just at a Kármán line? (Amy Schutte)

What if all the things and all the strategies that got you here were great, but now you need a whole new way of being? (Amy Schutte)

Maybe it’s a moment of transformation rather than a stop sign. (Amy Schutte)

Don’t you know this is how I got here? And I’m like, yes, but that’s gonna keep you here. (Dr. Emma Smith)

Sometimes we just don’t invest in plot. And you need plot for a good story. (Dr. Emma Smith)

Chapters

• 00:00 Amy Schutte joins the show
• 01:59 From journalist to brand strategist: marketing as identity transformation
• 02:39 Is your brand a separate person? Authentic and unedited are not synonyms
• 04:34 A gold-star kid, a newspaper, and a firm of her own
• 06:24 The founder story, and why everything starts to sound the same
• 07:13 Couples who stop investing in plot
• 08:23 The seven-year itch and proportionate change
• 13:41 The TEDx talk
• 14:13 The Kármán line: when what got you here stops working
• 17:37 Why adults take the stall personally
• 18:50 Rock bottom versus twenty years of success
• 20:35 The voice that asks who you think you are
• 22:00 Catastrophic stakes and the scaffolding of small steps
• 22:56 Where the Kármán line shows up for each of us
• 25:12 Building a practice with no playbook
• 26:57 Becoming the brand you build: luxury as quality
• 28:49 Nashville, DC, and a cocktail dress at an afternoon wedding
• 30:26 Amy’s vow: I will figure it out
• 32:33 The airplane, the rocket, and what comes next

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The Receipts

Where things get nerdy.

Amy Schutte

• Amy Schutte: amyschutte.com
• Hudson & Co., brand strategy and communications consultancy: hudsonandco.co
• Amy’s TEDx talk at Cambridge University: amyschutte.com/tedx or watch on YouTube
• The Kármán Effect™, Amy’s framework for reading thresholds (named on her website; not a term used on air)
• Instagram: @amyschutte | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/amyschutte

On the Kármán line

• “Where does outer space begin?”, Physics Today. Background on the boundary, including why the familiar figure of one hundred kilometers is a convention and what von Kármán’s own reasoning about lift actually claimed. General background, not discussed on air.

General background (not discussed on air)

• Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (2007). A leadership-coaching take on a neighboring premise: the habits behind success can become the obstacle to the next stage.
• William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes (1980). On the stretch between an ending and a new beginning, which is where most people at a threshold actually live.
• Rollo May, The Courage to Create (1975). The existential case that moving into the unknown is an act of courage before it is a technique.