“We can’t stop our biological processes.  We can’t stop our thoughts.  We can’t stop time or collapse space back into the singularity from whence it expanded.  We can’t detach from society, and most especially the people we love.  The future is coming, whether we want it to or not.  We must at least maintain and at best build.  And that’s being human.”

“These are the 3 ingredients to any group, and it will rise or fall based on their success. The common thread is sacrifice, because all of these require someone else to offer their scarce resources in support, motivated by the promise of a better future. What is the better future you promise? Effectively answer that question, and your communication will attract people to fund, run, and advocate for your organization.

That, and only that, is how to go FAR ➡️”

“But what if you had friends everywhere you went?  Life would seem much more fun and worthwhile, wouldn’t it?

I think of friends as the leavening of life.  Everything is lighter and more vital with friends in the mix.  There’s something about friendship, and nothing else like it.

It can be complicated, because it’s harder to keep decisions and evaluations objective when friends are involved, although some might argue the best friends manage to do that too.  Some professions even have regulations that prevent forming friendships between certain kinds of people, so you’ll have to conform to the ethical and legal standards of your industry.

But watching these two dance…”

“While today’s information and media landscape may be pathological and contributing to greater dysfunction than in past eras (and I’m not so sure that I grant this for numerous reasons - the health of humans and society is a dynamic and ever unsettled conversation, due simply to the nature of the spacetime that we navigate in each moment), we have a perennial condition that seeks to reconcile what I have come to call “influence and outfluence”.  They will never be precisely balanced, and we must discern this constantly.  As social beings, we are constantly in communication, community, and collaboration with our fellow social beings.  As such, there is no self, and no other to speak of.  No me or you.  Just us, interfluencing one another.  Somehow we all have a vision of an improved world that we work toward together.  It can be no other way.  Take a broad enough view and humans ultimately become a hive mind, very much like ants.”

“When I think about human commerce, the exchanges we seek and enact, this is how I imagine it.  Many, many individuals and overlapping audiences, with limited attention that is always stretching in some direction or another, searching, seeking a goal.  I think the goal is a sense of completion, and you need to figure out how your product, service, and organization fits into that collective project of completion. Once you do, you will meet your goals.”

“Each and every choice is a turning point, an entry into a new container or set of containers (we inhabit numerous containers at numerous scales all of the time), all designed to limit your freedom in various ways, to constructively constrict your possible choices so that you can more easily structure your actions as you navigate each day so as not to become existentially overwhelmed.

And if you’re lucky you can choose many of these containers, because some we can’t.  And when you inhabit the right containers you will feel free.  And when you inhabit the wrong ones you will feel trapped.  But we all have to choose them at one point or another, because life is a container of containers.  And every container contains other containers, because this works at so very many scales.  Organizations, locations, relationships, groups, activities - all are containers oriented toward different ends that will allow you to align your actions to various purposes.”

“It’s a remarkable time for you.  Overwhelming.  Exciting.  Stimulating.  Demanding.  Requiring new levels of focus, intention, energy, commitment.  It’s super cool.  I love the energy of such people at such a time.  They are primed and ready, waiting for just the right combination of strategy and pep talk from just the right person to shift their thinking, clarify their vision, strengthen their resolve.  And then they’re off and running, having hard conversations, building new habits, carefully putting the pieces in place that allow them to jump to the next level.

I do this work with people in all professions, industries, organizational shapes and sizes.  And the pattern is always the same.  It comes down to these 3 steps…”

“The story I told may seem disjunct and episodic, and to some people I’m sure it is, but I see a clear line.  Perhaps not a straight one, but a thread that ties it all together.  A thread of essence.

Many of us do many things.  And sometimes we think we’ve found the *one thing* that will take us where we are going.  But often it’s a latest best guess, and there are new corners of reality to investigate, new dynamics we simply don’t and can’t have a concept of.  Corners that are remarkably fulfilling, and a good fit for our essence.”

“I have seen this my entire life.  Parents do it.  Mentors do it.  College professors do it.  Friends do it.  Business coaches do it.  They advise their advisees to do things that come easily to them without realizing that they have innate talents and aptitudes that those in their care may not.

Do you know how to spot an inborn gift or aptitude?  Here’s the secret. Listen for “just” or “simply”.  When anyone begins a sentence with “You just…” or “You simply…”, I can almost guarantee that what follows will be a description of some kind of activity or sensibility that comes easily to them.  It’s particularly pernicious and grating when it has the feeling of a humblebrag, which starts with “Well, you just…”

Start listening for it and I guarantee you will hear this evidence of low self-awareness all around you.  I am convinced that it is responsible for a great deal of misery and self-doubt quietly experienced by so very many of us.”

“I thought about it.  I would have been happy to, because it would have added an unexpected but welcome space of family connection to my otherwise solitary and professionally-oriented day.  But it also would have meant sacrificing the time I had anticipated spending in my own personal ritual that offers its own highly customized traveling pace and the satisfaction of progressing through an intentionally-curated queue of content.  I noted the tension and prepared to make my choice.”

“Leadership is simple. Truly! All you need to understand is…”

“And if we start there we quickly realize that almost none of our lives at all exist in the present.  Because, with the exception of the current present moment, 100% of our lives have existed and will exist in the past and future respectively.  Further, a full 100% of the lives of all those who have passed were lived in the past, and a full 100% of the lives of those not yet born will be lived in the future.  Therefore, in what is essentially a direct contradiction to the original assertion, the present moment is actually almost none of what we have.”

“So, how do you like it? Want to get clarity on how to improve even more? Want to learn to work with this heavy responsibility and actually get better at discerning your own thoughts AND finding the right guidance from other people too? Because you can. And that’s really a good place to be, as long as you’re responsible for all of it anyway.

If this is speaking to you, I encourage you to join me…”

“Many people I meet have a craving.  It’s a craving for a new and better kind of life.  It’s more successful, prosperous, harmonious, influential, growth, and service-oriented.  They experience this as a persistent longing, and it touches on them personally as well as their families, organizations, and communities.

If this is you, listen up, because I’m going to tell you how to manifest a life that more closely resembles that which you crave.

Take a look around…”

“What if, as in The Matrix, we could see the code out of which reality is composed and therefore manipulate it at our pleasure?  Well, what if we can?

What if, as in Groundhog Day, we could steadily refine our behaviors to conform more and more closely to the exemplar of our ideal state?  Well, what if we can?”

“And contradiction is probably the most uncomfortable metaphysical state that exists: the tension between 2 premises that cannot both be.  Incredibly uncomfortable.  The analysis they provoke is uncomfortable.  Formulating a strategy to reconcile them is uncomfortable.  And the process of this reconciliation is uncomfortable.

But it’s an inevitable part of that growth process, of stepping out into who we feel we are meant to be.  We see glimmers of the promised land and begin to walk toward it.  Contradictions are what we face along the way.

There are 3 primary classes of contradiction with which we are faced over the course of leaving our comfort zones.  They are…”

“Maybe when we say “end everything” we are tacitly implying a metaphysic in which we acknowledge that “everything” needs the high level of awareness humans bring, that the whole system indeed improves itself with the data that our sophisticated and unprecedented human faculties provide.  And that it’s an imperfect, contradictory, competitive process with all humans jostling against one another, seeking to maximize valuation only as far as their/our limited sight can perceive.  And for this reason we need all of us, because no one else has the perspective that you offer.  And other parts of the universe conspire to stop you.

How strange.

I think about God, or at least the various concepts people offer.  It’s hard not to.  I’m a theologian at heart.

Here are two opposing statements that are both heretical, and yet the synthesis of their contradiction seems to be true….”

“So, what are your aspirations? Since action is unavoidable, it necessarily follows that we move away from certain things and toward others. What, then are you moving towards? Is it what you want? Do you want other things that you not moving toward? How would you change the alignment of those motivations to get closer to what you want and further from what you don’t?

Aspirations are beautiful because they reveal a universal human longing, which is the desire to realize a state of the highest possible value. This is what we are doing at every moment, individual, organizationally, societally, collectively, in all times and all places. It is the one common link between all human motivations and behaviors. Talk to me and I’ll help you see that more clearly.”