Welcome to Sunday Journal, a chance to start your week out with short, quiet reflections and advice for life.

This effort started with a handwritten journal I keep for each of my children, designed to give them a sense of how to become the best version of themselves. If you find this valuable, please share it with others.

Each edition contains three sections: reflections to put into practice, an inspirational quote, and an image to contemplate.

This week, a look at what or who we should be worshipping.

Reflection

Faith is not a passive thing. It is an act of directed attention — a choice, made consciously or not, about what we deem worthy of our trust, our time, and our admiration. That choice has consequences.

When we invest our faith in things of genuine substance, such as people of demonstrated character, institutions with ethical foundations, ideas that have weathered scrutiny and stand the test of time, we tend to build something durable. When we invest carelessly, drawn by spectacle or by the intoxicating promise of power, we tend to find ourselves holding something that was never as solid as it appeared.

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There is a moment, somewhere on the ascent, when the view changes. The feedback softens, disagreements become rarer. The room adjusts to you before you enter it. At first, it feels like respect. Later, it begins to feel like something else entirely.

The lead article in the latest issue of The Atlantic1 by Nathan Hawley captures this essence. Hawley attended Jeff Bezos’ annual Campfire gathering in Santa Barbara: 80-plus elite guests at a bought-out resort, private jets dispatched to multiple cities, and nannies provided for every family in attendance.

What Hawley discovered was a sense of disconnection from reality, a resort-sized walk-in closet of the emperor’s clothes, fully on display for no one to see:

“This is the hubris of accomplishment. To be declared a genius at one thing is to begin to believe you are a genius at everything.”

It’s a seductive delusion, and it is not limited to multibillionaires. It is the occupational hazard of anyone who has climbed far enough that the people around them have stopped telling the truth.

Deprivation

The scene at Campfire is painted as the world’s wealthiest men floating in “a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.” Being truly rich, he argues, doesn’t mean owning superyachts or private jets. It means that everything becomes effectively free — and that nothing can ever genuinely be lost.

That is an extreme case. But the underlying dynamic — the progressive insulation from honest feedback, from consequence, from the unvarnished reality that other people represent — is not extreme at all. It is structural. It is built into the architecture of leadership itself.

The data are stark.

Nearly half of CEOs report feelings of loneliness and isolation, and 61% believe it directly affects their performance.2 And 26% of executives show symptoms consistent with clinical depression, compared to 18% in the general workforce.3

In a 2024 survey, 55% of CEOs experienced a negative mental health issue within the past year — a 24-point jump from 2023, the steepest single-year increase since the pandemic. And yet 81% of CEOs say that organizations typically view someone with mental health issues as weak or a burden.4

As the problems compounds in silence, you begin to think it’s you. It’s not.

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The Conflict of Interest at the Top

There is a reason this stays hidden, and it has nothing to do with weakness of character. It has to do with the structural reality of the corner office.

Direct reports manage up. Boards evaluate. Spouses protect. Friends don’t fully understand the weight. The result? The person with the most consequential decisions to make is often the person with the fewest people who can tell them the truth without a conflict of interest.

Enter the hidden business cost of leadership isolation: degraded decision quality, increased turnover, slower organizational performance.5

These aren’t soft, intangible costs. They show up in results.

The Solution That Isn’t Weakness

Here is what the research actually shows: 71% of CEOs who sought peer support reported improved company performance.6

Not improved feelings. Improved performance.

The antidote to leadership isolation isn’t therapy, though there is no shame in that. It is structured access to someone with no stake in the outcome — no direct reports to protect, no board seat to hold, no equity at risk — who can offer the honest perspective that the organizational chart systematically withholds.7

This is what executive advising and coaching, done well, actually is: a deliberate counterweight to the gravitational pull of the echo chamber that power creates around itself.

What’s more, our Working Together™ Leadership and Management System, created by my former CEO Alan Mulally and personally entrusted to me, helps to address this with honesty, transparency, and accountability grounded in principles of love and humility, and backed by data.

The result was a room where every voice had standing, every problem was surfaced, and no one had to perform confidence they didn’t feel.

Most organizations don’t have that room. Most leaders have never been in one.

The warnings are urgent, the numbers telling. Nearly half of the people running our most important institutions are lonely in ways that are measurably costing those institutions — and the people who depend on them.

The question is not whether leadership isolates. It does, reliably, at every level of the ascent. The question is whether you have built a counterforce to it — someone in your corner who is not of your world, who can see what the room has stopped telling you.

The view from the top can be clarifying. It can also be dangerously narrow, without the right counsel.

Let’s get you back on track.

There’s so much to learn,

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There is a certain satisfaction in catching someone in a contradiction they didn’t know they were making.

Recently, someone online complained that the Pope should not be pontificating. Yes, you read that correctly. They probably meant that he was being overbearing; they probably did not mean to observe that the Pope was doing exactly what a pontiff does — and indeed, what the word was built to describe.

Pontificate comes directly from pontifex, the Latin title for a Roman priest — and later, of course, the Bishop of Rome himself. The pontifex was, etymologically, a “bridge-builder”: pons (bridge) + facere (to make). Whether the original priests were literal engineers of Roman infrastructure or whether the bridge was always metaphorical — a span between the human and divine — remains debated. What is not debated is that when the pontifex spoke, he spoke with the full weight of sacred authority.

So yes: the Pope was pontificating. Quite correctly.

But he is hardly alone in this etymological entrapment.

Dictators, we are told, are the great villains of political history. The word itself has become a slur. Yet the Roman dictator was a legal office — an emergency magistrate appointed by the Senate in times of crisis, given extraordinary powers for a period not exceeding six months.

The root is simply dicere: to say, to declare. The dictator was, at his origin, merely the one whose word was law. That the word degraded alongside the office is a study in how language absorbs history’s disappointments.

A president presides. This is almost too obvious to mention, and yet how rarely we notice it. From praesidere, to sit before, to sit at the head. The president is literally the one who takes the chair at the front of the room. (Students of leadership will note that the chair one chooses or is given says everything.)

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Once upon a time in my career, I was responsible for digital communication and social media strategy, which meant I was leading a team that constantly tested the boundaries of new platforms and methods of communication. Cutting edge stuff.

Yet my office belies that identity; my fountain pens and personalized stationery are on my desk, my small collection of typewriters is underneath it, a converted student lamp is on my desk, Victorian illustrations hang on the walls, and hundreds of books pack the shelves. There’s great comfort in these surroundings.

Record Success

In the 1890s, Edison’s phonograph cylinders were the most sophisticated recording technology available — hard wax tubes that captured sound with a fidelity that no flat disc could yet match. When Emile Berliner’s gramophone arrived with its cheaper, easier-to-store disc records, Edison refused to follow. He kept refining the cylinder, convinced that superior sound would win.

It didn’t.

Disc records swept the market — not because they were better, but because they were more convenient. Edison’s cylinders limped along until 1929, when the company finally discontinued them.

History has a habit of running this play. Just when a highly refined and superior technology seems to have sealed the argument, people quietly reach for something simpler. Not necessarily out of nostalgia, but out of need.

Same Old Song, New Verse

We’re watching it happen again. Consider:

A Cornell professor is handing out typewriters to combat AI-generated essays — and discovering that students are writing better, thinking harder, and remembering more.1 Sturgill Simpson released a new album on pressed vinyl and debuted high on the charts, bypassing streaming entirely.2 People are digging out iPods so their music can’t be interrupted with pings, alerts, or ads.3 Entire communities are converging around pen-testing videos4, old-school hobbies5, and anything that keeps their hands busy and their screens dark.

Some have called this a revival. It isn’t. It’s a retreat.

People aren’t fixing the systems that have made them feel surveilled, optimized, and disposable. They are escaping those systems on their lunch breaks. The typewriter and the vinyl record are not acts of resistance. They are coping mechanisms — small, private refuges carved out of a working day that has grown increasingly indifferent to the humans inside it.

Which raises a question most leaders would prefer not to answer:

Are we focused on fixing the system or supporting our people?

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Control Is an Illusion

In 213 BC, the emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the burning of books — a project born from anxiety rather than ignorance. He understood, with the clarity despots often possess, that writing was trust made permanent. Destroy the record, and you could rewrite the relationship between ruler and ruled.

His chancellor Li Si argued, with impeccable logic, that old knowledge only confused the people and undermined the new order. They burned the books. The dynasty fell fifteen years later.

The emperor’s error was not cruelty. It was the assumption that systems could substitute for relationships — that if you controlled the information, you controlled the people.

Every organization that has replaced a manager with a dashboard, a conversation with a survey, or a human judgment with an algorithm has made a version of the same bet.

So far, the results are similarly instructive.

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What the Best Companies Know

Fortune’s most recent list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For is, among other things, a quiet indictment of everyone not on it. The companies employees trust most share a common trait: their leaders are leading with humanity. They know names. They close the feedback loop.

At Synchrony Financial — this year’s top company and one that doubled earnings over last year — the CEO describes his operating principle plainly:

“That cycle of feedback and action is what keeps trust high.”

At Delta Air Lines, the world’s most profitable airline, CEO Ed Bastian has inverted the conventional customer-first model entirely.

“We’re not obsessing on customers at the leadership level, because we want to obsess over our own people, so that they can obsess over you as a customer.”

One unifying theme that emerged among top companies this year is a commitment to making employees feel supported, trusted, and trained as they stare down an AI-enabled future6.

These are not radical ideas. They are simply rare ones.

People First

Alan Mulally called it: people first — love ’em up. Not as a motivational slogan, but as a design principle. Our Working Together™ Leadership & Management System7 rests on the recognition that performance follows trust, and trust follows the accumulated evidence that a leader sees you, hears you, and will not discard you when the calculus changes.

Every week in the storied Business Plan Review at Ford, every leader in the room shared items in their plans with a red, yellow, or green status. No hiding. No hedging. The ritual itself was the message: we deal in reality here, and we deal in it together. And the vision was simple: profitable growth for all.

The analog resurgence is a signal, not a solution. When people choose friction — the stuck key, the skipped record, the pen that might run dry — over seamlessness, they are telling you something about what seamlessness has cost them.

They are not asking for a turntable in the break room. They are asking to be treated as though they matter more than their output.

That isn’t a technology problem; it never was. And it certainly doesn’t require more technology to fix it.

It requires a human being willing to be one.

There’s so much to learn,

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Welcome to Sunday Journal, a chance to start your week out with short, quiet reflections and advice for life.

This effort started with a handwritten journal I keep for each of my children, designed to give them a sense of how to become the best version of themselves. If you find this valuable, please share it with others.

Each edition contains three sections: reflections to put into practice, an inspirational quote, and an image to contemplate.

Today, I’d like to invite you to try to listen more and talk less.

Reflection

When were in a room with other people — particularly someone upon whom we’re trying to make a good impression — we tend to talk too much. It may be from anxiety, insecurity, or some other gnawing emotion, but the result is the same: an unfettered flow of logorrhea.

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“How gloriously legible are the constellations of the heavens!”
— Anthony Trollope, 1859

Life is filled with uncertainty. At any given moment, thousands of tragedies unfold across the globe—micro-moments affecting millions of families, each cocooned within its own fragile world.

The devastating death of a child. The sudden, disorienting prospect of losing a job. The quiet, grinding anxiety of forces beyond our control.

And then there are the macro-moments we share—events so large that humanity, for a brief instant, looks in the same direction. Moments that find us both at our worst (in the case of war and a threat to wipe out an entire civilization) and our best.

Earlier this week, a global event played out on our screens that, even for a moment, reaffirmed a belief in the goodness of humanity: the interactions with the crew of Artemis 2, as it made its way to the Moon and back.

And a little humanity is exactly what we needed now.

Another Hunter

NASA’s first lunar program was named Apollo — the sun god, driving his chariot across the sky. It was an apt name for humanity’s first reach into the heavens.

More than a half century later, Artemis returns us there. Named for Apollo’s twin sister, goddess of the moon: a hunter, like her brother — but also a guardian. Protector of women and children. A quiet symmetry, then, that this mission carries Christina Koch as the first woman on a lunar flight.

Humanity in the Stars

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves”
— William Shakespeare, 1599

Since Apollo 17 in 1972, technology has advanced so rapidly that a return to the Moon could feel almost routine—another unveiling, another headline, another fleeting moment.

And yet…

For a brief time, humanity looked up again.

As attention united humanity on this mission and this crew, we turned our faces toward the skies, just as the ancient Greeks once did, giving a sense of awe and wonder to forces beyond our understanding.

Long before telescopes gave us distance, the ancient Greeks gave the heavens meaning. As they looked aloft, they did not see cold points of light, but stories — heroes frozen mid-trial, lovers bound together in permanence, monsters defeated yet immortalized.

They gave us figures like Orion, Andromeda, and Cassiopeia, mapping the human condition onto the night sky. The stars became less a mystery than a mirror of humanity — reflecting ambition, hubris, sacrifice, and fate — reminding them, and now us, that even in the vastness of the cosmos, we have always searched first for ourselves.

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Messages of Love

In a week that included Easter Sunday and Passover — two symbols of love and sacrifice — even amid conflict in those ancient lands, the crew of Artemis 2 offered something quieter, but no less powerful.

First, the crew shared names for two craters they observed on the Moon: one was named “Carroll,” a neonatal nurse and late wife of Commander Reid Wiseman, who died in 2020. The emotion with which the news was given to Mission Control and then the supportive group hug were enough to bring tears to millions of eyes around the world:

More poignantly, just before losing contact on the far side of the Moon, Pilot Victor Glover offered a reflection that reached far beyond the mission.

He reminded us that what unites us is far stronger than what divides us:

“In all of this emptiness — this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe — you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together. I think, as we go into Easter Sunday, thinking about all the cultures all around the world, whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing, and that we’ve gotta get through this together.”

That’s what we are: together. And it is the only way we have ever done anything that matters.

As the module approached the other side of the Moon, Glover continued:

“Thank you to all of you for allowing us the immense privilege to be on this journey together…

As we get close to the nearest point to the moon and farthest point from Earth, and as we continue to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos, I’d like to remind you of one of the most important mysteries here on Earth: love. Christ said, in response to what was the greatest commandment, that it was to love God with all that you are. He also said the second is equal to it: love your neighbor as yourself.

So, as we prepare to go out of radio communication, we’re still going to feel your love from Earth. And to all of you down there on Earth, and around Earth, we love you from the moon.”

The ancient Greeks looked to the stars and found stories of who they were—flawed, striving, hopeful. We have traveled farther than the Greeks could have imagined, and yet we are still asking the same questions.

Who are we? What binds us? What matters?

From the far side of the Moon, the answer came back not as data, but as something far older.

Not power, fame, progress, or money.

Love.

And the quiet reminder that, in all this vastness, we are still in this together.

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There’s so much to learn,

About the top image

Niobe, queen of Thebes and daughter of King Tantalus, boasted of her many children, claiming superiority over Leto, the mother of the twin deities Apollo and Artemis. Offended by her arrogance, Leto sent her children to punish Niobe. In Thebes, Apollo killed all of Niobe’s sons, while Artemis killed all of her daughters.

In 1772, the French neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David captured the emotional turmoil of Niobe as she witnesses the divine retribution, with her children being killed by Apollo and Artemis. It is a powerful visual reminder of the vice of hubris.

In his letters, Gustave Flaubert wrote:

“Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.”

Read to live.

Books are voyages of discovery. And with them, you can get your passport stamped on destinations around the world and throughout all of time.

See the fog-enshrouded streets of Victorian London, walk the newly-laid cobblestones of the Via Appia in the second century BC, experience Hemingway’s Spanish bullrings of the 1920s, and smell the air in James Fennimore Cooper’s Mohican country of the 1750s.

“I have a passport to a far better age, As close as the bookshelf, as near as a page.”
— William Schweikert, 19841

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Destination Unknown

But here is what no one puts on the passport application: the best destinations are the ones you never planned to visit.

There is a particular species of joy that belongs exclusively to the browser — the person who wanders into a used bookstore without a list, who runs a finger along the spines of water-damaged paperbacks in a church basement sale, who follows a footnote into a wing of the library where the lights flicker on only when you walk in.

This is the joy of the unexpected find: the serendipitous shelf.

The algorithms, of course, have no interest in such visceral joy. They can’t smell the sweet elixir made from decaying pages, giving off the scent of vanilla, almonds, and musty paper.2 Or feel the thrill of finding a volume that has been like a white whale to you.

No, the algorithms are curators of the confirmed, showing you what you already like, amplified. They mistake your history for your appetite. And so, over time, the recommendation engine narrows the aperture of what you might ever encounter. You are given a library, but it is a library with walls closing slowly inward.

The Alternative

The solutions are many: the used bookstore, the public library’s discard bin, the estate sale with three tables of paperbacks at a quarter each, where a cracked spine catches your eye and you open to a random page and find a sentence that speaks directly to something you have been trying to think through for weeks.

I have found my best books this way. Not the ones I was looking for. The ones that found me.

There is something almost mystical in the encounter. The book has been waiting — sometimes for decades — and you have arrived, at last, to collect it.

A two-volume set on the essays and letters of E.B. White. A children’s natural history from 1887 with illustrations so alive they seem ready to leap from the foxed pages. A copy of a book already in my collection, but this one with an inscription to a titan of our shared hobby, making it a valuable association copy that comes with a story.

None of these would have appeared in a “You might also enjoy...” carousel. All of them changed how I think.

And now, for those of us who cannot always make it to the physical stacks, I have found something wonderful I’d like to share with you — a digital equivalent of reaching blindly into the dark and pulling out something extraordinary.

🔒 The rest of post is for paid subscribers.

What follows is a tour of one of the most delightful tools I’ve encountered for the purposeful wanderer with a curious mind. There’s a reason the most interesting minds you’ve ever met have usually read the most improbable things.

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Paid subscribers also receive access to the full archive, the fortnightly Off the Clock letter on language and history, and all future essays. The cost is less than a used paperback a month — and considerably more surprising.

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I prefer it when meetings begin on time. It’s orderly and shows respect to a commitment made to others. Of course, there is always the chance of a late arrival, despite our sincere intentions.

This isn’t meant to be a screed against the evils of tardiness; we are all human and any number of obstacles can prevent us from a timely arrival, even with the best planning. Rather, consider what happens when someone walks into a room where a meeting is already in progress.

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Finding Respect

The principle that sits at the heart of every great team, every enduring culture, every relationship worth having: respect is not declared. Respect is demonstrated — in small moments, ordinary gestures, and the quiet choices no one is officially watching.

Some people enter a room and read the situation before doing anything else. They notice who is speaking. They sense the energy. They find a place to settle without disturbing the flow. Their presence adds to the room rather than redirecting it. You may not even remember exactly when they arrived — only that somehow things felt a little more settled after they did.

Others walk in and the room reorganizes around them. Not because anyone chose that. Not because they asked. Simply because their arrival announces itself — in volume, in movement, in the gravitational pull of their need to be at the center. They don’t read the room. They rewrite it.

The Chair Theory

This is the Chair Theory — and while it sounds almost too simple to be useful, I’d argue it’s one of the most precise diagnostics for social and emotional intelligence I’ve encountered.

If someone arrives late and needs a chair, how do they bring it over? Do they pull up a chair thoughtfully, or do they drag a chair over loudly? The way a person pulls up a chair tells you a great deal about how they understand the concept of collaboration.

The Working Together Leadership and Management System is built, at its core, on love and humility — and I mean that without apology or sentimentality.

Love in this context means genuinely caring about the people around you: their contributions, their presence, their well-being. Humility means accepting that the room you just walked into was already complete before you arrived. Treating everyone with dignity and respect is the hallmark of leader humility.

Together, those two dispositions produce something rare in organizational life — a leader whose first instinct upon entering a space is to listen, to honor what’s already there, and to ask how they can serve rather than how they can lead.

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Little Gestures with Big Impacts

What’s striking about the Chair Theory is that it demonstrates that we can find respect in micro-decisions rather than in grand gestures. The leader who tries to understand before trying to be understood. The executive who enters a meeting and asks questions before offering answers. These are not dramatic acts of virtue. They are habits of orientation — the daily practice of treating shared space as genuinely shared.

The alternative is more common than we like to admit. We’ve all been in rooms with the loud chair dragger — and if we’re honest, we’ve all been the loud dragger at some point. The instinct to make our presence felt, to ensure we aren’t overlooked, to claim territory before someone else does — these are deeply human impulses.

The question is whether we’ve done the work to notice these behaviors in ourselves before they cost us the trust of others.

Because that’s the quiet tax that chair-draggers pay over time. People start bracing for their arrival. Conversations pause when they enter. Candor retreats. The room becomes a performance, and the leader who needed to be at the center ends up, paradoxically, surrounded by people who are mentally sidelining them.

Respect, practiced consistently, does the opposite. It creates the conditions for honesty, for contribution, for the kind of collaboration that actually moves things forward.

It signals: I see you. I’m not here to overpower the room. I’m here to be part of it.

The best leaders I’ve observed share this quality. They are comfortable arriving without announcing themselves. Their authority doesn’t depend on the room reorganizing in their direction. They integrate.

How you find a seat may seem like a small thing, but in reality, it’s a barometer of what you stand for.

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There’s so much to learn,

Marc Andreessen, the billionaire venture capitalist and self-appointed philosopher-king of Silicon Valley, recently made a confession that he seemed to regard as a boast. He engages in “zero” introspection, he announced on a podcast — or “as little as possible.”

“If you go back, like, 400 years ago it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective. Great men of history didn’t sit around doing this stuff.” 1

Self-examination, he explained, is essentially a Freudian invention, a fad dating from around 1910 that serious, productive people have no business indulging. The podcast host congratulated him.

You have to wonder if the host had ever heard of Delphi.

Ancient Wisdom, Forgotten

The injunction Know thyself was carved into the stone of Apollo’s temple there around 600 BC — a reminder that self-knowledge is not a therapy trend but the oldest instruction in Western civilization. Socrates built his entire life’s work around the idea, at considerable personal cost.

Marcus Aurelius, who managed an empire somewhat larger and more consequential than a venture capital fund, kept a private journal of relentless self-examination. You may have heard of it: it’s called Meditations.

Sun Tzu — a name every Silicon Valley operator claims to revere — wrote:

“It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”

This is, at one level, a failure of reading. But it is also something more instructive: a window into what happens when busyness becomes a philosophy.

Andreessen’s own account of his daily information diet makes the point without any assistance. He tweeted his perfect mix:

“1/4 X, 1/4 podcast interviews of the smartest practitioners, 1/4 talking to the leading AI models, and 1/4 reading old books. The opportunity cost of anything else is far too high, and rising daily.” 2

One wonders whether he reads those old books or simply asks the AI models for their summaries.

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Here, at least, is an honest confession: not that introspection is worthless, but that he has arranged his life so as to make it structurally impossible. He could only hold this position in the present era — the only moment in history when the platforms he funds have made non-optional boredom effectively extinct.

He has not transcended the need for self-examination. He has simply paid for enough noise to drown it out.

The Fear Within Us

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” — Socrates

I’ve written before about the barrenness of the busy life — how our frenetic pace, our clogged inboxes, our back-to-back calendars become not just inconveniences, but evasions. 3

Kahlil Gibran understood this with uncomfortable precision:

“There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone.
The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape.” 4

We seem, so many of us, to be running not merely to the next thing but running from ourselves. Andreessen has simply elevated that tendency into a manifesto and called it productivity.

But introspection, properly understood, is not rumination. It is not the mental doomscrolling of a mind that won’t let go. The word derives from the Latin for “looking within” — and its purpose is not to trap us in our heads but to liberate us from them.

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The Connection Between Introspection and Empathy

Self-knowledge and empathy are not separate faculties — they are, in the deepest sense, the same faculty. To wall off one is to impair the other.

A person who practices zero introspection does not merely fail to know himself; he also loses the capacity to imaginatively inhabit the experience of others. 5

For most leaders, the cost of that loss is measured in missed feedback, poor decisions, broken trust. For someone of Andreessen’s reach — whose firm funds the technologies of war and surveillance, whose political influence shapes policy, whose investments touch millions of lives — the cost is measured in something considerably harder to audit.

“Zero introspection,” then, is not a productivity hack. It is, as David Futrelle aptly noted, “a permission slip for zero accountability.” 6

Self-Awareness is Accountability

Leadership, at its best, is an act of continuous self-correction. Leaders who never examine themselves cannot know where their blind spots are, cannot hear what they are not saying, cannot feel the distance between their stated values and their actual decisions. They are, in Gibran’s phrase, living in their lips — producing sound rather than thought, motion rather than meaning. 7

Socrates paid with his life for insisting that the examined life was the only one worth living. We need not go that far. But we might at least insist — for ourselves and for those who hold influence over others — that self-reflection is not weakness, not navel-gazing, not a Viennese indulgence. 8

It is the oldest form of leadership hygiene we have.

The world will not slow down to allow it. That is precisely why it must be chosen deliberately, defended stubbornly, practiced in the margins of a schedule that would otherwise consume every quiet moment.

The examined life isn’t optional. It’s the essential work beneath the work.

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There’s so much to learn,

Examine more from our Archives:

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Earlier this week, we had a musical interlude with John Williams, applying his collaboration style with some of the principles behind Working Together.

Now, were doing a variation on a theme and heading to the side-door of music1 to connect music and language.

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Music predates the spoken word. Before humans agreed on names for things, they sang. The oldest instruments we have found — bone flutes carved from vulture wings, some 40,000 years old — tell us that the impulse to organize sound into meaning is not a late refinement of civilization but one of its foundations. Pythagoras heard mathematics in harmony and believed that the universe itself moved according to musical ratios.

We speak of music as a universal language, which is true enough, but also incomplete. Music is not merely like language; in many ways, it is language. It has structure and syntax, phrasing and punctuation. A melody travels where words cannot — across borders, across generations, across moments when speech fails us entirely.

What’s remarkable is not just that music communicates, but that it connects. A song heard at the right moment becomes a kind of shorthand between people: you hear this, too. You feel this too.

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Verbal and written language, by contrast, is a relative newcomer: powerful, and in certain respects a poorer cousin of music. Precise in a way that we can all agree on definitions; imprecise when taken out of context.

But perhaps the deepest evidence that music is a language is this: it has given us words we cannot do without. Music’s influence can be felt in terms so embedded in the way we describe conflict and cooperation, pace and proportion, that we no longer hear the melody behind them. We have become fluent in musical metaphor without ever having studied the instrument.

Musical Terms in Our Language

To read the full breakdown of how these terms shape our reality, upgrade to a paid subscription to the & Guild.2

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1. Off the Clock editions about words and language, every other Saturday

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Even the most brilliant composer needs others to bring a creation to life.

In 1974, a young director making his first theatrical film asked a composer to take a chance on him. The film was The Sugarland Express. The director was Steven Spielberg. The composer was John Williams.

What followed is one of the most enduring creative partnerships of the modern age.

Last month, as John Williams celebrated his 94th birthday, I was listening to an episode of The Legacy of John Williams Podcast.1 In that episode, there’s an excerpt from the AFI Masterclass with Steven Spielberg and John Williams (2011) in which they describe their partnership:

Steven Spielberg:

“One of the greatest honors that I have ever received in my life was the first time that John said yes to the movie that I wanted him to score, which was The Sugarland Express. And that was the beginning of a collaboration which next year, in 2012, will mark the 40th year that we have been working exclusively together. And I’m excited about that.”

John Williams:

“Forty years is incredible with any collaboration, I think, Steven. Ours has been a special evolution, certainly. But in the 40 years we have been working together, he’s never once said to me, I don’t like that, or this won’t work, or we need to do something else.

He’s never said that. He’s enjoyed everything that I’ve done, as I have with him. And I may say to him, and he may say to me, maybe we’ll try something else.

That might be fun. But he’s enjoyed everything, even the mistakes. One of the things about collaboration is the ability to, that will make it work.

I think it’s the ability to be unguarded enough to make the mistakes you need to make, not compete with each other, not try to impress each other, just have fun with it. And that unbuttoned trust is the essential thing, I think, that if it’s there in the chemistry of the personalities, a lot of fun can be had working together.”

There are partnerships—and then there are systems.

What Spielberg and Williams describe isn’t luck. It’s discipline. It’s design. It is, in many ways, a living case study in the principles of the Working Together Leadership & Management System.2

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Ode to Working Together

First Movement: Collaboration, Not Coordination

Most teams divide labor. Few truly compose together.

A film score is the perfect metaphor. The composer writes, yes — but only in response to story, pacing, emotion, silence. The director shapes the vision, but relinquishes control over how it will sound. Neither owns the outcome entirely; both are accountable for it completely.

That’s collaboration at its highest level: interdependence without insecurity.

Second Movement: Creating a Better Plan — by Not Clinging to One

Williams notes that neither of them says, “this won’t work.” Instead, they offer: maybe we’ll try something else.

This is not avoidance of standards; it is avoidance of ego.

In Working Together terms, the plan is always provisional. It improves through iteration, not assertion. The moment critique becomes personal, the plan stops getting better. What Spielberg offers Williams is a clear path with encouragement: keep moving, keep shaping, keep discovering.

A better plan emerges not from sharper criticism, but from safer exploration.

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Third Movement: A Find-a-Way Attitude

There is a subtle but powerful shift in language here. Not whether something works, but what else might.

“Maybe we’ll try something else.”

That is the essence of find-a-way. It assumes forward motion. It reframes obstacles as options. It replaces judgment with curiosity.

Over forty years, that posture compounds. It turns friction into fuel.

Fourth Movement: Enjoying the Journey — and Each Other

“Even the mistakes,” Williams says.

Most organizations tolerate mistakes. Few enjoy them.

But enjoyment is not frivolous; it is functional. It lowers defenses. It invites risk. It sustains energy over decades, not quarters. When people genuinely enjoy working together, they stay in the work long enough to become exceptional at it.

This is the overlooked advantage of great teams: they outlast everyone else.

Coda: Bringing It All Together

There is one final phrase worth lingering on: “unbuttoned trust.”

Not blind trust. Not forced trust. Unbuttoned. As in relaxed, open, or vulnerable.

It is the absence of pretense, the removal of performance, the quiet confidence that the work — and the relationship — can withstand a wrong note. It is a sense of psychological safety that we create for each other out of our sense of trust.

When that kind of trust is built into our culture, it weaves a safety net so strong that individuals and teams are able to achieve so much more because they know they are there for each other.

In leadership, we often look for frameworks, models, and systems to improve performance.

Spielberg and Williams offer something both simpler and harder: create the conditions where people can do their best work together — unguarded, iterative, and in good company.

The rest, like a great score, tends to follow.

There’s so much to learn,

P.S. Make sure you join us for Off the Clock on Saturday when we’ll continue our leitmotif and look at musical terms that have crept into non-musical vocabulary.

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1

“Words and Music by John Williams” on The Legacy of John Williams Podcast. By the way, isn’t theirs the most brilliant logo? Take a long look at it:

Welcome to Sunday Journal, a chance to start your week out with short, quiet reflections and advice for life.

This effort started with a handwritten journal I keep for each of my children, designed to give them a sense of how to become the best version of themselves. If you find this valuable, please share it with others.

Each edition contains three sections: reflections to put into practice, an inspirational quote, and an image to contemplate.

Today, a word about planning and sharing.

Reflection

There is an old military maxim, often attributed to Eisenhower, that no plan survives first contact with the enemy — and it is frequently used to excuse the absence of one. But Eisenhower himself never meant it that way. His point was that the act of planning is what matters. The rigorous thinking-through of contingencies, the alignment of purpose, the shared understanding of what we are trying to accomplish.

The plan is not a script; it is a shared map.

What leaders too often forget is that the map must be shared. A plan locked in one person’s head is not a plan — it is a wish. The communication of a plan is not a courtesy or an administrative burden; it is the completion of the plan itself. When people understand not just what they are to do, but why, and where their piece fits into the whole, they become capable of adapting intelligently when conditions change.

They exercise judgment in your direction rather than waiting for instruction. This is the difference between an organization that moves and one that merely responds.

Quote

“The most important thing is having a plan and communicating the plan.”

— Alan Mulally, in conversation, 2018

Image

On the night of December 25–26, 1776, General George Washington crossed the ice-choked Delaware River with 2,400 men to strike the Hessian garrison at Trenton at dawn. The operation had been planned meticulously and communicated only to those who needed to know. The men pulled on their cloth-wrapped oars in silence and darkness. They succeeded because every man knew his role, trusted his officers, and understood the objective.

Leutze’s painting romanticizes the moment — Washington did not actually stand in the bow — but it captures something true: purposeful, forward motion, into the dark, with a plan.

There’s so much to learn,

P.S. I’m available to speak to your team about the Working Together© practices and principles that helped turn Ford around; they apply to teams of all sizes.

Contact Scott's management for inquiries

There’s an old proverb: Success has many fathers; failure is an orphan.

The same might be said of courage.

When the moment arrives to say what others are unwilling to say, the room often grows very quiet.

History has a way of remembering the person who speaks anyway.

The Red Scare

In the early 1950s, Joseph McCarthy built a career on accusation. At the height of the Cold War, he claimed communist agents had infiltrated the United States government, the press, and the entertainment industry. The charges were sweeping, the evidence thin, and the headlines plentiful.

McCarthy understood something about politics — and about human nature:

Fear needs a villain. If none exists, one can always be invented.

For four years he rode that fear to prominence, making allegations but rarely offering proof. When critics pushed back, he accused them of sympathizing with the enemy. When journalists challenged him, he claimed persecution.

Even the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a fellow Republican, did little to slow his momentum. McCarthy simply found new targets.

Then, on March 9, 1954, a quiet television broadcast changed the tone of the national conversation.

On his program See It Now, journalist Edward R. Murrow devoted a full half hour to examining McCarthy’s methods. It was an unusual decision. Broadcasters of the era were expected to report the news, not confront powerful politicians directly.

Murrow closed with a warning that still resonates:

“We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”

Listen to an excerpt from his program:

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A Courageous Call for Decency

McCarthy responded as he often did — by attacking the messenger, accusing Murrow of communist sympathies on the air. But the spell had begun to break, and Murrow’s response the next week leveled McCarthy:1

“He proved again that anyone who exposes him, anyone who does not share his hysterical disregard for decency and human dignity and the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, must be either a Communist or a fellow traveler.”

Two months later, during nationally televised Senate hearings, Boston attorney Joseph N. Welch delivered the line that would echo through American political history:

“At long last, have you no sense of decency?”

The question landed like a gavel. McCarthy’s influence collapsed soon after. 2

None of those moments were inevitable. Each required someone willing to step forward first.

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Which brings us, perhaps unexpectedly, to artificial intelligence.

Anthropic Takes a Stand

In February 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was given a deadline by the Pentagon: agree to allow the military to use his company’s AI for any lawful purpose — no restrictions — or face being designated a national security risk.3

His competitors had already signed. Amodei said the company “cannot in good conscience” comply, citing two principles: no autonomous weapons, no mass surveillance of Americans.

The reaction was swift. Critics accused him of arrogance. Others suggested he was naïve about national security realities. Some questioned whether any technology company could afford such principles.

It is perhaps a low bar that “no killer robots” and “no spying on citizens” now passes for moral courage in the technology industry. But here we are.

Amodei has since returned to the negotiating table — a reminder that these moments are rarely as simple as a heroic stand followed by a clean exit. Principles and pragmatism seldom keep tidy offices.

What matters is that someone said, clearly and publicly, that there are things we will not do.

The line was drawn. That it may yet shift doesn’t erase the drawing of it.

And while it may seem like a lonely task at the time, you can rest assured that there are many people who share your values and who will line up behind you in support.

In every era, institutions drift toward convenience, power, or profit. What interrupts that drift are individuals willing to introduce friction — to insist, however briefly, that limits still exist.

The crowd often discovers its conscience only after someone else risks theirs.

Will you be the risk-taker or will you find yourself huddled among the masses?

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There’s so much to learn,

Welcome to Off the Clock — the Saturday bonus from Timeless & Timely where history, language, and the occasional rabbit hole collide. Arrives every other Saturday.

If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe here — and you probably should.

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Foxtrot. Tango. Zulu. The news from the Middle East arrives in fragments — dispatches clipped by distance, politics, and the fog of war.

Somewhere over a headset or radio, someone is spelling something out: coordinates, call signs, perhaps a pilot confirming a target or a controller confirming an aircraft. In those moments, language becomes a matter not of poetry, but of precision.

And the words coming out of their mouth have a surprisingly modern origin. War is ancient. The alphabet it uses is not.

The problem is simple: on a battlefield or in a cockpit, letters are unreliable things. B, D, P, and T dissolve into one another when shouted through static, engine noise, or the general chaos of combat.

A single misunderstood letter can move a plane miles off course.

So militaries came up with an elegant workaround: replace each letter with a full word. Simple in theory.

In practice, agreeing on which words took about 40 years… and two world wars.

And the words we use today — Alfa, Bravo, Charlie — are not the ones the soldiers of World War II used at all.

The modern phonetic alphabet is the result of wartime improvisation, linguistic research, and one very unusual international experiment.

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We are told we are at war.

Whether one prefers softer language or sharper phrasing is beside the point. History will not be impressed by euphemism. It never has been.

At a minimum, such undertakings deserve clarity — a stated vision, defined objectives, and some demonstration that the past has been consulted before the future is wagered.

As Lewis Lapham once wrote, tracing the long arc of conflict across the cradle of civilization:1

“Pick up the thread of the narrative in Babylon in the days of Cyrus the Great, move forward in time to the triumphs of Alexander of Macedon, student of Aristotle, to Caesar’s legions governing what they knew as the province of Mesopotamia, through the centuries of languid despotism imposed on the valley of the Euphrates by the grand viziers of the Sublime Porte, to the division of the Ottoman spoils at the Treaty of Versailles…”

Civilizations have marched confidently into that region for millennia. Confidence, it turns out, is not the same as comprehension.

Understanding the navigation of the past is just as essential as keeping a steady hand on the tiller of the future — whether on the battlefield, in the boardroom, on the playing field, or around the kitchen table.

And that is where this conversation truly belongs.

Because crisis is not confined to geopolitics. It visits families. It disrupts organizations. It unsettles teams. It exposes the fractures that were already present but previously manageable.

In times of crisis or uncertainty, three things tend to fracture simultaneously: clarity, confidence, and cohesion. Vision and strategy restore all three.

This is precisely why Working Together© is welcome and necessary — not only a system, but a way of living — particularly when dealing with uncertainty.2

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Why Vision and Strategy Matter

1. Vision Provides Meaning When Circumstances Create Fear

In a crisis, people do not merely ask, “What do we do?” They ask, often silently, “What does this mean for me?”

A compelling vision answers the deeper question.

It reminds the organization:

• Who we are

• Why we exist

• What future we are building together

When markets shift, budgets tighten, or public pressure mounts, tactical adjustments may change weekly. Vision should not. It is the stabilizing narrative that says: The destination still matters, even if the route must adapt.

Without vision, uncertainty produces anxiety. With vision, uncertainty becomes challenge.

Vision anchors the why so that people can endure the what.

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2. A Strategic Plan Converts Hope Into Direction

Vision without strategy is inspiration without infrastructure. Or, as Henry Ford put it, “Vision without execution is hallucination.”

A comprehensive strategy translates aspiration into clear priorities, defined roles, measurable outcomes, and sequenced actions. All of these are required for accountability.3

In crisis, ambiguity multiplies. People begin duplicating work, protecting turf, or freezing entirely. A plan eliminates guesswork. It provides:

• Alignment — Everyone understands the priorities.

• Focus — Energy is directed where it matters most.

• Discipline — Decisions are evaluated against agreed objectives.

• Adaptability — Adjustments are made within a coherent framework, not in panic.

A strategic plan turns motion into progress. Without it, organizations confuse activity with advancement, especially under pressure.

3. Vision and Strategy Build Trust in Leadership

In uncertain times, people watch leaders more closely than ever. They look for two signals:

1. Do they know where we are going?

2. Do they know how we intend to get there?

When leaders communicate a clear vision and a coherent strategy, they demonstrate steadiness. They project competence without pretending to possess omniscience.

Trust is not built on perfect prediction, but on visible intention and actions consistent with it.4

Working Together depends on trust because it requires voluntary commitment. People must believe that:

• The direction is sound.

• The plan is thoughtful.

• Their effort matters.

Clarity earns that belief.

4. Crisis Magnifies the Cost of Misalignment

In stable times, inefficiencies are expensive but survivable. In crisis, they are fatal.

When we have a shared vision, we gird ourselves against fragmentation, internal competition, and working at cross purposes.

Our comprehensive plans:

• Coordinate resources.

• Prevent reactionary decision-making.

• Ensure short-term survival does not sabotage long-term viability.

Working Together means collaboration. Collaboration requires alignment. Alignment requires clarity of direction.

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5. Vision Sustains Morale; Strategy Sustains Momentum

Morale declines when people feel powerless, unmoored, uncertain about impact and direction.

A compelling vision restores dignity5 to work. It tells people they all matter and their efforts contribute to something enduring and worthwhile — something bigger than themselves.

Having a strategic plan answers questions like:

• What do we do today?

• What must we do next?

• How will we know we’re succeeding?

Together, vision and strategy transform paralysis into purposeful movement.

6. Vision Provides Continuity; Strategy Enables Adaptation

Crises, whether driven by internal malfunctions or external forces, often demand rapid change. But change without continuity creates instability.

Here’s where the difference and the combination of vision and strategy matter:

• Vision is enduring.

• Strategy is adaptive.

The vision defines the future state; it tells us where we are heading.

Strategy evolves in response to reality; it is the plan we implement and constantly update in response to changing conditions.

This distinction is critical. When leaders conflate the two, they either cling rigidly to outdated plans, or abandon direction entirely in pursuit of short-term survival.

A clear vision allows flexibility in execution without sacrificing identity.

7. Working Together Requires Shared Direction

The system is called Working Together for a reason.

People cannot truly work together unless they agree on:

• Where they are headed

• What success looks like

• How their roles interconnect

Vision creates shared aspiration; strategy creates coordinated action.

Without both, “working together” becomes merely “working near each other.”

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In Times of Uncertainty, Clarity Is Compassion

Perhaps most importantly, clarity is a form of leadership generosity. In uncertain environments, people carry private burdens:

• Financial worries

• Professional insecurity

• Personal strain

When leaders provide a compelling vision and a coherent strategy, they reduce cognitive load. They replace rumor with direction. They replace anxiety with agency.

That is not merely operationally wise.

It is human.

The Essential Principle

Within the Working Together Leadership & Management System:

• Vision answers “Why?”

• Strategy answers “How?”

• Execution answers “What?”

• Culture answers “Who?”

In crisis, every one of these matters — but vision and strategy come first. They transform chaos into coordination, fear into focus, and uncertainty into disciplined movement.

Without them, leadership becomes reactive. With them, leadership becomes resilient.

And resilience is what allows people — and organizations — to work together when it matters most.6

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There’s so much to learn,

Welcome to Sunday Journal, a chance to start your week out with short, quiet reflections and advice for life.

Each edition contains three sections: reflections to put into practice, an inspirational quote, and an image to contemplate.

This week, try asking yourself: Am I truly committed or merely just interested?

Reflection

• When you are committed, you find a way. When you are interested, you find an excuse.

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Nowhere in history is the first laugh recorded. Not in pictographs, not in paintings, not in hieroglyphics.

But we do know that laughter – closely associated with humor – goes back tens of millions of years.1

However, the oldest joke on record is from around 1900 B.C. in ancient Sumeria (modern-day Iraq) and is a saying about flatulence, of all things. The proverb, written in cuneiform on a clay tablet, reads: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not [pass gas] in her husband’s lap.”2

Even the ancients understood the importance of etiquette and comportment (and apparently, the eternal comedy of bodily functions).

Babylonians recorded “yo mama” style riddles (c. 1500 B.C.). Ancient Egyptians entertained pharaohs with jokes. The Greeks formalized comedy as an art, as the plays of Aristophanes openly mocked politicians, philosophers, and public figures of his day.3

Its primary function appears to be social. Laughter creates and deepens bonds. When we share what amuses us, we signal belonging. “You see the world as I do,” the laugh seems to say. “We are safe together.”

And that is where humor becomes both gift and danger.

The Double-Edged Sword

Court jesters in medieval Europe could say what others could not. Their wit provided monarchs with uncomfortable truths disguised as entertainment. In some cases, humor served as a pressure valve — allowing criticism without open rebellion.

Satirists like Jonathan Swift used biting irony to expose injustice. His essay A Modest Proposal was so outrageous in suggesting that impoverished Irish families sell their children as food that it forced readers to confront the cruelty of British policy.4

There is a difference between punching up and punching down. Satire and mockery aimed at the powerful can illuminate truth; humor aimed at the most vulnerable among us corrodes trust — as a certain locker room conversation demonstrated this week.

And leadership, at its best, is about building and maintaining trust with everyone.

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The Best Humor Expands a Room

Within the Working Together© Leadership Management System (WTLMS), one of our principles is simple: Have fun, enjoy the journey and each other — no humor at others’ expense.5

That final clause matters.

There is a subtle cruelty in humor that reinforces hierarchy. Whether it’s a sarcastic remark in a meeting, a playful jab that singles someone out, or a story told for a laugh that leaves someone smaller, the result is the same: the room may laugh, but one person goes quiet.

Even outside of hierarchy, a jest that mocks a peer can indicate a poor sense of judgment in a culture that forbids humor at someone else’s expense.

I’ll never forget the time when we were at a company event in New York and I was in the green room with Alan Mulally, Ford’s CEO at the time. I made a witticism that was aimed at someone else — Alan heard it and the withering gaze I received was enough to make me want to crawl into a corner. It set me straight for a lifetime.

The lesson was clear: humor should expand a room, not shrink it.

Finding Humor Within

The safest and often most powerful form of leadership humor is self-deprecation.

Not false modesty. Not theatrical incompetence. But the simple acknowledgment that we, too, are fallible.

When Abraham Lincoln was accused of being two-faced, he famously replied, “If I had another face, do you think I’d wear this one?” The line disarmed critics because it absorbed the attack rather than deflecting it onto others.

Self-deprecating humor lowers defenses. It signals psychological safety and reminds everyone in the room that authority does not equal infallibility.

It says: We are human together. It shapes our culture.

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The Enduring Measure

Humor that binds endures. Humor that belittles decays.

The oldest joke in recorded history was crude, but it was communal. It reflected shared human experience. It did not require humiliation. It did not demand a victim.

Leadership demands the same discipline.

Have fun. Laugh. Tell stories. Relieve tension. Celebrate absurdity. The work of leading people is serious enough; it does not require solemnity at every turn.

But never mistake sharpness for strength.

The measure of a leader is not how cleverly they can wound, but how wisely they can elevate.

Laughter is one of humanity’s oldest tools.

Use humor to build, not break.

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There’s so much to learn,

Welcome to “Off the Clock,” a little something that lands somewhere between Timeless & Timely.

I send out this fun look at language and words every other Saturday as bonus content. If someone sent this to you, please consider subscribing.

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Some days, it feels like the world’s headlines are written in a language of fracture — pieces of news so discordant that even the syntax aches under their weight.

We see suffering in large numbers, conflict breaking over families and communities, and a sense that ugliness has come out of its corners and taken center stage. Was it always thus, we wonder.

But even there, in the tangle of human struggle, language reminds us of something true: beauty can exist alongside chaos. Not in naïve denial, but in the quiet constancy of words that have stood across centuries. Words that carry not only definitions, but echoes of a gentle breeze on a summer day, the hush of early dawn, and the sound of a voice we loved long after it is gone.

Writers and linguists have long marveled at the way certain words seem to resonate deeper than others, not just for what they mean, but for how they sound in our minds and mouths. 1

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Some have suggested criteria for this feeling: a blend of rhythm, soft consonants, and a melodic flow that makes the word itself seem like a kind of small music. Linguist Dr. Robert Beard compiled a list of The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English. (Amazon | Bookshop.org)

Seven Beautiful Words

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Welcome to Sunday Journal, a chance to start your week out with short, quiet reflections and advice for life.

This effort started with a handwritten journal I keep for each of my children, designed to give them a sense of how to become the best version of themselves. If you find this valuable, please share it with others.

Each edition contains three sections: reflections to put into practice, an inspirational quote, and an image to contemplate.

This week, why we choose good and love over evil and hate.

Reflection

Aristotle argued in the Nicomachean Ethics that humans are, by nature, oriented toward eudaimonia — flourishing, well-being, the good life. Not pleasure alone. Not power. Good.

He didn’t say this naively; he wrote in a world fraught with war, plague, and slavery. He said it because he observed something persistent and stubborn in human behavior: we keep trying to build, to connect, to repair.

Marcus Aurelius, writing in his imperial purple while managing a crumbling empire, returned again and again in his Meditations to a single discipline: assume the best of others, at least as a starting point.

Believing in good is not the same as believing everything is fine. It is a choice about where to place one’s attention — and that choice has consequences. Psychologists call this orientation dispositional optimism, and the research is unambiguous: people who hold it are healthier, more resilient, and more likely to act in ways that make the world incrementally better. The belief is generative. Cynicism is a closed loop; hope is an open one.

Choosing to believe in good is not sentiment. It is strategy. It is leadership.

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Further reading:

Quote

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Note: make sure you watch the video at the end — even if you don’t read this entire piece.

Every age flatters itself by believing it is uniquely cursed.

Ours insists that cruelty is realism, that cynicism is wisdom, that loving too freely marks you as unserious—or worse, naïve. We are told, subtly and relentlessly, that belief in goodness is a luxury item, something to be set aside when the world grows hard. That love is soft. That giving without expectation is for suckers.

History, of course, says otherwise.

The most durable civilizations — those that lasted longer than a news cycle or a quarterly earnings call — were built not on fear, but on shared belief. On the stubborn conviction that human beings are more than their worst instincts. That decency is not accidental and that goodness, practiced daily, compounds.

To believe in good is not to deny evil. It is to refuse to let evil set the terms.

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The Strength We Keep Forgetting

We’re told that love is patient, yet we get distracted because hate is loud. And that asymmetry confuses us.

Hate announces itself in absolutes and slogans, promising speed. It feels like action. Love, by contrast, works slowly, invisibly, through habits and choices that rarely make headlines. It builds trust, then institutions, then cultures — often without applause.

A frustrating timeline for those who wish to make an immediate difference. But hate burns hot and fast. Love endures.

Tacitus observed that “they make a desert and call it peace.” Hatred does the same thing to organizations, families, and nations. It clears the ground, yes — but leaves nothing worth inheriting. Love, inconvenient as it may be, is how anything worth keeping survives.

This is not sentimentality. It is structural truth.

You cannot build a functioning enterprise, a resilient culture, or a just society on contempt. Fear produces compliance; love produces commitment. One collapses the moment pressure is released. The other holds when things go sideways.

Every serious leader eventually learns this, usually the hard way.

I help leaders and their teams discover how to operate with love and humility to create value and growth for all through Alan Mulally’s Working Together© Leadership & Management System. I experienced it firsthand and practiced it when I served with him as an executive at Ford Motor Company. And now I can help you and your team — at companies of any size — do the same.

Let's chat about it

The Radical Act of Giving

Giving without expectation feels subversive because it refuses the dominant logic of transaction.

We live in a culture obsessed with leverage: What do I get out of this? How do I protect myself? Where is my return? These are reasonable questions in markets obsessed with the bottom line.

They are corrosive ones in human relationships. And isn’t every organization made from human relationships?

The ancient Greeks understood this better than we do. Charis — grace freely given — was not weakness. It was social glue. It created obligation not through force, but through gratitude. It bound people together because it was voluntary.

When you give without expectation, you do something quietly radical: you assert that the relationship itself matters more than the outcome. That trust is not foolish. That generosity is not a strategy, but a stance.

Ironically, this is how the strongest systems are formed. The most resilient teams. The deepest loyalty. The cultures people refuse to abandon when things get difficult.

What is given freely is often returned — just not on your timetable, and not in your currency.

Choosing the Longer Views

Believing in good, loving in a cynical age, giving without keeping score — these are not passive acts. They are choices we make daily. And they’re often lonely ones.

They require faith in something unfashionable: the long view.

They require us to believe that how we treat people matters even when no one is watching. That the moral shortcuts on offer—humiliation, indifference, cruelty—always come with hidden costs. That dignity, once lost, is difficult to recover.

We are not the first generation tempted to abandon these beliefs. But those who did rarely left behind anything worth admiring.

The truth, inconvenient and enduring, is this: love is stronger than hate because it creates. Hate can only destroy. Good is essential because without it, nothing lasts. And giving without expectation is how we remind one another that we are not merely consumers of each other—but stewards.

That may not trend. It may not scale quickly. But it has always been how the future is made.

Quietly. Patiently. On purpose.

Five Timeless Stories of Love Worth Watching This Valentine’s Day

Themes of humility, honor, humor, loyalty, dedication, honor, and of course, romance show the range of human love. ()

To Love and to Serve

The purpose of life is to love and be loved. Work Is Love Made Visible. To serve is to live. Living a life of humility, love, and service. These are the themes of the Working Together Leadership & Management System developed by Alan Mulally and part of what make up my Timeless Leadership speaking and coaching practice. (Timeless & Timely)

More than just a feeling, love can guide our moral compasses

Meghan Sullivan, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, presents the idea of the intwining of love and morality, speaking about the three components of a Love Ethic. First is what gives anyone moral significance: their mere human dignity. You don’t have to do anything else to be of profound value except exist. See the other two. (Psyche)

It’s nice to be important; it’s more important to be nice

There’s no shame in showing someone you care about them. In fact, it is probably the most cost-effective way of building a sense of rapport and camaraderie, not to mention helping you to make better decisions along the way. (Psychology Today)

If you do watch nothing else today, watch this. The company this ad was made for is irrelevant; the message is everything.

There’s so much to learn,