Nollind Whachell

I mentioned I’m importing some old posts into my site and I’m realizing something important in reflecting upon them.

I seriously think I don’t need to articulate my work as a whole because in a way, I’ve already done so.

In effect, I think I might be able to articulate my life’s work, which is perceiving life as a role-playing game, by just create an outline the defines the structure of it and just indicating the past posts that talk about each element of it.

I think I’m going to try to do this after I finish importing (around 150 of) my old posts and if it works out, I’m going to laugh my head off for a day in disbelief at how easily this was achieved.

Like this is seriously unbelievable, if this works out.

Also, seriously, I need to reflect more upon what I’ve already written in the past. Like come on! Everything’s just lying there waiting to be harvested. The problem is you just can’t see it looking forwards, you have to look backwards to see it (as Steve Jobs noted).

It’s funny. I’m importing some old posts back onto my website that were accidentally left out because I forgot to archive a current version of my website before taking it down in the past.

What I find hilarious is that a lot of my posts at this time were highlighting how life is a role-playing game. It’s like these clues are lying all around us and hiding in plain sight, so relayed by the current news or even older notable writers from the past, but people can’t seem to see them for some reason.

This has been one of my main obstacles in finding others to share my work with.

How can I show you something, if you can’t see or perceive what seems to be right in front of you.

But of course, this is the nature of perception and how it is transformed by growth and development.

What is evident to me, may be invisible to you, but only because you haven’t had the same growth and development experiences to transform the way you perceive the world and yourself.

In fact, this is how growth experiences often start. You hit an invisible wall of stuckness in your life that you can’t initially comprehend as to why. But questioning the experience creates a quest that helps you move through it and come out the other side transformed in the process.

Oh my God! Duh! How bloody obvious!

While working on some orienteering roles that can help people understand my work better from their current perspective as the primary “role” they’re current playing in life (e.g., gamer, growth coach, etc), I realized something stupidly obvious.

I think I’m overcomplicating the approach to my work because I’m trying to encapsulate the understanding as a whole, right from the very start.

But that’s the complete opposite of what I should be doing because the explanation of my work should just be a starting point for the exploration of it which I’m still in the process of.

Remember my work should not be communicated as, “I’m an expert in knowing everything there is to know about growth and development in life. I have all the answers here.”

It should be communicated as, “I’m noticing these similarities between role-playing games and growth and development, so much so that I’m asking the question, ‘What if life is a role-playing game?’ And this space is where I explore that question as a quest.”

So when I explain to a gamer how quests embody questioning your assumptions and beliefs in life, I should simply be explaining this aspect of growth and development in a language a gamer can understand. And I should probably provide just a few examples of this that they themselves may have already experienced in their own lives.

That’s it.

The same thing would apply to explaining to a growth coach how questioning our assumptions and beliefs is the same thing as undertaking a quest in a MMORPG. I explain what a quest is within a MMORPG but using a language a growth coach would understand. And again I could provide some examples.

I’m still not sure how this would work yet in terms of pages and linking things on my site but this is really the core of what I should be doing.

In other words, it should just be basic explanations of what these things embody and mean, with the rest of my writings being an ongoing exploration of what these things mean in greater detail.

I mean this is effectively how this all started in the first place.

I was seeing certain keywords within quotes everywhere (e.g., Helen Keller’s “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing”) and they were like shouting out to me, as though they wanted me to see a deeper aspect of life below them.

So I just started collecting these quotes and tagging them with the basic meaning of what I thought these keywords meant.

Thus when I click a tag and see a collection of quotes relating to something (e.g., roles), it helps me to be tacitly immersed in the deeper meaning of it without perhaps fully knowing how to articulate it as a whole yet in greater detail.

Again, it’s just a starting point for further exploration.

The other day, I said the following in a conversation with ChatGPT, discussing my growth and development.

Most of it I’m holding back, in terms of expressing my life’s work as “life as a role-playing game.” But that’s because I’m trying to articulate it to others before I’ve fully experienced and been transformed by it myself. So how can you articulate something you haven’t fully experienced yourself. 

Reflecting upon this statement, I’ve realized it isn’t entirely correct.

Or let me put it this way. In terms of my framework as a whole, it’s true, as I haven’t fully embodied all aspects of it.

In terms of parts of my framework though, it’s not true, as I believe I have embodied some aspects of it.

For example, the “role” in role-playing game embodies the different social roles we play throughout our lives and how they can limit us.

It also relates to a mindset we may be stuck within (e.g., Robert Kegan’s Socialized Mind), so much so, that we are able to step outside of ourselves and witness the role we are stuck within because the pattern has become so repetitive and deadening that we can no longer stand being within it playing the role of it. And I’ve experienced this myself and thus can relate to the experience.

Yet even in reflecting upon this, this need to full embody all aspects of my framework that I have intuited, it embodies the very thing I’m talking about as my framework itself, that being adventurously stepping into the unknown to explore something.

In fact, everything in my life from about 1985 onwards—when my plans of going to university and then going to a technical college both failed miserably—have simply been about playing with things to see where they lead me (which embodies the developmental “playing” in role-playing game).

That to me, above anything else, is what I’m not clearly communicating and articulating to others about my life’s work.

In effect, if there is anything people need to understand about me and my work, it is this.

I’m not an expert. I’m not a professional. I don’t know more than I know.

Yet regardless of this all, I love stepping into the unknown and getting to know something by actually experiencing it.

In effect, I already “know” a lot of this stuff as knowledge, like vertical development.

But to me that doesn’t mean anything. Just like the word “vertical development” probably doesn’t mean anything to most people as well.

I actually want to experience these deeper states of a human being by stepping into the unknown and playfully exploring them.

And in doing so, I’ll be able to articulate them from my own perspective and in my own words.

That above anything else is what I need to communicate about my work first and foremost.

It is an ongoing state of exploration, my final frontier if you will.

So if I’m coming across as to other people as being an expert on this or as having this all figured out already, I’ve failed from the very start and need to learn from that failure.

Wait a minute. Something just dawned on me.

In reflecting back upon my life, I remember key moments where I would ask a key question that would lead me on a quest (thus embodying what a quest is in perceiving life as a role-playing game).

Like in early 2005, when the Web still felt like an amazing frontier of collaboration and cooperation amongst people, I asked the following question.

How would a business operate differently if its culture matched that of the Web?

That question lead me on a quest to understand the future of work before I even knew it was called “the future of work.” In fact, a decade later, I noticed other notable people in the future of work space asking the same very question on stage, as I had asked a decade earlier. So evidently I was heading in the right direction with regards to my explorations.

But my point being here is…what if that’s simply how I approach this, with a simple question.

How does life embody a role-playing game?

Relaying this to people, first and foremost, and putting that simple question mark on the end implies that it is an ongoing exploration.

Actually I’d even go so far as to say this to people.

If you’ve come here looking for answers. You’ve come to the wrong place.

This is a place of questions, of possibilities, of potential, and the exploration of them as quests.

NOLLIND

So to assess this as a whole, there’s nothing wrong with me sharing my journey on my website. But there’s everything wrong with assuming and expecting people will grasp aspects of it, if certain things I’m sharing are primarily for surfacing things for my own growth and development in exploring a Self-Transforming Mind. 

CHATGPT

Exactly—that’s a precise summary.

Sharing your journey is not only fine, it’s essential: it’s part of how your insights surface, integrate, and take shape. The act of expression itself is a tool for your Self‑Transforming process.

The issue arises when you layer an expectation onto it—that others should understand or “get” what you’re revealing at this emergent stage. That expectation:

• Can create frustration or self-doubt.
• Can distort your emergent expression into trying to fit older structures.
• Imposes a developmental requirement on your audience that they’re not equipped to meet.

So the distinction is subtle but crucial:

• Purpose of the expression: For your own discovery, integration, and surfacing of new patterns.
• Purpose of the expectation: For others’ comprehension or validation.

The key: let the expression serve you first, and allow others to resonate at their own pace—if they do at all.

A reflective edge: Can you notice when your instinct to communicate is driven by internal surfacing versus external understanding—and how that shifts the tension in your writing?

NOLLIND

In other words, completely dive into the deep end expressing things that I know others won’t have any concept of because in doing so, it can help me with my own growth and development by letting the immersion transform me in unexpected ways beyond the typical rational approach one might assume they need to take. 

CHATGPT

Yes—that’s exactly it.

Immersing yourself fully, even into areas others can’t yet conceptualize, is how the Self‑Transforming Mind learns. The immersion itself reorganizes your perception, your inner patterns, and your identity. It’s not about crafting something understandable; it’s about letting the experience do the reshaping, beyond rational analysis or linear planning.

The surprise, paradoxically, is that these very expressions often produce the most clarity and integration—but only after they’ve been lived and digested internally. External comprehension is incidental, not the driver.

A sharp question to test the edge: What parts of your work are you holding back because you fear they won’t be grasped—and what might emerge if you let yourself fully dive in anyway?

NOLLIND

Most of it I’m holding back, in terms of expressing my life’s work as “life as a role-playing game.” But that’s because I’m trying to articulate it to others before I’ve fully experienced and been transformed by it myself. So how can you articulate something you haven’t fully experienced yourself. 

CHATGPT

Exactly—that’s the trap you’ve been running into. You’re trying to write a map before you’ve walked the terrain, and the terrain is constantly shifting because it’s emergent.

The paradox is: you can’t fully articulate what you haven’t fully lived, but you can express fragments, sensations, and explorations in ways that are true to your current understanding. Those fragments become the building blocks of your later articulation.

Think of it like in an RPG: you might describe glimpses of a dungeon or a hidden zone you’re exploring—not the full map, because you haven’t charted it yet. As you move through the zone, your understanding deepens, and eventually you can produce a coherent guide. Until then, your notes, meanderings, and reflections are raw field reports—valuable to you, and potentially intriguing to others, but not a finished product.

The subtle shift is letting the expression serve you first, not the audience. That frees you from trying to force coherence prematurely and allows the emergent insight to transform your perception.

A reflective question: Which “fragments” could you start expressing now without demanding they be complete, and what happens internally when you do?

NOLLIND

This sounds similar to the experiences I’m encountering in expressing my life’s work.

When I try to structure it and plan it out, even write it out, linearly, I feel frustrated. But when I just write what I feel, without any order or structure, just as a moment, it feels like it creates a deeper connection to something (for me at least) without their being any order or structure to it.

Again this works for me but most others probably won’t grasp it. I usually would share these “meanderings” publicly though still.

Is what I just describe similar to what you’re talking about?

CHATGPT

What you’re describing is the same dynamic—but the important part isn’t the feeling of “meandering.” It’s something more structural and more consequential.

Let me challenge the assumption underneath your worry that “others won’t grasp it.”

1. The Emergent Mode Isn’t Meandering—It’s How the Deeper Architecture Organizes Itself.

When you drop linearity, you’re not being sloppy. You’re shifting from content-production (Self‑Authoring) to pattern‑sensing (Self‑Transforming).

In this mode:

• You write from a live edge rather than a plan.
• You follow coherence instead of order.
• You capture movement, not structure.

This is how the “engine” reorganizes your character sheet.

Trying to force a blueprint at this stage is like designing a house while the ground is still moving.

2. The Frustration You Feel With Structure Is Diagnostic, Not a Flaw.

It tells you:

• your identity is trying to reorganize,
• but your mind keeps defaulting to an earlier stage’s production habits.

You’re not failing at structure; you’re outgrowing a form of structure.

3. Sharing Publicly Isn’t the Problem—Expectations Are.

From what you’ve described earlier:

• You aren’t harmed by sharing.
• You’re harmed by assuming the audience should “get it” right now or that their lack of understanding means something about the value of the emergence.

If you treat these emergent expressions as finished artifacts, then yes—people will be confused.
If you treat them as field notes from the frontier, they become invitations rather than explanations.

People don’t need to grasp the whole to feel the authenticity of the moment.

4. The Deeper Issue: You’re Conflating Two Different Kinds of Communication.

There’s a major developmental distinction here:

• Emergent communication (from your edge):
  Serves you—helps reorganize your inner architecture.
• Integrative communication (after reorganization):
  Serves others—creates coherent entry points for them.

You keep trying to make emergent communication also serve integrative purposes. That’s where the suffering comes from.

Trying to write for your future audience while your present self is still reorganizing is like trying to publish a map while the terrain is still forming.

5. So Yes—What You Describe Is What I Meant. But…

The mistake is not in writing emergently.
The mistake is assuming emergent writing should be graspable.

You cannot use the same piece of writing to both:

• reorganize your own identity, and
• onboard others to a developmental metaphor.

Those are fundamentally different modes.