The rule of 20%: How to find the sweet spot for improved performance | Daniel Coyle: Full Interview

I'm Daniel Coyle. I write about the science of human potential, and I'm the author of The Talent Code, The Culture Code, and my new book, Flourish. Today on Big Think, we're going to be talking about talent, highly successful groups, and thriving communities.

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We live at a really interesting moment in history. Unlike all of our ancestors, we live in a moment of peak individualism. Whenever we see achievement, we focus on the individual — what makes them special, their habits, their behaviors. We just see them. But like all matters of focus, focus makes you a little bit blind. There are all kinds of other currents, connections, and more ecological powers that make someone improve.

If you looked at Hemingway through the lens of individualism, you would ask what makes him great, and the answer would be his hard work, his particular gift, his talent. That's a very sexy, beautiful story to tell — that he's a magical person, that Steve Jobs is a magical person, that Michael Jordan is a magical person, that Baryshnikov is a magical person. We get kind of addicted to looking through this individualistic lens. But when we do that, we're blind to all the other forces that are truthfully generating that talent, that performance, that fulfillment.

When you actually scratch the surface of a great performer — when you look into what made a Hemingway, a Jordan, or a Baryshnikov — what you will invariably find is an elite environment, a bunch of relationships, a bunch of connection. Who taught Mr. Hemingway to love words? What model served him as he began to develop? What kind of environment was he in? Taking on this environmental lens opens up new opportunities for leadership. In the end, it's about creating conditions where people can grow together.

There's a great saying in the Da Jing: where there's a good leader, people say "what a good leader that is." But where there's a great leader, people say "we did it ourselves." That's not how we've typically thought about leadership. We often focus on control, on results, on treating people as if they're separate from others. Taking a more ecological approach opens up new ways to create more growth.

So I spent five years visiting talent hotbeds all over the world — places that produced impossible numbers of talented performers, like a Russian tennis club that produced more top-25 players than the entire United States, or a Bulgarian chess club. The places I visited shared common environmental features that I saw over and over again.

The first is that they were kind of junky. I started to call them "chicken wire Harvards." You'd go to the music camp and there'd be cinder blocks holding up the stairs, and the camp hadn't been repaired in a long time. They didn't put their attention on creating a luxurious environment — they explicitly did not, and kept it very Spartan. An elite development environment is not one where every luxury is given to you. It's a place of work. It's a place of craft.

The second thing I noticed is that they had a really different relationship to mistakes. There's something called learning velocity, and the best story I know to get a handle on it is about Clarissa. Clarissa was a 15-year-old musician, part of a study done by the psychologist Gary McPherson. McPherson tracked her practice for months and identified one brief six-minute segment where she progressed more than she did in a month of normal practice. What did that look like?

Clarissa is sitting down, wearing a hoodie, with her clarinet, looking at the music ferociously intently. Then she plays a little snatch of a song called "The Golden Wedding" — a jazzy little tune. She plays the first couple bars, makes a mistake, and stops. She feels that mistake, then reads the notes again.

Clarissa goes back, hums the passage to herself, plays a little further, makes another mistake, and stops. If you picture what the wires of her brain are doing in that moment, she's reaching—sensing the failure and then reaching again. That's called deep practice: getting to the edge of your ability to increase learning velocity, deliberately making mistakes in order to build skill.

When I visited these talent hotbeds, they were all practicing like a bunch of Clarissas—keenly focused on pushing themselves to the edge of their ability, sensing the mistake, and reaching again. Deep practice is all about that moment of reach, where learning velocity goes up. It's really a moment of reinterpreting what mistakes are. We walk around thinking a mistake is a verdict, a sign that "this isn't meant for me." But in fact, a mistake is information—information about where you should reach next. That combination of intense desire plus intense reaching is like an engine: high motivation fueling reaching into that zone.

Who are the fastest learners in the world? For my money, probably 12-year-old kids on their skateboards—they learn really fast, they get good really fast. And the slowest learners? Maybe those same kids in their algebra class. Looked at through a Clarissa lens, the skateboard environment shows them where the mistakes are. They feel that moment and can correct and adjust, make mistakes and fix them. In the algebra classroom, they're sitting passively while knowledge washes over them. By tweaking the environment, you can massively impact learning velocity—and that's the lesson of the talent hotbeds. They tweak the environment to create those reaches.

At Meadow Mount School of Music, where some of the top musicians on the planet have trained, students would take the sheet music they're learning, cut it into strips line by line, mix them up in a bowl, pull one out, and play it—learning bit by bit, chunk by chunk.

One place that was really good at generating errors was Brazilian soccer. There's a mystery there: why does Brazil produce so many brilliant players? The usual answer is, "Well, it's Brazil—it's warm, they play on the beach, they love soccer." That makes a little sense, but lots of places are warm and love soccer, and until the 1950s Brazil wasn't actually that good—they were beaten by Hungary in the World Cup, which is not exactly a beach nation. What made Brazil good was becoming addicted to a strange little game called futebol de salão—soccer in the room. It resembles soccer if you fed soccer amphetamines and shoved it in a phone booth: intensely fast, played in a space about the size of a basketball court, with a small ball, five aside, very narrow passing lanes, no space, and decisions required right now. It forces you into the sweet spot over and over again, and the pressure it creates puts people into that zone of development, that Clarissa spot.

Brazil is uniquely addicted to futebol de salão—until about 2009, there were 39 international championships and Brazil had won 38 of them. It's played all over the nation, and the biographies of great Brazilian players show they all spent a huge portion of their youth playing this game.

What surprised me about the talent hotbeds was that they were not making each other comfortable. They were tipping their environment so they could get into that Clarissa zone, make more mistakes, and build more skill. I call it the rule of 20%: if you're making mistakes about 20% of the time, you're probably in the sweet spot. If you're making no mistakes, you're not learning; if you're making 80% mistakes, you're not in the sweet spot either. The great irony of the sweet spot is that it feels kind of bitter—hanging out at 80% success and 20% mistakes is hard. It takes that extra bit of focus, what they would call deliberate practice.

There was an embrace of struggle at these places—the struggle was validated, expected, even noble. I saw it vividly at Spartak, a tennis club outside of Moscow that produced more top-25 women players than the entire United States in the 1990s and early 2000s. When you arrive, you wonder why: it sits in the middle of a huge park in an old Quonset hut that looks like something from World War II. Walking in, I felt I'd gone to the wrong place—it seemed deserted. There was a tiny door, and when I opened it I expected to hear tennis balls, but I didn't. The reason was that they were all swinging without the ball, lined up almost like dancers, swinging slowly. The teacher, Larisa Preobrazhenskaya, was 79, and this was her routine: she would not let them begin to compete until they had perfected the stroke. She was incredulous—how can you start to compete unless you build the stroke? Through that slow-motion practice, moving through the stroke like dancers, she fixed their wrists and elbows, had them repeat it again and again until it was absolutely built and grooved, and only then could they compete.

For me that captured the focus on building that happens in these places. They don't roll out the balls and say go hit and see who has magical talent. They say: we have to start from the ground, from the most basic transfer of power, the most basic movement of your body, and struggle through that until we've got it. They build it piece by piece by piece.

The rule of 10,000 hours has been both elevated and trashed in recent years, and we've landed somewhere in the middle: it's not a hard-and-fast rule. You can't just do 10,000 hours of something and become world class, and it depends on the skill—for high jump or the 100-meter sprint, genetics play a bigger role. But for most skills, it's a good rule of thumb that you need to deep practice a lot and build that circuitry. That's non-negotiable, and it takes time. There's no shortcut or hack.

Spending time building fundamentals, making mistakes, reaching past where you currently are on the edge of your ability, over and over—that's what skill is actually built of. Saying "there's no shortcut" can sound depressing, but in the talent hotbeds I found it immensely liberating and joyful. It makes each repetition actually matter, because each time you go to a slightly further place: you made the mistake, you learned from it, you grew. That growth is what repetition actually is.

There was also a sense that you could steal ideas—nothing was purely individual, something you had to figure out alone. You could borrow, beg, and steal ideas from other people. An elite environment is one where a person has the opportunity to learn from others, to stare and learn. That's really the first moment of deep practice: when we look at a skill and say "I want to do that," and fall in love with it—fall in love with that baseball swing, that poem, that music, that dance move—and take it inside yourself. So the pattern I saw was a social environment where you can stare and learn, where you're not focused on yourself but using other people's ideas, and where struggle is not just accepted but validated and made noble.

One of the greatest mysteries is why the Renaissance happened, and why in Italy at that time. Historians give all kinds of reasons—that Florence was emptied out by the plague, that the Medici existed—but those things happened in other places too, so why there? What you find when you dig in is that Florence was where craft guilds evolved. A guild was a workshop where young people were brought in and taught the craft of mixing paint, carving stone, making fresco, and preparing pigments.

Apprentices would get hundreds, even thousands of repetitions and thousands of hours learning the fundamentals of their craft, each repetition putting them into that zone of deep practice. That is an elite development environment. It was not a country club setting with lessons from painters; they worked every day with others on real projects, learning as they went—first as a young apprentice preparing the surface, then mixing paints and learning how the medium worked, watching great masters at work. They were staring, struggling, and stealing.

So as we look at our schools, our families, and our work environments, the challenge is how to create that environment where it is safe to stare, struggle, and steal together in the craft of getting better—a guild environment where we can dig in and grow ourselves.

The most mind-blowing thing I see people astonished by is the compounding effect. If you improve 1% a day at piano, public speaking, dance, or whatever you are trying to improve at, by the end of a year you are 37 times better than when you started. Compounding, exponential growth is mind-blowing. That is why we have all known people who took off like rocket ships—kids in our neighborhood who became incredible musicians, or high school classmates who seemed unimpressive but are now remarkable in skill and talent. That speaks to all the potential waiting for you when you take off that individual focus and start looking at it through a more holistic kind of...

When you look through a more ecological lens—when you stop treating talent as a magical gift and start treating it as something you can grow—the question becomes: how do you get someone to take on such a big project? Growing that much skill takes that much time, and it's not easy to spend all that time at the edge of your ability. What makes someone do that? The answer is ignition.

We tend to think of motivation as an internal trait, and it does feel that way. But in fact it's about the relationship, the interaction we have with the culture around us. Motivation doesn't happen from the inside out; it always happens from the outside in. When we see someone we want to become, some vision of our future self—a person on the horizon toward which we want to travel—that is what unlocks motivation.

The birthday experiment

There are all kinds of fascinating experiments on this. One of my favorites is the birthday experiment. A class reads a biography of a mathematician, covering where they were born and how they developed, and at the end the bio gives the mathematician's birthday. Here's the twist: for half the students, the mathematician's birthday was made to match their actual birthday. Then everyone took a math test to see how hard they would work. The students whose birthdays matched worked three times as hard—on an unsolvable problem on the test, they spent three times as long trying to crack it. Which is kind of crazy, because all it was was this little moment of "you and the mathematician are connected." A little guitar string inside them got plucked—"oh, that person is connected to me in some way"—and that social connection unlocked energy.

That's how we're built. When we see something we really connect with in our windshield, when we feel that guitar string get plucked, it unlocks energy. That's the moment of ignition.

Talent hotbeds and their ignition moments

We typically think of talent hotbeds as magical places, but with many of them you can go back in time and see the moment they got lit. If you're a Russian tennis player, it was when Anna Kournikova, a girl from the same Spartak club, went to the finals at Wimbledon—next thing you know, more champions were coming out of Spartak five years later. If you're a baseball player on the island of Curaçao, it's the moment Andruw Jones hit three home runs in the 1996 World Series. From that moment on, the island began to produce players.

It's like the ultimate guitar string: everyone is saying, "If they can do it, why can't I?" That moment is completely irrational and illogical—it defies everything we know about individual development and talent. Yet because talent is really a process of funneling energy into deep practice to grow skills and circuitry, that's why it's so powerful. It's like a lightning bolt that lights up a place where people can say, "If they can do it, why can't I?"

You can't force ignition, but you can invite it

Motivation is this remarkable lightning-bolt moment. A lot of the time you can't force it to happen, but you can increase the likelihood of it happening with a certain set of tools. One place that did this really well was Pixar.

We all know Pixar is good at making movies, but consider what happens on a new employee's first day. You come to an auditorium, and Ed Catmull makes a very short speech:

Whatever you did before, you're a moviemaker now. We need you to help us make our films better.

That's the end of the speech. Then the whole company—baristas, engineers, IT folks—comes together to watch rough versions of the films and is asked for suggestions: do you notice anything that could be better? I met an IT guy who had suggested one of the funny messages on the boy scout's badges in Up; he raised his hand, made a suggestion, and they put it in the movie. It's about creating a moment where you invite someone in to play a role of active contribution to that larger goal.

I saw the same thing on the baseball fields of Curaçao, a place that has produced an uncountable number of major leaguers after producing just the one. I coach little league, so I was curious how they organized their practice. Where I have one coach and 12 players on the field, in Curaçao there were about a hundred players divided into groups, with the older kids teaching them. What a moment that is—rather than looking at some old guy, they're being taught by older versions of themselves: kids who had been to the Little League World Series, kids on their way to maybe playing in the majors. Think about that guitar-string moment of being invited into the struggle, the contribution, the growth process.

They're really good at structuring environments to create that kind of invitation that Ed Catmull offers and that those older players in Curaçao offer. It's saying: "Here's a future vision of yourself. Here's something you can play a part in. Do you want to do that?"

It's a playbook, not magic dust

Through the individualistic lens, we tend to look at Pixar and Ed Catmull as magical—that's just their little magic dust. But it's a playbook. With the right level of deep knowledge, sincerity, learning and growth, you can apply it in other places—and they did, at Walt Disney, after Disney acquired Pixar. Disney was struggling; their animated division hadn't produced a good movie in a long time. Ed Catmull started visiting once a week, moved the desks around so people had to walk by him, and created brain trust meetings where people would get together and point out flaws and things they could do better, just like in the earlier example. Next thing you know, Disney had turned their animated division entirely around.

When I reached the edge of individual talent, what became apparent was that there were places where people came together and two plus two equaled ten—groups that, by combining in a certain way, created entities. When you combine individuals who are growing into an entity that is growing and learning, that's where you get something really powerful. That's what we're talking about when we talk about group culture.

Culture, in our modern conception, often gets used as the vibe of a group, the feeling of being with the group, or the identity of the group. I'd like to offer a different theory: culture is a set of living relationships in pursuit of a shared goal. It's a functional definition rather than one focused on the vibe or the feel—it focuses on the core behaviors that allow a group to become greater than the sum of its parts.

Three relationships that define thriving groups

Every human being has three relationships: to yourself, to others, and to the larger world. In the places I visited where people had this sense of thriving, connection, and growth, those relationships were unique:

• Relationship to the self: one of growth. You're not fixed—there's a belief that you can grow and change.
• Relationship to others: defined by curiosity and connection. They're not focused on the self but on connection, and connection creates energy and possibility.
• Relationship to the world: one of contribution and creativity. They're looking for something to contribute to, something to add.

If you were to X-ray all those places I visited—businesses, sports teams, nonprofits, schools where people are truly thriving—you'd find those same core qualities: real interest in personal growth, real interest in connection and curiosity with others, and a deep connection to creativity and contribution.

Those interactions add up to a bubbling aliveness that we've all experienced at some point—when we're around those kinds of groups, we can feel it. That's not an accident. We evolved in community, not as rugged individuals rugging our way through time. We evolved connected to others, in living communities—groups that can self-organize around problems, unlock hidden gifts, and create something new. So those feelings of personal growth, curiosity and connection, and contributing to something better are deeply wired into us. That's why they feel so familiar.

Culture from the outside in

The thing most people get wrong about culture is thinking it comes from the inside out—that if you're in a certain group, like the Navy Seals, Pixar, or the Marines, the culture is in your heart, your guts, your DNA. It's their identity. When we think about culture that way, mushy words come to mind: cohesion, honesty, mission, purpose, values, integrity, trust, teamwork. Culture tends to become this really mushy thing.

But viewed through this functional lens, it's more accurate to look at a great team in motion. Of all the teams I visited, one of the best you could conceive of is a flock of starlings moving as one through a forest. What are they doing? Three main things:

1. They're connected. They're in the group, not out of it—not going off to have a meeting. They're all in.
2. They're sharing information. They move together because they see what others are doing and transparently respond with shared awareness.
3. They're handling direction. They're moving toward something—a north star—not this way or that way, but all together.

That's what it's like to watch Pixar make a movie, to watch the Navy Seals in action, or to watch a great sports team: they're connected, and they're sharing information to create a shared...

These groups share a consciousness and move toward a goal — and that's the functional definition of culture. Beneath it are core behaviors that make it possible. Behavior number one is building safety. Building safety is the absolute foundation: nothing happens without connection. When we're trying to accomplish hard things in a fast, fragmented world, establishing that connection isn't something you do third or fourth — it's the primal thing that has to happen for any group to build a good culture.

The marshmallow challenge

One of my favorite studies of safety comes from Peter Skillman, who ran a very simple contest: who can build the tallest tower using 20 pieces of raw spaghetti, a yard of scotch tape, and a single standard-size marshmallow, with the only rule being that the marshmallow goes on top? He chose groups of CEOs, lawyers, MBA students, and kindergarteners, and gave them 15 minutes.

All the adult groups started the same way: they talked. Someone would propose an idea, others would refine it, then they'd divide into roles and build according to the plan. It looked smart, collaborative, and beautiful. The kindergarteners didn't do that. They ate every marshmallow except one, then just started jamming pieces together hand overhand — no plan, total chaos. If you had to bet your annual salary on the winner, most of us would bet on an adult team, because that's our model of group performance: we focus on what we can see, and smooth, planned, cooperative behavior looks like it should add up to good performance, while chaos looks bad.

But the kindergarteners win every single time. Their towers average 28 inches in height; the MBAs average 7, the lawyers 14, and the CEOs 21. It seems like an optical illusion — you want to run it again — but it isn't, because it's not about how smart you are. It's about how safe you are.

The adult groups are doing what humans can't help but do: managing status. In every social group we manage our status, and it manifests as a whisper in the subconscious asking, "Is it okay to say that? Who's in charge here? Are we being graded on this?" That whisper slows down iteration and creativity and self-silences us. The kindergarteners are safer — nobody's trying to be CEO of Spaghetti Incorporated. They're tackling a complicated problem the best way possible: try stuff, see what happens, fix it, and repeat. They don't win because they're smart; they win because they're safe.

In every great culture I visited, I saw that same pattern: they weren't trying to be smart or like the adults — they were trying to be like the kindergarteners, creating situations where people could try stuff, fail, learn, and work hand overhand, shoulder to shoulder, making mistakes together and adding up to more experiments and more learning.

Belonging cues

For those of us who aren't kindergarteners, safety gets delivered through belonging cues: simple, clear behaviors — not just words — that signal "I care. I see you. We share a future. We are connected."

A story about how these work: Wipro, a call center company, struggled with retention like many call centers — it's a hard job and people kept leaving. Wipro responded by improving benefits, the campus environment, and salaries. None of it worked, until they ran a one-hour experiment. Two groups of new hires: Group A got a one-hour session on the history of Wipro, met a star performer, and received a fleece shirt with "Wipro" on it. Group B's session was flipped — it was about the trainee, not Wipro. They asked the trainee to describe their best day and their worst day, then posed a thought experiment: "We're marooned on a desert island for a month — what skills do you bring to our survival?" At the end, Group B got a sweatshirt with the trainee's own name on it instead of Wipro's.

Six months later, retention in Group B was up 300%. Not because of some magic chemistry, but because they had received a crystal-clear set of belonging cues — simple signals saying "I see you, we're connected, we share a future, I care." Those signals are what allow you to relax, connect, and bring your full self to the situation.

Learning from Unsafe Environments: The Minutemen Missiles

One of the places you can learn the most is the opposite of a safe environment—the opposite of what the kindergarteners are producing or what's happening at Wipro. One such example is the Minuteman missiles: the nuclear officers spread across the upper Midwest. Their job is to take care of missiles ready for launch, with the possibility of launch always over their heads, and to remain perfectly disciplined and drilled to execute their performance.

Yet for years, those crews were some of the worst performing in the Air Force. There was cheating on tests, all kinds of drug scandals, and they even lost track of one nuclear missile. Each time a mistake happened, they made the classic error of trying to control people more—more controls, more carrots, more sticks, forcing compliance. That's the classic leadership mistake: the more you control, the worse you lead. It's a pattern seen throughout the history of command and control.

When a new set of leaders came in, they flipped it, similar to the Wipro example. Instead of pushing, pushing, pushing and transmitting, they set about building community and a culture from the ground up—creating psychological safety and methods of feedback that brought problems to the surface rather than pushing them out of sight. We're tempted to think those are just some bad apples causing the problem, but in fact it's a bad environment, and the more you try to control, the worse you lead.

Small Signals That Flip an Environment

The cool thing about building safety is that, like many changes that flip an environment, the signals are very subtle and small. A couple of my favorites:

• The two-line email. This is an idea from Laszlo Bock, who ran HR at Google for some time. It's an email you send to people you work with, asking: "What's one thing you'd like me to keep doing? And what's one thing you'd like me to stop doing?" Two lines—very simple, very powerful. It signals: I'm curious, teach me, help me, we're going to be working together for a while, I want to get better. And when you send that email, it's a bit contagious—more people send it, and it becomes a cascade.

• Your face is like a door. A Navy SEAL commander taught me this. Your face has two settings: open or closed. We know what closed looks like—brow down, jaw set, determined, a bit of that Clint Eastwood look, transmitting a message. Open is your frontalis muscle, probably the most important muscle on your body for communicating curiosity, connection, energy, excitement, and enthusiasm. It doesn't have much of an evolutionary function, but it has a tremendous social function. It might be the most important muscle you have, especially in a world where we're on Zoom calls more than ever.

• Embrace the messenger. We're often told not to shoot the messenger, but that's a pretty low bar. What I see great leaders doing when given bad news is actually celebrating that moment and the person who brought it—not just not shooting them, but saying, "I know this is bad news, and thank goodness you brought it to me." It's almost like saying: this is the moment where we're going to learn together, where we're going to grow, where we're actually facing a truth together.

I was recently at a meeting with a major league baseball team that was about to make a big decision to hire a new manager. At the last minute, one person in the room brought a passionate argument against it, absolutely derailed the meeting, and stopped the action from happening—an awkward finish, since everyone thought we were headed in that direction. The first thing the president did afterward was go straight over to the person who had made the objection and thank him for it. This person had derailed the whole decision process and stopped what everyone thought was going to happen—and the president said, "Thank you."

Saying thank you to the messenger, rather than merely not shooting him, is an incredible cultural signal. The second skill of building culture is sharing vulnerability. Once you've established a foundation of safety, the question becomes: how will we face the truth together and build a shared consciousness? The answer is to create moments of openness—and they feel really weird.

The two-minute experiment

My favorite demonstration is the two-minute experiment. You divide a group of people into two, and each person picks a partner. Group A gets fact-based questions, like "Talk about your favorite pop star" or "the last pet you owned." Group B gets more personal ones: "When was the last time you cried?" or "Is there something you've always dreamed of doing? Why haven't you done it?"

The energy on the two sides of the room is radically different. Group A talks normally, exchanging facts. Group B turns toward each other, raises their voices, leans in, laughs, becomes animated. A sociometer—a device that captures the texture of social interactions—would show completely different readings on each side.

Why? You cannot answer those personal questions without creating a moment of genuine openness and disclosure, without connecting. That openness is what creates connection, energy, and ultimately relationships and trust—which is strange, because we're always taught that we have to build trust before we can be vulnerable. The science shows we've got it exactly backwards: shared moments of vulnerability create trust and ignite connection and relationship. In the original experiment, two strangers in Group B who began talking about those deep questions got married—so be careful who you do these questions with.

Engineered vulnerability

Strong cultures don't leave moments of vulnerability to chance; they engineer them, treating them like a calisthenic: "We're going to circle up and talk about the truth, share and build a shared consciousness around these hard things." Like a calisthenic, it burns and hurts—and like a calisthenic, it makes you better.

One of the best at explaining this was Dave Cooper, who commanded the troops that got Bin Laden. When I had breakfast with him, he said:

The four most important words a leader can say are, "I screwed that up."

That's remarkable for a great leader of an almost invincible group, but seen through the lens of vulnerability, it's an invitation: "We're all going to talk about those things together." The SEALs have operationalized this into the after-action review (AAR). After a mission or training run, before eating or sleeping, they circle up and ask three tough questions: What went well? What didn't go well? What are we going to do differently? Simple questions, powerful questions. In that conversation people say, "I screwed up," "I think you screwed up," "I think that was right"—a conversation of real vulnerability that creates shared awareness of what they're trying to do and helps them get a little better.

Groups get stronger the way our bodies do: by enduring moments of test. We get stronger doing hard things together, and groups get stronger doing hard emotional things together. Places that do this well focus on small-group conversation: like the SEALs, they circle up and talk about what happened—taking action, then pausing to assess and connect, which most groups find difficult. And those assessments are often not led by the leader, but by people lower on the totem pole.

Safety gives people courage to speak

Why is vulnerability so important—can't we just build safety and get on with things? The purpose of a safe environment isn't just to make people feel safe; it's to give them the courage to speak out. In the 2015 NBA finals, the Golden State Warriors were losing to the Cleveland Cavaliers because nobody could defend LeBron. In a meeting about how to defend him, the video intern raised his hand with a suggestion. It turned out to be a smart idea; they used it, defended LeBron better, and won the series.

The interesting part isn't the moment the intern shared the idea—it's the million moments before that gave him permission to raise his hand: all the little interactions with players and coaching staff that gave him the courage to speak up. Those moments are where safety and vulnerability really work together.

Safety and vulnerability start to play together here. The purpose of safety is to let people be vulnerable—you can't have one without the other. That's why they're so powerful together: a moment of safety and connection lets you reach with courage and step into uncertainty, like the video intern did, which in turn makes you feel more connected. That's what great culture is—moments of feeling so connected that you can speak out, and speaking out deepens the connection.

We started with safety, the foundational skill, then vulnerability, which creates action. Now the question is how we figure out our direction, and that's the third skill: establishing purpose. We usually think of purpose as mission statements on the wall—big statements, big north stars we're moving toward. What I find in high-performing groups is that they're much more skilled at creating the lowercase-p purpose: what's our purpose as this team, right now, in this space?

Many of them have moments where they come together and talk about why they're doing the task right now. I've seen groups call this process "teaming." The teaming process begins with coming together and talking about the why—what's our ideal end state here, and why does this matter? Getting personal about what energizes us and what de-energizes us. That moment of coming together lets the team create its own sense of purpose for the project. They're not doing it for some big, pie-in-the-sky long-distance goal; they're doing it for each other and to solve a problem together. On the best teams, the purpose often ends up being each other—the relationships on the team. If you ask great teams why they do things, they will inevitably talk about being a great teammate, supporting the people next to them. There's something addictive about turning toward hard problems with people we like and admire, and great cultures tap into that energy. Finding spaces where people can create those cohesive teams is an important part of purpose.

The other thing about purpose is that you can't talk about it too much. I went into my research thinking purpose would live quietly in people's hearts and wouldn't be discussed much, but I found the opposite: high-performing cultures talk about it all the time. At Pixar, they constantly talk about the culture. The Navy SEALs are always repeating "the only easy day was yesterday," "we shoot, move, and communicate," "we're the quiet professionals"—they can't shut up about how quiet they are.

I'm reminded of a study where CEOs were asked how many people in their organization could name the top three priorities. The CEOs estimated 64% could. When the employees were actually surveyed, it turned out to be 3%. We routinely overrate the clarity factor. That's why these cheesy mantras and repetitions get brought in: they stick in your head, they work, and they make things vivid when we're constantly being pulled in different directions. A good cheesy saying like "quiet professionals" works.

One of the best stories about this is Danny Meyer. He opened a restaurant in New York and now runs Shake Shack, with 22 restaurants opened—he's sort of the Pixar of the restaurant world. His first restaurant was successful. When he opened his second, both started to fail, because he couldn't be in both places. When he was in the room, everyone knew what proficiency was: everyone looked at him, everyone knew how to behave and what mattered. But when he couldn't be in both restaurants, they both started to fail.

That's where he did something really smart for building a culture of proficiency: he closed both restaurants and went on a retreat, where he started building what he called a mantra map—distilling all the key behaviors of his culture into a series of catchphrases. They were genuinely cheesy: "the excellence reflex," "mistakes are waves, servers are surfers of those waves," "the road to success is paved with mistakes well-handled," "loving problems," "athletic hospitality."

I was having breakfast with Danny Meyer one day in one of his restaurants when somebody in the corner dropped a tray of glasses on the floor. He stopped talking to me and started watching the corner. I asked what he was looking for, and he said:

One of two things is about to happen. Either this restaurant's going to come together and clean up this mess together and the energy level is going to go up, or there's going to be some hint of anger, blame, resentment, and the energy level is going to drop. Litmus test.

As it happened, they came together and the energy went up—which put a spotlight on how genius his mantra map is. Culture doesn't happen when things are smooth; culture happens in moments of adversity. And in those moments, it's very helpful to have a compass—a map of mantras like "athletic hospitality," "loving problems," "the road to success is paved with mistakes well-handled."

That's not cheesy—that's genius. Building that kind of language is immensely powerful when it comes to sending a lighthouse beam of clarity around proficiency. Getting your team together and building your own mantra map ends up being one of the most powerful things you can do, because you already know what challenges you are going to face. It's not a mystery. If you're a trauma team, a high school teacher, or a tech worker, you know what those challenges will be. So why not anticipate them? Why not talk about the kinds of responses you think you should have, and create a mantra with your team?

The other tool is storytelling. Stories are the most powerful drug ever created—they stick in your head 22 times better than data does. When there is a story to be told, treat it as a little nugget, a little piece of gold, a little radio station you can broadcast into your group. I know a lot of tech groups that hold an end-of-the-week gathering called a CSWD meeting—"cool stuff we do"—where they just share cool ideas they've heard. Simple stories that can be shared and help people navigate. Stories are navigational tools.

Another tool is symbols. Symbols capture things that can't be captured in words; there's a reason every belief system in the world uses them. If you walk into the headquarters of the San Antonio Spurs, one of the most successful NBA organizations of the last 30 years, you see a rock and a hammer sitting behind a glass case. It comes from a story coach Gregg Popovich heard years ago, about a granite quarryman pounding on a rock with a sledgehammer. Someone comes along and asks, "Why do you keep pounding that rock?" And he says:

"When the rock splits, I will not know if it is the last blow or all the blows that came before that did it."

That's the story he tells in the group, and he makes it come alive every time the players come in and leave. What do they see? What's the mantra at the San Antonio Spurs? Pound the rock. These things turn behaviors into language that can be shared, spotlighted, and celebrated—and not just good stories. The bad stories matter too. Telling stories about disasters and mistakes is perhaps even more powerful for navigation, because knowing where to go is really good, but knowing where not to go is even better.

So as you build safety at the bottom, that's the connective function: Do I belong? Do I have a place here, a future? Do we care about each other? Upon that, we add sharing vulnerability: Are we telling the truth? Do we have a shared consciousness? Are we hiding and avoiding, or facing problems together? And finally, how do we handle direction? With a really clear north star of purpose. Cultures are living feedback spirals moving in search of that north star—a set of living relationships establishing safety, sharing vulnerability, and moving toward purpose.

We know it's possible to perform at a really high level and still have an empty life—we see those examples all around us. It's possible to climb mountains, get to the top, and just see more mountains. That got me interested in looking at the environments and interactions of places that create joy, fulfillment, connection—deep places of flourishing.

What does it mean to flourish? It's joyful, meaningful growth, shared. That last word surprised me most when I looked at the scientific definition. Joyful, meaningful growth—okay, I got that. But shared? The more you investigate people experiencing joyful, meaningful growth, the clearer it becomes: all flourishing is mutual. We become our best selves in and through our relationships with other people. Nobody is flourishing alone in a cave in Switzerland; there are no rugged individualists flourishing. We need other people to do it.

Seen through that lens, two basic insights emerge. First, this is a team sport—it's not about me, it's about the space in between us. Second, we're pre-built for this. Our ancestors didn't survive as rugged individuals; they got here through their ability to form and thrive through community.

If flourishing is shared growth, the question becomes: what does that sharing consist of? What does it look like in our own lives, and how do we do it in this individualistic era? An example of unlikely flourishing gives us a great look: the bottom of a Chilean mine in 2010.

The Chilean miners: questions, not answers

Thirty-three miners were trapped a thousand feet below the surface, with 100 million tons of rock on top of them and very little hope of rescue. They spent 16 days in darkness not knowing if they would live or die—and they emerged like brothers, with an incredible bond. How did that happen?

The early stories credited charismatic leaders who told people what to do and organized the group. But later studies showed the truth: what brought the group together was not charismatic leadership. It was when they circled up, surrendered control, and opened up to each other.

The first moment came shortly after they were trapped. The group's leader, a stern supervisor named Luis Urzua, walked to the center of the circle wearing his white supervisor's helmet, took it off, and said, "There are no bosses and no employees anymore." That stopped everybody. It wasn't a statement of leadership—it was a question, posed to the group, creating a space. A few minutes later, while counting heads, they found there were 33 miners. One of them, noting that many were Catholic, said, "That's the same age as Jesus when he was crucified. Maybe there's something bigger waiting for us outside." Again, a question—not a statement, not a direction, not "we need to do this."

What brought the group together was that moment of creating space, when the group could let go of control, circle up, and actually grapple with their situation. Those questions sparked engagement. People began self-organizing: one took charge of the sleeping space, another of their meager stash of food. They developed rituals around each meal—sharing a small scrap of canned tuna, everyone being served, waiting until all were ready, saying a prayer, and eating together. They developed rituals around playing games in the dark, a "guardian angels" program where one person watched over whoever slept, and a kind of confessional where someone who made a mistake could confess it to the group. They built an entire little civilization in the worst environment you could imagine.

When they were rescued, there was no question they were thriving. Asked to board the final rescue elevator, they kept deferring to one another: "No, you go first. No, you go first."

The transformative power of community isn't created by people with answers. It's created by people who create questions, and then create space for others to explore those questions together—to step into uncertainty together. All of this sounds a little soft, a little kumbaya, but we see the same pattern over and over: leaders and places that can create that space where people make meaning together.

Seen this way, flourishing isn't some magic thing that happens to certain lucky people. It's much more like a skill, and like any skill it has two practices, two pillars. The first is making meaning: how do we stop and see what matters, and make meaning together? The second is building community: how do we create something new together, connecting in ways that make our situation better? Community is what happens when people turn toward each other to improve their situation.

The first action is like a pause that creates energy; the second is action. They work together like a heartbeat: you stop, you see what matters, you make meaning together and connect deeply — then you try something, take on some messy project together. That is the ultimate thread of human community throughout time: circling up, coming together, finding meaning, and using that energy to make the situation better.

The longest table in Paris

There's a neighborhood in Paris that was like any other — people buried in their phones, upper middle class, busy all the time. A journalist there named Patrick Bernard got obsessed with one question: "Does it have to be this way?" As an experiment, he rented 80 tables to create the longest table in Paris, got permission to close off a street, and invited everyone to a potluck — bring your own dish, happening on this day.

His neighbors thought he was nuts and called him a "teddy bear kisser" — a naive soul. People are distant; it's Paris, people are snobbish, this will never work. There wasn't much optimism going in. But when the day came, the whole neighborhood showed up. Kids turned the traffic cones into giant megaphones, people came playing instruments and brought their own food — it was an immense celebration.

Then Bernard did the next thing: he had people self-organize into interest groups. If you're into biking, here's where the biking group meets; if you're into cheese, here's the cheese group; history, dogs — there was a group for each. Those groups gathered under only two rules: first, no negativity, no politics; second, you have to gather around a "joy device" — coffee, alcohol, food — something to gather around in small groups.

Go into that neighborhood today and it feels like a village. When an older woman broke her wrist, she got 15 offers of help with groceries. When an older person goes into the hospital, a group self-organizes to water their plants and take care of their dogs. It feels like a different place — and it's the same people. What happened was that Bernard tipped the environment to create a sense of meaning and presence.

Why the table worked

That table is not just a table. Like any ritual, it's a pause where you can actually connect and bring your gift to the circle. Those moments produce nothing useful — the table produced nothing you could measure, and that's why it worked: it put people in a different attentional state. We walk around the modern world in narrow task attention, figuring out how to get from A to B to C to D. Moments like that table, just like with the Chilean miners, are open questions — spaces that let us step into uncertainty alongside other people and create meaning together.

That's how we're pre-wired to behave, and that's where meaning comes from. Meaning in our own life happens when we stop, widen our attention, surrender control, and connect. Creating environments where that connection can happen is the key move. We're taught that our brains are problem-solving devices — true, they're good at solving little problems and analyzing — but they're also good at creating relationships. Creating spaces where those relationships can take root and grow is really the key move. All of these places are like little greenhouses.

These places are a little disorganized, and that's where the aliveness comes from, because you're not quite sure what's going to happen. It's almost like walking up to a potluck: Are people going to like my dish? Am I going to like theirs? Who's going to sit next to me? What's going on over there? This atmosphere of aliveness and uncertainty is the exact opposite of the algorithmic world on which so much of modern life is built, which is about frictionless certainty. What's happening in these places is friction-y uncertainty, and that's why it's powerful. That's how relationships get built; they don't get built in the algorithmic world, which is just function. Over here you have a sense of reciprocal openness and connection that creates actual relationships—and that's how we're built to make them.

This year, we've all seen the New England Patriots go from 4 and 13 last year to the Super Bowl, and they've talked all year about the incredible relationships on that team. How did they do that? On the first day of practice, their new coach, Mike Vrabel, didn't practice. It made sense to practice—the utilitarian thing—but he didn't. He did something that didn't make sense, called the four H's exercise. You get into small groups and circle up, just like that French table, around four topics: Who's your hero? What's your history—where are you from, how'd you get here? What's your heartbreak? And give me a hope—what's your hope for the coming year? It's a super simple exercise that takes fifteen minutes at most. But at the end of it, you've taken relationships that were transactional and opened them up, energized them, created deep connection.

We often talk about that as if it's just chemistry—"we had a good talk"—but those things can be engineered. Those environments can be created. Those questions aren't actually questions; they're spaces for people to step forward and connect.

Two attention systems

When we look at our attention systems—plural, because neurologically we have two—we typically think we have just one. The first is task attention, which sees the world narrowly as something to control. It evolved as the way we spot food, categorize it, and grab it; if your ancestors were going to survive, they needed to see something and control it. But you also need to attend to the wider world, which is why we have the second system, relational attention. It's much broader: it catches the nuances of things, it's how we connect to other people and groups, how we sense narrative and everything that isn't narrow and controlled.

That moment of surrendering control—stepping into uncertainty and saying, "I'll share with you my heartbreak"—is the moment relational attention lights up like a lamp. That's what relationships are made of: those moments where you feel connection, a real, illogical, non-informational sense of meaning, like a guitar string inside you gets plucked and you feel a vibration.

Flourishing groups are really good at creating those moments. They don't treat them as accidental; they treat them as part of the daily fabric of life.

Fred Rogers' attentional architecture

One of the people on the planet best at this was Fred Rogers of the television show. His show was almost cancelled a year in—they couldn't get a new sponsor and announced it was ending—and it had never happened in PBS history that angry mothers came to PBS stations to protest. In Los Angeles, 3,000 people showed up to support Mr. Rogers, and because of that support the show continued and he became an icon. All he did on that show was create an attentional architecture where he continually stopped and created space. Every time he spoke a word, he would pause and wait, as if the kid on the other end of the television were talking to him—continual awareness.

He had a simple exercise he performed in front of the crowd at the Emmy Awards in the late 90s. It lasted ten seconds:

All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are—those who have cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life. Ten seconds of silence. I'll watch the time.

By the end, the whole crowd was weeping. These were glamorous people at the top of their profession, and every bit of eyeliner in that room was running. Whomever you've been thinking about, how pleased they must be to know the difference you feel they've made.

In ten seconds he was able to awaken and nurture the relationships waiting to be awakened in those people's lives. That's what those groups are good at doing. It sounds soft, kind of kumbaya, and yet it's the most elemental part of building what human beings are born to build, which is community.

Why do rituals exist? A while back, an author wrote a book about rituals and offered readers the price of the book back if they could find any human group that did not do rituals. He has received no such offers, because every human group has rituals. We are absolutely built for them.

What is a ritual except a space where the usual causal laws of cause and effect do not apply? A ritual says, "I'm going to light this candle; it's going to make me work better at my desk today." A ritual is a good luck charm or something like that. They don't actually have a cause and effect; they only work through this sense of presence, this sense of illogical connection. When we look at communities and cultures, many of them use ritual to exactly that effect.

Why does Iceland, for example, have some of the closest community cultures on the planet? They also happen to have rituals where the whole community takes a hot-tub bath together once a week. They come together in those rituals. There are other ways they could get clean, other ways to achieve the same goals, but taking the time to do that ritual is what helps bring them together.

In the modern world, we focus a lot on habits to automate our lives—habits to make things go quicker and more efficiently so we don't have to think. That's how habits are built: so we can automate. Rituals are how we animate our lives, so we can actually slow down and pay a deeper form of attention, whatever that ritual might be. Maybe it's prayer, maybe it's a good luck charm, maybe—

Rituals slow us down and, rather than automating our lives, infuse them with a new kind of animation. Building community happens through a process I call group flow: the process through which a group comes together to navigate problems and self-organize into new shapes and patterns. Like everything, it operates according to two rules: the rule of the beautiful mess and the rule of surprise.

The rule of the beautiful mess

The rule of the beautiful mess says that disorder is not the obstacle—it's the doorway. When I visited these places, I kept encountering the same scene: they would deliberately design messes.

The New Zealand All Blacks, one of the best rugby teams in the world, have a period of their season and of their week where they let the players run practice. That isn't the smoothest way to do it—the smoothest way is to have coaches run practice—but it creates all kinds of unpredictability and messes. What it also creates is the ability to self-organize around those problems, to create new patterns, and a sense of deep agency and ownership.

I saw the same pattern with an art teacher named Lynda Barry, who would often pair one of her master's art students with a four-year-old. Was it predictable? No. Neatly designed? No. It was messy—having a four-year-old work with a master student is a mess. But in that mess, the master's student rediscovers the joy of creating art, and the four-year-old discovers the power of what they're doing. It's the same as what the All Blacks were doing: purposely creating a little bit of chaos so that life is not like a machine, but more like a pickup basketball game.

That's the rule of the beautiful mess. You have to create some disorder to create group flow, and to actually create community. Community is not about staying ordered; it's about creating and building together.

The pickup basketball game is a powerful model because group flow requires three factors:

• A clear horizon—a basket you're shooting for, a clear gradient you're moving down.
• Clear guard rails—places where you can and can't go.
• Agency—giving people freedom to navigate.

That sense of ownership, agency, and horizon is what we see in group flow. It turns leadership away from "how do I tell them what to do? How do I know the answer?" and toward "what can you design that lets people use their gifts, and self-organize through a problem together in ways that generate new possibilities and new solutions?"

Building 20

We get a vivid example of this in the story of Building 20, built on MIT's campus in 1942 to develop the radar technology that helped win World War II. After the war, it was left abandoned, and different groups moved in haphazardly. The building was junky—plywood walls, exterior plumbing, no real facilities, freezing in winter and boiling in summer. No one really wanted to go there except people who didn't quite fit in.

Over time, it turned out to be what was called the magical incubator of MIT. Some of the first video games were created there, the first completely soundproof chamber, important black hole research, and Noam Chomsky did important linguistic research there. Why that place, rather than a nicer, neater building under a clear departmental structure? The answer is: it was a beautiful mess.

The people there had to self-organize—for their lunches, and in morning meetings that brought people together from different disciplines to share what they had learned. There was a sense of joy and exploration: they wrote an opera together, felt like the black sheep, and taught each other how to swim. An engineering student once wandered down the hall to the acoustics lab and started messing around—that became Bose's electronics.

Why was it so fertile? Because the same thing was happening as in the All Blacks' practice and Lynda Barry's art class: creating the conditions where people can self-organize—not obeying something else, not being coerced, but noticing things, building relationships, and experimenting and trying stuff together. That's how growth really happens.

The rule of surprise

The rule of surprise is really simple: if you know it's going to happen, you're doing it wrong. If you know what's going to happen, you are operating a machine. But if you're actually trying to flourish, if you're trying to create something new, you shouldn't know what's going to happen.

A beautiful example comes from a rundown old neighborhood in the Netherlands, where two handymen without much work, Patrick and Linder, used to sit on their stoops out front. One day, a little bored, they looked at their street—and it didn't have any...

flowers on it. So they decided to build a flower box. They pried up the bricks of their street, arranged them as a flower box, and plunked in some flowers. Their neighbors noticed and asked, "Could you build that for me?" The two men taught others how to build it, and soon there were a hundred flower boxes on the streets. Then a knitting club decided to knit a really long scarf to wrap around the neighborhood's lampposts. Someone else noticed an empty lot and suggested building a playground there.

There was also a debate over refugees. Some communities in the Netherlands were rejecting them, but this neighborhood wanted to accept them. Around the refugee house donated for the cause, they wrapped a scarf, saying, "What better signal of welcoming to our new neighbors than to give them a hand-knitted scarf that we all made."

The neighborhood was revived, and no one could have identified a plan by which that happened. It happened because one thing led to another: each thing generated a new pattern that everyone could notice and respond to — the flowers, then the scarves, then the playground. That's how growth actually happens. Mathematicians call these attractors: when you change the energy of a system, it generates new patterns, and flourishing groups are skilled at creating them.

This spotlights something deeper. We tend to think of groups and communities as fixed things, but in practice they operate more like rivers. In cases like this neighborhood or Building 20, the energy and relationships are funneled and moved toward some horizon. Just as tilting a river produces new swirling patterns, people aren't machines — as a group, we operate like rivers. As parents, business leaders, and teachers, one of the most powerful things we can do is create that gradient: spotlight a north star, create a clear space for exploration — "we explore in here, not out there" — and then give people agency to do whatever they want within it.

That's what happened in Building 20. There were clear boundaries — we're in this building. There was a clear gradient — invent something new, create something that's never been created before. And there was total agency: when someone wanted to enlarge their lab, they got out a saw and cut a hole in the wall; when they wanted to run wire, they ran it themselves; they didn't have to ask permission. This combination of agency, guard rails, and horizon is a powerful toolkit for tilting the river of an organization.

That's where the rule of surprise comes in. If you know what's going to happen — if you're predicting and controlling it — then people aren't really free, and you don't get the kind of exploration that leads to something new. The rule of surprise changes how you think about the future. We tend to treat the future as a fixed destination we're heading toward, but over and over I keep encountering places where — and reflecting on our own lives, we see this too — the future we're creating results from a series of explorations. We're creating our own future in a deep way, just like the people in Building 20, that rugby team, and that neighborhood in the Netherlands: making explorations, stopping, noticing what happened, and building on it.

That's how community gets built — when people turn toward each other and say, "How can we make this better?" and try something. That's the moment that happened on that street in Paris: creating conditions where people can turn toward each other and ask how to make things better.

We sometimes take a fearful stance toward the future, hoping things work out as if it were a gamble. But the lesson these flourishing communities teach is that the future isn't fixed — it's something you're in conversation with. You can't control it, but you can nudge it, influence it, and change it in profound ways by turning toward the people next to you and asking, "What can we do to make this better?"

After studying all these groups, the differences become stark between groups that become more than the sum of their parts and create flourishing, and groups that become less. I think of it in three categories. The first is a sense of fun: the groups that flourish are places where there is joy and delight — delight for no reason, delight just in each other's presence, delight in the failures and the imperfections.

The second thing these groups have is a sense of forgiveness—a sense that imperfection is okay. My kids recently taught me a saying: annoyance is the price of community. I love that because I saw it at these places. They weren't doing things the most efficient way. There were probably more efficient ways to organize people than Patrick Bernard did with that long table, and definitely more efficient ways to organize laboratories than MIT did. But it isn't about being organized or efficient. These inefficiencies are just evidence that we're human beings, that everyone is a little bit annoying. Our modern world treats that friction as something almost toxic that should be removed from everything, but these groups welcome it and forgive it—forgive the annoyance while knowing that we're also annoying.

The third thing I saw was a lack of fear, a security within their community that allows them to make daring explorations. There's a saying that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base, and that's what these places embody: when you have that deep, meaningful connection with people, you can make fearless moves. In moments of adversity, we're often told "everything will be okay," but in these flourishing groups I heard a different message: nothing's going to be perfect, and you'll never be alone. The security of that deep attachment isn't about saying everything's going to be great—it's about saying nothing's going to be great, actually, and that's okay, because we're going to be together. That, to me, embodies the mindset and heartset of flourishing communities.

If there's one key takeaway from all of this, it's that this is not a straight-line story. I keep telling the story of these messy spirals upward that communities, individuals, and high-performing cultures are making. If you take a pen and a blank piece of paper and map the story of your own life, you won't draw a straight line. You'll draw a very squiggly spiral, hopefully upward, with all kinds of turns where you're going the wrong direction, realize it, fix it, then go the wrong direction again, realize it, and fix it. It's a story of resilience and reinvention—and that's what natural systems are really good at. Look out your window at a tree, a vine, moss, or a mushroom: living systems excel at resilience and reinvention.

The shift is identifying that pattern in our own lives and letting go of the straight-line illusion that every day will be a clear A to B—that our life, career, or relationships will go from A to B. Instead, it's seeing the twisted, curving spiral and asking what tools, what relationships, what thoughts, and what modes of attention will help me navigate it with other people. It's a deeper, bigger, and I think better story than the story of straight lines. It's messier, more challenging in some ways, slower, and more frustrating—but it's also more authentically human, and richer and more rewarding in the end.