A embarrassing photo of me drunk at the wrap party for my first film, Three Days.

Act One: Hold This

The cinematographer handed me a two-by-four.

“Hold this,” he said.

It was 1993 or 1994, and we were shooting a music video for a Chicago rap group called The Rhyme Poets. It was the middle of another brutally cold Chicago winter. We had almost no money, and the production lights needed more power than the building could—or perhaps was willing to—provide.

The cinematographer’s solution was to open the building’s electrical box and tie directly into its power.

This was completely illegal. It was also extraordinarily dangerous. But in the world of no-budget filmmaking in Chicago in the early 1990s, it was not especially unusual.

I was still in film school, young enough to be thrilled simply to have a place on a real set and inexperienced enough not to know which rules could be bent and which ones existed to keep people alive.

The cinematographer positioned himself in front of the electrical box and prepared to reach inside. He looked like one of those scenes out of an action film where the hero has to cut the blue wire or the red wire. And if he cuts the wrong one… boom.

“If you see me getting electrocuted,” he said, “hit me with the two-by-four. It’ll knock me off the box.”

I looked at the piece of wood in my hands. Then I looked at him.

He was serious.

I had gone to film school to learn how movies were made. Apparently, there had not been a class on what to do when your cinematographer asked you to club him with a piece of lumber before the electricity killed him.

It scared the living hell out of me.

But I held the two-by-four.

That was independent filmmaking in Chicago in those days. We made movies, television shows, commercials, and music videos with budgets that rarely came close to matching our ambitions. We borrowed locations. We called in favors. We stretched equipment and people far beyond their intended limits. When we encountered a problem that money would normally solve, we improvised.

Sometimes that resourcefulness was exhilarating.

Sometimes it was reckless.

In my early twenties, I did not always know the difference.

During that same production, a couple of feet of snow fell on Chicago. The electrical cables running across the location gradually disappeared beneath the accumulation. By the time we wrapped, they were buried under heavy, wet snow.

My job was to dig them out and coil them.

And so there I was, pulling electrical cables from the wet snow after spending part of the production holding a two-by-four in case the cinematographer electrocuted himself.

I was freezing, soaked, exhausted, frightened—and absolutely thrilled to be making movies.

That contradiction captures the young man I was then.

From the outside, I was doing the coldest, wettest, least glamorous work on the production. To me, it felt like I had finally gained admission to a world I had imagined for years. I was no longer just studying movies or talking about making them. I was on a set.

I was beginning.

At that age, proximity can feel like progress. If you are standing close enough to the camera, carrying equipment, fetching coffee, or holding an emergency two-by-four, you believe you are moving closer to the life you want.

Sometimes you are.

But ambition has a way of making young people accept things they would recognize as unacceptable in almost any other setting. You don’t want to appear difficult. You don’t want to admit what you don’t know. Most of all, you don’t want someone to decide that you aren’t sufficiently committed and give your place to one of the hundreds of other young people waiting for the same opportunity.

So you hold the two-by-four.

It is important to remember what was happening around us at the time.

This was the early 1990s, and American culture—especially the culture that mattered to young people—was being overturned.

Grunge had arrived.

Almost overnight, the music that had defined the previous decade seemed to belong to another world. The hair bands, the polish, the theatrical excess, and the familiar rock music of the 1980s were pushed aside by something rawer, louder, more wounded, and more honest.

I embraced it completely.

Pearl Jam, in particular, invigorated me. The music energized me. It influenced my thoughts, fed my ideas, and pushed me toward action. It felt immediate and unvarnished, as though the people creating it had decided they no longer needed to ask permission to say what they meant or sound the way they sounded.

For a young man trying to understand himself, that mattered.

At roughly the same time, independent film was undergoing its own revolution.

Filmmakers were emerging with movies that did not resemble the polished studio productions we had grown up watching. These films were smaller, stranger, more personal, and often made with whatever resources their creators could scrape together.

Kevin Smith’s Clerks became one of the defining examples. It was shot in black and white on 16mm film, made for almost no money, and physically spliced together by people who had no institutional reason to believe it would ever play in a major movie theater.

And yet, there it was.

Audiences accepted it. More than that, they embraced it.

Side note: Later in my career, I will get a chance to work with one of the actors from clerks, Jeff Anderson. He and I created a pretty good friendship with some of the other actors and crew members and had a blast making my second film, Love 101, which revealed the true me. I wanted to make Independent films, and I did, but my sensibilities were more toward Hollywood style comedies… I guess, yeah, like John Hughes movies. You can see that about me very clearly in Love 101.

Anyway, there was Clerks, a movie that looked as though it had no business sitting beside a Hollywood production, changed what a generation of filmgoers believed a movie could be. It changed their tastes. It also changed what young filmmakers like me believed we were allowed to attempt.

That was the larger backdrop to my life.

Music was telling us that polish was not the same as truth. Independent film was telling us that access was not the same as permission. Artists in both worlds were demonstrating that you did not have to wait for the established system to decide you were worthy of creating something.

You could simply begin.

While I’m long since out of the entertainment industry, I still believe that and I still do it. I just see something that I want to do and even if there’s no reason why anyone like me should be able to do it, I go and do it. Do varying degrees of success, for sure, but I do it. It was only recently that I recognized that’s the independent film mindset,l still stuck in me after all these years.

I had not attended a traditional college. I had gone to film school. Now I was learning who I was as a young man and dreaming about a career in independent film.

I did not want to make someone else’s version of a Hollywood movie. I wanted to tell my own stories. I wanted to write the movies I wanted to see, gather together the people who believed in them, and somehow find a way to put them on the screen.

The artists emerging during that period gave us permission—or at least made us realize that permission had never really been required.

We felt as though we could do whatever we wanted.

Of course, wanting complete creative freedom and knowing what to do with it are very different things. We were still learning our craft, still discovering our voices, and still finding out how far determination could carry us when experience and money ran out.

But we believed.

And belief can be a powerful source of capital when you have no actual capital.

I wasn’t dreaming of blockbusters then. I wasn’t imagining red carpets or a career among the Hollywood elite. I wanted to make independent films. I wanted to tell my stories and put something on the screen that had not existed before.

I loved that process. I loved the audacity of it.

Then, through an extraordinary piece of luck, I landed my first official job in entertainment. Just after I graduated from Columbia College Chicago film school, my childhood friend, Traci Bergles, called me and said she had just landed her first job. However, she thought it was a job as a nanny for a family, and it turned out to be a job as an office assistant for John Hughes.

Yes, that John Hughes.

She told me she was going to turn down the offer - it wasn’t what she wanted to do - but that I should quickly fax my résumé to them and she would tell them I was the perfect guy for the role. And low and behold, it worked. I owe a lot to Traci for that turn of events in my life.

By 1995, John was already one of the most recognizable filmmakers in the world. He had written or directed movies that defined a generation - Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club - and a new genre of cinema; the teen comedy. Yet his operation was not based in some imposing Hollywood studio complex. It was housed in a small office in Lake Forest, Illinois, near where he lived.

There were two personal assistants, another young man, and me.

I had somehow gone from digging cables out of the Chicago snow to working for one of the most successful filmmakers alive—without leaving Illinois.

It was the summer of 1995, and the world outside that little office sometimes felt as surreal as the movies. I remember the day O.J. Simpson was fleeing the police in the white Bronco. Like millions of other people, we were glued to the TV, watching the chase unfolding on television, unsure of what we were witnessing or what it would come to mean.

At the same time, something equally disorienting—at least to me—was happening in my own life.

A local producer had expressed interest in my first screenplay. He believed in it enough to raise the money to make it.

Suddenly, I was living in two different versions of the entertainment business.

During the day, I worked for one of Hollywood’s most successful filmmakers. Outside the office, I was trying to get a small independent movie made with a local producer and whatever resources we could assemble.

The strange thing was that these worlds were not as far apart as they appeared.

John became more than my employer. He became my mentor and, eventually, my friend.

We shared a fear of flying, a love of movie props, and, most importantly, a love of writing. I learned more about writing movies from John than I could possibly have understood at the time.

He was prolific, but there was nothing mystical about his process. He wrote. He treated writing as work worthy of structure and discipline. He would write from nine to five, and when the working day ended, he devoted the rest of his time to his family.

That made a lasting impression on me.

Here was someone who had achieved a level of success that most filmmakers could barely imagine, yet he understood that the work needed boundaries. He did not seem interested in performing the role of the famous Hollywood director.

I wish I could say I fully absorbed that lesson.

I absorbed the discipline. I absorbed the commitment. I absorbed his understanding of story, character, and the daily labor of putting words on a page.

It would take me much longer to understand the part about going home.

John taught me that writing really was rewriting. It was not about waiting for inspiration to arrive. It was about sitting down and doing the work. He taught me that a successful movie begins long before anyone steps onto a set. It begins with understanding what a character wants, what stands in the way, and why an audience should care.

He also taught me that enormous success does not have to extinguish the independent spirit that made someone want to create in the first place.

I saw that spirit in him when my screenplay moved closer to becoming a real film.

The producer had raised the money. We had an opportunity to make it. More than that, I had the opportunity to direct it.

There was only one problem: my job.

John had a seven picture deal with the Walt Disney Company at the time, and some lackey at Disney told me I could not take time away from my Disney job to make an independent film. Disney employees were not permitted to go off and make movies that were not Disney movies.

It was my first real job in entertainment. Jobs like that were difficult to get, and I understood how extraordinarily fortunate I had been. Walking away from it could easily have looked foolish.

The independent film had little money and no guarantees. There was no promise that it would be successful, that anyone would see it, or that another opportunity would follow. I would be trading a secure position beside one of the most successful filmmakers in the business for the chance to direct a small movie in Illinois.

John did not hesitate.

He told me to quit.

He said he would support me in whatever way I needed. And if I wanted to come back afterward, he told me, there would always be a job for me.

What he was offering was more valuable than permission. He was removing the fear that so often keeps a young person from taking the first defining risk of a career.

John understood something about me that I was perhaps only beginning to understand myself: I had not entered entertainment simply to work near people who made movies.

I needed to make them myself.

I also believe the opportunity spoke to the independent filmmaker still living inside him. However successful he had become, he understood what it meant to have a story, an opportunity, and just enough money to attempt something improbable. He knew that those moments do not arrive according to a convenient schedule. When they come, you either step into them or spend the rest of your life explaining why the timing wasn’t right.

So I left.

I walked away from my first real entertainment job, from the security of that small office in Lake Forest, and from the daily privilege of working beside a filmmaker who had become my mentor and friend.

There is a temptation, when telling stories about a life in entertainment, to focus on the famous people encountered along the way. But John’s place in this story is not important because he was famous.

It is important because, when I stood at the first real crossroads of my career, he did not ask me to protect his interests. He encouraged me to pursue mine.

My first education in filmmaking had taught me how badly I wanted to be on a set. John began teaching me what kind of person I wanted to become while I was there.

I went to make my movie.

Directing Three Days, the true story about my life when my mother died in a plane crash, changed the direction of my life. It began my career as a writer-director, which eventually evolved into producing.

I went on to make Love 101 next and never looked back. By the time I turned 26 I hit the road for California with two independent feature films under my belt, a spirit of ambition, and zero contacts in Hollywood.

In ways I could not have seen then, these two little indie films set in motion the events that would lead me to build a permanent life in Hollywood for more than twenty years.

Looking back, it would be easy to frame the choice as an act of courage. I am not sure it felt courageous at the time. I was young. I was ambitious. I believed in movies.

Sometimes that’s all a person needs.

The young man holding the two-by-four could not have known any of this. He did not know that a Midwest kid would end up in Hollywood, that Hollywood would become a home, or that the career ahead of him would last 25 years.

He knew only that he wanted to make movies.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my 54 years on earth, it’s that there’s are seasons in life when everything seems to be moving in the wrong direction.

Things we counted on disappear. Relationships change. Doors close. Plans unravel. Parts of our identity that once felt permanent suddenly no longer fit.

We look at what remains and wonder what happened.

A vineyard in winter might wonder the same thing (if a vineyard could wonder).

Not long before, it was full of life. Its branches stretched outward beneath the sun, heavy with leaves and fruit. Then the season changed, and the pruning began.

Healthy branches were cut back. Growth that had taken months or years to produce was removed in moments. What remained looked bare, diminished, and almost lifeless.

To someone unfamiliar with vineyards, the pruning might look like damage.

But the person tending the vine knows otherwise.

The cutting is not careless. It is not punishment. And it is not evidence that the vine has been abandoned.

It is preparation.

The vine cannot see what the gardener sees. It does not know which branches have finished serving their purpose, which ones are consuming strength without producing fruit, or where new growth will eventually emerge.

It only experiences the loss.

I think this is what makes certain seasons of life so difficult. We are living inside the winter, while God, the “great gardener of the universe,” can already see the spring.

We see what has been removed. He sees what now has room to grow.

We feel the silence. He is working beneath the surface.

We measure the season by what is visible, forgetting that some of the most important work happens where we cannot see it.

Roots deepen in darkness. Wounds close quietly. Strength returns slowly. A new life begins forming long before anything green breaks through the wood.

This does not mean every loss is easy to explain. It does not mean pain should be dismissed with a convenient lesson or that we must immediately understand why something happened.

Some winters are simply hard.

But I believe that the absence of visible growth is not proof that nothing good is happening.

Actually, the life we thought was being dismantled is being reshaped.

Perhaps something had to be cut away because we had become too attached to a version of ourselves that could not carry us into the next season.

Perhaps what feels like emptiness is actually space.

And perhaps the silence is not abandonment, but attention—the quiet, deliberate work of a God who knows precisely what the vine needs, even when the vine does not.

The vineyard does not flourish despite the winter.

In many ways, it flourishes because of it.

And here’s the most important part: Spring doesn’t return the vine to exactly what it was before. It brings forth something new: growth that is stronger, more intentional, and capable of bearing fruit where there once was only bare wood.

If you are living through a winter season now, you may not be able to see that yet.

You may only see what is gone.

But always remember, bare branches are not dead branches. An unfinished story is not a failed one. And a quiet season is not necessarily an empty season.

Sometimes the most loving work looks, for a while, like loss.

Sometimes the hardest seasons are the ones in which we are being most carefully tended.

And sometimes, while nothing good seems to be happening in the foreground, an entire spring is being prepared just beneath the surface.

Modern work culture tends to push people toward extremes. On one side, there’s the culture of obsession: Work harder. Sacrifice more. Sleep less. Be all in.

On the other side, there’s a growing culture of detachment: Protect your peace. Don’t care too much. Never emotionally invest in work.

Both paths are understandable. And both paths are often reactions to each other. But I’ve started to believe neither path produces the best leaders. Because meaningful work was never supposed to consume us entirely. And avoiding meaningful work altogether leaves us empty in a different way.

The healthiest careers — and often the most impactful leaders — seem to emerge somewhere in the middle. Not from emotional extremes. But from sustainable belief over time.

The Burnout Path

Most companies celebrate intensity.

Especially startups.

The employee who answers emails at midnight. The founder who hasn’t taken a vacation in three years. The leader who proudly talks about exhaustion as though fatigue itself were proof of commitment.

Example: Elon Musk and the whole "sleeping under your desk" concept. He literally says: "No one should put this many hours into work. It hurts my brain and it hurts my heart." And yet he continues to do it and encourage it.

For a while, this kind of intensity can feel meaningful. There’s momentum. Purpose. Excitement. Belonging.

You feel needed.

And for many ambitious people, work slowly stops being something they do and starts becoming who they are.

That’s where the danger begins.

Because when identity fuses too tightly with career (like in Elon's case) every setback becomes personal. Every missed goal feels existential. Every difficult season feels like failure.

Eventually, exhaustion sets in. Physical exhaustion. Emotional exhaustion.

The work that once inspired them starts producing frustration instead. The mission becomes pressure. The passion becomes resentment. And many people eventually walk away entirely.

Personally, I experienced this in the entertainment industry. After 25 years producing movies, TV, commercials, music videos... always hustling for the next client and next job, I experienced this complete burnout. It is not fun and certainly not the outcome I had expected when I embarked on that journey thinking that I was "following my passion."

Burnout is often misunderstood as proof someone cared deeply. But now I know that burnout is not the same thing as meaningful commitment. Very often, burnout is what happens when commitment exists without sustainability.

A fire without boundaries eventually consumes its own fuel.

The Detached Path

Some people see the burnout culture and decide they want no part of it. So they emotionally distance themselves from work altogether. They do their tasks. Collect their paycheck. Protect themselves from disappointment. They never fully commit. Never fully believe. Never fully risk caring deeply about what they’re building.

Example: Millions of people all over the world who are what I call "lever pullers." They show up, do the bare minimum, and go home.

And to be fair, this path usually avoids the dramatic crash of burnout for sure. But it often creates something else: A quiet kind of emptiness.

Because human beings are not designed only for comfort. We are also designed for meaning. And meaning usually requires investment. Responsibility. Ownership. Vulnerability.

My friend Jim Uhls once said to me that the biggest affront to God is to live a comfortable life with no challenges. He wasn't talking about the detached path, but I think it still applies here.

Detached employees may survive longer emotionally, but many never experience the deeper fulfillment that comes from truly building something worthwhile alongside other people.

They become observers instead of builders. Present, but not fully alive within the work.

There’s a difference between balance and disengagement. And sometimes what we call “protecting our peace” is actually protecting ourselves from disappointment, responsibility, or growth.

The Builder’s Path

Then there’s a third path.

The people on this path are often quieter than the extremes. They care deeply about the work, but they also understand something important: A career is part of a life. Not the entire definition of one.

They do not worship work. But they do respect meaningful effort. They understand that all worthwhile work has rhythms. There are seasons of momentum. Seasons of frustration. Seasons where progress feels obvious. And seasons where growth feels invisible.

They don’t panic when things become difficult because they never expected meaningful work to be emotionally linear. They understand that leadership is not built through endless intensity. It’s built through resilience. Pacing. Recovery. Humility. Consistency.

They learn how to work hard without losing themselves. How to care deeply without becoming consumed. How to pursue excellence without tying their entire identity to outcomes.

And over time, something interesting happens. These people often become the leaders others trust most. Not because they are the loudest. Not because they are the most extreme. Not because they burn the brightest for short periods of time.

But because they endure.

They create steadiness in difficult moments. Perspective during pressure. Calm inside uncertainty. And perhaps most importantly: They help build cultures where other people can thrive sustainably too.

This is the path I am trying to be on now. While the over achiever in me is still there, I am doing my best to quiet his voice and bring to the forefront the voice of the builder. And, to be honest, it is hard. After 30 years of being on the burnout path, it is hard to change paths. And maybe that is okay. I am not sure. But I can tell you that I know now that it is the right path for me.

You Are More Than Your Career

I believe that meaningful work matters. Building things matters. Leadership matters.

But work was never meant to carry the full weight of human identity - something I learned after leaving the entertainment industry where your work was your identity entirely.

Your title is not your worth. Your startup is not your soul. Your quarterly performance is not the final measurement of your life. As the great Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen wrote in his book How Will You Measure Your Life?,:

“Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives.”

Family matters. Friendship matters. Faith matters. Health matters. Love matters. Presence matters.

Work should contribute to a meaningful life. Not replace one. And ironically, the people who understand this often become better leaders anyway. Because they lead from groundedness instead of desperation.

They are anchored beyond the company itself.

Final Thought

Some people burn out because they believe suffering automatically creates meaning.

Others avoid meaning altogether because they fear suffering.

But the healthiest and most impactful leaders usually learn something deeper: Joy in work is not found through obsession. And it is not found through emotional detachment.

It is found through sustainable belief over time.

The goal is not to avoid the ups and downs.

The goal is to build a career that doesn’t cost you who you are.

Several years ago, I watched a time-lapse video of an ant colony at work, and it was mesmerizing. Thousands of ants moved with purpose, each carrying out its role—some gathering food, others building tunnels, and still others defending the colony. There was no visible leader, no barked orders, just seamless cooperation. The result was a thriving, self-sustaining system that adapted and grew no matter what challenges came its way. It struck me then how similar this was to a well-functioning organization. Each employee, like each ant, plays a critical role, and when their efforts are synchronized, the result is something extraordinary.

In the natural world, ant colonies provide a striking example of how a system can thrive without centralized control. Each ant has a specific role, contributing its knowledge and skills to the greater good of the colony. Together, they form an efficient, adaptable organism capable of incredible feats. Businesses, like ant colonies, are complex systems, and their success depends on harnessing distributed knowledge—the collective expertise, experience, and actions of their employees.

As leaders, embracing this concept can transform how we approach our roles and empower our organizations to thrive in a rapidly changing world. Let’s explore how the science of complex systems underpins this idea and how leaders can use it to drive success.

Businesses as Complex Systems

A complex system is a network of interconnected parts that interact to produce outcomes greater than the sum of their parts. These systems—found in nature, economies, and organizations—share key characteristics:

• Interconnectedness: Actions in one part of the system affect the whole, often in unpredictable ways.

• Decentralization: Control is distributed; no single entity dictates outcomes.

• Adaptability: The system evolves in response to changes in its environment.

• Emergence: Novel solutions and behaviors arise from the interactions of individual components.

In business, this means the success of the organization isn’t dependent on any single person or department. Instead, it emerges from the collective efforts and interactions of its people.

The Role of Leadership in Distributed Knowledge

If an organization is a complex system, the leader’s role shifts from control to stewardship. You are no longer the commander of every decision but the facilitator of an environment where distributed knowledge can thrive. Here’s how leaders can embrace this responsibility:

1. Empower Employees to Act

In a complex system, autonomy is critical. Like ants responding to local signals, employees must be empowered to make decisions within their areas of expertise. Leaders must set clear strategic priorities and trust their teams to act accordingly.

• Practical Tip: Remove unnecessary bureaucracy and provide the tools and authority employees need to solve problems independently.

2. Build Connections

The flow of information is the lifeblood of a complex system. Leaders must foster collaboration and ensure that knowledge moves seamlessly across teams and departments.

• Practical Tip: Break down silos and model collaborative behavior by working openly with cross-functional teams.

3. Cultivate Diversity and Inclusion

Diversity of thought drives adaptability and innovation. A workforce with varied perspectives and experiences is better equipped to respond to challenges and seize opportunities.

• Practical Tip: Recruit for cognitive diversity and create spaces where differing opinions are valued.

4. Adapt to Change

In a complex system, rigidity is a liability. Leaders must focus on creating a learning culture that embraces change and encourages experimentation.

• Practical Tip: Use feedback loops to monitor outcomes and adjust strategies in real-time.

5. Embrace Emergence

Great ideas and innovations often arise from unexpected places. Leaders should create an environment where emergent solutions can surface and flourish.

• Practical Tip: Celebrate and scale small successes, reinforcing the value of experimentation and collective problem-solving.

The Risk of Reductionist Leadership: A Duct-Taped Bumper Won’t Protect You

I’ve seen leaders approach their businesses with a reductionist mindset, believing that success lies in cutting away everything but the bare essentials. In theory, this approach can seem efficient—focus only on what matters, strip away the rest. But in my experience, it rarely works as intended. It’s like fixing a car’s broken bumper with duct tape: you have a bumper, but it won’t protect you in a crash. Worse yet, the duct tape sends a message to everyone who sees it—that the car, and maybe even its owner, isn’t in top form.

When leaders reduce their organizations too far, they create a facade of functionality while compromising the foundation of the business. Internally, this often leads to overburdened teams, fractured processes, and a lack of adaptability. Externally, it damages credibility. A duct-taped bumper doesn’t just fail to protect; it signals to others that corners have been cut, priorities misplaced, or resources mismanaged.

Balancing Optimization and Radical Reduction

It’s essential to clarify: I’m not saying optimization is bad. Far from it. Smart optimization—streamlining processes, creating efficiencies, and reallocating resources—is critical for any successful business. It’s like upgrading your car to run more smoothly, improving its performance without compromising safety or integrity. The issue arises when optimization crosses the line into radical reduction.

Radical reduction isn’t optimization; it’s dismantling. It’s the business equivalent of ripping out critical parts of the car to make it lighter, only to find it can no longer drive safely or efficiently. From a distance, the car might still look like it’s running fine, but under the surface, it’s barely held together.

My Personal Experience: The Duct-Taped Bumper

I’ve experienced this firsthand. I once worked with an organization where leadership decided to strip the business down to just a few core areas, believing this would create a leaner, more agile operation. At first, the results looked promising—expenses went down, and the remaining teams worked hard to fill the gaps. But over time, the cracks began to show. Critical functions were missing, employees were burned out, and customers noticed the difference. It was like driving a car with a duct-taped bumper: it might look okay from a distance, but one crash—or in our case, one major challenge—was enough to reveal the flaws.

What’s worse, the outside perception wasn’t positive. Customers and partners started to question the company’s stability and leadership. The “duct tape” wasn’t just a bad fix; it became a symbol of neglect and a lack of vision.

Leadership Lessons from the Bumper

This experience taught me a crucial lesson about leadership: it’s not enough to focus on efficiency for efficiency’s sake. Leaders must take a holistic view, ensuring that every change strengthens the business as a whole, rather than creating the illusion of progress. Here’s how:

1. Invest in Structural Integrity: Optimization should focus on strengthening the organization, not merely cutting costs. Evaluate the long-term impact of every decision to ensure it enhances the business’s ability to perform and adapt.

2. Consider Perception: Just like a car with a duct-taped bumper signals neglect, a business that’s visibly over-reduced signals instability. Customers, employees, and partners are watching—make sure your decisions inspire trust and confidence.

3. Find the Right Balance: Effective leaders know when to trim excess and when to invest. Ask yourself if a change strengthens the whole system or simply reduces its footprint.

The Employee Experience as the Foundation

Distributed knowledge can only thrive if the employee experience is positive. Employees need to feel valued, safe, and supported to contribute their best:

• Psychological Safety: Employees must feel free to share ideas and voice concerns without fear of judgment.

• Recognition: Acknowledge the contributions of individuals, no matter how small.

• Development: Provide opportunities for continuous learning and growth.

The employee experience isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s the foundation of a resilient and innovative organization.

Leading the Colony

Imagine your business not as a hierarchy but as an organism, where each employee plays a vital role in the whole. Your job as a leader is to create the conditions where this collective system thrives—empowering individuals, fostering connections, embracing diversity, and guiding the organization through constant change.

By applying the principles of distributed knowledge and complex systems, you can unlock the true potential of your organization. It’s not about controlling the colony; it’s about leading it.

Leadership Takeaway

Great leadership in today’s world is about balance. It’s about understanding that while optimization is crucial for efficiency, over-reduction can dismantle the foundation of your business. Leaders must resist the allure of short-term fixes that only appear to improve the system and instead focus on fostering a resilient, adaptable, and interconnected organization.

Your role as a leader is not to micromanage or dictate every decision but to empower your team, build connections, and nurture an environment where innovation and growth emerge naturally. Like the steward of a thriving ant colony or the driver of a well-maintained car, your job is to ensure every part of the system works together seamlessly, with purpose and integrity.

Remember: a business isn’t just a sum of its parts—it’s a living, breathing organism. By investing in its structural integrity, considering how your choices are perceived, and fostering a positive employee experience, you can create an organization that not only survives challenges but thrives through them. Leadership isn’t about duct tape; it’s about building something that lasts.

I like being right.

I don’t always say that out loud, but I feel it. There’s a certain physical and emotional satisfaction in having the better argument. I was trained to be right by all those family dinners where I had to win.

I’m quick with systems. Patterns make sense to me. Flaws reveal themselves. And when they do, it’s hard not to point them out.

But here’s what I’m learning—slowly, reluctantly: Being right often costs more than it’s worth.

I’ve won arguments and lost closeness. Proved a point and widened the distance. Held my ground and watched connection step back.

The strange thing is, the victory never lasts very long. The room gets colder. The conversation tightens. Something subtle leaves. Something more important than being right. More emotionally and physically satisfying than being right.

The feeling I get from being right is temporary. And I often lose the long-term feeling in favor of the temporary feeling. I’m left holding correctness like a trophy no one wanted. And they’ve all gone home.

There’s a difference between truth and ego. Between clarity and control. Between helping and needing to win. I can’t believe I’m saying this at 53, but I’m still learning that difference.

Sometimes being right is necessary. Sometimes truth needs a voice. But sometimes what the moment needs more is gentleness, or curiosity, or the discipline to ask a question instead of delivering a verdict.

It’s hard for me because letting go of being right feels like losing. But it isn’t losing. It’s choosing relationship over resolution. Understanding over applause.Peace over performance.

This note is for me. For the next time I feel the argument rising in my chest. For the moment I’m tempted to prove instead of listen.

It’s better to be happy than to be right.

I’ve heard that before. I’m just learning what it costs to live it. And maybe what it gives back.

When I don’t know what to do, I wait.

Not gracefully. Not confidently. And definitely not with some quiet sense of spiritual superiority.

I wait because I’ve run out of moves.

Waiting, for me, usually begins with frustration. I replay the problem over and over. I look for angles I’ve missed, things I should have said. I try to force clarity where there isn’t any.

Eventually, I realize I’m not being patient, I’m being stubborn. So I stop pushing. Not because I trust the process, but because I’m tired of fighting it.

Waiting isn’t noble in those moments. It feels exposed. Like standing still while everyone else looks busy. But here’s what I’ve noticed:

When I stop pretending I know what to do, something softens.

The urgency loosens its grip. The need to perform certainty fades. And I make room for information I couldn’t hear before.

Waiting doesn’t fix things. It doesn’t magically make decisions easier. But it does keep me from making the wrong one out of panic. And for me, that’s huge.

So when I don’t know what to do, I try to do less.I keep showing up. I keep listening. I let time do what it does best; reveal what can’t be rushed.

This note is for me. For the moments when action feels responsible but isn’t. When stillness looks like failure but isn’t. Waiting doesn’t mean I’ve given up. It means I’m leaving space for the next right thing to arrive.

Even if it takes longer than I’d like.

I’m still forgetting. But I’m forgetting less.

I used to think progress meant the lesson finally sticking—that once I learned something, it would stay learned. Clean. Permanent. Installed.

Now, at 53, I realize that’s not how it actually works for me.

I’m a fast learner with technology. Systems. Strategy. Business. Give me a problem with structure and I’ll find the pattern quickly.

But in my personal life, I’m a slow learner. Pain slows the process. Ego interferes often. The same lessons come back wearing different clothes.

For a long time, I thought that meant I wasn’t growing. Now I’m starting to see it differently.

I guess progress doesn’t mean I never forget. It means I remember sooner. I catch myself earlier. I return faster.

I still lose patience, but I notice it before it hardens.

I still choose the wrong thing sometimes, but I don’t live there as long.

I still wander, but I know the way back.

That feels like something.

So yes, this is a note to myself. A reminder that slow learning is still learning. And forgetting less counts.

If you’re quick in some areas and painfully slow in others, you’re not broken. You’re just being taught in the language of your life.

And maybe that’s the lesson that takes the longest to learn.

In today’s fast-paced business world, being teachable isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a competitive advantage.

Whether you’re an executive, a team leader, or just starting your career, a learning mindset will make you better at what you do.

Being teachable means more than just absorbing information. It means approaching every situation with openness, humility, curiosity, and the willingness to evolve — even when it challenges your ego or comfort zone.

It’s about continuously refining how you work, think, and solve problems based on new insights and feedback.

Here’s why this matters for professionals at all levels:

➡️ Executives: Leaders who remain open to learning signal that growth is part of the culture.

➡️ Managers & Team Leads: Being teachable builds trust, fosters collaboration, and strengthens your team’s collective problem-solving ability.

➡️ Individual Contributors: Those with a learning mindset adapt faster to change, take on more responsibility, and stand out for potential advancement.

Let’s lean into learning — not just for ourselves, but for the teams and businesses we serve.

#professionaldevelopment #leadership #mindset

https://lnkd.in/gxD5A6sX

Carnegie, the American writer, lecturer, and pioneer in the field of self-improvement and interpersonal communication, built his life’s work on a simple truth: people want to be understood more than they want to be right. Forgiveness begins there - in understanding.

We often expect logic to resolve conflict, but forgiveness doesn’t follow reason; it follows compassion. People are driven by fear, pride, longing, and pain. When we remember that, we stop expecting perfection and start seeing humanity.

To forgive is to meet emotion with empathy, not argument. It’s to recognize that every outburst, every wound we cause or receive, comes from somewhere tender and unfinished.

The listening heart forgives easily because it listens deeply.

To read more daily quotes from important voices across the centuries and my reflections, check out the full book here: 👉 https://a.co/d/5dqSIYE

We live in the most distracted era in human history.

At no other point have we had so many tools designed to fill every empty moment: phones in our pockets, headphones in our ears, notifications waiting the instant silence appears. We no longer just encounter distraction—we live inside it.

Solitude was never meant to disappear from the human experience. It was meant to be part of it.

Not as isolation.

Not as loneliness.

But as a deliberate return to self.

It’s crazy to think, especially for those of us born before the digital revolution, that these days solitude requires intention. And because of that, it may be more important now than ever before.

What Solitude Gives Us That Nothing Else Can

For me, solitude is the place where the noise finally drops away.

It’s where I hear the voice of God more clearly ans everything else quiets down. In that quiet, I gain perspective on my life. I stop reacting and start seeing.

For others, solitude may bring clarity through nature, creativity, philosophy, or simply stillness itself.

What solitude gives - almost universally - is this:

• Perspective replaces reactivity

• Freedom replaces anxiety

• Presence replaces exhaustion

In solitude, success and failure both lose their grip. So does the approval or disapproval of other people. The internal scoreboard shuts off. The nervous system exhales.

In solitude, it feels like coming home.

The Cost of a Life Without Solitude

The absence of solitude has symptoms.

When I neglect it, I notice the shift almost immediately:

• I become more reactive

• I lose perspective

• I feel disconnected from God, from myself, from meaning

• I get tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix

• I become emotionally brittle

Without solitude, life turns into constant input with no integration. We consume endlessly but never digest.

And when that happens, we don’t just get tired, we become vulnerable. While I believe that vulnerability can be a good thing in certain circumstances, I don’t believe it’s good when it leads to bad decisions, to compulsions, to chasing validation, stimulation, or escape.

A life without solitude slowly loses its center.

Solitude Is Not a Place. It’s a Practice.

The ancient word “eremos” is often translated as “the wilderness” or “the desert.” But it was never really just about geography. It was about intentional withdrawal.

Solitude doesn’t require a cabin in the woods or a silent retreat. It can look like:

• Walking alone to a nearby park

• Sitting in your backyard at night without your phone

• Getting up before the rest of the house wakes

• Staying up late when the world finally quiets down

Solitude is about returning to life with clarity.

Like intentional boredom. Like silence. Like even silliness—unstructured, purposeless time that reminds us we are human, not machines.

These were once built into daily life. Now they must be chosen.

Why Solitude Matters Now

Technology isn’t evil. Opportunity isn’t the problem. Connection isn’t the enemy. The danger is living without any counterbalance.

Without solitude:

• We confuse noise for meaning

• We confuse movement for progress

• We confuse visibility for value

Solitude restores proportion. It re-centers us. It reminds us who we are when no one is watching and nothing is being measured.

In a world constantly asking for our attention, solitude is the act of choosing ourselves briefly, quietly, deliberately.

Not forever. Just enough to remember.

A Simple Invitation

I invite you to invite solitude into your life. But don’t worry, you don’t need to overhaul your life to do it. Just start small. Ten minutes of No phone, No music, No agenda.

Just space.

If you practice it—consistently, imperfectly—you may find what humans have always found there: clarity, grounding, and a sense that beneath all the noise, something steady has been waiting for you all along.

Solitude is a human need. So, don’t deny yourself this important aspect of your existence. Make a small about of daily time for it and watch your world change for the better.

Hope is a practice.

Something we return to. Especially on the days we don’t feel like it.

What I’ve learned about hope

I used to think hope meant believing things would work out. That if you hoped hard enough, the universe would reward you.

Life taught me otherwise.

Some things don’t work out. Some doors stay closed. Some seasons last longer than they should.

And yet, hope remains.

Not because outcomes improve, but because we do. In a way, hope promises endurance.

How Hope Shows Up

Real hope doesn’t shout. It whispers. It says:

• Try again tomorrow.

• Send the email.

• Make the call.

• Get out of bed.

• Walk outside.

• Drink the water.

Hope lives in the small decisions. No one applauds quiet courage, but it’s what carries us forward.

Choosing hope daily

Every morning we wake up with a choice: To replay what hurt us or to imagine what could still heal. To assume the worst or to leave space for the unknown. To armor up or to stay open.

For me, hope is simply believing something good can still grow here.

Even in cracked soil.

What hope has taught me

Hope changes shape. Sometimes it looks like excitement. Sometimes it looks like survival. Sometimes it’s big dreams. Sometimes it’s just getting through today.

I find that hope is adaptable. It bends without breaking. It learns. It waits. It returns.

When hope feels risky

There are days when hoping feels dangerous. When disappointment still stings. When you’ve been let down before. When protecting your heart feels safer than opening it.

But don’t close off. That’s just retreat.

Remain hopeful! Because hope is courage. The courage to want again. To believe again. To trust again.

Closing

Hope is something we practice. In small ways. Every day. Not because life is easy—but because we refuse to let it make us small.

Hope is how we keep becoming who we were meant to be.

We live in the most connected era in human history.

And yet, real connection feels harder than ever.

Our phones sit between us at dinner.

Conversations happen in fragments.

We listen with one ear while scrolling with the other.

We’re always reachable—but rarely available.

Somewhere along the way, love became something we fit in between notifications.

Not because we don’t care. But because so much is competing for our attention.

And attention, it turns out, is the currency of love.

The quiet erosion

Love rarely disappears in dramatic ways. It doesn’t usually end with betrayal or betrayal alone. More often, it fades through neglect.

Through postponed conversations. Through “later.”

Through presence replaced by proximity. Through being in the same room, but living in different worlds.

We don’t stop loving. We stop showing it.

Love is not a feeling

We’ve been taught that love is something we fall into.

That it arrives like lightning. That it stays as long as the feeling stays.

But feelings are like the weather. They change.

Love, on the other hand, is like the climate. It’s what remains when the storm passes.

Love is what you choose on your worst day.

The discipline of love

In a distracted world, love requires structure. It requires intention. Boundaries. Ritual.

Not romance-movie moments—but daily decisions.

To put the phone down.

To look someone in the eye.

To ask a real question and wait for the real answer.

To stay when it’s uncomfortable.

To speak gently when it would be easier to be sharp.

No one stays strong by accident. And no one loves well by accident either.

Love is trained.

Small practices that change everything

Love needs consistency.

Try this:

• One distraction-free conversation per day

• One genuine check-in

• One act of quiet service

• One moment of gratitude

• One pause before reacting

• One choice to respond with kindness

Try these not because they’re easy. But because they matter.

These moments won’t trend. They won’t get likes. But they build something far more durable.

Trust.

Safety.

Depth.

What we’re really choosing

Every day, we’re making a choice between love and noise. Between presence and performance. Between connection and convenience.

Love is choosing to stay awake in a world that wants you numb. It’s choosing depth in a culture addicted to speed. It’s choosing people over devices. Listening over reacting. Practice over promises.

Closing

Love doesn’t need more passion. It needs more practice.

Not someday. Not when life slows down. But today.

Because in a world pulling us apart, love is the quiet act of pulling us closer.

Choose love every single day.

January 10, 2026

For centuries, the human-animal divide was built on a simple, comforting assumption: humans are the thinkers, and animals are the instinct-driven machines. I admit that for most of my life I’ve thought the same. It wasn’t until only recently did I start to even consider there could be something else going on. Part of that change in me came as I’ve begun to think more about consciousness and the meaning of life. Probably because I’m now in my 50s and closer to the grave. I’m finding myself more thoughtful about many things in life, particularly the things I didn’t really think much about before. The other part of that change in me came from having spent the last couple of years around more animals than ever before in my life and working with top veterinarians and other animal experts.

As we move into 2026, that wall isn’t just changing in me, it seems to be changing across society as a whole. For example, there has been a wave of new research suggesting a radical shift in how we understand non-human minds.

The question "Are animals getting smarter?" has two answers. It appears that biologically, some are evolving at light speed to keep up with us. Scientifically, we are uncovering depths of intelligence that have been there all along, hidden by our own "human-colored" glasses. Artificial Intelligence is helping to uncover these things about animal intelligence and at the sane time people seem to be generally more interested in knowing than they have been in the past.

I recently dive into some basic research to answer this pressing question and here’s what I discovered.

1. The "Third Wave" of Domestication

If you’ve looked at your dog recently and felt like they were reading your mind, you might be right. Research from Duke University released in late 2025 suggests we are entering a "third wave of domestication".

Unlike the first wave (survival) or the second (working roles), this new phase is driven by our demand for companionship. Modern dogs are evolving larger brains and higher-order cognitive regions to facilitate complex social interactions with humans. A landmark study published just days ago in Science confirmed that "gifted" dogs can now learn the names of objects simply by overhearing human conversations—a trait previously thought unique to human toddlers.

2. The Urban Jungle as an Evolutionary Lab

While domestication reshapes our pets, urbanization is acting as a "powerhouse of evolution" for wildlife. Cities are high-stakes puzzles. For a raccoon, a "smart" latch on a trash can is an IQ test; for a crow, a busy intersection is a tool for cracking nuts using car tires.

Recent 2025 findings show that urban populations of coyotes, mussels, and even crustaceans are showing significantly higher resilience and behavioral flexibility than their rural counterparts. We aren't just changing their habitats; we are inadvertently selecting for the "problem-solvers" of the animal kingdom.

3. Breaking the Language Barrier with AI

Perhaps the most startling findings of the last year haven't come from the animals themselves, but from the tools we use to listen to them. Projects like Project CETI are using AI to decode the "phonetic" alphabet of sperm whales.

By using machine learning to analyze millions of acoustic recordings, researchers in 2025 have begun identifying complex linguistic patterns that challenge the notion that language is a human-only trait. We are realizing that the "silence" of the animal world was actually a frequency we didn't know how to tune into.

4. The Intelligence Tax

Evolution, however, is a ruthless accountant. Intelligence is "expensive"—the human brain consumes about 20% of our daily calories. In a world of climate-driven food scarcity, some animals are actually evolving to be smaller and potentially less cognitive to save energy.

Studies from late 2025 indicate that over 3,500 species are currently facing an "existential crisis" where the energy required for complex thought might be a luxury they can no longer afford.

The Verdict for 2026

Are animals getting smarter? In the case of our closest companions and urban "pests," the answer is yes, they are evolving rapidly to navigate the human-dominated Anthropocene.

But more importantly, the "New Science of Animal Minds" is proving that we have consistently underestimated the life already around us. From African dogs that "vote" on group decisions to crows with brain connectivity reminiscent of our own neocortex, the gap between "us" and "them" is smaller than it has ever been.

As we move forward into 2026, I think the challenge isn't just to see if they can catch up to our intelligence. It’s to see if we are smart enough to truly recognize theirs.

They turned out beautifully. Holding all three books together in one volume feels really special.

If you haven’t picked up the series yet, this complete edition is a great option. It includes all three books in the series, all in one place, and it’s priced a little lower than buying them separately.

I’m so proud of this collection and grateful for everyone who’s walked this journey with me. If these books have been on your heart, now’s a perfect time.

-Adrian

Get yours here 👉 https://a.co/d/6YrriSH

Love has a way of waking us up — not just to others, but to ourselves. Suddenly, the ordinary becomes beautiful. Words come easier. Silence feels full. We notice details we used to miss.

Plato’s line reminds us that love is not just a feeling between people — it’s a force that stirs something deep in the soul. It makes us see differently, speak differently, live differently. Even the most practical among us find ourselves moved to create, to give, to express.

You don’t have to write a poem. But let love touch you today — and see what stirs.

This past year reminded me how much words still matter, how meaningful thoughtful connection can be, and how powerful it is when people show up with curiosity and kindness.

I’m grateful for each of you and for the conversations we’ve shared—and the ones still ahead. Wishing you a new year filled with clarity, growth, and moments that truly matter.

Happy New Year. ✨

Reaching 100 subscribers matters to me. Not because of the number itself, but because of what it represents. It’s validation that the writing resonates. That the ideas land. And, more importantly, that there’s real engagement happening—thoughtful comments, private notes, and exchanges that feel human rather than performative.

Substack has quickly become my favorite place to show up. More than any other platform, it rewards depth over noise and curiosity over speed. It feels less like broadcasting and more like a conversation. That difference matters.

To everyone who has subscribed: thank you. Your presence here is not passive. It shapes what I write and how I think about writing. And to those who read, comment, or simply show up without subscribing—thank you as well. You’re just as much a part of what makes this platform special.

This feels like the beginning of something worth building carefully. I’m grateful to be here, grateful for the community forming around these words, and excited to keep going.

Onward.

I just wanted to take a moment to wish you a very Merry Christmas.

Thank you for being here, for reading, and for sharing this space with me. Your presence and support mean more than you know.

I hope the day brings you peace, rest, and moments that matter.

Warmly,

Adrian

The Essentials - Complete Edition brings together three companions for the inner life — Love, Hope, and Faith — in one complete collection.

Written for readers who want depth without overwhelm, these books are designed to be read slowly. One page a day. One thought at a time. Each volume offers 21 short reflections built around timeless quotes from poets, philosophers, artists, scientists, spiritual teachers, and unexpected modern voices.

This bundle is for the moments when you want to pause.

When you’re tired of noise.

When you need something steady to return to.

I hope you’ll consider getting a copy for yourself or a loved one this holiday season. I promise you, you won’t regret it!

👉 Get your copy here: https://a.co/d/7CtrQ4D

The box of darkness - pain, rejection, grief - becomes the soil where wisdom grows. To forgive is to finally see what the hurt taught you. A lifting of the veil of darkness that surrounded you for so long.

Sometimes forgiveness means thanking the moment that broke you for showing you what needed to be rebuilt. What was once a wound becomes light. What was once darkness becomes a gift.

👉 Read more: https://a.co/d/3zt5VU8