Leadership isn’t about the pop-culture traits: charisma, certainty, or control. It’s about what you do when no one’s watching and how you listen when anyone is speaking.

The antidote to frailty isn’t in a gym or a book. It’s in cultivating robustness; across mindset, metabolism, movement, relationships, and purpose. Robustness is the baseline, but we can aim higher yet: toward anti-fragility.

Everywhere we look, our culture provides surface-level symbology pressed onto reality. We can assume this is to soothe us, reassure us and distract us. But above all it's to sell us. If not an actual product, then a reality of their creation.

While awareness can lead to guardedness if we direct it outside ourselves, it can also lead to connection if we turn it inward. Oftentimes, we discover the security we seek isn't something that can be found in the world.

Real leadership demands holding a mirror to complacency and inviting people into the friction that leads to fire. This creative tension is where new strength, strategy, vision and resolve emerge.

Originality, perhaps, is not raw, brazen inventing from scratch. It’s more like a remix of reality into something nature didn’t quite try: a twist of absurdity, purpose, or rebellion.

There’s a lot of talk about waking up these days. A mass awakening leading to a collective leap in consciousness. The world is shaking, and it seems to be shaking people awake.

Far as we know, humans are the only critter aware of — and able to limit, explore, or expand — its capacity. This awareness is the key to our superpower: adaptation.