If you are successful but tired. Accomplished but restless. This book was written for you.
A boy in a Saigon alley hands Alex a crumpled note with three words:
What’s prompting you?
Alex has built the career most people envy. Title. Influence. Security. He has done everything right. And yet one morning, standing in his kitchen holding coffee he doesn’t remember pouring, he feels something unsettling.
Nothing is wrong.
But something is no longer alive.
When the question on that scrap of paper refuses to leave him, Alex begins a journey that takes him from Vietnam to Japan, Mexico City, and finally back to the one place he has been avoiding. Himself. In a world obsessed with building smarter machines, Prompted asks a more uncomfortable question:
What if humans are already the most sophisticated generative systems in existence — and most of us are running on autopilot?
Every day we respond to invisible prompts:
- Physical.
- Emotional.
- Relational.
- Digital.
- Cultural.
Most of them were never consciously chosen. The difference between us and AI is not intelligence. It is awareness. It is soul. It is the ability to pause and decide what runs our lives.
This book is for you if:• You have achieved success — and it no longer feels like enough
• You are in the second half of your career and the old motivations don’t move you anymore
• You lead others but quietly feel disconnected from yourself
• You sense the world accelerating and don’t want to lose your humanity in the process
Prompted is not a productivity manual. There are no frameworks to memorize. No hacks to optimize your morning routine. It is a modern fable for leaders in midlife. A story about success, identity, AI, family, and the subtle erosion of agency that no one talks about.
Readers have called it:
“A rare gift.”
“A book that meets you exactly where you are.”
“A quiet wake-up call.”
Written by a former Big Four partner who left the corner office after three decades to ask a harder question:
Not how do I achieve more?
But what is actually prompting my life?
Karel Bakkes is an executive coach, former Deloitte Partner, and founder of Authentes, a leadership practice dedicated to helping leaders become the kind of people others want to follow. After a 35-year international career in finance and consulting, including senior leadership roles across Europe and Asia, he shifted his focus from performance alone to the deeper questions of purpose, identity, and inner stability.Now based in Hội An, Vietnam, Karel works with senior executives navigating transition, complexity, and the quiet pressure of success. His work integrates leadership development, psychology, and spiritual reflection, grounded in the belief that human beings are not just strategic operators, but meaning-making systems with agency and soul.Prompted grew out of his own questions about ambition, usefulness, and what it means to stay human in an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence.Karel is a father of four, a lifelong student of human behavior, and someone who still believes that awareness changes everything.
