Not diagnosably crazy. Just — off. Eccentric. Beyond the pale of what your strategic mind can sanction. It troubles you. It doesn’t fit the persona you have been creating. It is subversive to who you think you have to be in the world.

That’s the part I want to talk about.

I decided to become a pastor before I decided to become an engineer. The engineering came second, on purpose. A five-year slog in the school of engineering in Croatia, chosen deliberately, as a ticket into a graduate program in the United States where I could train for something entirely different. My crazy gave orders to my strategic mind.

That was thirty-odd years ago — one shape the crazy took. I'm not a pastor now. There have been several more since.

Back then I told my father about my adventure into faith. “I hear the music,” I said. He looked at me with a painful smile. Years later I said the same four words to Vesna’s parents, the day they sat me down to find out who their daughter was about to marry. The same painful smile.

Around that same time, Sonja — my first girlfriend and first kiss from middle school — watched me go through the ring of fire that becoming religious put me through. When I was down, beaten, about to give up, she told me: “Samir, there are some things worth standing for against the whole world.”

At that time, Vesna’s family and mine could not occupy the same room. We had two weddings. Two ceremonies. Two best men and maids of honor. Four roasted lambs, twice. Two sets of “I dos.” Each family pretending the other did not exist.

When we went to the airport to fly out to America, both families stood there together for the first time, to send us off. There is a photograph from that day. Vesna studies family photographs — where people stand, who’s touching whom, what their bodies are signaling — she says it tells you everything about the power moving through the relationships. In this one, both families are standing together, dumbfounded. Most of them are crying, or about to. Vesna and I are smiling, and neither of us could say why, except that we heard the music, and were ready to venture out.

The world is wild. Fierce, indifferent, larger than your agenda. And so are you. The wildness out there is symmetrical to something in each of us. You were not made for a tame world because you were not made to be tamed.

This wild part of us is the holy part of us. Forget that; they are the same. To be holy is to be wild!

That’s why you cannot name your crazy too early — the moment you name it, you have it under control, which means the wild is slipping away. So, you are stuck with living it.

You mostly encounter this crazy as a surprise — when someone sees it, they resonate, you resonate, as you feel the shock of being seen.

Some people say they believe in God. Some say they don’t believe in God. God says, “Who cares whether you believe in me or not? I don’t. I care whether you are paying attention and living alive.”

You have probably figured it out by now: You are not special. So get over it — but know that you are irreplaceable in your particularity.

You hear something we don’t hear. You imagine something we don’t imagine. You embody something we don’t embody. I am not giving you or me a compliment. It is a fact about your particularity; it means we are missing something without you.

If you have something to add to our conversation as humans — and you do — we need you to come out.

You owe us your crazy.

My patron saint David Bowie sings: turn your face to strange.

Including the strange in you. I know — you turn away from it because it feels like too much. I know — people gossip about your too-muchness. Turn your face to it anyway. Respect it. Offer it.

My Irish poet friend Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin wrote a poem called The Virtuoso about refusing to apologize for your own gift.

I don’t care if you’re sorry,
nor do you even, anymore.
Why atone for your gifts?
Express remorse for
your ability, begging
pardon in public? 

Be instead, the
unrepentant virtuoso!
For you choose to stand
showing us the spirit stir,
then fill and overflow
within you.
 
The spirit does not
ask forgiveness,
nor permission.
And upon your stage
You can do no wrong.
 
Get out of the way,
we love what you have
and need no reminder
of our sentence here
on earth, please,
just set us free.

We don’t care if you are sorry.

We need you.

What is your virtuosity?

My friend Melissa Hefferlin, who is a professional painter, whose husband is a professional painter, and whose stepson is a professional painter, says everyone is an artist, and everyone deserves fans. Playfulness, she believes, is as profound as seriousness, and creativity is the defining gesture of being human.

We also receive wildness from a story larger than us. In my case, cooking found me before I found it — my parents were fanatics, and life gave me ten thousand kitchen hours before I was sixteen. I did not choose it. It chose me. But it was mine, my epic ordinary to keep.

Now. About cringe. Cringe is how we experience visibility. We would rather show up cool, because cool keeps us invulnerable. It commits to nothing. We have built an entire culture around making fun of earnest people. To believe in something, visibly, to want something, openly, to try something grand — that is cringe.

I often think, courage feels like fear. Equally, passion feels like cringe.

When I was a teenager in Zagreb, a few of us would cram into a beat-up car, smoking oregano (dealer convinced us otherwise) and dreaming of walking on the wild side in New York City. Ridiculous. Whoever does anything they see as significant has to outlive the embarrassment. You want what my friend Jordan calls a New Renaissance? It starts in mud, he says.

Get ready to be ridiculous to both yourself and others.

My friend Viji Sarah Boloico just did exactly this. Recently, she spent three days alone in total darkness — no phone, no clock, no light — a new single mother from a conservative religious background, and then she published all of it: the weeping on the floor, the old hymns she didn’t know she still knew, twerking on her yoga mat in the dark, and a vibrator she’d named Joey. She could have written the tasteful version. She wrote the true one instead. Viji is paying her cringe tax here, not to get your attention, but to take a risk of being herself.

My friend Rod manages fortunes for the wealthy and gives away nearly all of his own. Franciscan cross under the suit, sandals on littered asphalt far into the fall, a hug made of words for everyone who walks in. His crazy is a conviction he won't file down — that joy, kindness, and justice are the only sane response to life. He believes the world can be changed, and he lives as if it already is.

There was someone — maybe when you were young — who came to you and spoke in a way that cost them something. They paid attention to you, gave you time, and spoke in the epic language about your ordinary life. They told you what they saw in you. And you hid those words or that smile or that caring touch inside. They did not have to do that — say significant words — but they did. They paid their cringe tax to give you something you still carry inside. (I am 60 and my crazily kind friend Matt Stone still dares to do it for me.)

Now go be that person to someone else. That’s a good excuse to take these risks.

Go out of your way, find new words, dare to say to others, “I see you.”

The worst thing in the world is not to cringe. The worst thing in the world is to hide.

The best thing in the world is not to be successful. The best thing in the world is to see and be seen by the world.

So live alive. Be too much.

MORE

Reading about being seen is one thing. Here’s an hour of the real thing.

An Hour To Be Seen — we talk, and we write you a one-page story of this moment in your epic ordinary life at www.epicordinary.com.

Harvest Your Story — 90 min WORKSHOP to help you stop telling your tired story and start being seen at www.epicordinary.com/monthly-workshop

A version of this piece becomes a chapter in my forthcoming book, SEEN: The Story of Your Epic Ordinary Life. Subscribe to The New Glossary, and I’ll keep you posted.

1. Register for a Book Salon: When We Walk By. Soon, the dumb evil we are dealing with will be brought down, and we will dance on the streets. Let’s give substance to our joy by learning how to better care for each other. Order a printed, audio, or e-book copy and dive in right away!

2. Join me for Renaissancing hour. I know you wonder what this might be.

3. Download 5 Principles of Telling Your (or Your Loved One’s) Life Story. We tested these with hundreds of people who found the nerve to say their lives out loud. It can change the way you think about the most important story you’ll ever tell.

And now, to the article “A Nifty Lil’ Drawing You Got There: Which life do you want to live?”:

Five years ago, my older daughter Ena walked into my office asking, “Dad, what do you actually do?”

She was applying to a graduate school in social work. My wife has been a social worker her whole career. Me? With years as an engineer, a pastor, a management consultant, and a life and leadership coach, I was operating in a blurrier area. Transformation? That sounded really blurry.

I felt caught by her question, with no direct answer or explanation about the many ways I have been helping people over the past thirty years.

No, really, what was I doing and who was I? The word “impostor” came to mind.

For decades, I had a question growing at the center of my life for which I couldn’t articulate an answer. It has been following me like a stray kitten, as a fire in my brain, and as a dream waking me up at night, sometimes with dread, sometimes with laughter.

Years passed like this. Decades. I couldn’t name the riddle that has organized my heart. All the while, the experience hadn’t been frustrating. Instead, it has been magnetic, pulling me forward and connecting me with people I needed to meet and experiences I needed to have. Tortured and happy, I was in love, obsessed with something I couldn’t name.

To name it at any point earlier in my life would have been too early. But now, when Ena stood before me with her gorgeous, young curiosity and power, I sensed the moment had come to face what I couldn’t face for so long and name it right there and then.

As I have done a thousand times before, I picked up a pen and one of the 3 x 5 cards I always carry in my pocket and said, “This is what’s going on.” Holding the pen in my right hand and pressing down the card with my left, I still did not know what I was going to draw or say.

This conversation was an improvisation, a loving play between a father and a daughter, so I drew and said what I had never drawn or said before.

I said, “There’s life you can control, and then there’s life you can live. I help people live a life greater than what they can control.”

Years of personal struggle and professional experimentation came to this moment of release, an answer birthing itself within the safe space held by the pure, loving presence of my daughter.

“The way I see it, crossing this line and learning to live this greater life is the most important journey a human being can take. I help people do that.”

I sensed an archangel in the room with wings spread over us, as a surge of new clarity and fresh energy for the years to come rushed in.

She said, “Oh, okay.”

She walked from the doorway to where I was sitting, put her elbows on my shoulders, pointed her index finger toward the table, said, “That’s a nifty ‘lil drawing you got there,” and left.

I looked at the stick figures. One person, a hero of their domain, in a power position with their arms on their hips, declaring, “I can do this!”

Across the line, the other stick figure, a person with arms extended up in wonder and faith, saying, “How exciting!”

Which life do you want?

Whom do you want to become?

I looked at the card the next morning and many mornings after that, beginning to realize how different, difficult, and utterly delightful this larger territory is. It is, veritably, the greater life.

I first began using it to help others. Then, in assisting myself in my times of despair, and when I needed to let myself experience joy. When isolated and when connected. In my prayers and in my writing. Turning my attention from my maps to the landscape of life.

As I went, the territory changed, like those restored ecosystems that wide-eyed entrepreneurs adopt and nourish, where flora and fauna return to health and entirely new forms of life appear.

Again, an invitation to participate in what I’m doing:

1. Register for a Book Salon: When We Walk By. Soon, the dumb evil we are dealing with will be brought down, and we will dance on the streets. Let’s give substance to our joy by learning how to better care for each other. Order a printed, audio, or e-book copy and dive in right away!

   

2. Join me for Renaissancing hour. I know you wonder what this might be.

   

3. Download 5 Principles of Telling Your (or Your Loved One’s) Life Story. We tested these with hundreds of people who found the nerve to say their lives out loud. It can change the way you think about the most important story you’ll ever tell.

   

The original of the article below was recently published in the Developing Leaders Quarterly and is behind the journal’s paywall.

“He who travels gently, travels safely; and he who travels safely, travels far.”
~ Joseph Thompson, Scots Explorer in 19th Century

In his 1949 tome, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell synthesized his massively influential mythic model of the ‘Hero’s Journey’. Even if you don‘t know it by name, you know it in substance. From the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh written around 2100 BC, through Homer‘s Iliad to Star Wars, Harry Potter, and almost every Hollywood movie, the Hero‘s Journey format endures in how we narrate our lives and decipher our leadership challenges.

The vast majority of stories in the West are one version or another of the Hero‘s Journey. Campbell, somewhat obliviously, labels it and praises it as a monomyth. The Hero’s Journey has incredible explanatory power of our experiences. Yet, human experiences can give rise to different explanations and stories. At the moment, we are in danger of finding ourselves on the depleted soil of a monomyth. (Discover more about the strengths and drawbacks of the Hero’s Journey in this related article This Is Not Your Story).

Over the years, this has led me to imagine what could be another kind of journey and story conflict that we need now - one that is more accurate about our present condition and more generative for our times.

I have been experimenting with the concept of the Immigrants’ Journey in leadership development contexts with delightful results. It goes like this: We are immigrating into the future.

Stuck Heroes

When my daughter, Leta, was on her hero’s journey in the dragon-land of her high school, at the very same time, I was on my hero’s journey of slaying my dragon. I was to become a New York City teenage daughter’s parent. She, trapped in thinking this story was all about her dealing with the challenges of clueless parents and the magical yet treacherous world of her high school, and I, trapped in thinking this story was all about me dealing with the crowning mid-life task of protecting and passing on the wisdom to my posterity. Two stuck heroes.

I thought, “what if I cease seeing this as my journey?” So, I told her, “We have never had this relationship before. I don’t know what I’m doing. You don’t know what you are doing. Let’s help each other immigrate into territory that’s new for both of us.”

I told her, “Look, we are entering this world where I’m learning to be a teenager’s parent, and you’re learning to be an adult. It’s new for you. It’s new for me. I feel lost. You feel lost. What if there’s no need for this push and pull to see whether you can deal with me or I can deal with you? Let’s invite ourselves to immigrate to a new place where we both dare to experience being different. It would be a step into a new land where you and I would be displaced. Do you want to do this?”

Every story needs a conflict, and we had a better conflict. Instead of heroes needing villains and victims, the challenge was in us discovering and entering a new way of seeing, doing, and relating.

We crossed the threshold into the unknown. The heaviness lifted, and fresh air enveloped us. This was quite a different story. Mobilizing, sturdy, dangerous, and joyful. It was exciting! The new perspective affected my parenting from then on and fundamentally changed us. Today, we are still leading and following each other.

We took the Immigrants’ Journey. Notice the plural pronoun.

I now approach my life, love, and leadership differently. I adjust how I see who we are and who we are becoming. With heroes, villains, and victims in cameo roles, I found myself in a place of far more possibilities. I started using this concept in my executive coaching, consulting, and speaking. There were stuck heroes everywhere I turned.

Another Kind of Journey

In contrast to the Hero’s Journey, the Immigrants’ Journey is not sequential or neat. It resembles life more closely. We are all invited to live lives greater than we can control and lead others to learn to do the same. So, Campbell’s 17 steps have not fallen into place. There are no stages. Anything can happen at any time, anywhere and we find stability in our common human capacity to respond to life in real-time, re-interpret our past, and have grounded faith in the future. We do not roadmap. We wayfind.

Wayfinding is an irreducibly human capacity to live, love, or lead through uncertainty. It confronts us with the astonishing fact of being here now, insists on giving meaning to our experience, and meets our needs for belonging and becoming. In contrast to road-mapping or GPSing, which detach us from the landscape, wayfinding is a skill of leading as we go. There is always a new way.

Wayfinding, the earliest human capacity to move from known to unknown, has been well-researched by anthropology and neuroscience. Every species has its umwelt (one of those nifty German words) directly translated as “world-around.” It conveys the uniqueness of the species’ genius. We, humans, have this one thing that separates us from every other species: Left to ourselves, we walk into the unknown, befriend it, and learn to delight in it. We can’t help it. It took us a mere 20,000 years from grunting about our plan to catch dinner together to developing the theories about the universe’s consciousness. We are wayfinders.

Immigrant is a contemporary and more recognizable word for wayfinder. We continuously find a new home, take on new responsibilities, and become someone new.

Wayfinding has been our way since time immemorial. The very first human power was to find ourselves curious or frightened enough to get out of the confines of our shelters. Then we walked to the end of the familiar territory, then forward and forward again, learning to survive and thrive by finding a way we have never been on before. Walking, talking, inventing fire, the wheel, mirrors, juicing, soccer, computing all came as we went about our real business of befriending the unknown.

The true gift of wayfinding is not the arrival at the destination. It is who we become along the way. It is not that we have been finding a way out there; it is that we have changed as we did. Our wayfinding is as inner as it is outer. Yes, our world’s problems seem insurmountable. We know we cannot simply do what we have done in the past. But we are not doomed. Here is the good news: we are not the same humans we were back then and can do something we have never done before.

One more thing. In more personal terms, wayfinding is also about learning your particular way of traveling toward your horizon. Whenever we cross a critical threshold, we enter the unknown realm and temporarily disorientate. We become inner-life wayfinders as we discover the creativity that can only come with the experience of being a bit lost.

Immigrating is about knowing how to take your next very ordinary step, and then next, and then next, alone and in the company, always learning, always looking back to the pliable past and forward with our hearts tethered to the horizon that is calling. Knowing how to travel well may be the best definition of happiness. And to help others learn to do the same, the most rewarding view of leadership.

There is one non-negotiable quality of a leader. Having faith in the future. You have to believe that the unknown will not only serve new dangers and challenges but also supply you with new energy, truth, and joy. None of us have any business leading without this sort of faith in ourselves, others, and the world. As Michael Margolis, the leading authority on narratives for disruption, puts it, “Disruption sucks. So, give people faith in the future.”

You, an Immigrant

Before we go on, a clarification.

We think of immigrants as other people. Those of us who have been in a stable geographical configuration are not used to thinking of ourselves as immigrants. But we are. We all are.

We are all displaced. Whether or not someone is from this company, community, or country does not matter. Everything around us is shifting. It is not that we have moved into a different place; it is that a different place has surrounded us. Look back. We are not where we were a year ago or even a month ago. Transition upon transition upon transition. It is bewildering. In the new world of informational, political, and scientific “overwhelm” and escalating complexity, none of us feel at home as we used to.

We are all on the move from the known into the unknown - everybody. There is no home for the hero to return to. We are creating new homes as we go, and it is as scary as it is exhilarating. And we do it together. It is not that we are vulnerable. It is that we are vulnerable together. “It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is a part of our common humanity,” says Salman Rushdie.

Leaders with whom I have shared this invitation to see themselves as immigrants felt empowered, particularly if they were not geographical immigrants. “Now I know why I feel the way I feel. I am an immigrant too,” they would say. “This helps me lead others with more empathy and imagination.”

Three Skills That Matter

Let’s select and review three immigrant skills that can make our leadership more robust.

1. Perspective

It is entirely possible to change one‘s perspective.

Nobody knows this better than immigrants. Almost by definition, only immigrants know the meaning of having a new perspective.

As we immigrate, we change not only the answers to our questions but also the questions themselves. With the new questions, we change where our attention goes. And where our attention goes, our mind and heart follow.

If our perspective can change, everything can change.

Without embracing our status as immigrants, we fully invest ourselves in defending and perfecting our established views, which is another way of safeguarding the biases that have been running our lives in the known that is no more.

Immigrants, on the other hand, are willing to drop their old maps for a moment. They have to. As mathematician Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “The limits of language are the limits of my world.” Instead of looking for a villain, immigrants focus on learning a new language. Made of new words, concepts, or experiences, this language can be literal, nonverbal, emotional, cultural, business, or a new kind we don‘t even know yet.

Immigration can occur from country to country, from system to system, from this to the next epoch of our lives. In each case, it is a journey from one way of seeing to an additional way of seeing everything. Two ways of seeing are far more than double. It is experiential proof, a bodily experience and the memory of that experience, that there is truth, kindness, and beauty outside of the way we are used to being in the world. That is a mystical moment.

Perspective is today’s leader’s defining asset not more information, not more time, and not more power. When the tsunami of information, knowledge, and wisdom is drowning us, people follow the leaders who will help them get on a hill.

How do you see?

That is what matters. Your perspective determines how you show up in every moment and what stories you tell.

2. Practice

It is entirely possible to change one‘s practice.

Immigrants embrace the role of apprentice again.

Instead of observing change and talking about it, chasing an illusion of managing change, or indulging in calling themselves change agents, they learn to inhabit change.

This is humbling. Rainer Maria Rilke writes in a poem, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” Immigrants acknowledge the forces larger than their own lives and are finding their way to survive and thrive in a story larger than their own.

We live and lead in a reality far larger than what we can control. Yet, there is one thing we can control: our practice. While navigating the new landscape, our previous views become difficult to maintain. Our new experiences no longer fit our old explanations. New experiences and new experiences make new and more useful explanations possible.

We are entering a new landscape with old maps, gravitating to answers based on the intuition that has sustained us in the past. Our intuition is our capacity to have a lucid moment that helps us deal with complexity.

However, it is based on our experiences up to the present moment. That is why we have to recalibrate our intuitions with new experiences. Without updating them as we go, our intuitions deteriorate into biases.

On a more personal level, we can never control the outcomes the way we can control what we do day-to-day, the rituals, the habits, and others routines.

The artists stand with one foot in the known and one in the unknown, communicating from that place to us. They do not have control of their communication‘s impact, but they do have control of their process and practice. A painter cannot paint six masterpieces at will, but she can create her masterful practice of showing up in the shop and doing her thing her way six hours a day.

The results are not up to her, but the process is.

This is the case with the change artists, too, which is another name for leaders.

Controlling results is daunting personally, professionally, and spiritually because it is impossible. Even if it were possible, control would render our lives deathly dull. We live in a complex system made of complex systems. But complexity does not have to be complicated. It is possible and critical to respond to complexity overload with some form of radical simplicity. More likely than not, such radical simplicity will be in the form of practice.

A thought leader on how to live in complex times, Jennifer Garvey Berger asks a helpful question we can use: “Who have I been, and who am I becoming?” I think this is less of a question of pondering and more of a question of observing. You will not become who you wish or strain to be. You will become who you practice becoming.

What is your practice of becoming?

We want our life and leadership to produce something of great value, and here is the kicker: The practice is that something. In economics-speak, the practice is the product.

3. Participation

It is entirely possible to change how we relate to the world.

We begin our adult journey when we finally cross the threshold called ‚’ I’m enough’. Once we utter this with conviction, it is a joyful new beginning with a wide-open floodgate of confidence and accomplishments. That is what lots of leadership coaching for people in their 20s, 30s, and even 40s is about. Later in a leadership career, the path of growth leads through realizing something quite startling: Actually, I am not enough.

Everything that matters to us, lasting and meaningful, cannot be done alone. In some ways, our early career resistance to saying ‚ “I am enough” is a premonition of the future discovery that, in some fundamental way, ‘I am, in fact, not enough’. ‘As Carl Jung puts it, ‘The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego’, the second half is going inward and letting go of it. ‘

Hero‘s epiphany: I am enough.

Immigrant‘s epiphany: I am not enough.

Both are necessary. This is one of the reasons we cannot afford to live with a monomyth.

What is it that you want but can never accomplish alone? Go and give your best to that, and you will soon realize that your best is not enough. You merely (and gloriously!) participate.

When the time is right, cross the threshold called ‘I‘m not enough.‘ Then, ask for help and offer help. This is one of the most crucial thresholds one has to cross on the way to executive-level leadership. Your participation is not what you do when you cannot do leaderly things. Your participation is the highest calling and experience of leadership.

Being an immigrant never resolves. You continually take the risk of trusting the unsafe world. Which is the only way we can walk into the future.

I play the role of leader as needed. Others play the role of leader as needed. We all participate. The story is largely not about me. It is like the meaning of Ubuntu: ‘I am what I am because of who we all are.‘

The Invitation

Leadership at its best is modelling followership. A leader is a lover. We love and care for something deeply, so much so that we are willing to get lost in order to find it.

We are willing to enter the borderland where we continually leave and arrive. It is not a phase. It is a place where we are learning to make our home now.

We live more than our own heroic story. We discover other stories, participate, and sing our songs, old and new, perhaps all night long, as immigrants do.

The unknown is dangerous. It is also a place where our not-yet-known collaborators, questions, and answers await to be found. It is all so exciting!

Unlike the Hero‘s Journey, the Immigrants’ is not a story of defending our perceptions until the strife teaches us otherwise. We are not blinded to the ordinary mysticism of being where we already are. Instead of bending others to fit our story, we invite them to our story and let them invite us to theirs.

Often, we don‘t need or even want to be heroes. With all its dangers, the unknown is also waiting for us in friendship. We don‘t know who we will become but are not frightened because whoever we become will catch us.

Leaders who learn to articulate a new way of journeying to their people in a plausible, felt, and pragmatic way will touch them the way the Hero‘s Journey used to touch people, eliciting a nod of recognition and giving expression to a new and newly alive language that can meet the challenges we face.

Let‘s summarize our three leadership tips:

1. Perspective: Watch over the way you see.

2. Practice: Do what is yours to do.

3. Participation: Enjoy leading and being led.

Leadership is an invitation. Whether to our daughters, organizations, teams, board members, friends, or enemies, we say, “Let‘s not go where I am, as beautiful as that place seems to me. Let‘s not go where you are, as wonderful as that place seems to you. Let‘s go together to a place that neither you nor I have been before.”

👇🏾 I would love to hear from you about anything in the article that has resonated with you. Please leave a comment below. Thank you!

This year has had the texture of speed. Headlines, polarization, wars, elections, migration, fires, AI slop everywhere, loneliness everywhere. Many of us are living with a low-grade hum of dread and a high-grade demand to function. We’re tired. We’re disoriented.

I believe it will begin (and it is already beginning) with the practice of seeing differently.

There’s an old image I return to: when the storm comes, cows turn away, hunker down, and prolong the pain. Buffalo run toward it, then walk into it, shortening the suffering. Seeing differently isn’t a spa day from the world. It’s choosing the buffalo move: turning toward what’s here so that we can meet it with courage and creativity.

Twenty years ago, on a whim, I went to a Jewish Mysticism Seminar at 92Y (a venerable public learning institution in Manhattan). I was in the front row, a teacher’s pet at the edge of my seat, when Rabbi Lawrence Kushner looked at us and said, “You. Are. Mystics.”

“Who, me?” I blurted out, startling myself.

“Yes, you,” he said.

I staggered onto the sidewalk of Lexington Avenue during the seminar lunch break, drunk with the discovery of human power to see differently. This mystic courage went beyond what I’ve experienced in my home, educational, religious, or professional life. (Mystic courage: the willingness to perceive what is without recoiling)

I was still dizzy when we reconvened. The rabbi went on to say that “for most people, their mystical experiences occur for about twenty seconds, about every two years.” That seemed about right.

What if, I asked myself, the twenty seconds became a daily minute?

Soon after the seminar, the angular life of computer screens, city streets, and filing systems of our modern minds took over. I got back to familiar worries that have been squatting in my head ever since I can remember.

But that’s not how the story ends. My muscle of astonishment warmed up, relaxed, and awakened, and I found some long-needed rest from the numbing sanity of my strategic mind and defended self.

After the experience, a new sense of freedom would rarely appear. It happened while taking my daughters for a walk. I would sometimes blurt out, or even scream, “Joy, joy, joy!” to them (As kids, they were a bit embarrassed on the street. Now, as adults, they see it as a tic of their aging dad). Then, while running, cooking, or cleaning. A brave step forward was trying it while paying bills. Then, while feeling worried, sad, or anxious. Then, the latest, while enraged.

Is it possible to think these thoughts of joy and feel these feelings of surprising appearance, belonging, becoming, and then glorious disappearance? To live alive, everywhere and always?

Seeing differently doesn’t make us float above the mess. It makes you more available to it. It changes what you do in meetings, in conflict, in parenting, in voting, in the way you spend, in what you refuse, in how you apologize, and in what you build. It makes you harder to hypnotize and easier to mobilize.

It’s an intoxicating prospect for those who want to change the world: Learning to see the world as ordinary mystics, urban monks, suburban wizards, or corporate shamans (How would you call yourself?). Not biannually. Daily.

You and me. Daily.

To be clear: I’m not talking about using wonder as anesthesia. If “seeing differently” makes us less honest, less accountable, or less willing to face suffering, then it’s not seeing, it’s sedation. This is not about feeling better while the house burns. This is about seeing the fire clearly enough to carry water with steadier hands.

We want to change the way we see the world and help those we love and lead to do the same. So let’s set down Mevlana Rumi, Theresa of Avila, and Albert Einstein for a moment. Let’s set down Anne Frank, Mr. Rogers, and David Whyte, too. Let’s even set down our compassionate teachers, life-nourishing artists, and family members who showed us how to be in love with life. They are fantastic guides, and we owe them our lives.

Yet, they have all been saying, loud and clear (here in Rumi’s words):

Don’t be satisfied with our stories, how things
have gone with others. Unfold
your own myth

Our steps toward a safe and thriving future do not have to be as difficult as we imagined. We don’t have to control the process from start to finish. You can begin with the mystic courage of seeing differently and learning to fully inhabit a life you cannot control, and do your life’s work that has no competition.

Before you answer the question below, try a tiny inventory of the year: one or two moments you shrank to stay safe, and one or two moments you expanded without knowing the outcome. Don’t judge them. Just name them. That’s already the practice.

What was a recent occasion when you’ve hazarded yourself experiencing life greater than what you can control? Perhaps starting a conversation with a stranger? Or by giving more than you can afford and noticing more than you can take in? Or by your bold stand for justice? How about a vulnerability? Or letting go of what you know and asking a more beautiful question?

May you find yourself surprised, in 2026, by the ways you can see the world.

“We don’t need another hero.” ~ Tina Turner

“Happy is the land that does not need heroes.” ~ Bertolt Brecht

If you are a leader in an organization, you will have heard it said, “You only need to focus on what you can control.”

It is not that simple, though. We cannot wall ourselves into a space where we are in control. And even if we could, that is not where the action is. Or fun. Or people. Or relationships. Or reality.

Learning to let go of control and lead from that space is not antithetical to leadership. Quite the contrary, when we know how to be out of control, we cease to be at war with reality and become better not only at making things happen but also at letting things happen as we participate in dynamics larger than the circle we have drawn around ourselves.

Control does matter, obviously, and we aim to get control of the shared reality by creating models, frameworks, and maps that help us manage what we think is going on.

“All models are wrong,” wrote statistician George E. P. Box back in 1976, “but some are useful.” We move to better ways of making sense when the previous ways become less useful in helping us predict, manage, and work with and through the new complexities we face. When a model does not work anymore, we move to those that work.

Myths that Work

One of the most powerful tools for living with complexity is choosing the myths we live by. Myth is a timeless truth poured into a story, armed with our values, and cemented into our experience.

We humans used to think we were above them. Fortunately, we have been coming to terms with the fact that we have over-reached in our myth-free confidence. We are not living in a merely complicated machine we can learn to control, but in a constantly changing system managing physical, psychological, organizational and other forces that we cannot bring under control. Life and, with it, change, is too wide and too deep to master.

There is always far more happening than what we can fully grasp. So, we have to relate to the unknown, befriend it, even delight in it, get things done in the middle of it, and get others to get things done. That is where the myths come in.

Myths that work hold our worlds together.

They are larger stories that hold smaller stories. Whether true or false, myth is a necessity for any meaning we hope to have as humans. Without the myth, we are all whirling subatomic particles, becoming aware that we are nothing, a realization that is itself a myth.

Now, the most crucial function of myth is to provide us with a perspective, and in today’s world of excess information, perspective is everything, or almost everything, depending on how you look at it. Myths we hold, whether we are aware of them or not, are that perspective.

Good Old Myth

There is a myth we are all quite familiar with.

Even if you don’t know it by name, you know it in substance. It is a pervasive and recognizable story format in the West, particularly in the United States, that has gone global. If you are unaware of it, use this ChatGPT prompt: Tell me about the Hero’s Journey. Then brace yourself.

You might also be familiar with the powerful work of Joseph Campbell, who brought the Hero’s Journey to public awareness. If you are a movie maker, marketer, coach of any sort, organizational psychologist, leadership trainer, management consultant, officer in the military, entrepreneur of any kind, or work in any industry that uses the power of the story, you are probably already overdosed on the Hero’s Journey. It is ubiquitous. So, I promise you, the rest of this article will not be just another Hero’s Journey drill and praise fest. We will go beyond.

First, a quick summary. (Feel free to skip this paragraph if you think, ya, ya, ya, I’ve heard this a hundred times already.) The Hero’s Journey is an archetype, an original and recurring motif or symbol behind many ideas and stories that shape our lives today and have also shaped the lives of humans since the dawn of human civilization. Campbell traced the Hero’s Journey through 17 universally traversed steps across culture and time. In its most fundamental form, the journey comprises a three-part cyclical structure: Departure, Initiation, and Return. The hero leaves the ordinary world responding to a call to adventure (Departure). The hero then enters a liminal space, where they face trials and achieve a climactic victory or revelation (Initiation). Finally, the hero returns to their ordinary world, transformed, and often with knowledge, power, or healing to share with others (Return). This cycle, we are told, represents a universal process of growth and integration that resonates across people and eras.

The Hero’s Journey has obvious advantages. It provides a framework for personal growth, fosters empathy for the experiences of others, and offers a roadmap to navigate life and leadership challenges, among other benefits. Its explanatory power has been felt by many of us. Do you remember the rush when, in the middle of a troubling life challenge, you first thought, “Is it possible I’ve been on a Hero’s Journey all this time? Is it possible I am on one right now?”

Living In a Monomyth

While Hero’s Journey is part of the truth, it is also less than the truth. It has its limitations, which, as we move into a world where our stories are colliding with one another, are becoming quite obvious and grave.

Our imagination has been taught to look for it, and now we see it everywhere. Often, it is the only thing we see. It is what we are told we want and what we learn to want.

When I engage with leaders who question this myth, the majority become defensive from the start, forcing every alternative idea into the existing perspective. They have experienced the monomyth’s power and now use it to construct the same explanations for new experiences.

However, life and leadership bring new experiences, and these are arguably the only forces capable of loosening the grip of our knowing and opening up possibilities for new explanations.

As poet David Whyte would put it in his corporate leadership training, we tend to name our experiences too early. We leaders, he argues, can find our way forward by first stopping the conversation we are having. By conversation, he means the tired and tiring ways of naming and reassuring ourselves, telling the same old story over and over again.

Stories, like humans, are alive. One model or myth gives way to another. That is how we change. As all living beings, our stories exist in ecosystems. In every complex system, whether biological, cultural, or organizational, a monoculture eventually, and always, spells devastation.

Historically, we humans are all exposed to the tyranny of one story. Like the former head Rabbi of the UK, Jonathan Sachs, argues in his book The Dignity of Difference, the more perfect we become as humans and the better we become as a global society, the more varied we will be in the way we see, understand, and experience the world.

Let that land. The more perfect we all are, the more different from each other we will be.

The drive to find the best way to finally get control over complexity, uncertainty, and volatility will sooner or later end in violence, he argues. Universality breeds death.

We have been driving the Hero’s Journey for so long, and so far, we are in danger of finding ourselves on the depleted soil of a monomyth.

Let's examine three constrictions of the Hero's Journey so that we can open ourselves to new experiences, explanations, and stories that might help us liberate ourselves from the monomyth's grip on our leadership.

Constriction 1: Hero's Perspective Only

The Hero's Journey requires tricking our perspective. It is the story told through the eyes of the hero and limited to the way the hero sees the world. It suffers from solipsism, a self-centered lack of awareness, and a single perspective to the exclusion of other perspectives.

Humans tend to suffer from the main character syndrome. We believe the main story is about us. We see our story, the story in which we are the protagonist, as the story. We have all met leaders who suck up the majority of the oxygen in the room and expect all participants to contribute to the story they have already written for themselves in their heads.

I am not being judgmental here. I am still in recovery from it myself.

In reality, where we actually live, there are other stories at play. If I see myself as being on a Hero’s Journey, however, I need others to play the roles I need them to play.

You know what happens next, right?

In a world where a hero monomyth shapes our imagination, everyone expects to be at the centre of the story. Even when there is every reason to agree, use opposing views to find a solution, or play only a supportive role to create a better world, we do not choose to do so. We are conditioned to feel like we are somebody only if we focus on our opinions.

We are drowning in opinions.

Not clarity, not inspiration, not shared values, but nauseating contrarianisms. It is a pyramid scheme of heroes. Heroes are taking over the heroes, who are taking over the heroes, where we eventually all lose—a contrarian hell.

But, deep inside, we know: other stories don’t exist to serve ours. To love and lead, we let others have their own stories in which they see us differently. Perhaps we are a villain in their story. Or a victim. Or, even better, we both live in a story that is different or larger than heroes colliding with villains, in which the same villains see themselves on Hero’s Journeys of their own.

As a human, I have the capacity to realize that my perspective is not the only perspective. My story is not the only story. Who I am is not only about me. It is also largely about how I am seen and experienced by others. As Spanish poet Antonio Machado puts it, "An eye is an eye not because you see it; an eye is an eye because it sees you."

There is nothing wrong with telling a story from the hero's point of view. A lot is cut out, though. Too much. Nigerian author Chinua Achebe says, 'Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.' Everything, literally everything (including our planet), but the hero and his beloved story is expendable.

Constriction 2: Villains Wanted

Another limitation of the Hero's Journey is the way it creates tension in the story. Every story that commands our attention and draws our hearts needs a conflict or, at the very least, a contrast. Without a conflict, there would be no story. The issue here is how Hero’s Journey creates the story's conflict.

When leadership work becomes difficult or overwhelming, we have a favourite starting point: a villain. Someone, somewhere, is doing this to us. To regain control, we need to identify and vanquish the villain. We believe our world would be better without it.

Notice how in the Hero's Journey, the villain is expendable. There is neither redemption nor a future for the villain. There is an evil, a mistake, or a problem. It is the other. We do not have to understand, live with, or certainly not learn from the villain. God forbid we find the villain in ourselves.

And in the world where everyone wants to be a hero, everyone needs a villain of one kind or another. Stories in which the roles of heroes, villains, and victims are the only roles available push us apart and antagonize us. While everyone loves a hero, who wants to be the villain?

Or the victim? In these kinds of stories, victims are story extras or, to name them more directly, passives. Think of employees, consumers, the public, or the planet. They have to be conquered, saved, served, or entertained. The story offers them no agency.

“Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy,” writes F. Scott Fitzgerald. The monomyth has left us in a perpetual cycle of conflict. Sometimes, it seems as if we live in a Groundhog Day scenario. The villain and the hero play a zero-sum game to the bitter end, setting the stage for the next cycle in the spiral of destruction. The result is an exhausting and increasingly tedious repetition of establishing the next king of the hill, cage-fight champion, or a winner who takes all. In many ways, modern history is a story that repeats itself over and over again, with heroes' departure, initiation, and return becoming three stages of not changing.

What if the world beyond the walls of the village is not villainous? What if that world just is? Like our world. What if the dark underworld is troubling but also kind and cooperative? What if the wild we fear is not evil or ungodly, and what if it does not need our hero to tame it or save it? What if the unknown is not only a source of danger but also a source of new and better questions and solutions we have been looking for all along? What if the unknown is reaching out to us in friendship?

Constriction 3: Superpowers Distraction

Over time, Hero’s Journey has become too predictable, a shortcut, really. One of the earliest and most notorious problems with ChatGPT has been how quickly it will make you into a hero. A hero has now become a tourist, with a curated journey into a liminal space. And that tourist now wants, nay, expects, a superpower.

In the Hero’s Journey, heroes used to be regular people who, among other things, discover their unique power. They stumble on it, or a mentor gives it to them, or they win it.

In the monomyth world, that is far from enough. We are all now talking about superpowers. Superpowers break the laws of ordinary life. They pull out an extraordinary sword and other feats that break the physical and every other aspect of our ordinary lives, but the ordinary life is where we all actually live. Superpower shrinks our larger, complex, and natural human abilities into a fetish. In other words, our pining for a superpower distracts us from what I would call commonpowers.

Commonpowers are powers that come from having an aware, curious, and courageous human experience. Coping, connecting, creating, relating, and contributing, to name a few. They are skills of human maturity. In other words, our ordinary lives can teach what no specialized book or training (even those on the topic of leadership) can. Developing our common powers is the most direct way to increase our leadership range, repertoire, and results.

We believe that superpowers will solve our problems “once and for all” and give us a sense of control. If we can wield fire at will, we can just incinerate those bastards attacking our walls. If we can make people laugh, we can bypass feeling uncomfortable by simply cracking a joke. You get the drift. Superpowers are a distraction.

Power is much more common. You have what you need, and others have what they need for us to do what we need to do. Hiding in plain sight, these powers are potent and available. If only we could let go of our paralyzing fascination with what we don’t have, and recognize what we already do.

I know, something is deflating about this.

You have probably walked away from a superhero movie exhilarated to face your own situation, only to realize there is no superpower in sight. Realizing that you are a common person, led by common people, who in turn lead other common people, can be a downer.

But if you stay with that difficult feeling long enough, the weather inside of you will change. You begin to feel the strength of something real arriving. Your ordinariness becomes a door into everything. To embrace yourself as ordinary is the way (perhaps the only way) to discover and live out one’s singularly unique calling in the world.

That deflating feeling is the experience of moving from fantasy (someone else’s journey) to a dream (of what is actually yours to do). Superpowers are for stories of control. Commonpowers are for stories of something greater: reality. And reality is better.

Done Pretending

As I came of age, I had three posters on the wall above my bed. The most idolized guru of my youth was David Bowie. Now, forty-five years later, I find his epic song “Heroes” prophetic. That anthem took me over the threshold of allowing myself to be different from other people and live a life I can call my own.

I remember singing it back then with my freshly colored turquoise hair, fantastical purple pants, and newfound freedom to be myself. His soaring voice declared, “We can be heroes, just for one day.”

Notice his qualifier, however, “Just for one day.”

That is it. Have your turn to be a hero, for a day.

That is plenty. More than that, would that really be sustainable for you? For others?

Okay, take a year, or, if necessary, ten years. But then go on with the task of finding stories other than the hero’s story you have inhabited for so long, no matter how awesome that story might have seemed when you first encountered it. There are different ways to see, experience, and act in the world.

What if you are not on the Hero’s Journey? What journey are you on? What else is out there?

The invitations to the good old myth will keep coming to each one of us from all directions: “Become the hero of your own story!” I hope that now you know, and cannot un-know, that for that to work, you need to pretend that your story is the only one that matters to you.

But we are done pretending. When we stop and think about it, we cannot, and we don’t want to, control the world, even the corner of the world that we lead. We want to discover, be turned around, and right side up. Leadership, at its best, is not a matter of control but of surprise, including the surprise of finding ourselves in a story we have never imagined before.

Don't Lose Heart

These are the times of myth-famine. Both religious and scientific myths have been steadily deteriorating, losing their potency to inspire and ground human thriving. Communism is dead. Its longer-living twin brother, capitalism, is on the deathbed, pretending to be the greatest hero ever. You might have a global myth that you see to add to this list.

The truths behind many of these myths no longer ring true. There is no timelessness and boundlessness to them. They are not useful anymore, too small to inspire and ground us.

Yet, in my daughter’s generation and among people from around the world, I notice that people come alive when someone tells a story that interrupts the tired patterns of symbiosis, ecology, revolution, friendship, pilgrimage, and magic, even in the stark worlds of business, economy, and politics.

When I immigrated to the United States, the most popular American phrases I encountered were startlingly violent. “You killed it.” “You are dead in the water.” Then there were also empowering (and less boring) ones, such as “You got this.” It assumes that you already have what it takes and witnesses to you that you are not alone.

So, let’s not lose heart.

We got this. While the loud and powerful are falling asleep at the wheel of imagination, in the clandestine places invisible to unsuspecting people like many of us, new and better myths are being born, like new stars. These myths in the making are so new, tender, and powerful that we cannot even recognize them yet. As our disoriented hearts are taking the necessary time to grieve the myths that are dying, away from our sight, new ways of being kind, strong, and wise are being discovered and practiced in thousands of communities of young, old, divergent, and inexplicably good and resilient humans in every corner of the world.

(originally published in Developing Leaders Quarterly, August 2025)

💎 LEADERSHIP TOOL 💎

Are you stuck in hero mode?

This is a 2-minute self-check—a mirror, not a metric. Ten quick prompts help you spot “hero-mode” reflexes, then pick one tiny 48-hour experiment to try.

Use it solo: notice your patterns, reduce control-anxiety, and make one purposeful shift.

Use it with your team: create shared language, defuse hero-vs-villain loops, and align on one small experiment everyone tries.

NOTE: It’s available to read below for paid subscribers of The New Glossary. A printable PDF that includes both the tool and this article is attached.

Read more

As Ordinary Mystics (OMs) of today, let’s give a whirl to this question: What does the heart want?

What I notice first these days is that my heart feels forced upon.

We are told that those who will thrive will be those who can embrace uncertainty and see disruption as an opportunity. I, too, have been writing—at times pontificating—about the imperative of befriending the unknown for those of us who want to love, lead, or create.

The truth, however, is that my heart is not interested in soldiering on. It’s not looking for something easier, but for something entirely different instead.

Instead, I am in my home country of Croatia, sipping espresso at a tiny table in Virada Caffe with a view of the harbour. It’s early morning, and while the day is already hot, the bones in my body still hold the precious cool absorbed from the sea during my early morning swim.

Instead, I am ignoring the fact that my LinkedIn account has just been hacked. Years of posts, articles, endorsements, and ongoing business conversations, as well as other assets that I’ve carefully developed over countless anxious hours and many years, have been wiped out. Gone.

Instead, I am taking a break from the convulsing world for a moment. I choose not to think about the relational, economic, and health implications of the political predicaments that I, you, and all people who care about the common good in the world are facing.

I have three more days, I tell my heart, before I have to give up the smell of salt and sun and come back to the dog-poop littered asphalt of New York City, where I can then face the unknown.

Right now, my heart is not interested in regaining control of the situation or even deciding on the next course of action. Most shockingly, it doesn’t seem to care if I, personally, win or lose in any of it.

It doesn’t fear the fears of my strategic mind, which lives in two columns of pros and cons for every decision. My sadness or fear does not phase it. It doesn’t care about my ledger of happiness.

I let my heart be. And I wait. Until it quietly gives me clues about what it does care about. Let me share two of them.

Clue #1: Having Home

“Where’s my home?” it asks.

It lives in the echo of the city streets, while at the sea, and in the echo of the sea, while at the city streets. So, I answer my heart, “I don’t know.” And as I say it, I realize it’s not because of my bi-continental life. It’s because of the disruption that has been imposed on me, on you, on us all, by forces larger than ourselves. We are all displaced.

“We are a new kind of nomads,” I mansplain to my heart. We are not physically displaced. It’s not armed hordes that are after us. It’s a violent horde of billionaires on their march. It’s political molestation. It’s faith famine.

“But,” I tell my heart, “look up, all of this should be for the best.”

That’s right, I distract and lie to my heart.

It’s because I've been distracting and lying to myself about home.

Home is one of those taken-for-granted words, like mother, that holds immeasurably more in it than the big words we like to use, like God, fuck, or languishing.

Through a one-way six-lane highway called the vagus nerve, the heart sends rich and insistent signals of home need to our brain. As a result, in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to help us remember and find home, we have tens of thousands of clues.

These clues were once landmarks, signposts, and natural processes supplying almost infinite information to our wayfinding ancestors. Our hearts used to fall in love with a cliff, a forest, a lake, and a way light appeared or darkness held us all.

In recent evolutionary history, however, the hippocampus has undergone a significant repurposing. Now we have this enormous capacity to belong to a home composed of narratives, ideas, and metaphors. We now navigate through and fall in love with stories, from tiny ones that are just one word long, to big ones like those of a world religion or a philosophical system.

This means that in the past, now, and in the future, we all need a home—all of us. These are heart’s orders.

In high school, I remember humming the song by Lene Lovich as a sort of relief from the challenges that come with having a home, sometimes dysfunctional, sometimes suffocating: “Home is just emotion / Sticking in my throat / Home is good clean living / Home is … I forgot.” At the same time, I carried books of Herman Hesse in my backpack, one of them saying, “We have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.”

So, Lovich or Hesse?

Now, forty years later, after migrating from one continent to another, from one religion to another, from one vocation to another, and after putting out a mighty effort to embrace uncertainty and use disruption as opportunity, hands down, Herman Hesse won.

Clue #2: Getting Lost

What else does the heart want?

“I want to get lost,” it says.

On the one hand, the heart wants a home. On the other hand, the heart wants to roam.

The heart knows about other hearts, and it gives a damn about the world.

When we are fully alive, as much as we want to be at home, we also want to cross boundaries, take risks for something larger than ourselves, or luck ourselves into a new vocation, relationship, and purpose.

I vary between homing and roaming several times a day. One moment, I feel like everything belongs and all manner of things will be okay, and in the next, I feel like we are maneuvering our kayaks through the white water, heading, possibly, for a waterfall.

We get lost.

It’s inevitable. The fine state of being lost happens every time we break out into a new way of seeing, experiencing, or being in the world. This is part of what it means to be free.

We often cannot achieve what we want, not because we are incapable of doing what needs to be done to get there, but because our calculating, strategic mind does not see the utility in being lost in the process. But the heart does.

It does not care about whether you are comfortable or not. The heart only cares about you being real.

Perhaps being lost is the only time we can meet ourselves and the world in a real way. When we experience being lost, we have the opportunity to shift our attention to a reality that differs from the one we have created. We can meet a stranger both in others and within ourselves. When we are lost, we also give the world around us a chance to find us.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés offers compassionate acknowledgment that we are built for more than safety: “When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.”

Being lost is time well spent.

Sometimes, often actually, mindfulness is not enough. To live, we need enchantment. We are meant to get lost in conversation, in making love, in a tale, and in countless other delightful and never-predictable ways.

GPS requires you to decide on your starting point, A, and your ending point, B, before you allow yourself to discover. It’s an enemy of wondering. Maps, AI, and other navigational devices force us to have our heads down.

They make us devalue clues available that are in the world itself. We arrive, without the process of becoming on the way there. Our becoming is short-circuited by instant arrival. As a result, we don’t have a story to tell or a presence to bring to where we arrive.

For that, you have to get lost.

Five Findings

With those two clues, let’s attempt some findings. What does your OM heart want from you? Here are some suggestions to take for a whirl.

1. You don’t have to be clear.

Getting lost is the only way to find your path.

A rule of OMs thumb: When you have an easy answer about where you should go, who you should be, and what you should do, you are very likely on another’s path, mistaking it as your own.

As Joseph Campbell puts it, “If the path before you is clear, you are probably on someone else’s.” 

Our true self is and will remain unknown to our conscious mind. We are so close that we can’t see it. It’s okay. If you could name it, it would be the wrong name.

2. You can learn to love that feeling.

How can we be at home and lost in the world?

Heart’s answer does not sound good to our tribal selves: practice embracing the whole world as your home.

John Stilgoe, a seminal American landscape thinker from Harvard University, speaks for our hearts: “If I’m lost and I don’t have anyone to ask, I love that feeling.”

There’s no me, you, them.
There’s no present, past, or future.
There’s no certainty, faith, or doubt.

Everything belongs.

I know this is some hardcore mystic stuff, unprovable but true.

3. Rebirth yourself.

In the womb, the child is primordial, as though it existed from the beginning of time. It is wordless, with borders between herself and the environment non-existent.

Then, the infant undergoes a rich experience of being lost that forms the child’s nervous system. It establishes references and distinctions, learns the language and covenants that make up the meanings. You may not remember it, but, reluctantly yet unstopably, you found your way.

Such is every change in identity, whether gradual or instantaneous, throughout our lives. We get reborn, over and over and over again.

Want a new life? Getting lost is the price of admission.

4. Apprentice yourself.

There’s a sense of freedom that only comes with not knowing, even for a moment, who we are, where we are, why we are here, and what’s going on. That’s what the heart wants.

It wants you to apprentice yourself to your life.

As David Whyte puts it:

“What we recognize and applaud as honesty and transparency in an individual is actually the humble demeanor of the apprentice someone paying extreme attention, to themselves, to others, to life, to the next step, which they may survive or they may not, someone who does not have all the answers but who is attempting to learn what they can, about themselves and those with whom they share the journey, someone like everyone else, wondering what they and their society about to turn into.

5. Something quite different.

Without having something you can call your home and without stepping over the edge of your map, you don’t touch either real fears or real joys.

In that home and on that edge is where you learn to listen, feel what others feel, and forge your faith in the future. When you get lost, you become real. And you cannot love, lead, or create if you are not real.

That’s what the heart wants: To live an authentic life in the real world.

When we are properly lost, we are not on the way to eventually recognise, name, conquer, and domesticate the space or stories we live in. We are doing something quite different. We live real life in real time.

🤗 My fellow OM, I’m glad you are meeting me here on this tiny spot on the screen, and I hope you enjoyed this AI-free writing. Do you have any additions, insights, or intuitions from your experience? Let other OMs know below.

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It felt familiar. At first, I thought I was in the present time, at a concert in one of the small venues here in Manhattan, where I now live in my 50s.

Then came the realization that sent shivers through my body: The concert was in Croatia, the capital city of Zagreb, where I grew up as an asphalt kid. I knew the venue very well. It gradually dawned on me that I was in the exact place I frequented, the same band, and the event I attended when I was 15!

The teenager me might be out there in the audience. Oh, the thrill of the possibility of meeting my younger self! What would I tell him? Then I saw him, curly hair, plaid shirt, and jeans, calm, fresh, unlived.

"I know," I thought, "I can make his coming decades so much easier. I can warn him about three wrong turns he doesn't have to take, share with him three revelations about the future that would make all the difference, or gift him with three tried and tested life tips that he could keep in his pocket for the moments when he would need them the most."

And then, like it happens in dreams, the next scene was me walking up to him at the concert's end.

I stepped before him, our eyes met, and I asked, "Do you know who I am?"

"I think I do," he said, slightly nodding.

I walked straight into the gravity of it all. No coyness. No circling. Just transmission. And the ache to offer something that might change a life and say, "I can tell you things."

He looked at me with the peace I had back then:

"You're trying too hard. Let me live it."

Silence. The silence of the handing off of a gift.

And the realization that it wasn't I giving it.

His words didn't sting. They settled. They landed with a quiet mercy.

When I woke up—in my bed, in Harlem, New York City—I knew I was trying too hard.

For so long.

My realization wasn't a resignation. It was clarity.

The dream dragged something out of sleep and into my waking life. I thought the dream was about the past. It wasn't. It was about now. It was about the part of me and all of us that keeps trying to fix, optimize, and solve life.

Even joy gets project-managed.

Even rest becomes effortful.

My younger self pleaded with me: "Let me live it," as if saying, "Don't take it away. I want it all."

Carl Jung once said, "In each of us there's another whom we don't know," and that unknown part of myself found a way, through the dream, to speak to me.

And now, I take freedom here to speak to you, the reader of this, my friend who wants to live fully, change the world, die alive, and have it all: "You might be trying too hard. Let yourself live it all."

As someone who has been helping leaders transform themselves, others, and the world for 20 years, I know this: Transformation should look more like experiencing life than working on it.

Let yourself live.

But I loved control—dressed in good clothes, passion, and strategy.

1990

Pastor intern with a mind and a plan.
Not shouting, not shaming.
Just setting people free.
Someone had to do it.

1995

Pastor turned leader.
Ran things with drive and purpose.
Controlled people with vision, conviction, and fun.
It looked inspired, but it felt heavy.

2000

Burned out quietly.
No public collapse, just... depletion.
Always having something to say.
Wondering, "Why does doing what I love feel like this?"

2005

Left religion, started a nonprofit.
Heart poured into the mission.
Built programs.
Gripping the slippery reins.

2010

Crashed and burned out again.
Working harder.
Still in control.
Crashed and burned out again.

2015

Resurrection: Became a have-it-together organizational consultant.
Traded community for corporations, rituals for frameworks, and art for planning decks.
Back in control (this time in a business suit).
Depleted. Again.

2020

Shift.
Slowed down enough to realize:
Leading is like breathing.
Became a leadership and career coach.

2025

Resonant human.
Ease.
Curiosity.

The opposite of control is resonance. (Note: This notion comes from the heart and brain of the German philosopher Harmut Rosa.)

Now I help people drop the control script and make themselves available for resonance with people and forces, both visible and invisible.

Resonance is personal, cosmic, and practical.

Presence over performance.
Enchantment over breakthroughs.
Less control--more resonance.

It's true, to make things happen in the world...
Control matters. Clock matters. Spreadsheets matter.
But so do poetry, philosophy, and pancakes.

Control feels responsible.
Control takes power.
Control looks like strong leadership.
Control hides disconnection.
Control burns you out.
Control doesn't lead.

But—

Resonance leads.
Resonance is clarity.
Resonance is trust.
Resonance is energy.
Resonance is connection.
Resonance is what makes it all beautiful.

Resonance is joy that happens to those who learn to accept, respect, and revel in the uncontrollability of the world.