We spend half of our waking hours in life at work. It is our chance to prove that we can cooperate to do something worthwhile, to do what's right, and to make things better for people who care, so that in this wayward and chaotic world, we will be prepared when the stakes are inevitably higher.
Yes, we need to make a living.
But how do we make a life?
The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.
More isn’t the point. Better is.
On Work
Posted on Thursday, December 29, 2022
Last updated on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 4:27 PM
I spent the last five years in the retail and foodservice industry, where I’ve spent the majority of my career as a manager. More importantly, however, I’ve spent over two decades as a consumer, and if you've lived in the US for any extended period of time, you'll likely share at least some of my sentiment of being absolutely appalled at the soullessness, mediocrity, and laziness of the service industry.
When they accidentally mix up your coffee order with one that has almond milk, but you have a nut allergy.
When you want to ask a question about a shirt you want to buy, they ignore you because they're in a rush and there's a line of customers to the door that they have to deal with.
When you spend over an hour on hold to speak with a customer service representative, and that phone call takes yet another hour to finish because they have to go down a checklist of what they have to say as instructed by the manager instead of just helping you get what you want.
When they forget the reservation cake for your five-year-old son's birthday party, but you're already running late, and rudely tell you to wait one hour, and after an hour, they forget to give you candles or a knife. And when you open the box, your son's name is misspelled.
Dealing with these situations is infuriating. Often we can’t expect to receive even decent service, let alone something we might call good or great, so many of us lower our standards and expectations; we're conditioned to think that mistakes on our order is normal, that rude or apathetic staff is normal, that subpar products and services are normal, that being frustrated when you go out to do your daily routine is normal. Something that is as integral to modern society as grocery shopping, eating at a restaurant, getting your morning coffee, or buying clothes is undermined by carelessness and negligence. I think we can all agree that the people that work in these industries are doing important work. So, why then, is it reduced to being the most miserable, lowest paid work in the entire country? Why has it regressed into a robotic, soul-sucking slog that eats away at the welfare of our society?
Unless you're part of the 1%—a high-level executive or a significant stakeholder in a company—the rest of us are playing a zero-sum game.
Mid or low-level managers within a dysfunctional organization become mired in what Zeynep Ton describes as the “vicious cycle of retail.”
It’s incredibly demoralizing to witness high turnover rates, good and bad employees alike leaving your organization left and right, a hapless sense of perpetual disorganization and instability. It is hard to not be distraught when your workers are brought down by low morale, constantly suffering, being disrespected by customers, and working long, grueling hours for a poverty-level wage that you didn’t decide on. These lower-level managers become powerless puppets to upper management, being assigned absurd deadlines and arbitrary targets for sales or productivity. They become scapegoats in corporate’s obsession with P&L's and audits amidst ear-chafing, repulsive buzzwords like the "bottom line" and the "best practices,” which are never characterized by a genuine desire to improve the service or product at hand nor the working experience for those involved. It’s no surprise then, that these managers get burned out themselves, only making the lives of workers and customers worse as they’re not able to properly do their job of leading teams and ensuring smooth operations without losing their own sanity.
Frontline workers have to endure horrible, oppressive working environments—poorly designed, dirty, and disorganized workspaces, a lack of essential tools or supplies, inconsistent schedules, insufficient staffing and training, and absurd, nonsensical workplace rules or conventions created by wholly incompetent or just unmotivated, burnt out managers. Furthermore, there is often a complete lack of investment into the working conditions or benefits for these frontline workers. You know there's a problem when you have to ask permission from someone in corporate to justify the purchase of a $2 countertop dusting brush because it affects "the bottom line." Then try asking for a raise.
However, chances are, if you asked most retail workers what the worst part of their working experience is, they will likely tell you it is having to deal with entitled customers, people that have somehow simultaneously attained moral superiority and the audacity to forego any standards of human decency or respect from the moment they walk through the door. It is this unconscious—though often conscious—bias against minimum wage workers that denigrates your worth and thus your commitment to the job. The social norm is that retail jobs are part-time, throwaway jobs that you use to get some side cash to help you pay for college and get a "real job." And the people that want to do the work full-time often are as underpaid as their disposable brethren, and they still suffer from that same ridicule and social perception that they just aren't smart enough or are just too poor to go to college and pursue a decent career. You're at the lowest rungs of the corporate ladder, and everyone will make sure to remind you of it.
As consumers, we have just as much to lose. It's not fun to interact with soulless zombies on your weekend trip to the mall or cafe. In fact, it's deeply saddening and can kill the vibe of your experience. And it certainly doesn't inspire confidence that your order will be made with care and attention. It's not fun to have to deal with frequent mishaps—wrong items, directions not followed, items not to standard, packaged or shipped poorly, etc. On top of this, the market has fewer and fewer products and services that are exceptionally well-built or meticulously well-executed, because it takes both generous, motivated employees and a company culture that is willing to sacrifice profits to uphold standards. We have a marketplace filled with mediocrity, not excellence. Instead of investing back into the product or service towards making improvements, or back into the employees that made the business possible in the first place, we are lining the pockets of corporate executives and shareholders.
Can we just agree that this is a plague on our society? Why are we accepting this as a fact of life? That this is just the way it's always been? Every day that we choose to live with the status quo, we are perpetuating unkindness and needless suffering to millions of people. Have we lost all compassion, let alone respect, for ourselves and the rest of the society we live in?
We've been tricked our entire lives into thinking that we should hold back—the notion that if you give it your all, the industrial system, solely interested in productivity, is just going to ask you for more. And so evolved this nonsensical notion of “keeping work and life separate,” wherein it is believed that at all costs we should avoid overcommitting ourselves to work to save time for our own happiness and enjoyment of life. This bifurcation of responsibility is a toxic, backwards belief that undermines the value and impact of our work; it makes us complacent, and it distances ourselves from the responsibility we have to take against profligate corporate greed. I’m not saying burn yourself out or think about work constantly; we should know that overworking is not productive or conducive to a sustainable career. I’m saying that regardless of the type of work we do, all work has an impact on the welfare and functioning of society as a whole and the specific communities we are a part of.
We spend half of our waking hours at work; when we consciously suck the humanity out of what we’re doing, when we make what we do soulless and selfish—solely as a means of making money or status for ourselves—we make half of our lives essentially meaningless when we could've contributed towards something greater. We need to stop being afraid. We are afraid of a change to our way of life, afraid to lose our job, afraid to lose our income—the same income the corporatists want us to squander on their mediocre products. We can’t just walk through the office door and decide today that we’re going to shut off part of our brains and forget that we had any responsibility as human beings. Our attempt to draw an invisible boundary with our work doesn’t actually extricate us from this human responsibility—to be kind, to be compassionate, to be understanding, to service one another in our quest to find happiness, fulfillment, meaning, and purpose.
Posted on Thursday, December 29, 2022
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Posted on Thursday, December 29, 2022
Confidence
Posted on Thursday, June 29, 2023
Last updated on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 4:27 PM
Why is it that we glorify confidence as one of the hallmarks of a strong, resilient character, when it has proven time and time again that it fails us? When we succeed, we do not hesitate to attribute our it to our determination, our resolve, our tenacity. But when we fail, we are all too eager to sweep it under the rug, to turn a blind eye to the fact that we blatantly misled ourselves, and to forget that we shut down all the avenues of truth that were presented to us. Is this tenuous, fragile state of being self-assured and the act of being assertive actually contributing anything to help us understand a situation for what it is, as opposed to merely how we feel about it?
All too often in our culture today, our compulsion to maintain an image of confidence becomes an obstacle to reason and objectivity. Words that indicate uncertainty—might, maybe, perhaps—are conflated with unsubstantiated signs of weakness and a lack of knowledge. On the surface, one might argue that the only situation where confidence is good is when it is conjoined with lucid and rational judgment. But even with sound judgment, how can anyone be so sure? Why be sure when—in this paradoxical, hostile, and chaotic world—it’s nearly impossible to be completely sure from an objective standpoint? And even being justifiably sure on the outcome of our choices, it’s more than likely that our selfish, narrow-minded, and erratic emotional tendencies—shortcomings that are closely associated with any variation of confidence, haughtiness, or arrogance—are inevitably undoing any rational judgment we once had?
Lest we continue to conflate confidence with character, charisma with competence, bravery with bravado, and certainty with success. Above all, in an effort to whittle down and disintegrate this pretense of confidence at its roots, it should be an indication of integrity and humility—not self-deprecation and shame—to say, “I was wrong.
Posted on Thursday, June 29, 2023
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Unproductive
Posted on Friday, March 3, 2023
Last updated on Thursday, August 6, 2026 at 5:23 PM
The term “unproductive” has garnered a significant negative connotation in recent history. It is often an ideological bludgeon used to denigrate and shame anyone who doesn’t feel obligated to become a cog in an industrial system, anyone who doesn’t wish to sacrifice their lives for a cause they don’t believe in, to deteriorate their mental or physical health in doing so, to waste away their one chance at life.
In a capitalist society, we’ve been wired to believe that producing, that more is inherently good. More resources, more products, more productivity, more money, more opportunity.
But at a certain point, we have to decide when something is enough. Nothing good in our lives keeps growing and growing. It is almost a universal rule that everything in our lives, whether a certain type of food, a certain type of work, a certain type of leisure activity, a certain type of relationship or friendship, requires balance.
The greatest paradox of our first-world society is that the people in it simultaneously recognize that while humans operate better by enough, capitalism operates better by more.
Posted on Friday, March 3, 2023
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Posted on Friday, March 3, 2023
The Job Interview
Posted on Sunday, January 8, 2023
Last updated on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 4:27 PM
“What are your strengths and weaknesses?”
This is a hackneyed question that appears on far too many job interviews, and it exemplifies the utter lack of nuance within the reasoning process to hire someone or not within most organizations.
To any interviewer that regularly uses this crude question in their hiring process, I’d love to ask some questions of my own:
Why are we using a loaded question that presumes that there are generalized strengths and weaknesses, as if we can only choose between being proud of some part of ourselves or ashamed about others?
Why are we so inclined to bifurcate our personality traits into strengths and weaknesses when clearly our psychology and our circumstances are infinitely more complex than two lazily defined categories?
Strengths and weaknesses in regard to what? In regard to our personal lives? Our happiness? Our personal definition of success? Our social relationships? Our previous job, which may have nothing to do with our success in a future one?
Do we measure it against each and every specific task we’ll be doing on the job, or are we measuring it against an oversimplified, crude narrative of what the job entails, because many interviewers or recruiters don’t actually understand or even care to understand the work itself?
Do we really expect someone to give an unbiased, honest breakdown of all their personality traits, when a “bad” answer would cost them a potential job offer?
How will we apply this question when we consider that most people lack the self-awareness, humility, and at least halfway-decent comprehension of human psychology that is required to do so?
And if someone is honest, let’s take a step back and ask ourselves: why are we probing someone’s ability to monologue coherently and confidently about their personality to a stranger?
Why should we hire someone based on these skills when it has absolutely nothing to do with most jobs?
Can we really be convinced that this question is such a great opportunity for people to talk about themselves in a fair and meaningful light?
Having hired dozens of people in my career as a manager, I can tell you first hand how little correlation there is between my impressions during the interview and that new hire’s performance on the job. We have to realize that most jobs are rather complex; while they do have their fair share of outright menial tasks, even seemingly basic jobs—cashiers, receptionists, stockers, janitors, servers—possess a variety of responsibilities that, in order to achieve excellence in that position, require one to independently utilize skills or qualities such as planning, multitasking, task prioritization, effective communication, composure under stress, problem-solving, and decision-making. When we want to make any work into an art—an endeavor that requires constant generosity and commitment—more often than not it isn’t absolute whether certain personality traits would be directly conducive toward someone’s individual ability to contribute within an organization.
We should adopt a more nuanced conception of ourselves where we don’t define strengths and weaknesses by the person, but by each trait. More specifically, how each trait potentially contributes or detracts from a specific goal. Only then can we understand how each trait creates a unique dynamic with other traits, and how this on its own has the potential to create yet another unique dynamic with either the work itself or with the people around them. We also have to accept the fact that there is no simple answer when it comes to human personality.
I’m with Seth Godin on this one. Instead of wasting all our time asking pointless, unnatural, and awkward questions and solely probing people’s ability to be confident in job interviews, just have people use that time to do a trial run of the job itself, which also gives them an opportunity to see if the work environment is a good fit for them before commuting to it. If it isn’t a good fit, neither party benefits.
Yes—it’s certainly costly to pay people to do these trial runs, to train and invest in knowledgeable and motivated recruiters to undertake this operation, but what’s even more costly than that is having dead weight in your organization—people that don’t actually contribute anything valuable. And what’s even more costly than that is staff turnover—all the costs of rehiring and retraining new employees, the productivity loss and disruption of business operations, and the cascading effects of declining organizational reputation among employees and customers alike.
The only purpose of this absurd question is to use it to provoke someone who would be repulsed or bewildered by such a blatantly dense conception of personality—someone who dares to challenge the convention and offer nuance in pursuit of truth even when it might undermine their own chances of getting the job. That’s someone that can be truly invaluable to any organization.
Posted on Sunday, January 8, 2023
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Posted on Sunday, January 8, 2023
Conflict
Posted on Sunday, March 5, 2023
Last updated on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 4:27 PM
Disagreement and conflict is inevitable. We live in a world that’s often hostile and inimical, bereft of love, filled with contempt and selfish desire, quick to shame and ridicule, and predisposed to hate, to polarize, and to antagonize. But there is nothing inherently wrong with the process of disagreement; in fact, it’s the only mechanism by which we progress human knowledge and culture. Rather, it’s the narratives that we assign to this dissension that precipitate and perpetuate nearly all the issues that pervade our modern day society.
We fabricate a narrative of us against them, when unity is actually the only long-term solution.
We make it a game of pride, of winners and losers, while in reality we all lose.
We assign motives of sabotage, of purposeful wrongdoing while there are no such motives.
We make it about revenge, justice, retaliation, and retribution, while we fail to realize that it becomes an perpetual, unending cycle of self-wrought destruction.
We seek to advance the world through business and politics, while all that these systems do is dehumanize our interactions by needlessly abstracting and thus corrupting them.
And the consequences of holding onto these narratives as the social norm are unequivocally clear; while I hope that the egregiousness and horror of the brutal wars throughout our history would be enough to convince us to change, it is our inability to unite—to truly work together to tackle the staggering amount of unaddressed and neglected social and public health issues—that is equally appalling. We have no reservation in continuing to conjure up an ever-increasing, intricate collection of excuses to justify our way of life and the narratives that we assign to it: I’m just trying to get by and be happy. My life already has so many of its own worries. We can’t change human nature; we will always be predisposed to conflict. Everything is hopeless, so we might as well live our lives selfishly and as how we see fit. Even when the world is falling apart around us, it’s all too easy to remain haughty and complacent when we’re not the ones in a grave, a trench, or a hospital bed. Our survivorship bias assures us: the world’s not all that bad. If the system isn’t broken, why fix it?
In an ideal world, we have disagreement, debate, a realization of common ground, then progress and change—not disagreement, debate, a realization of inexorable differences, then conflict as a means of last resort. Lest we forget, there is solely one purpose for a debate—the advancement of ideas. It is an opportunity for two individuals to learn from each other.
The fact that debates have become a spectator sport for some is an absolute travesty. In the age of social media and political polarization, it has become a mere caricature of intellectual discourse; from the absurd pantomime of the past presidential debates or the average high school debating competition, what was originally intended to be a means of advancing our collective intelligence as a society is instead now a means of degrading it. They have perverted the very process that allows us to obviate the game of us against them—of realizing the inexorable differences that inevitably lead to conflict.
In an intellectually honest debate, there are no winners or losers. There are no sides to take. There is no applause. There is no emotion.
There are facts and evidence. There is logic and reasoning.
Nothing else.
We can choose to end our disagreement then and there.
What we most need to recognize is that the debate is as much about what we disagree on as it is what we agree on. Any productive debate consists of participants that not only disagree on the topic of the debate, but agree on the purpose of the debate itself; it is only when we can agree about what it means to create a better world—when we can agree about the value of pursuing a greater truth—that we can actually practically make use of all this exchange of knowledge. If we can’t agree on what all this is even for, it merely devolves into raucous, senseless banter or, better yet, glorified intellectual masturbation.
Yes, none of us are without fault. None of us are without blame. None of us are truly qualified to talk about anything. But we have to remember that none of this actually matters when we want to reconcile our differences. What matters is that we have an idea, a thought, an opinion, and we are willing and generous enough to share that with the rest of the world that will not judge the person who said it, but will judge the idea itself. When we preoccupy ourselves with who said it, why they said it, and how they said it, we actually lose sight of what they’re saying. We lose sight of what we’re all actually trying to do.
I want to urge us all—don’t let the lizard brain win. Don’t merely let our human predisposition towards antagonism and division inhibit us from making a better world for all of us; it is singlehandedly the greatest threat toward our progress as humanity.
I am far from being an optimist, so I’d likely be the first to tell you that it doesn’t seem likely that any one of us could realistically upend the current status quo and win the battle against our antagonistic instincts. But I cannot simply ignore the malleability of the human spirit; in the same way that the leaders of our nations and the captain of industry have meticulously shaped the predominant culture in the past two centuries of the industrial age, there is no reason to believe that it is unfeasible to reverse this process. As humans, we will certainly never reach a point where our perspectives of the world completely align, but look how far the industrialists got. We believe it isn’t possible because, for generations, we’ve been told a different story—a story of the value of compliance and conformity, where insolence and refusal to adhere to the status quo will harm our ability to live a prosperous, stable life. We’ve been told that story so that we wouldn’t come to the dangerous realization that all this conflict and strife was merely a means for the wealthy and powerful to hold onto their wealth and power. When from birth we’ve been so intimately cajoled by the glamor of consumerism and the lulling comfort of modern life, it becomes almost impossible for us to imagine losing these luxuries for such a distant and quixotic cause.
Yes—it will be difficult, but we have to start somewhere, and it begins with deciding what narrative to assign to our inexorable tendency towards disagreement and thus conflict. We can decide to promulgate a culture where the norm of a debate isn’t about vehemently defending our own worldview, but is rather about an opportunity to learn from one another’s unique perspectives. We can create an environment where we don’t have to make crude assumptions about one another’s motives. We can build a narrative that—instead of fixating on our irreconcilable differences—allows us to hone in on what unites us as humanity, to learn about why we’re all here in the first place, what each of us value, what gives us reason to live, and how we can best serve each other. The only true way forward, the only way we begin to change our world and the present narrative, is together.
Posted on Sunday, March 5, 2023
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Posted on Sunday, March 5, 2023
No, Don’t Ask Me to Vote
Posted on Saturday, December 17, 2022
Last updated on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 4:27 PM
I don't want to involve myself in politics simply because I know nothing about it. I don't want to be involved in any important, society-altering decision-making process, for that matter, if I'm not extremely well-versed in the relevant fields. Does that make me strange? Does it make me strange for not wanting to make rash, biased, ill-informed, and emotionally-charged decisions for other people?
Political issues are incredibly complex, and often require a very profound understanding of history, geopolitics, psychology, sociology, science, moral philosophy, among many other things. I, and most certainly not most people, do not possess this level of comprehension in these topics to make any informed judgments whatsoever. And it's not just the average person; it's even those in the upper middle or upper class, those that have attended prestigious colleges and have had their path paved ahead of them. The problem isn't only that the people are retarded, it's that on top of that, they're also entitled—the type of thinking that voting or any form of political involvement can come for free, that it's a privilege, and that we can use it just because we can. To be honest, it's no surprise, considering the educational philosophy of public schools and most universities that value conformity and compliance over anything else, where from a young age we're constantly drilled into following directions to gain a reward. We're not taught to think, to know how to effectively communicate and create productive civil discourse, to be self-aware enough to proudly say that you don't know. But instead we're ridiculed and deemed a failure if we say we don't know. So, when none of us are being held to a standard, we hide behind a façade of knowledge and self-appointed moral superiority. And being conformists, we don't have a problem with this, since that's what everyone else is doing.
I don't have a problem with people having their opinion. It's when you decide that your mere opinion should decide how other people should have to live their lives and how society should be run, regardless of whether or not you've done the intellectual heavy lifting and spent the long hours of research, reading, and discussion. No—this is not a discussion regarding what political structure is optimal; I don't know the answer to that question and I'm in no position to answer it. What I'm contending with is that, regardless of the present political system we live in, why is no one being held to a standard of knowledge or comprehension? Why is it that so few people actually know how to create productive civil discourse? Why is it that we perpetuate and embrace a culture that values being "right" over being truthful, a culture that is characterized by polarization of beliefs instead of a communal pursuit of human welfare? Do we just not care anymore?
Following a barrage of news surrounding the Itaewon crowd crush back about two months ago, I've begun to visualize the crowd crush as a microcosm of our political climate, and thus as a stark warning for us all to realize the dangers of a mass of people. Just as panic sets a crowd into a frenzy, pushing one another more aggressively and trampling one another to the point of death, we can in the same way drive our nation into chaos, forcing each and every one of us against our will down a path fraught with immorality, corruption, and both the very real consequence of death and the figurative death of our nation and what we stand for. No one blames the individual for the casualties in a crowd crush. Why is that? After all, in a crowd, we're the ones doing the pushing. Because we do it for our survival. We do it because there's no other path but forward. We understand that the individual becomes powerless in such a situation; they unwillingly become part of a force that compounds to eventually suffocate someone down the line. The fact of the matter is, if you want to avoid death, you avoid crowds entirely, because you understand the inherent power a crowd has—it has become not the sum of its constituent elements of consciousness, but an entire beast in and of itself. Sure, you can put all your trust and faith in the government or the event organizers to be well-prepared for such an event, but the risk always remains; it is—at the point of no return, the point at which you become part of an uncontrollable tide—the risk of losing all individual freedom to decide your fate.
"[A] crowd in its very concept is the untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction.”
— Soren Kierkegaard
I find it particularly interesting that many of us like to speak about the horrors of the 20th century as if they were the dark ages of humanity, as if we're somehow past that harrowing chapter of human history, that we've learned from our mistakes and we're far more enlightened and intellectually informed now than we were then. But seven or eight decades ago, in the grand scope of human history, is very recent history, and I think we don't realize the weight of this notion fully. And it is the idea that fundamentally, as humans, we're not all that different from who we were when we wiped hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people off the face of this earth. Yet we don't act like we live with that kind of danger, yet we are the ones that are capable of carrying out the atrocity. We are the ones that are complicit if it happens.
Jordan Peterson, in one of his lectures recounting the origins of the nationalist socialist movement in Germany in the 1930s, remarked,
"It wasn’t only stupid people who got tangled up in this. It was pretty much everybody who got tangled in it. And one of the things you might think about is: if you were there, for any one of you, there is a 90% chance that you would have got tangled up in it. You wouldn’t have been a person who rescued the gypsies, forget that."
Look at how we talk to one another, the way we find joy in trampling our political "opponents," how little we think for ourselves and instead just take a side, and how low our standards are for not only the people that we elect to lead this nation, but more importantly, for each other as citizens. There is the proof that we haven't come that far. When we normalize and perpetuate this behavior, we don't realize that this is the same exact behavior that precipitated the complete and utter catastrophes of the 20th century. Only now, we have more tools of destruction at our disposal.
So am I wrong for thinking that this intellectual negligence and dereliction of our duty as citizens is gravely immoral? That when we allow the brute force of a crowd, a panicked mob, to dictate the path of our nation, we ourselves become capable of unjust murder? When you consider the political blunders of the past, how corrupt or inept politicians have led us astray and squandered billions of dollars? When you consider the abysmal state of living that millions of Americans still endure to this day? When you consider the atrocities and the hundreds of millions of people killed in the last century because people had no courage to stand for what was right, or the intellectual capacity to even comprehend what was right? When we instead let our emotions drag us to blindly follow ideologues and tyrants, people, that above all other considerations, merely make us feel better? Have we learned absolutely nothing from history?
Don't encourage each other to vote. Encourage each other to think.
Posted on Saturday, December 17, 2022
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Posted on Saturday, December 17, 2022
Work is the expression of our energy and our dreams. We owe those along for the journey the same dignity and connection we would like to receive in return.
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Mindfulness is healthy, it’s professional, and it allows us to be our best self. It is also maddeningly difficult, particularly in a culture that prizes busyness over just about everything else.
But mindful isn’t the opposite of busy.
Mindfulness demands intention. Mindfulness is the practice of simply doing the work. Without commentary, without chatter, without fear.
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Yes, we need to make a living.
But how do we make a life?
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The alternative is to bring actual wonder to the conversation, to be with a person in their story and narrative. Wonder is the open-ended version of curiosity, without seeking an explanation to solve the problem.
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Pathfinding is at the core of creating with significance, and finding the path is largely the work of finding non-paths until the path is evident.
That doesn’t mean that we’re sloppy. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite.
There’s a rigor to this exploration, a nonrandom way to explore the possible.And that doesn’t mean we ship junk. We can make mistakes together, in private often, testing and measuring and improving.
And then we can ship the work. Work we’re proud of. Deliver it to people who care and begin again.
Added in 2026
Appears in
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- The alternative is to bring actual wonder to the conversation, to be with a person in their stor…Seth Godin
- Parallel Worldsan essay
- More isn’t the point. Better is.Seth Godin
- The foundation of all real skills is this one: the confidence and permission to talk to one anot…Seth Godin
- Mindfulness is healthy, it’s professional, and it allows us to be our best self. It is also madd…Seth Godin
- Without tension, we wait. Without a deadline, we meander. Without urgency, it’s easier to stall.Seth Godin
- Because significant organizations spend most of their time and energy not being where they were…Seth Godin
- Choicean essay
Added in 2026
Because significant organizations spend most of their time and energy not being where they were yesterday. In fact, the uncertainty and the dislocation are the point, not a temporary inconvenience.
Added in 2026
Along the same lines
- Parallel Worldsan essay
- More isn’t the point. Better is.Seth Godin
- Pathfinding is at the core of creating with significance, and finding the path is largely the wo…Seth Godin
- The foundation of all real skills is this one: the confidence and permission to talk to one anot…Seth Godin
- Mindfulness is healthy, it’s professional, and it allows us to be our best self. It is also madd…Seth Godin
- The alternative is to bring actual wonder to the conversation, to be with a person in their stor…Seth Godin
- Without tension, we wait. Without a deadline, we meander. Without urgency, it’s easier to stall.Seth Godin
Added in 2026
The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.
Added in 2026
More isn’t the point. Better is.
Added in 2026
Along the same lines
- Parallel Worldsan essay
- Pathfinding is at the core of creating with significance, and finding the path is largely the wo…Seth Godin
- The foundation of all real skills is this one: the confidence and permission to talk to one anot…Seth Godin
- Mindfulness is healthy, it’s professional, and it allows us to be our best self. It is also madd…Seth Godin
- The alternative is to bring actual wonder to the conversation, to be with a person in their stor…Seth Godin
- Without tension, we wait. Without a deadline, we meander. Without urgency, it’s easier to stall.Seth Godin
- Because significant organizations spend most of their time and energy not being where they were…Seth Godin
Added in 2026