Between What I Have to Do and What I Want to Do is a story about responsibility, work, choices, and the price we pay when we become the person everyone turns to when something has to be solved.

Adrian Vance works in a world where projects are never just ideas or visible results. They are deadlines, budgets, contracts, construction sites, funding requirements, technical decisions, teams, and hundreds of small details that have to fit together. Over time, his ability to solve problems becomes both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness: the more he can carry, the more people expect him to carry.

The book offers an inside view of project management and public administration, but its real subject is people. Engineers and financial specialists whose expertise can determine whether a project succeeds, implementation teams, procurement and legal professionals, technology specialists, employees facing digital transformation, and managers learning that leadership does not mean replacing experts.

It is ultimately a story about learning the difference between being responsible for something and believing that everything must depend on you—and about one deceptively simple question: how much of our lives is what we have to do, and how much is what we actually want to do?