Full transcript, chapters and links: https://www.rootastro.org/journal/back-to-human-ep-1-what-is-a-leader-for?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=bth-ep01

Watch the video episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/anKV9JTVLJg

Chapters

0:00 What is a leader for?

3:35 What AI reveals about leaders

8:43 Will, and where it runs out

13:52 What’s going soft

17:26 Not broken, blunted: Lee’s story

22:49 Answer machine or sparring partner

25:39 Where the human edge lives

29:10 Why does it have to be hard?

32:46 Rest that fortifies

34:46 The fully present leader

40:01 Leading through the cuts

45:25 Who looks after the leader

49:06 Going device-free

55:06 One thing this week, and a year from now

60:02 The question to sit with

Mentioned in this episode

HARD: Building Your Inner Citadel, by Lee Arthur: https://www.rootastro.org/book

The Fieldstone Letter, the Root Astro newsletter: https://www.rootastro.org/subscribe

Andrew Huberman with David Goggins on the anterior mid-cingulate cortex and willpower (Lee refers to it at 8:43): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imXzK9XcfZc

Gloria Mark’s research on interruption and refocus time

Back to Human is a Root Astro production. Root Astro runs device-free leadership retreats on 7 acres of private land within the Shawangunk State Forest, 90 minutes from New York City. First cohorts from May 1, 2027. https://www.rootastro.org

Marsha and I saw our first bear on the land this week.

Not in person (I would have run!). On the security cameras. A black bear working up the treeline, unhurried, completely at home. What sticks with me about this sighting: the cameras only pick up the big animals when we’ve been away for a few days (the deer come frolicking too). They know when we’re there. The woods read our presence long before we see anything, and the wildest things in them wait until we’re gone.

Our security camera, October 2026: the first black bear we have seen on the land. Watch the clip here.

I’ll come back to the bear, because it turned out to be about work.

First, the thing I see in leaders, usually said with a half-held breath and disappointment, the posture a busy person holds: the day is full and the work is empty. Every hour accounted for, every message answered, and at the end of it nothing you could point to and say, that felt like it mattered. In the book I call this Busy but Hollow. It is not the exhaustion of effort. It is the exhaustion of fragmentation, the particular despair of having been productive all day at the wrong level. I wrote a sentence about my own desk that readers keep sending back to me: I have processed noise. I have not found the signal.

This half-held breath is common, and it has a name: “email apnea,” coined by the writer and former tech executive Linda Stone. We inhale in anticipation of the next message and forget to exhale. That “anticipatory tension” is what knowledge workers carry as a physical tightness and shallow breathing when deep in “busy mode.” It happens below conscious awareness, and the held breath nudges the body toward fight-or-flight, as if a flooded inbox, Slack pings, or a long to-do list were a micro-threat.

Here is the cause. During the last twenty years the job quietly changed from directing work to processing it. Every system in the company routes through your attention, and every ping is a micro-dose of something that feels like productivity. The research says it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to a task after a single interruption. Check your phone every ten minutes, which one large survey found is the average for Americans, and you are not just less capable of deep thought, you are incapable of it. As I put it in Chapter 3: if you are interrupted more frequently than you can recover from, you are not doing knowledge work. You are performing the appearance of it.

Now the bear.

We did not make the bear happen. What we did was set conditions: left the land wild, placed the cameras, stayed patient, and got out of the way. The output arrived on its own schedule, and only when we were not standing in the middle of it.

Outputs arrive where you are not standing in the way.

There is a leadership discipline called Commander’s Intent you can adopt to help with this, and it is in Chapter 13 of Hard. We do not give step-by-step instructions. We define the End State, what success looks like, and the inputs, including the important why, alongside what information and resources should be considered. Then the team makes the micro-decisions themselves, and our cognitive energy is reserved for the twenty percent of decisions that actually matter. The executives I know who work this way, on impact, deep thinking, inputs, and real motivation for their people, get outputs that compound while their calendars stay humane. The ones who stand in the middle of everything get fragmented days and hollow years.

And here is the part I find genuinely profound. This exact posture is what the new AI agentic tools can help you with. You do not sit inside an agent’s work any more than you stand in the woods making bears happen. You give it an End State, the inputs, and a standard, and you judge what comes back. Commander’s Intent, applied to software. A leader who only knows how to process will use these tools to process faster: more empty work at higher speed. A leader who has trained the other posture is about to be handed something rare. The busy work goes to the machines, and what is left is the deep, cumulative work only a human can do. One early reader of Hard, a GTM director, said it better than I can: “The author makes a compelling biological case that nature isn’t a luxury - it’s the environment our hardware was actually built for. In an AI-first world… Going back to our roots isn’t escape. It’s rescue.”

So breathe. The interesting thing about this anticipatory tension is that you can train yourself to be immune. In Linda Stone’s observations of around 200 people, the ones who kept breathing normally included a former military test pilot, a triathlete, dancers, and musicians (like a cellist). The mastery of their craft meant they had to train for specific, conscious breathing mechanics under stress. Marsha encourages breathing techniques as part of her coaching practice for this very reason, shifting busy executives out of fight or flight to a state of focused calm.

Coping with the often hostile digital work environment is what everything at Root Astro is built to train for, and why the resources are one system, not a shelf of tips. We call the resource map the Lodestone, which if you look it up here you will see why. Its resources include The Original Stack: five nature groundings you need. It’s the natural operating environment your hardware was built for. Back to Human Practices build your resilience and courage. Creating Communitas is the team layer that moves the work from empty to heart-full and satisfied: chosen “hard” things done together, which is where real motivation comes from. The Instrument measures where you actually are right now, as a fully embodied leader. Truth, Health, Wealth sets the aim; as humans, we love and react well to goals. And the 90-Day Bearing resource turns all of it into the plan you carry back to work: the self-commitment in your own hand.

Walk the map here: rootastro.org/resources

The bear was always out there. All that changed was that we finally set the conditions and stopped standing in the clearing.

Lee

P.S. Here is a proven breathing exercise you can try to build your own immunity.

The research is unusually clear for this field. In 2023, Stanford researchers ran a month-long trial: five minutes a day of structured breathing against five minutes of mindfulness meditation. The winner was the simplest thing in the study, a pattern your body already runs on its own every few minutes. Two inhales through the nose, the second one short, topping up the first. Then one long, slow exhale through the mouth, longer than the inhale. Five minutes of that daily improved mood more than meditation and lowered resting breathing rate, a marker of a calmer baseline. The double inhale matters: it helps reopen the small air sacs in the lungs that sag under shallow breathing, and the long exhale clears carbon dioxide on the way out.

What works, distilled to four lines: exhale longer than you inhale. Slow toward six breaths a minute. Use the nose when you can. Five quiet minutes a day beats an occasional heroic session.

And in the middle of the meeting, when none of that is available, one cycle still works: two inhales, one long exhale, under thirty seconds, hands never leaving the table.

No single protocol is magic. The common engine in all of them is the long exhale. The ancient practices found it by feel; the laboratory has now confirmed the wiring.

You cannot always walk out the door with the question. You can always take the next breath slower than the last.

Sources

Linda Stone, “Just Breathe: Building the Case for Email Apnea,” HuffPost, 2008. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/just-breathe-building-the_b_85651

Linda Stone, “Are You Breathing? Do You Have Email Apnea?,” lindastone.net, 2014. https://lindastone.net/2014/11/24/are-you-breathing-do-you-have-email-apnea/

Gloria Mark, Victor M. Gonzalez, Justin Harris, “No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work,” Proceedings of CHI 2005. https://doi.org/10.1145/1054972.1055017

Gallup, “Too Many Interruptions at Work?” (interview with Gloria Mark), Gallup Management Journal, 2006. https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/23146/too-many-interruptions-work.aspx

Asurion, “Americans Check Their Phones 96 Times a Day,” 2019. https://www.asurion.com/press-releases/americans-check-their-phones-96-times-a-day/

Melis Yilmaz Balban, Eric Neri, Manuela M. Kogon, et al., “Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal,” Cell Reports Medicine, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100895

Peng Li, Wiktor A. Janczewski, Kevin Yackle, et al., “The peptidergic control circuit for sighing,” Nature, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature16964

Paul M. Lehrer, Richard Gevirtz, “Heart rate variability biofeedback: how and why does it work?,” Frontiers in Psychology, 2014. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00756

Christina Zelano, Heidi Jiang, Guangyu Zhou, et al., “Nasal Respiration Entrains Human Limbic Oscillations and Modulates Cognitive Function,” Journal of Neuroscience, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2586-16.2016

This essay first went out as Issue #7 of the Fieldstone Letter, our fortnightly letter from the land. Subscribe here.

There is a specific kind of intelligence you have been conducting your career without.

Not information. Not strategic judgment. Not the emotional literacy it takes to read a room. Something older and more fundamental: the intelligence of the hands. The knowledge that moves from eye to grip to outcome without the intervention of language. The part of you that already knows the answer while the prefrontal cortex is still formulating the question.

Every leader I work with has spent decades quietly starving it. Knowledge work systematically amputates the connection. We navigate spreadsheets, moderate calls, process abstractions. The physical world becomes something we move through on the way to screens. And what we do not use, the neuroscience is unambiguous, we lose. Not metaphorically. Literally: the motor circuits hardwired to our executive control centers go quiet. The Somato-Cognitive Action Network, the brain structures responsible for planning and high-level decision-making, depend on physical engagement to stay online. Sitting still in a climate-controlled room is not rest from work. It is the gradual unplugging of the machine.

At a Root Astro retreat, the first thing that happens is fire.

Not the symbolic lighting of a wick. The real thing: learning to read a hillside for dry kindling, understanding how wind moves through a break in the treeline, building a structure that will catch before it collapses. The first attempts fail. They always do. That failure is not a problem to be managed. It is data, delivered immediately and without ambiguity, in a language older than words. Then shelter. Then water. Then wood.

This is not metaphor.

By day two, something shifts. Leaders who have been running on adrenal fumes for years begin to think differently. Not louder. Quieter, and with a different quality of precision. Fire creation, shelter building, water sourcing, and woodwork are not symbols for leadership. They are the operating conditions the human machine was actually built for: problem, material, consequence, and the specific satisfaction of something made well with your own hands. The brain does not run better in the Highlands because it is beautiful. It runs better because it is finally doing what it was built to do.

What you build there does not come back with you. The part of you that built it does.

See the retreats →

Read On

Hard: The Book The neuroscience behind what fragmented digital work does to executive intelligence, and why the SCAN discovery changes the recovery calculus. Chapter Three arrives June 15.

What Founder Burnout Actually Feels Like The version of burnout that does not look like burnout, because you are still performing.

The machine does not run better when you give it more to process. It runs better when you give it something real to do.

Lee

There’s a particular quiet that most people have never actually sat inside. Not the absence of noise. The absence of anyone needing anything from you, for long enough that the noise you carry around gets a chance to surface.

Most of what we call rest doesn’t do this. A long weekend still has a phone in it. A vacation still has decisions in it: where to eat, what time to leave, who to answer. You’ve changed the scenery, not the demand. That’s why you can come back from four days away and by Tuesday feel exactly like you did the Friday before you left.

Psychologist Rachel Kaplan had a name for what’s actually missing: soft fascination. A setting that asks nothing of your attention, so the part of your mind that has been on shift since your first meeting of the day finally gets to stand down. Attention is not infinite. It depletes the way a muscle does, and it does not restore itself just because the view improved.

I found this out the hard way, thirty hours into the Utah desert with no phone signal and no one to talk to, somewhere past the point where the pain in my legs stopped being about my legs. What surfaced wasn’t the race. It was the argument I hadn’t finished. The thing I should have said three weeks earlier. Whatever I’d been outrunning while the day still had room to stay busy. There was no meeting to duck into out there. Just me and the thing I’d been carrying, and finally enough room to look straight at it.

You do not find out what you actually think until there is no one left to perform it for.

That’s the part that surprises people about real stillness: it isn’t relaxing, at least not at first. It’s clarifying, and clarity has a cost, because it tends to hand you back exactly the thing you’d arranged your whole schedule to avoid looking at. But it also hands you the thing you actually needed: the decision you’d been circling for months, the sentence you didn’t know how to write until the noise finally stopped covering it, the felt sense that something in your life doesn’t fit anymore and hasn’t for a while. That is not idle time. That is insight, arriving on its own schedule because you finally gave it room to.

This is the entire premise behind Still Point: three to five days, alone, on Root Astro’s land in the Catskills. No group. No agenda. No one needing anything from you. Guided, not simply unattended, so the silence has a container instead of just an absence.

If you have been circling something for a while and haven’t been able to hear yourself think about it, that’s usually the tell.

Learn about Still Point →

Field Notes

My best work now comes from stillness, not of body but of mind: staying inside one important task for a long time and letting everything else go. Sunday is 4:30 a.m. straight through to 1 p.m. without distraction, then a run afterward as the reward, quietly meditating as I move. The busy mind still shows up, a hundred small ba’s, but none of them are as important as the work in front of me. The more I practice going quiet on purpose, the less the digital world can reach me when I let it back in.

The noise was never the enemy. It was just louder than the thing you needed to hear.

Lee

The week fills up before you’ve decided what matters.

That’s not a complaint. It’s a description of what happens when the machine works. People ask, you answer. Meetings require attendance. The inbox restocks overnight. If you’re good at your job, the demand is real.

The problem isn’t the demand. The problem is that a packed calendar is not a neutral container. It sequences your thinking. The first meeting of the day gets your freshest judgment. The sixth meeting gets what’s left. By the time the decision that actually matters arrives, you’re working with depleted resources, in the last window before dinner, with two unread threads still open in your head.

Baumeister’s research on decision fatigue showed this clearly: decision quality degrades across a day not because the decisions get harder, but because the resource that makes good decisions possible gets used up on easier ones first. A fully scheduled day is a machine for spending your best thinking on low-stakes calls.

There is a second problem, harder to name.

When you remove hours from the calendar, the team fills them. Not badly. Often better. The questions they’d been routing to you, they resolve. The judgment calls they’d been holding for your approval, they make. The calendar had been training them not to think without you, and training you not to trust that they could.

The calendar isn’t protecting your leadership. It’s consuming it.

I learned this running the Moab 240. Clearing 8 hours from a week that didn’t have them required actual decisions about what would move and what would wait. The team handled what I’d been handling. I came back from the desert to find that the decisions made in my absence were better than the ones I would have made in my presence, because the people making them had to think critically themselves. Not escalate. Think.

What’s in the book isn’t the schedule fix. It’s the structural argument for why the full calendar and the leader who needs it are producing each other.

Read the free chapters →

Field Notes From the Week

Lee Arthur: We cleared land this week and ran into snakes and spiders. My first instinct was to move them out. Then I noticed they were useful: keeping the rodents and mosquitos down. The work never feels done out there. I’ve started to notice the same is true at the desk. There’s no real peace in the day until I’ve paid my dues. Hard work isn’t the weight. It’s what makes rest feel like rest.

The full calendar and the leader who needs it are producing each other.

Lee

Think of the last decision that actually mattered. Not the calendar shuffle, not the approve-and-move-on. The one with real money or real people in it. Now try to remember where you were when you finally made it. Almost nobody answers “in the meeting where it was discussed.”

There is a reason for that, and it is not a character flaw. Deciding is a different kind of work from discussing. Discussion happens at speed, in company, with your attention held tight to a screen or a room. Deciding needs the opposite: slack in the attention, time that is not metered, and enough quiet for the option you have not thought of yet to surface. Researchers at Columbia found that when people walk while working through a problem, their attention loosens in exactly the way idea generation needs. The state is physical before it is mental.

Most working weeks simply never supply that state. Not because anyone is doing anything wrong, but because the modern week is optimized for throughput, and throughput is the enemy of the one decision that outweighs the other forty. So the big call gets carried, half-made, from Monday to Monday. You know the weight of a decision you have been carrying too long. It does not feel like an open question. It feels like a stone in the bag.

I get my ideas anywhere, screens included. But I cannot decide anything important at a computer. The decisions that shaped this business were made on runs, in the woods, at the archery range, and then written down by hand: the question at the top of a page, the honest options under it, including the option of doing nothing at all. The screen is where I prepare a decision. It has never once been where I made one.

Ideas will find you anywhere. Decisions have to be given somewhere to happen.

Here is the one thing to try this week. Take the single decision you have been carrying longest and refuse to make it at your desk. Write the question by hand on one page, walk out the door with it, and give it thirty unmetered minutes somewhere with a longer horizon than your monitor. Then come back and write the answer under the question, in pen, with a date. You are not adding a productivity trick. You are giving one decision the conditions it has been waiting for. This is the same principle our retreats are built on, and the same one behind the 90-day operating plan every leader will take home from them: the right conditions first, then the commitment in your own hand.

Further reading: You Have Notes. You Do Not Have a Decision. →

The decision you keep carrying is not waiting for more information. It is waiting for room.

Lee

You cleared the afternoon. No calls, no messages, nothing owed to anyone. And you spent the whole of it circling, half-reading, checking a phone that had nothing new on it, waiting for the rest to start.

It never quite did.

Here is the mechanism underneath that: rest that hasn’t been earned doesn’t register as rest. Somewhere early, most of us learned that stopping has to be paid for with visible effort first. Finish the work, then you may sit down. The rule made sense when the work had edges. It stopped making sense when the work became infinite, because against an infinite task list the payment is never complete. You carry a debt the mind keeps collecting on, whether or not one was ever really owed.

So the cleared calendar doesn’t calm you. It indicts you. An open hour reads as evidence you’ve stopped delivering, and the mind starts generating urgency to cover the shortfall. Not because anything is urgent. Because you are keyed up inside space you don’t believe you’ve paid for.

I spent this week clearing land. Two days in, I stopped flinching at the snakes and spiders and started seeing them for what they are: working parts of the place, eating what would otherwise eat the garden. Nothing out there earns its rest. The snake is not behind on anything. The land doesn’t audit itself at night. Only I was doing that.

Peace that requires proof isn’t peace. It’s the debt, wearing a different coat.

The practical move is not another system for finishing more. It is noticing the moment an open hour starts to feel like a shortfall, and naming what is actually happening: an old rule, applied to a life it no longer fits. The work will still be infinite tomorrow. That was never the question.

Field Notes

Think of one piece of work you actually finished this week, the kind you can point to and say, that’s done. What did finishing it earn you? Not praise: the right to spend an hour on something deeper, to take an afternoon with nothing to prove, or to play without first checking you’ve earned it. Name what you finished, and what it bought you. Reply and tell me; I read every one.

You earn rest the same way you earn anything that matters: not by arguing yourself into deserving it, but by clearing the ground for it on purpose, and then actually standing in the space you cleared.

Lee

Most of the leaders I know have stopped noticing that they’re cut off from two things.

The first is the physical world. Not the world as an idea, but actual terrain: ground with weight and temperature and resistance. The working environment removes it so systematically that, after enough years, most leaders have lost the felt memory of being somewhere real. Tile, carpet, airport terminal, open-plan floor. The body becomes irrelevant to the work. So does the location.

The second is less obvious. It is the experience of being with other people in a genuine way. Not managing them, not networking, not collaborating toward an output. Just being in the same difficult place together, with nothing between them except what they’re carrying and how they respond to what’s in front of them.

You can run on the fumes of both for a long time. Senior leadership selects for people who can. The calibration you lose is harder to measure than performance: the sense of what you actually think, when there’s no agenda to orient around. The trust that builds when you’ve moved through something difficult together and the difficulty was real.

I spent the better part of two decades believing that if I moved faster, the pressure would resolve. It never did. It compounded. The leaders I work with are not short of drive. They have more of it than almost anyone. What they have lost is the ability to stop without feeling that something has gone wrong. The drive that built the career has quietly become the thing that runs it, and it has no off switch.

Robert Sapolsky’s work on chronic stress describes what happens next: a system built to handle short bursts of threat is left switched on for years. The body adapts. The part of the brain that is supposed to be doing the actual leading goes quiet. You keep performing. You stop deciding well.

This is the part no one warns you about. The decline does not feel like decline. It feels like being busy. The calendar is full, the output is real, the results still arrive. And underneath it, the capacity to think clearly about what actually matters is thinning out, one reactive day at a time.

At mile 191 of the Moab 240, I wasn’t managing anything. Desert, cold, three days of continuous movement. Two other people were running alongside me. The terrain didn’t care who we were. Neither did we. What we were was together, in the same dark, holding the same ground.

Somewhere in that dark I stopped. Not because I had a plan. Because there was nothing left to push with. And in that forced stillness I saw, with a clarity I hadn’t had in years, exactly which things in my life I’d been avoiding by staying in motion.

Stillness is not the reward for the work. It is the condition that makes the work possible.

My co-founder, Marsha Prospere, has built her coaching practice on exactly this, and the practice that follows is hers.

So here is the one thing worth trying before the inbox takes you tomorrow. Ten minutes, before the day’s momentum starts, with a single question: what am I currently too busy to look at? Do not solve it. Just let yourself see it. The leaders who last are not the ones who never stop. They are the ones who have built somewhere to stop.

That is the experience Root Astro was built to return.

Ninety minutes from Manhattan, the land changes. The Shawangunk Mountains lift on one side and fall away into wetland on the other, and the property sits at the seam between them.

Up on the ridge run the Long Path and the Shawangunk Ridge Trail, two of the longest footpaths in New York, past rocky overlooks and cold trout streams through the Gobbler’s Knob State Forest. White-tailed deer, bobcat, and black bear move through it. Down in the valley sits the Basha Kill, the largest freshwater marsh in southeastern New York: three thousand acres of open water and reed, more than two hundred bird species, bald eagles and ospreys nesting overhead, river otters and bowfin working the channels beneath a surface that goes to water lilies by late summer. Ridge trail in the morning, a kayak through the marsh in the afternoon.

Device-free, by design. Far enough off the grid that the quiet does the rest.

See the retreats →

Read On

What Founder Burnout Actually Feels Like (And Why a Weekend Retreat Won’t Fix It) The version of burnout that doesn’t look like burnout, because you’re still performing.

Hard: Chapter One The book, on the questions we outrun by staying busy. Chapters arrive as they’re written.

The Power of Strategic Rest Marsha Prospere on treating rest as a strategic asset rather than a reward, and the practices that protect it.

The field does not get cleared by working harder. It gets cleared one heavy stone at a time, set down where it can hold weight.

Lee & Marsha

TL;DR

Something in the meeting now writes everything down, perfectly, and it is not you. Capture is not deciding. The pen forces you to choose, the keyboard stopped asking, and the notetaker removed the question. The measured effects are small, which is exactly the case for a near-zero-cost edge applied to your biggest decisions.

Key Takeaways

• Museum visitors who photographed objects remembered them worse, but zooming in on one detail erased the impairment entirely: choosing what to capture is itself the act of attending

• In the closest test run so far, fully automated AI notes produced the worst comprehension, the middle setting the best, and people preferred the one that taught them least

• Handwritten notes you never reopen lose to a summary you actually read: the pen only wins if you go back to the page

• Alpha is a small persistent edge at asymmetric cost, and the cost here is a pen and the choice not to do average work

• This newsletter is a guest post from the Fieldstone Newsletter, you can subscribe to that here: https://www.rootastro.org/subscribe

Something in the meeting is now writing everything down, perfectly, and it is not you. What that costs is small, and it compounds, and it lands on the only decisions that matter.

There is a folder on your machine holding every meeting you ran this year, and you did not write a word of it. The bot joined before you did. It transcribed the whole thing, labelled who spoke, pulled out the action items, and had a summary in your inbox before you reached the kitchen. Nothing was missed. Nothing was lost. And when somebody asks you three weeks later what you actually decided, you open the file and read it like a stranger reading somebody else’s mail.

You were not slacking. That is the part worth sitting with. You were present, you were listening, you were looking at the person instead of hunching over a keyboard, which is exactly what the tool was sold to you for. And it delivered. The problem it solved was real.

There is a ladder here, and most of us have climbed the whole of it in about fifteen years. A pen catches maybe a third of what is said in a room, so you are forced, continuously, in front of the person you are listening to, to choose which third. Then the keyboard arrived, fast enough to keep pace with speech, and the choosing quietly stopped being necessary. I remember typing furiously at Dow Jones during meetings, capturing everything said as if the words were money itself. Now the notetaker has arrived, and the attending has stopped being necessary too.

The mechanism is not distraction. It is more specific than that, and worse. Knowing a thing is being captured is itself what stops you taking it in. Linda Henkel ran the cleanest demonstration of this at Fairfield. She walked people around an art museum and had them photograph some objects and simply look at others. Afterwards they remembered the photographed ones worse. Fewer objects, fewer details, and less about where in the building they had been standing when they saw them.

The part of that study nobody quotes is the part that matters here. When she asked people to zoom in and photograph one particular detail of an object, the impairment vanished. Not only for the detail they had framed, but for the whole object, including the parts they had deliberately left out of the shot. Choosing what to capture was itself the act of paying attention. The camera was never the problem. Handing it the decision was.

Which is roughly what a team at Michigan found when they tested AI note-taking head on. Three settings: a raw transcript, a live summary, and full automation where the notes are written for you. The people given full automation scored worst on the material they had just sat through. The people given the middle setting scored best. Then they were asked which they preferred, and they chose the one that had taught them least, because it felt easiest. Nobody has yet run the study that matters most, which is what a notetaker does to the people sitting in the room rather than watching a lecture.

Comprehension was never quite what you were doing in that room anyway. You were not revising for an exam. You were deciding.

I cannot decide anything important at a computer. I have known that about myself for years and I have stopped fighting it. When something matters I get up and go somewhere else, and I take a pen, or the digital pen of a Kindle Scribe, and I draw the options out until they have a shape I can look at. Many people working with me have deciphered child-like drawings and my illegible writing. Expected value on one side. What happens if I do nothing, which is the option most people never write down at all. Then I invert the whole thing and argue the opposite case to find what I have missed. If it is genuinely large I add the other ingredients. I run with it, literally, for hours. I leave it overnight to stew. I take it to people I trust, and I go back to the research to see what else is there. Somewhere in the middle of that I ask whether I am even answering the right question, which is the check that has saved me most often.

That is how the decision to build RootAstro.org got made. Not to find a retreat centre already standing, not to rent one for a season and see how it went, but to build a physical business from nothing after thirty years of knowledge work done almost entirely in front of a screen, no bodily movement required. It got decided on long runs, walking in the woods, and on an archery range between arrows, with the options drawn out in my own hand and a small number of trusted people telling me where I was wrong. The journey so far has already been worth more than the easier versions I could have chosen.

The computer, for me, is for acting on decisions. It has never once been where I made one.

You do not write things down to remember them. You write them down to find out what you think.

A notetaker is better than you at the first one. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the second.

Which is why the pen survives the arrival of better tools, and why it does not matter whether the pen is plastic and talks to a cloud. The Norwegian study everyone now cites for this, Audrey van der Meer’s team at Trondheim, is almost always reported as paper beating computers. It was not that. Both of their conditions were digital. Their subjects wrote in cursive with a stylus on a touchscreen, and that is exactly where the brain connectivity turned up.

The cleanest account of what is actually doing the work comes from Karin James at Indiana, who taught pre-literate children letters three ways: forming them freely, tracing them, or typing them. Only the children who formed the letters themselves developed the adult reading circuitry. Tracing produced nothing, with the same pen, the same paper, the same hand moving through the same shapes. The active ingredient was not the ink or the page. It was generating the form yourself. A stylus keeps that. A keyboard removes it. A bot removes the question.

So keep the transcript. Let the machine do the part it is genuinely better at. But there is a catch the research is honest about: handwritten notes you never open again lose to a summary you actually read. The pen only wins if you go back to the page. Writing it and never returning is the worst of both, and it is what most of us do.

I want to be careful not to dress any of this up as a productivity argument. You will find people claiming that going back to pen and paper lifts performance by thirty per cent, or cuts an hour off your meetings. Those numbers are invented. The honest position I have read is that most of the measured effects here are small. The best review of handwritten notes puts the advantage at about a quarter of a standard deviation, and only when the notes get read again. The best evidence for writing a plan as a specific trigger rather than a deadline, once you correct it for the studies that never got published, is smaller still.

Which is exactly why it is worth doing. Alpha is never a large effect in one go. It is a small persistent edge with an asymmetric cost, applied where the stakes are highest, compounded over time. One of our founders at Blenheim Chalcot bangs the drum on this all the time. The cost here is a pen and the choice not to do average work. Set that against the decisions you would apply it to, which are the ones that determine whether the next two years of your life were worth anything, and the trade is not close. You are not buying a thirty per cent lift. You are buying a slightly better decision, slightly better held, slightly more likely to actually get done, every single time it matters. This is how great performance manifests itself.

There is one exception to the smallness, and it is the thing my own hand does without being asked. When people draw something rather than write it out, they remember it at better than twice the rate. Not a quarter of a standard deviation. Double. Real problems are not lines of text. Organisations, systems, the shape of a decision and its second-order consequences: these sit in your head as things next to other things, with lines between them. A page lets you put them there. A screen makes you type them in sequence, one after another, as though they happened in order.

If you want alpha in how you perform, that is where it is, and it is not in the tooling. Pick up a pen and put the decision in front of your own eyes, in your own hand, before you touch a keyboard.

On the last morning at Root Astro, before anyone drives home, they will write a single page planning the next ninety days in their own hand. One sentence for each of the three bearings. What done looks like at day ninety. The first action, and the moment it starts. Nobody types it. Nothing records it. Nobody leaves holding a plan that something else prepared for them, because a plan you have been handed is a plan you have only read, and the gap between reading a sentence and generating one is among the most reliable findings in the whole of memory research.

That page is the first day of ninety, not the last of three. Everyone leaves with a structured journal built to carry it: the same plan laid out to be worked week by week, written in by hand or imported straight onto a reMarkable or a Kindle Scribe, whichever is the one you will actually open on a wet Tuesday in November. The object matters less than the fact of it. What we are trying to prevent is the thing that happens to every retreat and every offsite ever held, which is that the decisions get made somewhere beautiful and then quietly fail to survive contact with the calendar. It starts with one page on the morning you leave.

A decision you did not write in your own hand is still only an opinion.

Appendix: the evidence, and what it will not carry

Every claim in the essay traces to a source below.

Note: AI research agents led the research that follows and shortlisted the studies for reading by the author. Their selections were red-teamed for inaccuracies and comprehensiveness. Please also do your own research.

Van der Weel, F. R., & Van der Meer, A. L. H. (2024). Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1219945. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219945

Thirty-six university students analysed, 256-channel EEG. Handwriting produced widespread theta (3.5 to 7.5 Hz) and alpha (8 to 12.5 Hz) coherence across parietal and central regions; typing did not. The handwriting condition was cursive written with a digital stylus on a touchscreen, and the words came from the game Pictionary. There was no paper condition in this study at all, which is why it cannot be cited for paper and can be cited for the stylus. Note the date carefully: the DOI carries 2023 because that is the volume year, but publication was 26 January 2024.

Pinet, S., & Longcamp, M. (2025). Commentary: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1517235. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1517235

James, K. H., & Engelhardt, L. (2012). The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 1(1), 32 to 42. Full text (Indiana University)

Five-year-olds learned letters by printing them freely, tracing them, or typing them. Only free printing recruited the adult reading circuit. Tracing did nothing, despite identical pen, paper, hand and movement. Holding everything constant except self-generated production, and watching the effect disappear, is the strongest available evidence that the active ingredient is forming the shape yourself. That is what a stylus preserves and a keyboard removes.

Umejima, K., Ibaraki, T., Yamazaki, T., & Sakai, K. L. (2021). Paper notebooks vs. mobile devices: brain activation differences during memory retrieval. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 15, 634158. doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2021.634158

Forty-eight participants encoded calendar appointments on paper, on a stylus tablet, or on a phone, then were scanned an hour later. The paper group showed higher hippocampal and visual-cortex activation. Overall memory performance did not differ significantly between groups, and the widely repeated line that paper users “memorised twenty-five per cent faster” is a distortion. The twenty-five per cent comes from the university press release and refers to how long it took to write the calendar entry, not to memory at all. Two authors were employed by the company that funded the study.

Mayer, C., Wallner, S., Budde-Spengler, N., Braunert, S., Arndt, P. A., & Kiefer, M. (2020). Literacy training of kindergarten children with pencil, keyboard or tablet stylus. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 3054. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03054

One hundred and forty-seven children, seven weeks. The stylus group landed between pencil and keyboard and differed significantly from neither.

Osugi, K., Ihara, A. S., et al. (2019). Differences in brain activity after learning with the use of a digital pen vs. an ink pen: an electroencephalography study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13, 275. doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00275

The digital pen produced a greater neural learning signature than the ink pen, but only among participants already familiar with digital pens. No effect in the unfamiliar group. Small study, and it points at something useful: the stylus penalty in other work may be unfamiliarity rather than the medium. A founder who has written on the same device daily for two years is the familiar group.

Flanigan, A. E., Wheeler, J., Colliot, T., Lu, J., & Kiewra, K. A. (2024). Typed versus handwritten lecture notes and college student achievement: a meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 36(3), 78. doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09914-w

Twenty-four studies. The source of the essay’s “quarter of a standard deviation” figure: taking and reviewing handwritten notes was associated with higher achievement, g = 0.248, while typing wins decisively on volume of notes captured. A second review of the same literature (Voyer, Ronis & Byers, 2022, Contemporary Educational Psychology, 68) finds essentially no difference once device distraction is accounted for, which is why the essay calls the question unsettled.

Henkel, L. A. (2014). Point-and-shoot memories: the influence of taking photos on memory for a museum tour. Psychological Science, 25(2), 396 to 402. doi.org/10.1177/0956797613504438

Museum visitors photographed some objects and simply observed others. They later remembered the photographed objects worse: fewer objects, fewer details, fewer locations. The nuance is the whole point. When participants zoomed in to photograph one specific part of an object, the impairment disappeared, and memory for the parts they had not zoomed in on was just as strong. Selecting what to capture was itself the act of attending. Indiscriminate capture harms; deliberate capture does not. An AI notetaker is maximally indiscriminate. A person deciding what to write down is the zoom lens.

Chen, X., Ruan, K., Ju, K. P., Yap, N., & Wang, X. (2025). More AI assistance reduces cognitive engagement: examining the AI assistance dilemma in AI-supported note-taking. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW). doi.org/10.1145/3757632

Peer-reviewed, and about note-taking specifically. Thirty participants took notes under three levels of AI help: raw transcript, live summary, or fully automated notes. Full automation produced the worst comprehension scores. The middle setting produced the best. Participants preferred the fully automated condition, because it felt easiest. People choose the setting that teaches them least.

Risko, E. F., & Gilbert, S. J. (2016). Cognitive offloading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 676 to 688. doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.002

Offloading is not good or bad. It is a decision, and the decision is governed by your judgement about your own mental abilities, which is frequently wrong. That is the precise problem with a notetaker in the room: not that it stores things, but that its presence silently reprices your judgement about whether you need to attend. Pairs directly with the Michigan finding above, where people’s preference ran opposite to their performance.

Kiewra, K. A., DuBois, N. F., Christian, D., McShane, A., Meyerhoffer, M., & Roskelley, D. (1991). Note-taking functions and techniques. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83(2), 240 to 245. doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.83.2.240

Unusually well controlled, and double-edged. Taking your own notes and reviewing them beat everything. But reviewing somebody else’s borrowed notes beat taking your own notes and never looking at them again. Since most executives never reopen their notes, the realistic comparison is not pen versus bot but “notes I never re-read” versus “a summary I actually read”, and the literature does not obviously favour the pen there. This is why the essay concedes the point rather than hiding it: handwriting wins on encoding, and that win is only banked if you go back to the page.

Kosmyna, N., et al. (2025). Your brain on ChatGPT: accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task. arXiv preprint 2506.08872. arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

The famous one. It is a preprint, not peer reviewed, with 54 participants, and it has drawn a published methodological critique (Stanković et al., arXiv 2601.00856) arguing it is substantially underpowered for the number of comparisons run. The authors themselves asked journalists not to use words like “brain rot” or “harm” about it. The one result robust enough to quote is behavioural rather than neural: in the first session, 83% of the ChatGPT group could not produce a correct quotation from the essay they had written minutes earlier, against 11% of those who wrote unaided. Do not repeat the EEG numbers.

Zindulka, T., Goller, S., Fernandes, D., Welsch, R., & Buschek, D. (2026). The AI memory gap: users misremember what they created with AI or without. Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791494

One hundred and eighty-four participants generated ideas with and without an AI assistant, then a week later tried to identify which were which. AI involvement impaired source memory, most of all in mixed human and AI workflows. For a leader, forgetting whether the judgement was yours is arguably a worse problem than forgetting the content.

Wammes, J. D., Meade, M. E., & Fernandes, M. A. (2016). The drawing effect: evidence for reliable and robust memory benefits in free recall. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(9), 1752 to 1776. doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2015.1094494

Seven experiments, and the source of the essay’s “better than twice the rate” claim: drawing a word beat writing it out in free recall, often by more than double, and the effect survived controls for elaborative encoding, visual imagery and picture superiority.

Why the ninety-day pages are handwritten, and blank

Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69 to 119. doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1

Ninety-four tests. Specifying when, where and how you will act, in an if-then form, produced a medium-to-large effect on goal attainment, d = 0.65. The mechanism is that the cue becomes easier to notice and the response fires without needing a fresh decision, which is precisely where intentions normally die.

Sheeran, P., Listrom, O., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (2025). The when and how of planning: meta-analysis of the scope and components of implementation intentions in 642 tests. European Review of Social Psychology, 36(1), 162 to 194. doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2024.2334563

Effects were larger with a genuine if-then format, with highly motivated participants, and when the plan was rehearsed.

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: a 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705 to 717. doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705

Roughly four hundred studies, forty thousand participants. Specific and difficult goals reliably beat vague ones, easy ones, and none.

Slamecka, N. J., & Graf, P. (1978). The generation effect: delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4(6), 592 to 604. With the meta-analysis: Bertsch, S., Pesta, B. J., Wiscott, R., & McDaniel, M. A. (2007), Memory & Cognition, 35(2), 201 to 210. doi.org/10.3758/BF03193441

Originally published at RootAstro.org

It started as a discontent I couldn’t put down.

I am, by temperament, a gardener. I notice what is dying and what wants to grow. For a long time the thing I kept noticing was myself, and the people around me, being slowly pulled away from center by phones, by feeds, by the relentless digitizing of every ordinary hour. We had become very connected and very lost at the same time.

The hunch was simple, and it would not leave me alone: people are willing to give real time and real money to be part of something bigger than a feed. Not to be numbed. To be reminded of what they are. The skills our grandparents took for granted, how to build a fire, how to find north, how to sit still, had become exotic. That gap felt like fertile ground.

A seed is not a plan. It is a pressure. The only honest thing to do with it is to put it in the ground and find out.

So I wrote it down. That is the whole trick.

An idea in your head can be anything, which is another way of saying it is nothing. The moment you write it down it has to choose. It commits to words, and the words push back, and in that argument the idea finally takes a shape you can hold up to the light.

My first draft had a working name. I called it Namuh, “human,” spelled backwards, because the whole point was a return. Back to the thing we were before the screens. Here is the first sentence I ever wrote about it, exactly as it sat in the notebook:

Exhibit · Notebook entryDraft 01 · “Namuh”

“A community of people, purposefully practising to be more human again.”

First line, Namuh manifesto

It was rough. It used words I would later throw out. But it existed outside my head for the first time, and that changed everything. You cannot edit a thought. You can edit a sentence. Writing is how thinking becomes work.

You don’t write to record an idea. You write to find out what it is.

On the gardener’s method

Then the words asked to become a shape.

Once a thing is written, it wants to be drawn. The first marks were a mess: a blue-pen brain-dump on a whiteboard, arrows running everywhere. Then a quieter pencil sketch the next morning, with a tree at the center and the rooms arranged around it. These are the real first pages. I’m keeping them here on purpose. This is what the beginning actually looks like. Not a finished brand, but an honest first guess.

Exhibit A · The first scribble. Everything at once. “Back to Human,” upstate New York, community, CEO coaching, team retreats. Arrows running in every direction. The seed, before it had an order.

Exhibit B · The first layout. The next morning, in pencil. A tree at the center, rooms arranged around it: Curious, Improve, Awareness, Practice. It had a name then: the Namuh Institute. The Lodestone was already there.

A page of rambling, sorted patiently, becomes a spine.

Ideas refined, start to shape.

Then you give it to a real person and shut up.

A plan on paper is still a guess in good handwriting. So I started handing pieces of it to real people and listening, properly listening, the kind where you don’t defend anything. The first to sit with the early “Flowscore” self-diagnostic was a friend named Louise. What stuck with her wasn’t a feature. It was a question.

Customer Interviews

That one line reorganized everything. People didn’t want another dashboard. They wanted to know where they stood, where they were headed, and proof they were moving. So I kept what tested true and cut what didn’t, without mercy.

The second habit nobody photographs: you stay.

Starting gets all the credit. But a seed in the ground is not a garden. It is a promise that demands you come back. Most ideas don’t die at the start. They die in the long, unglamorous middle, where there is nothing to show and no one is watching.

So I tended it through seasons. Names changed. The thesis sharpened. The woo got cut. What was once a sprawling community called Namuh narrowed, year over year, into one true thing built with rigor, because I kept showing up to the page, and then to the land.

SEASON 01

A discontent, named Namuh.

SEASON 02

Tested with real people. Cut to the core.

SEASON 03

A method takes form: The Astrolabe.

NOW

Seven acres. Under construction. The doorway to 2,000 acres of nature’s best.

And one day the sketch came back at scale.

This is the moment a dream stops being yours alone. Your handwriting goes to a surveyor and comes back drawn to the foot, on real contour lines, with setbacks and a septic field and a title block. The tree from the notebook is now a gathering yurt. The vague “places to practice” are a hundred-and-eighty-foot archery range. The idea is now something other people can build.

Exhibit C · Marked up at scale. The same idea, on contour lines and drawn to the foot. Proposed yurts, a central firepit, the gathering yurt, a 100′×180′ archery range. Hand-circled where it mattered most.

Exhibit D · The title block Orange County, New York. The title block no longer says Namuh. It says Root Astro. A sentence had become a place with an address

Same root. Truer name.

RootAstro.org

The name had to grow up with the idea. Root for what holds you down: the body, the ground, the unglamorous practice. Astro for what you steer by: the fixed star, the bearing you can’t fake. Roots below, the instrument above. The Lodestone.

Everything soft got cut. What remained was a strapline I could stand behind without flinching. The same idea that started it, finally said plainly.

Back to Human.

There is a particular silence in a room of policymakers when someone shows them the displacement numbers. Forty percent of customer service. Thirty percent of paralegal work. The first cohort of junior software engineers who will not be hired this year because the work they would have done now happens between a prompt and a response. The slides are clean. The forecasts are sourced. Nobody argues with the numbers. The silence is what they do next, which is nothing, because the numbers describe a problem that does not yet have a constituency. The people who will lose these roles do not yet know they are losing them. The people who could speak for them do not yet exist as a group.

This is the failure mode that matters. Not the displacement itself. The displacement is real, but it is also the part that gets attention, because compression is visible. Compression has a name and a face and a press cycle. What does not have a face is the thing forming on the other side of it. A new layer of work is appearing above the automated layer. Coordination, judgment, taste, accountability. The orchestrator role. It is appearing now, in real time, inside the companies that have already started using these tools at scale. It is also being staffed entirely by people who were already on the inside of those companies. Everyone else is reading the displacement story.

The mechanism here is not new. Every general-purpose technology in economic history has done the same thing. The spreadsheet did not kill bookkeeping. It killed manual tabulation and created financial analysis, corporate development, modelling consultancies. The web did not kill retail. It killed classified ads and created the entire architecture of digital commerce, growth, product management, devrel. Each abstraction layer compressed the work beneath it and opened a larger surface above it. Each transition produced winners who could ride the new layer and losers who could not. The losers were not stupid. They were not lazy. They were standing on the wrong side of a wall that the policy class had not yet noticed was there.

The wall this time has a name. It is the gap between the moment a role disappears and the moment the role that replaces it becomes legible enough for an ordinary person to train for it. The mathematics of this gap are unforgiving. If displacement runs at, say, five years and category creation lags by three, the area between those two curves is human suffering measured in tax base, in dignity, in the slow-motion radicalisation of people who can see they have been left behind but cannot see what they were left behind from. The endpoint optimists are right about where we end up. The lag pessimists are right about everything that happens in between. Both arguments are correct. The policy class keeps trying to choose between them.

I learned this in a smaller way running businesses through earlier transitions. When I was supporting Avado, I watched two cohorts of mid-career professionals try to retrain into digital work at the same time. The ones who started while they still had their jobs got through. The ones who started after they had lost them, mostly did not. The difference was not aptitude. The difference was time, money, and identity. By the time the second group arrived, they had spent six months in the version of themselves that had been made obsolete, and the work of becoming someone new was now compounded by the work of unbecoming someone old. Reskilling is not a curriculum problem. It is a sequencing problem. You have to start before the displacement, not after it.

The lesson is one sentence and the rest of this is the cost of not learning it. Reskilling has to begin before the role is lost, not after, because the gap is not a gap in skill. It is a gap in identity, and identity does not retrain on a deadline.

What this means for someone in a policy seat right now is specific. It means the orchestrator role has to be named, formalised, credentialed, and made legible before the displacement curve peaks, which on current trajectories is inside this decade. It means the people who will need this training are not the people currently asking for it, because the people currently asking for it are already on the ridge, they can see and touch the new AI world of work now. It means the budget line for reskilling has to be funded out of the surplus the new technology is generating, captured at the point of capital accumulation, and routed to the workers whose labour is being absorbed into the model weights. None of this is novel as policy. All of it is overdue.

The hard part is that the constituency for this work does not yet exist, and by the time it does, the work will already be late. This is the structural problem with every transition: the people who need the help cannot ask for it in language the system recognises until the help is no longer the help they need. Policymakers who wait for the demand signal will arrive on time for the wrong intervention. The ones who move before the signal will be accused of solving a problem that does not yet exist, right up until the moment it does.

Every economic transition in history has produced two groups of people. The ones who reached the new ground and the ones who did not. The line between them is almost never talent. It is almost always whether someone built them a bridge while the old ground was still under their feet.

I asked AI to solve the timing issue, here is what it recommended:

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/c607c539-1332-46b7-97cc-3647479fa178

All proceeds to charity.

Introduction

In October 2025, at mile 205 of a 240-mile race through the Utah desert, I sat down on a rock and had a conversation with myself that I had been avoiding for two years.

Not a motivational conversation. Not a breakthrough moment with a swelling soundtrack. A reckoning. The kind that only arrives when you have stripped away everything that isn’t essential, the devices, the meetings, the deals, the comfortable performances of competence, and the only thing left is you, a headlamp, and 35 miles of darkness.

I finished the Moab 240. And I came back a different person. Not because I suffered. Because I chose to, deliberately, with full understanding of the cost. That choice, structured, bounded, intentional, is what this book is about.

This book does not argue that suffering is virtuous. It argues that deliberately chosen hardship, with a purpose and a finish line, does something to a person that comfort cannot undo.

What Is Actually Breaking

Modern life has been engineered to remove friction. Every inconvenience smoothed, every wait eliminated, every discomfort pre-empted by an algorithm that already knows what you want before you’ve decided. We call this progress. It may be. But it carries a tax we have not been honest about.

Attention is the first casualty. When nothing requires sustained effort, the capacity for sustained effort quietly atrophies. Not with any announcement, just with a gradual shortening of the window before the mind drifts away. Then judgment. Then resilience. Then, most corrosively, integrity: the alignment between what you believe and what you do when it would cost you something to act on it.

Humans were shaped by challenge, uncertainty, physical effort, and real-world consequences. These were not obstacles to our functioning, but the conditions of it. Remove them systematically, over years, and something essential erodes. Not all at once. By degrees. You become easier to distract, easier to placate, easier to compromise. And the worst of it is that it happens at a pace too gradual to name, so you never notice the moment you become a smaller version of yourself.

I noticed. Eventually. Several years into a high-functioning career that was, by every visible measure, succeeding, while something underneath it was very quietly failing.

Why Easy Is Not the Answer

The dominant response to this problem is more comfort. Wellness programs, mindfulness apps, four-day weeks, flexible working, optimized sleep. These are not worthless. But they treat the symptom. They add softness when what is needed, in many cases, is friction.

“Hard” has been mis-sold. We have come to associate it with punishment, with unnecessary suffering, with the macho cultural hangover of “no pain, no gain.” That is not what I mean. I mean something precise: hardship that is chosen, structured, time-bounded, and oriented toward a purpose. Hardship with a finish line.

The difference between that and mere suffering is the difference between a Vision Quest and a grind. One builds you. One depletes you. The distinction is everything.

What This Book Will Do

This book makes one central argument: deliberate hardship, chosen and structured, restores what comfort erodes. Clarity. Self-respect. The capacity to act from your own values rather than from the path of least resistance.

It will show you why the voice that negotiates you downward, the one that arrives at mile 80 of a race, or at the moment a decision costs something, and begins its quiet work of reasonable-sounding retreat, is not wisdom. It is the product of a nervous system that has not been tested in a long time.

It will give you a framework. A modern Vision Quest, built on three bodies of evidence: the neuroscience of stress-induced growth, the anthropology of rites of passage across every human culture, and my own proof, of using structured hardship to recalibrate when the usual methods had stopped working.

And it will ask you to design your own ordeal. Not mine. Yours. Calibrated to where you are, what you have avoided, and what you need to prove to yourself.

You do not need to run 240 miles. You need to choose something that costs enough to matter, and finish it.

How to Read This Book

The book is in four parts. They follow the same sequence as the transformation they describe.

Part I: The Problem. Names what is actually breaking in the modern leader and why. Ease, removal from nature, and the digital tsunami consuming executives and disembodying them from the teams they serve. It also makes the case that existing wellness solutions cannot fix a biological problem. Recovery is not the same as recalibration. Part I explains the difference.

Part II: The Ancient Solution. Before there were leadership consultants, there were vision quests. For millennia, societies used structured voluntary hardship to move adolescents into adulthood: strong, grateful, and prepared to contribute to something larger than themselves. Part II recovers what those traditions understood, explains the science of why the natural environment supports deep renewal, and introduces the concept of the Original Stack, the five-layer biological environment our hardware was actually designed for.

Part III: The Method. How to choose, design, and conduct your own modern vision quest. What the Descent requires, what it produces, and why the ordeal that costs enough to matter is the only kind that changes anything permanently.

Part IV: The Embodied Leader What you become when you return, and how to hold it. The Silverback in the boardroom. The 90-day return protocol. The three lintels of the Inner Citadel. Part IV is about converting the clarity earned in the wilderness into the way you lead in the room, every day, against the full force of the digital world trying to pull you back.

A Warning

After reading this book, you may decide that certain comforts you have been maintaining are not worth their cost. You may look at compromises you have made at work, in your thinking, in how you lead, and find that you can no longer make the case for them that you used to.

That is not a side effect. That is the point.

The comfort zone is not a safe place. It is a place where the slow erosion happens without your noticing. This book is an argument for leaving it. Not permanently, and not recklessly, but deliberately, on your own terms, for long enough to remember who you are when the noise stops.

You are more capable than your current conditions are asking you to be. That gap between what you are capable of and what you are being asked to do is not just a waste. Left unaddressed, it becomes damage.

Let’s close it.

All proceeds from Hard: Building Your Inner Citadel are donated to registered children’s charities supporting young people, including Baby Zone and New Yorkers for Children.

Buy the book on Amazon →

Most leaders think speed is a personality trait , some people are fast, some aren’t. They’re wrong. Speed is a skill. And like every skill, there’s a learning curve most organizations haven’t even started climbing.

In psychology, the four stages of competence describe how humans learn any new skill. They apply to organizations too. And they explain why most companies are losing to competitors they think they’re better than.

Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence

You don’t know you’re slow.

This is where most organisations live. They don’t see their slowness because it’s dressed up as “rigour,” “governance,” and “due diligence.”

Days become weeks. Weeks become months of lost revenue. Then you missed your targets, burned too much cash, and now you’re letting people go. The slow decision was the expensive one, but nobody tracks it that way, so nobody learns.

The hidden costs of slow are invisible precisely because you’re not looking: carrying inventory, reworking outdated plans, managing bloated work-in-progress queues, re-recruiting the top talent who left because you made them wait.

“Let’s wait for more data” is usually code for “I’m afraid to decide.” But nobody calls it fear. They call it prudence. That’s Stage 1.

When IT says “no” too often, your team doesn’t stop. They just go underground, shadow IT, workarounds, untracked risk. You think you have control. You have theatre. “Zero risk” is a fantasy that costs you market share.

Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence

You realise speed is a thing you’re failing at.

This is the uncomfortable stage. You start measuring and the numbers are brutal.

Tiny improvements compound. A 1% edge per week is a 67% advantage by year-end. Your competitors aren’t waiting for your committee to reconvene.

Elite tech performers ship 3x as much per day and have lower failure rates. Speed and quality of decision-making are statistically correlated. Small, fast changes are easier to fix than big, slow releases.

Top talent hates friction. Remove it or they leave. It’s that simple.

You look around and realize: your executive team takes a week to greenlight tactical issues. Someone needs three approvals to do their job. People kill momentum with undetailed “concerns” that never come with probabilities, options, or mitigations. Your technology leader is playing security police instead of enabling speed. Your legal team says “No” without offering a “How.”

A 1% chance of a legal issue is not worth a 100% guarantee of missing your quarterly target.

You’re not unlucky. You’re slow. And now you know it.

Stage 3: Conscious Competence

You build the systems. It takes effort and focus.

This is where you install the operating system for speed. It works, but it requires constant attention.

Decision architecture. Every decision goes into two buckets. Type 1: irreversible, high stakes = deliberate carefully. Type 2: reversible = decide now, adjust later. Most decisions are Type 2. Most organisations treat them all as Type 1. That’s where speed dies. Push Type 2 decisions lower in the org. If your exec team is deciding tactical issues, your structure is wrong.

Demand rigour, not delay. Don’t accept vague concerns. Make people think it through: the probabilities, the options, the mitigations. Expected value (probability × all outcomes) fixes prioritization overnight. Replace “We can’t do that” with “Here’s how we can do that safely.”

Measure throughput. In every department, leads, deals, deliveries, resolutions. What gets measured accelerates.

Remove friction. No meetings without a clear decision to be made. Your product team ships regularly and publishes performance. Respond to clients faster and with more value than they expected. When you enable speed, people stay on the paved road where you can see them. Speed is visibility. And visibility is the only real security you have.

Speed is not haste. Speed is high professionalism. At this stage you’re proving that every day.

Stage 4: Unconscious Competence

Speed becomes culture. The org defaults to fast.

This is the end state. Speed stops being a programme and starts being identity. You don’t have to push people to move, the systems, habits, and hiring all reinforce it. Fast is just how things work here.

How do you get here?

Leadership sets a visible, high state of urgency, not panic, but relentless forward motion. You weaponize “disagree and commit”: debate hard, decide fast, execute fully. You train teams on speed frameworks: Type 1/Type 2 decisions, OODA loops, the five dysfunctions that kill team velocity.

You shift domain authority to small teams and let them run without interference in the how. You make speed a KPI in all reporting. You visibly reward output. You promote the doers.

The result: your organization learns and iterates faster than the market can move. You solve more complex problems in less time. You attract and retain the best people because they can feel the momentum the moment they walk in.

Speed is a competence. Most organizations are still at Stage 1.

Where are you?

References:

• Google Cloud / DORA (DevOps Research & Assessment)

  • Source of: The “Speed = Stability” findings, including the statistic that elite performers recover 6,572x faster and have a 3x lower change failure rate.

  • Accelerate State of DevOps Reports

• McKinsey & Company

  • Source of: “The Need for Speed” research showing fast organizations have 2x higher operational resilience and financial performance.

  • The need for speed in the post-COVID-19 era

• Gartner

  • Source of: The cybersecurity survey finding that 69% of employees have bypassed their organization’s guidance to get work done.

  • Gartner Survey Finds 69% of Employees Have Bypassed Cybersecurity Guidance

• Amazon (Jeff Bezos)

  • Source of: The “Type 1 vs. Type 2” decision-making framework and the “Day 1” culture concept.

  • 2016 Letter to Shareholders

• Bain & Company

  • Source of: “The Founder’s Mentality” and research on “Organizational Drag” (the $3 trillion productivity cost).

  • The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth

• Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

  • Source of: “Time-Based Competition” concepts proving that reducing time-to-market lowers overall costs.

  • Time-Based Competition (Classic Perspective)

• Colonel John Boyd

  • Source of: The OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) military strategy applied to business speed.

  • The OODA Loop Explained (Farnam Street)

• YouTube Resource (CISO Talk)

  • Source of: The argument that culture and contracting are the primary barriers to speed and security.

  • Overcoming Cultural and Contracting Barriers to Speed and Security

The Core Philosophy: The RARA Framework

Most GTM engines are flying blind. We track activity (calls made, emails sent) and lag indicators (revenue booked), but we lack the navigation system in between. We don’t know if we are actually winning the battle for attention and trust until the deal is either signed, lost or a customer churns. To build a predictable revenue engine, you need to stop asking “Are we busy?” and start asking “Do we resonate?”

This requires a shift to the RARA Framework (Relationship–Action–Relevance–Action). It re-imagines your pipeline not as a list of names, but as a battlefield map defined by two axes: Relationship (Trust) and Relevance (Context).

The Core Concept: The GTM GPS

Imagine your accounts are not rows in a spreadsheet, but dots on a radar screen.

• The Y-Axis (Relationship): How much do they trust us? (From “Who are you?” to “Trusted Ally”).

• The X-Axis (Relevance): How urgent is our solution to their current problem?

When you plot this, you get a Resonance Coordinate.

• Bottom Left: Low Trust/Low Relevance. This is the “Spam Zone.” You are noise.

• Top Right: High Trust/High Relevance. This is “Strategic Resonance.” You are the natural choice.

Your job is to mathematically move that dot toward the top right. Try it here on the link by moving the sliders: Resonance Calculator

What are the right sliders?

Operationalization

Lead scoring and customer “health scores” are standard in GTM and customer success. But they are usually run as separate systems. The work now is to join them up. The RARA lens asks you to bring these together and layer in competitive context, so you can see how strongly you actually resonate with a customer’s or prospect’s goals versus alternatives. When you combine relationship health (trust, posture, access) with relevance (right message, right time, right person) you can plot each account as a coordinate on a simple 2×2:

You cannot deliberately move toward strategic resonance unless you first know your starting coordinate. The RARA Framework forces that awareness, and then turns it into a repeatable way to select and sequence actions, that increase both trust and relevance over time. The good news is AI and automation in the hands of your RevOps and Customer Success teams can make it scale.

The Relationship Side of the Equation (Y Axis):

Relationship is not just “liking” someone; it’s a distribution channel for truth. High trust reduces the “Psychological Distance” between you and the buyer. To move up the Y-Axis, your team must stop acting like generic salespeople and adopt the right Posture.

Think of these postures like a wardrobe. You don’t wear a tuxedo to the gym. You must ‘wear’ the right persona for the context to build trust.

The 6 Postures

1. The Vendor (The Supplier): Transactional reliability. You do what you say. The foundation.

2. The Educator (The Teacher): You teach best practices (e.g., webinars). You build early credibility cheaply.

3. The Facilitator (The Simplifier): You remove friction (integrations, logistics). You create “switching costs” through ease.

4. The Advisor (The Strategist): You diagnose problems using data. You shift from teaching how to guiding what.

5. The Challenger (The Truth-Teller): You call out a strategic flaw in their thinking. High risk, high reward. This is how you displace competitors.

6. The Confidant (The Ally): You are trusted with internal politics and career goals. This is the ultimate defense against churn.

The Executive Takeaway: If your team approaches a C-level buyer with a “Vendor” posture when the moment calls for a “Challenger,” you aren’t just annoying them—you are damaging your Relationship Score.

The Relevance Side of the Equation (X Axis)

The Relevance Sliders score if you are delivering the right message, at the right time, to the right person. Relevance is the “Unsubscribe” Filter. Humans are bombarded with information. Cognitive Load Theory tells us we delete anything that isn’t immediately useful. Relevance is the passkey that bypasses the brain’s spam filter.

Relevance isn’t static. It’s a slider that moves based on four signals:

1. Contextual Fit: Identity matching. A “User” cares about features; a “VP” cares about risk. When a contact gets promoted, your message must instantly pivot.

2. Intent & Timing: The Half-Life of Interest. If a prospect visits your pricing page, they are in “evaluation mode.” If you wait 48 hours, that relevance evaporates. Speed is a feature.

3. Preference: Friction removal. If a CEO lives on LinkedIn but ignores email, sending a PDF to their inbox is functionally irrelevant. Meeting them where they are creates an immediate relevance lift.

4. Competitive Dynamics: The Contrast Effect. If your competitor is spamming generic emails, and you send a hyper-personalized, handwritten note, your relevance scores double simply by contrast.

The Maths

We can stop guessing. By combining these factors, we can calculate a specific coordinate for every account. The maths of putting this together, to create location coordinates looks like this

• Relationship Score : Measures the stability of your Trust minus the risk of competitive activity

• Relevance Score: Measures the timing and fit of your message, adjusted for how much noise your competitors are making (Share of Voice)

The Result: A clear visualization of your end to end pipeline & existing customer health. Instead of a forecast based on “gut feel,” you have a map. You can see exactly which accounts are stuck in the “Spam Zone” and prescribe the specific Next Best Action (e.g., “Shift posture to Challenger,” or “Wait for Intent Signal“) to move the dot.

Conclusion

This is not theoretical. You already have the data and some of the math in place, it’s just fragmented across CRMs, call recordings, lead scores, health scores, and marketing tools. The future of GTM is unifying these signals to automate the RARA framework. This is where HivePerform.com (a Blenheim Chalcot company) enters. HivePerform combine posture intelligence, relationship data, and relevance signals into a single workflow. The Bottom Line: You cannot navigate to a destination if you don’t know your starting coordinate. The RARA Framework gives you the map. HivePerform gives you the GPS to get there.

References

• Cognitive Load Theory: Sweller, J. (1988). “Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning.” Cognitive Science.

• Attention Economics: Davenport, T. & Beck, J. (2001). The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business.

• Social Proof: Cialdini, R. (2009). Influence: Science and Practice.

• Trust & Commitment Theory (Relationship Marketing): Morgan, R. & Hunt, S. (1994). “The Commitment–Trust Theory of Relationship Marketing.” Journal of Marketing.

• Psychological Distance / Construal Level Theory: Trope, Y. & Liberman, N. (2010). “Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance.” Psychological Review.

• The Challenger Sale: Dixon, M. & Adamson, B. (2011). The Challenger Sale.

• The Trusted Advisor: Maister, D., Green, C., Galford, R. (2000). The Trusted Advisor.

They built innovation labs, venture arms, hired Chief Digital Officers, and obsessed over agility. The goal was to build technical moats to protect them from disruption.

That era is over.

We are entering an era where innovation, specifically technical and creative capability, is being democratized to the point of commoditization. Before we discuss the solution, we need to understand the fundamental shift in the competitive landscape.

Here are the four forces dismantling the old rules of business:

1. The Collapse of “Hard” Skills

For the last 30 years, competitive advantage often came from “technical moats.” If you could write better code, design better algorithms, or produce higher-quality creative assets than your neighbor, you won.

AI flattens this.

• Coding: An innovative app idea that used to require a team of six engineers and $500k can now be prototyped by one person with an LLM in a weekend.

• Strategy: Strategic analysis that used to require McKinsey is now a 30-second prompt away.

• Creativity: High-fidelity images and copy are now commodities.

The Result: The “floor” of innovation has been raised so high that “being innovative” is now just table stakes. It is the baseline requirement to exist, not a strategy to win.

2. The “Red Queen” Effect

There is a concept from evolutionary biology (and Alice in Wonderland) called the Red Queen Hypothesis: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

If AI allows you to innovate 10x faster, but it also allows your competitor to innovate 10x faster, net competitive advantage is zero. You are both just running faster to stay in the same relative market position. Innovation becomes an operational cost, not a profit driver.

3. Where the Advantage Moves (Post-Innovation)

If inventing the solution is easy, the competitive advantage moves to things AI cannot easily replicate yet. We are seeing a shift from “Who can build it?” to “Who can verify and sell it?”

Here is where the new moats are being dug:

• Proprietary Data (The “Secret Sauce”): Everyone has the same engine (GPT-5, Claude, Gemini 3), so the car that wins is the one with the best fuel. Companies with unique, messy, non-public historical data will win because their AI will know things yours doesn’t.

• Taste and Curation: When AI generates 1,000 ideas in a minute, the value shifts to the human who has the taste to pick the one idea that culturally resonates. The scarcity is no longer generation; it is selection.

• Trust and Brand: As AI floods the world with average-to-good content and products, consumers will retreat to brands they trust. “Human-verified” or “Authentic” becomes a luxury good.

• Physical World Execution: AI can invent a better logistics route or a new product design instantly, but it cannot physically drive the truck or manufacture the widget (yet). Hard, physical infrastructure becomes a major moat again.

4. The “Implementation Gap”

There is one final friction point. Just because innovation is democratized doesn’t mean organizations can absorb it.

• The Innovation: “Here is a perfect AI agent to handle customer service.”

• The Reality: The company has 20-year-old legacy databases, strict compliance laws, and a culture that hates change.

The new competitive advantage isn’t having the innovative idea; it is the organizational agility to actually implement it without breaking everything.

A First Step

A first step could be to perform a “Friction Audit” across the legacy business: define the three most expensive, slowest, or most error-prone processes that are currently impossible to automate due to messy data or compliance fears. Instead of building a new “AI tool” in a silo, the team’s mandate becomes deep integration into one of these friction points. Their KPI shifts from “number of ventures launched” to “measurable reduction in operational friction.” This means the innovation team needs to embed themselves within the business unit, learning the legacy systems and cultural roadblocks, and using their technical expertise to weave AI into the existing fabric of the company, rather than trying to drape a new fabric over it.

Here is how I did it.

Main stats

LOCATION: Moab, UT

MILES: 239.66 miles, begins and ends

ELEVATION GAIN: 31,564’

ELEVATION LOSS: 31,564’

AID STATIONS:

• 15 full aid stations

• 5 sleep stations

The Terrain

The terrain is brutal at times, with significant vertical, building to two major peaks at 10,000 ft altitude (circa 30% less oxygen availability). In between you are running vertically down lots of rock-kicking landscapes or climbing muddy trails.

Sleep

I slept a total of 8 hours, 2 per day starting circa 22 hours after the race start. then a similar time each day, except the last where I slept at circa 3am in the morning having come down of the toughest climb. Many runners would catch sleep on the trail (see below). I never did.

Nutriton

I mainly ate Neversecond Energy Gels every 1-2 hours. I preferred them as they are watery and you can force feed yourself without really tasting them. I also ate at aid stations their chicken soup and oatmeal. I tried a beef-burger twice, one was nice and the other shut down my running for an hour. I don’t normally eat meat, but all rules go when doing something like this. Everyone is different on nutrition and I met a runner who lived on cheeseburgers for the whole race! I was surprised how little I needed to eat. I lost around 7lbs during the race but the energy gels kept my energy levels up. I drank water, electrolytes and sometimes coca cola at the aid stations. I tried coffee once, but it wasn’t enjoyable.

Strategy

Walking, marching, running, climbing.

If I walked, I marched. I didn’t walk unintentionally unless resting to drink or eat before running again. I found most people walked much faster than me, but I could march reasonably fast. I ran wherever possible on flat or downhill. I was also slower climbing that most runners. It was easy to get into the habit of not running, which I noticed many did. I resisted this by marching/making myself run the flats / downhills. I would also take timed walking-breaks, but not for long, typically a minute.

I took it slow through to half-way, passing the first major peak Shay Mountain. Only then I allowed myself to listen to music from mile 126, and try to put my foot down. This worked well with me running through most of the night and passing over 20 runners.

Then the wheels came off on the major climb from Pole Canyon to Geyser Pass. A storm hit hard and everything went wrong. What should have took me 4 hours took over 8. The section is hard climbing, breathless, at altitude. Water from the storm, turned our trails in mud and I constantly slipped and fell. Our GPX was affected and in the dark with poor trail markings I got lost several times, including heading down and losing an hour the wrong way. I tried following others but kept falling behind breathless. We summited 4 times and the cold storm hit us sideways, and even though we all wore water proofs, we ended up soaked and freezing. It was as I imagined hell would be, stuck doing something that is painful, going wrong, with no end in sight. In the early hours of the morning, around 4am, I finally escaped to Geyser Pass Aid station and slept for two hours, harrowed from the experience but now with only 40 miles left to go.

On waking for the final run to the finish, my legs wouldn’t allow me to run for the next circa 15-20 miles. At an aid station, I had my knee’s taped with 20 miles to go which got me running again. The last few miles around the Porcupine Rim trail where beautiful and felt endless, before I finally making it to the roadway in Moab with 3.6 miles to go. When you hit the road, you know you are going to finish. Finishing was a very special moment after over 4 days running in such difficult conditions.

Mindset

My mindset got me through. I had visualized & meditated a lot on how I wanted to behave when things went wrong, or felt too difficult and how to give 100% throughout the race and remove quitting as an option. This year’s Moab (2025) was unique as all runners had trained for heat; but the weather flipped into storm and flash floods, turning our routes into thick mud, and streams. This caused many to quit, give up, or run too slow to hit the cut offs. They were not trained for our conditions and so their mind’s couldn’t cope and they quit.

I used the techniques in this book to focus on calm resilience when things got really hard. Specifically focused on mantra’s of patience, courage and wisdom in decision making. I was treating the whole run as a VisionQuest, doing something incredibly hard to build and learn resilience.

Crew, Pacers.

My wife, close friend, and his partner were my crew. They accompanied me in an RV which was a real treat every day to be able to sleep and change in it. Having a crew to support makes an enormous difference to your well being, even if only seeing them every 15-24 hours. I had no pacer, though sometimes ran with other runners.

Pre-Race Training

I trained for 6 months with an experienced coach on TrainingPeaks, Rachel Bambrick. She stopped me over-training and also pushed where I wasn’t getting enough vertical in. Lots of small tips along the way helped a great deal. I highly recommend. I did a lot of vertical training, but looking back now it wasn’t specific enough. I should have done more high step/trail or step-master, this would have protected my knees on the last day and allowed me to run further. My advice on training is you have to get as specific as possible and you can’t overdo your vertical training.

Post-Race Recovery

My feet exploded in size and I couldn’t walk for two days. I had to get helped through the airport on disabled transport to get home. Eating a ton of food, sleeping a ton, and relaxing with soaking feet to recover is how my last few days have gone.

Was a wild experience. Am deeply grateful I got luckier than most runners and nothing major went wrong. Hope this is helpful to those who are seeking their own VisionQuest!

Most of us first learn this lesson through work. You show up at an organization, a hospital, a design firm, a tech startup. You offer your time, and the org pays you for it. Far from being a bad bargain, this exchange can be liberating. On your own, it might take weeks to grow vegetables or build a roof. With wages in hand, you can walk into a supermarket or sign a lease, trading hours of labor for food already harvested, for shelter already built. You get to spend your best energy on your craft, while relying on the strengths of others for the rest.

This is the quiet genius of the market: specialization and exchange. Adam Smith described it centuries ago. A factory magnifies the weaver’s hour; a distribution network magnifies the factory. Companies are leverage machines, able to turn your one hour into many. And in the process, they create communities: the colleagues who become friends, the stability of a paycheck, the sense of belonging to something larger than yourself.

But here is where the story begins to shift. For centuries, the most powerful forms of leverage: capital, machinery, intellectual property, global reach, belonged almost exclusively to large companies. If you wanted your hours to amplify more than a single pair of hands could manage, you had to hand them over or take on the many years of entrepreneurship yourself, and the high risk that is necessary to build your own leverage from scratch. (Read Atlas Shrugged or the Hard Thing About Hard Things to feel what that is like.)

Now, the tools of leverage are slipping outwards, powered by three powerful forces. Firstly, AI is enabling all the worlds intelligence to be available on demand, and in any device, lifting every other technology’s useful value too. Secondly, the fall of solar energy costs and its increasing availability ( Amazing article on that here.) And the third, social media, meaning anyone can sell directly to millions, without the need for a middleman.

A New Kind of Workshop

Look ahead a decade. By 2035, the world hums not just with factories and server farms but with small-scale machines in garages, basements, and backyards. Already, John Deere has unveiled fully autonomous tractors, and researchers at MIT have 3D printed entire houses in less than a day. The International Energy Agency has declared solar “the cheapest electricity in history,” with costs down more than 60 percent over the past decade. Home batteries can now power neighborhoods through the night.

This convergence of robotics, renewables, AI, & digital fabrication is creating a futuristic homesteading renaissance. Homes become workshops and power plants, as self-watering gardens climb kitchen walls, machines knit clothes to order, and rooftop panels hum quietly under the sun. The very levers that once belonged to billion-dollar companies are now available, at human scale, in the places we live.

The result is not a retreat into isolation, but the opposite: an explosion of local and global exchange. Families produce more of their own essentials, yes, but they also create surplus, a new kind of abundance that flows into neighborhood markets and digital platforms alike. A retired engineer in Tampa designs an open-source water filter, and households in Manila print and improve it. A mother in Lagos builds a side business in solar-charged kitchen appliances, shipping them directly across the continent.

In this world, entrepreneurship is not the exception but the everyday. Every household becomes a node in a vast network of creation and trade.

The Marketplace of Experience

As homes produce more essentials, food, energy & tools then more of our money can be used for non-essentials. Instead, we begin to purchases stories, joy, connection. The data already points there: two-thirds of global consumers now prioritize “bucket-list” experiences over goods, with affluent consumers shifting spending to travel and fulfillment, per Mastercard . Globally, the “experience economy” is booming, driven by emotional connection and memories ; even Millennials favor vacations over possessions.

By 2035, this cultural shift is magnified. Neighbors exchange small lessons, beekeeping, song-making, forest walks. Creators share workshops, recipes, music, and receive compensation directly from audiences who value those experiences.

This new economy of experience, built on decentralized, personal creation, channels passion to generate profits. Meanwhile connection with others in shared experiences now becomes a main form of consumption.

The Future of Leverage

In the 20th century, business held the tools of leverage; in the 21st, that power begins to move out to the edge - to rest with individuals. Homes become autonomous production centers, powered by AI, robotics, renewables, and digital fabrication, all tools once out of reach.

The hypothesis: That money is time, and that leverage is shifting outward, is no longer speculative. It’s already observable. Autonomous farm machinery is real; solar is affordable; personal fabrication and AI tools are everywhere.

So the question becomes: What will we spend our time on once we no longer need to sell most of it to survive?

I am betting we will turn the money store of our time back into hours of joy: laughing around dinner tables, teaching in gardens, crafting on weekends, walking beneath old trees, being fully alive. Back to being human.

What a time to be alive!

Sources:

• https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-is-now-cheapest-electricity-in-history-confirms-iea/

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity

• https://www.therobotreport.com/john-deere-harvests-the-seeds-of-large-vehicle-autonomy/

• https://www.businessinsider.com/sc/consumer-spending-is-shifting-to-purpose-passion-and-bucket-lists

• https://www.brandvm.com/post/consumer-spending-trends-2025

First, congratulations. You’ve earned the opportunity to lead not just with your results, but with your presence. And now comes the most powerful, misunderstood, and underused lever at your disposal: mindset.

Humans are unique. Just the idea of something bigger than themselves can drive people to work through the night, put up with failure again and again, take bold risks, and even put others first. In a world shaped by AI, rapid change, and now daily ambiguity, you’re going to need exactly that from your team: conviction, courage, and belief. In the mission, and in you.

Most people think of mindset as something individual, a personal asset you “work on” quietly. But now, your mindset is not just yours. It’s contagious. It sets the tempo. It shapes culture more than any quarterly review or KPI dashboard. It multiplies performance, or bottlenecks it, every week.

Neuroscience tells us the brain operates in one of two primary states: threat or challenge. Under threat, the amygdala floods the system with cortisol, narrowing perception, shutting down creativity, and driving reactivity. But under challenge, the prefrontal cortex lights up, enabling problem-solving, motivation, flexible thinking, and trust. You, as a leader, influence which system activates - not just with your words, but with your tone, posture, cadence, and the way you emotionally hold your team’s experience.

Every interaction you lead is an opportunity to shape mindset. The way you open a Monday call, respond to a mistake on Wednesday, or tell the story when results fall short - these are not throwaway moments. These are the moments that make the results happen.

Leadership is not about masking uncertainty or powering through with pressure. That just shuts people down. It narrows their capacity to think, and pushes them back toward what’s familiar, even if it’s not working. Real leadership is about modeling reflection, emotional regulation, and grounded clarity. It’s about helping your team move from reactivity to response and comfortable dealing with truth as their norm, especially in dealing with each other.

So think of your meetings not as obligations, but as mindset activators. Done right, they become rituals that cultivate a challenge response, build trust, and create room for new ideas to take root.

And there’s a tool most leaders overlook: awe.

Awe reduces self-focus, quiets the ego, and expands our sense of what’s possible. Even 60 seconds of awe, a NASA image, a story of overcoming, a walk under the stars, has been shown to increase empathy, cooperation, and humility. This isn’t fluff. It’s neuro cognitive realignment. Awe shifts us from survival mode into perspective. When your team loses theirs, bring awe to the table.

Whether it’s a start-up fighting for traction, or a corporate team battling to make change, the story you tell, the why behind the work will catalyze a mindset shift. It can turn exhaustion into drive, and fear into forward motion.

Ask yourself often: How am I, in the eyes of my team?

Mirror neuron research shows that observing another’s emotion activates the same neural networks in the observer. What you model emotionally, especially under pressure, becomes the unspoken language of your team. Optimism, paired with accountability, becomes rocket fuel. Your calm presence, and grit, becomes becomes culture.

So your job now is to be the keeper of mindset. Train others to see setbacks differently. Design cadences where people leave meetings with more clarity and courage than when they entered. Build cultures that value presence as much as output. Lead people not by shielding them from difficulty, but by teaching them how to stand inside the fire, even enjoy it, and grow.

That’s what great leaders do. They don’t just scale businesses, they scale humans.

Keep this close. And remember: the most powerful shift you can lead is the invisible one - the one that changes how people think, what they believe, and how they show up, together.

Meeting by meeting. Moment by moment. That’s how you move a company.

Onward,
Lee

PS, here is one of my favorite examples of leadership & coaching. You don’t have to deliver it in this style, always create your own authentic one. But you do want to create this level of energy and performance.

Teddy Atlas & Tim Bradley "We are Fireman!"

We walk into our weekly meetings with polished presentations, convinced we’re purely rational and in full control. Yet we operate much like old-world primates. Wired to notice high-status figures, unconsciously jockey for attention, and let subtle hormonal cues influence us. None of this is inherently bad; it’s just our inherited hardware. But if we ignore these impulses, they can quietly steer decisions without our awareness.

Research (see references at the end) confirms that the same primal drives that govern a primate troop-dominance, alliance-building, and bias toward “silverbacks”, appear in our meetings. We imagine expertise is all that matters, but survival strategies still bubble up behind the scenes. High-status individuals naturally command more attention, and attractive people often gain extra mindshare. Multiply that by a dozen hidden biases, and even well-educated teams can skid off course. I see it firsthand: as one of those “silverbacks,” my influence can overshadow others. I don’t always succeed at reining myself in, and sometimes I overpower colleagues despite my best intentions. Yet recognizing these patterns is the first step toward more balanced, collaborative decisions.

So how do we keep these primal responses from hijacking the conversation? One promising solution that is emerging is to let AI serve as a “third eye,” quietly monitoring data and dynamics in real-time. Picture an impartial assistant that tracks who’s speaking, who’s drowning out quieter voices, or whether we keep drifting off into tangents. By structuring the meeting around frameworks like SPQA - State, Policy, Questions, Action, we anchor ourselves in evidence rather than raw hunches. AI can tap us on the shoulder when we’re about to overlook something crucial or give in to groupthink or the bosses uninformed, but well meaning direction.

Imagine you’re engrossed in a heated debate over budget cuts. Old-school instincts might push the loudest alpha forward; maybe the CFO’s emotional pitch takes center stage by default. But if the AI promptly flashes a simple metric, like projected ROI or the real cost-benefit ratio, everyone regains perspective. Now, it’s not just about who roars the loudest but whether we’re staying tethered to what truly drives value.

It might feel mechanical at first, lists, reminders, algorithms highlighting neglected viewpoints. But consider how many times we’ve walked out of a meeting unsure if we truly heard all sides. Or how often a brilliant idea dies on the vine because the quieter person, overshadowed by a “silverback,” never got the floor. AI doesn’t destroy the free-flow of discussion; it points out blind spots so we can harness our better judgment, creativity, and empathy. Qualities that define the best of humanity rather than the most basic of primate behavior.

And that’s the real opportunity: day by day, as we integrate these tools and cultivate self-awareness, we raise our collective performance. We stop clinging to old impulses as if they’re unchangeable fate. Instead, we adapt, we collaborate, and we make decisions that reflect our highest goals, not our hidden biases. It’s not about becoming reliant. It’s about delivering our mission, paying attention to the wisdom in the room, no matter their level, and leaving each meeting with a sense that we’ve harnessed both data and human connection to get the best possible result.

To get started, below is an example prompt you can run in your weekly meeting:

Unified SPQA Prompt (For ChatGPT)

### Instructions for ChatGPT

You are an AI assistant helping to prepare a **Weekly Management Meeting** using the **SPQA (State, Policy, Questions, Action)** framework. The user has provided two types of information:

**1** **STATE folder data** (e.g., weekly reports, event trackers, transcripts of meetings, operational snapshots, sales results, performance metrics).

**2** **POLICY folder data** (e.g., budgets, quarterly/annual OKRs, KPI targets, compliance requirements).

⠀Use the following steps to analyze the conversation and generate a single, coherent output for the meeting. Note that this meeting is attended by a leadership team, & your output should be written **directly for them**—that is, you are producing a meeting plan, not a user-facing explanation of how to run a meeting.

Step 1: STATE

1 Summarize key metrics, project updates, and notable highlights from the STATE folder:

* **Performance Indicators** (revenues, pipeline, churn, marketing conversions).

* **Recent Project/Operational Updates** (events, progress on strategic initiatives).

* **Risks, Bottlenecks, or Delays** (unresolved tasks, resource constraints).

* **Positive Outcomes** (major deals closed, successes worth replicating).

2 Provide succinct bullet points or short paragraphs, or interesting graphs that highlight what has changed or requires management attention.

Step 2: POLICY

1 Cite the relevant **OKRs** or **KPI targets** from the POLICY folder:

* For example, if the user’s documents mention “East Division” and “North America” pipeline goals, incorporate those numeric targets.

2 Include **budget constraints** or resource limitations that might affect decision-making.

3 Mention **compliance** or governance guidelines if the user’s policy documents specify them.

⠀**Note**: You only need to reference the policy items that are actually relevant to the updates found in the STATE data.

Step 3 & 4 (Combined): QUESTIONS + ACTIONS

Create **six categories** of question-action pairs, **merging** the typical Step 3 (Questions) and Step 4 (Proposed Actions) into a single section for clarity. Each category corresponds to a critical focus area for the meeting, and each question should be followed immediately by a set of proposed actions. Here are the **six categories**:

**1** **On-Track Status**

* **Question**: Are the current metrics on pace with the POLICY targets (e.g., pipeline, deals, churn)?

* **Proposed Actions**: (List bullet actions or short paragraphs.)

**2** **Successes and Working Initiatives**

* **Question**: Which initiatives from the STATE data are going well and why?

* **Proposed Actions**:

**3** **Failures and Challenges**

* **Question**: Which efforts are lagging or facing major hurdles?

* **Proposed Actions**:

**4** **Unaddressed Items**

* **Question**: Which tasks or deliverables remain incomplete from last week, and what’s blocking them?

* **Proposed Actions**:

**5** **Next Steps and Focus**

* **Question**: Based on the STATE vs. POLICY comparison, what do we need to accomplish in the next 1–2 weeks to stay on track?

* **Proposed Actions**:

**6** **Future Outlook**

* **Question**: Are there upcoming external or internal changes that require a POLICY update or resource shift?

* **Proposed Actions**:

⠀When writing these sections, always **reference** the relevant STATE and POLICY data, and propose **concrete** next steps (who should do what, by when, or which resources to reallocate).

Additional Requirements

**1** **Use Short Headings and Bullets** whenever possible to keep the output concise and scannable for a six-person management team.

**2** **Cite** the user’s documents (STATE or POLICY) where relevant, but do not overwhelm the text with references. Summaries are usually enough.

3 If the user’s transcript or the user’s data mention specific staff members (e.g., “John,” “Samantha,” “Emily,” etc.), try to tie them into the proposed actions (e.g., “Assign John to finalize event budget.”).

4 Keep the language **action-oriented** and **solution-focused**. The final output is effectively a “meeting briefing” that the user’s management team can walk through step-by-step.⠀

Example Output Structure (For ChatGPT)

Here is a **template** for how your final structured response should look:

### markdown

CopyEdit

Weekly Management Meeting Output (SPQA)

1. State

- Key Metrics

- Updates on Projects

- Risks / Delays

- Wins / Positives

2. Policy

- OKRs / Targets

- Budget & Constraints

- Relevant Compliance / Governance

3 & 4. Questions + Proposed Actions

3.1 On-Track Status

Question:

Proposed Actions:

3.2 Successes & Working Initiatives

Question:

Proposed Actions:

3.3 Failures & Challenges

Question:

Proposed Actions:

3.4 Unaddressed Items

Question:

Proposed Actions:

3.5 Next Steps & Focus

Question:

Proposed Actions:

3.6 Future Outlook

Question:

Proposed Actions:

Appendix

Recommendations for Leadership Teams (podcast transcript extract report):

1. Design the Workplace for “Focused Foraging”

   • Action: Eliminate constant pings and pop-ups; schedule “deep work” blocks without Slack/email interruptions.

   • Why: Continuous partial attention degrades decisions. A calmer “resource environment” (fewer digital distractions) lets the team explore ideas more productively.

2. Slow Down High-Stakes Decisions

   • Action: Build in a “pause” for big calls: re-check data, ask a neutral AI “devil’s advocate” to identify contrary signals.

   • Why: High arousal or time pressure triggers shortcuts and mistakes. Pausing ensures the team weighs true signal over noise.

3. Foster Trust and Synchrony

   • Action: Incorporate short but meaningful “fast-friend” or “deeper conversation” prompts at meetings (e.g., two genuine minutes each to share a personal win or lesson).

   • Why: Brief, face-to-face, emotionally aware interactions build the empathic circuits that promote alignment and help groups coordinate better.

4. Leverage Status Cues Wisely

   • Action: Recognize that visible “symbols” (e.g., someone’s fancy title or office) alter group dynamics. Use them intentionally or reduce them to flatten hierarchies when collaboration is essential.

   • Why: Humans (like monkeys) pay extra attention to high-status figures. Excessive status gaps can stifle diverse input.

5. Team Composition: Balance Explorers and Focusers

   • Action: Assess team profiles for people with high “creative exploration” vs. methodical focus. Pair them so each project benefits from both.

   • Why: “Explorers” spark innovation but risk distraction; “Focusers” excel at refining and finishing. Good results come from bridging both mindsets.

6. Employ GenAI as a “Third Focus”

   • Action: Use AI dashboards or bots that collate real-time KPIs, parse meeting transcripts, highlight unaddressed concerns, or run “scenario tests.”

   • Why: By offloading grunt work, AI frees teams to do deeper social bonding and high-level strategy.

7. Reward Pro-Social Behavior

   • Action: Publicly acknowledge or reward knowledge-sharing, help given to peers, cross-silo cooperation.

   • Why: Reflects the “social ledger” principle; encouraging reciprocal giving fortifies team unity and morale.

Why These Lessons Matter in Business

1. Brain Wiring Explains Workplace Biases

   • Much of what we call “office politics” is old world primate hierarchy logic: high-stress environments exaggerate status fights.

2. Attention Is Finite

   • Business demands often push people to multitask. Research shows too many “inputs” degrade group accuracy and creativity.

3. Team Social Bonds Increase Performance

   • Oxytocin, empathy, and “mirroring” behaviors can be harnessed. People who feel psychologically safe in teams take better risks and adapt to new challenges together.

4. Decision-Making Improves With Right Context

   • By managing speed-accuracy trade-offs, offering deliberate “deep dive” sessions, and using AI as a check, leaders reduce impulsive errors.

5. GenAI as a Neutral Mediator

   • A well-structured AI platform can highlight data without human status bias, help unify teams around facts, and provide suggested courses of action without ego battles.

Ultimately, these social-neuroscience principles underscore that teams thrive when leaders shape an environment that aligns with human biology—reducing needless threat signals, promoting trust, and reducing noise. Adding GenAI into the mix can reinforce or accelerate that alignment, ensuring decisions reflect true priorities rather than reflexes.

References:

• https://newsletter.danielmiessler.com/

• https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/how-hormones-status-shape-our-values-decisions-dr-michael-platt

  • Podcast Summary:

    • Humans as “Old World Primates”

      • We share many neural circuits with other old-world primates (e.g., macaques).

      • Nearly every behavioral or cognitive phenomenon (attention, social interaction, decision-making) has parallels between humans and monkeys, demonstrating deep evolutionary roots.

    • Swiss Army Knife vs. Supercomputer Brain

      • The human brain is often (mis)described as a supercomputer. A more apt metaphor is a 30-million-year-old “Swiss Army Knife,” full of specialized mental tools.

      • Evolution selects for these specialized circuits (e.g., attention to social threats, cues to hierarchy, mating signals) rather than a broad, purely general computing system.

    • Attention as a Limited Resource

      • Attention is about prioritizing what matters most; we shift our gaze or “mental spotlight” to relevant objects or people.

      • Stimuli that are bright, moving, or socially salient (e.g., faces, strong emotions) naturally hijack our attention.

      • Digital, busy environments can lead to chronic partial attention and "multitasking," lowering deep focus and decision quality.

    • Foraging Theory of Task Switching

      • Decision-making has parallels to ecological foraging: should we stay or go? (a.k.a. “the Marginal Value Theorem”).

      • We leave a “patch” (a task, website, or social context) when it falls below the average “reward rate” in the environment.

      • With abundant options (fast internet, multiple phone apps), we constantly switch (a trait increasingly amplified by modern technology).

    • Speed-Accuracy Trade-Off

      • Under time pressure or fatigue, people make fast decisions prone to error.

      • Taking more time allows a more thorough evidence-accumulation process, reducing noise and mistakes.

      • Environments or tasks that artificially press “urgency” can exploit or disrupt this process.

    • Impact of Hormones on Behavior

      • Oxytocin: reduces anxiety (anxiolytic), increases prosocial behaviors (trust, generosity, social synchrony), and can flatten social hierarchies by lowering fear and status threats.

      • Testosterone: increases risk-taking, intensifies existing personality traits (e.g., more impulsivity, bigger displays of dominance).

      • Social Signaling: Humans read subtle hormonal cues (e.g., facial fullness in women during ovulation) often below conscious awareness.

    • Monkey “Pay-Per-View” Experiments (“Monkey Porn”)

      • Monkeys will pay juice to look at high-status or sexually relevant images (e.g., swollen perineum indicating fertility).

      • This mirrors how humans respond to celebrity endorsements or attractive imagery—showing that deep “reward circuitry” is triggered by social or sexual cues.

      • These experiments illustrate how “inherent value” can attach to certain stimuli with evolutionary significance (status, fertility).

    • Social Accounts, Grooming, & Reciprocity

      • Monkeys groom each other in equitable patterns over time, tracking who “owes” grooming to whom.

      • Neurophysiological data show that monkeys (and humans) maintain social “ledgers”—a mental account of cooperation or helpful acts.

      • Humans do similar “text reciprocity,” gift giving, or acts of service. When these accounts are out of balance, relationships suffer.

    • Emotional & Group Synchrony

      • During positive in-group interactions, group members’ brain and physiological activity (heart rate, breathing) synchronize, fostering deeper cohesion.

      • Oxytocin helps align group behavior and “mirroring,” enabling better group decision-making and trust.

      • This neural synchrony underlies the “chemistry” of great teams or meaningful relationships.

    • Brand Loyalty & Status Cues

    • Neural circuits for social bonding and empathy also activate for brands.

    • Apple vs. Samsung experiments showed that Apple users displayed real “empathy” for Apple’s fortunes, while Samsung users felt mostly “anti-Apple” sentiments and less bonding with Samsung itself.

    • This effect underscores how brand communities function similarly to in-groups in a tribal sense.

    11. Irrationality & Bounded Rationality

    • People’s decisions may appear irrational in modern contexts but often reflect “ecological rationality” adapted to ancestral environments.

    • We have limited attentional and energetic resources (bounded rationality) and rely on subconscious shortcuts (heuristics) that can be exploited (e.g., urgency or fear marketing).

    12. Social Media, Meme Stocks, & Herd Behavior

    • Observing others’ enthusiasm (or panic) can whip up collective bubbles (e.g., GameStop saga, cryptocurrency hype).

    • Strong theory-of-mind sensitivity or “fear of missing out” (FOMO) can override objective data.

    • More socially “impaired” individuals in experiments actually avoided groupthink and performed better in bubble markets, highlighting how group biases can be detrimental to rational investing.

    13. Practical Implications for Business & Leadership

    • Team Synchrony: Encourage face-to-face, pro-social rituals for trust-building and creative alignment.

    • Managing Speed-Accuracy: Slow down critical decisions; let external checks (e.g., coach, neutral AI) help under fatigue or urgency.

    • Leveraging Status Cues: Carefully handle power dynamics; flatten hierarchies to reduce stifling fear or friction.

    • Attention Engineering: Use design (bigger “positive” fonts, calmer channels) to shift attention away from losses or noise.

    • Balancing Exploration & Exploitation: Identify who is more creative vs. methodical; harness both traits in the right mixture.

• Glimcher, P. W. (2003). Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain: The Science of Neuroeconomics. MIT Press.

• Platt, M. L., & Hayden, B. Y. (2016). Origins of the Brain’s Valuation System. In Neuroeconomics (2nd ed.), Academic Press, pp. 3-20.

• Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131.

• Chang, S. W. C., Brent, L. J. N., Adams, G. K., Klein, J. T., Pearson, J. M., Watson, K. K., & Platt, M. L. (2013). Neuroethology of primate social behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(Supplement 2), 10387–10394.

• Nae, G., Camerer, C. F., & Platt, M. (2018). Social and hormonal factors in decision-making. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 19(8), 499–509.

• Falk, E. B. et al. (2022). Brain coupling and shared experiences in communication. [Various fMRI-based team synchrony papers from the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania.]

• Harbaugh, W. T., Mayr, U., & Burghart, D. R. (2007). Neural responses to taxation and voluntary giving reveal motives for charitable donations. Science, 316(5831), 1622–1625.