Something is becoming evident to me in the articulation of my work.

What’s evident to me is that most of it is hiding in plain sight, often within everyday articles that you read online, yet most people aren’t aware of what it is because it goes by many different names.

For example, I’ve been calling it vertical development but that’s just one name of many it goes by. It could also be called leadership development, ego development, adult development, or even developmental psychology.

I’ve seen it hiding in other forms as well, like as creativity applied to yourself, liminal thinking, or even as Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.

Yet what these really are all about at their core is growth and development.

Yet what’s difficult and confusing for people to grasp is that the focus of your growth and development changes at each stage of your development because your needs and values change as you grow and evolve.

So the focus of one person at an earlier stage of their growth and development will differ to the focus of another person at a later stage of their growth and development.

In other words, as you grow and develop, your view or lens of your world and yourself are transformed and evolve in turn.

For example, when you’re a young adult, knowledge may be the end-all and be-all for you, as you may believe that knowing everything allows you have control and certainty over your life.

Yet as you get older and are fortunate enough to grow and develop, you begin to realize that continually gaining and accumulating knowledge to know everything is a fallacy, an illusion. You can’t know everything. It’s impossible.

So it becomes less about gaining and accumulating knowledge and more about transforming your relationship to it and life as a whole. This is the difference between information and transformation. Your relationship to what you know changes and it gives you a much larger perspective and context to life in the process.

Jonny Caplan reveals how those who wait for certainty often miss out to those exploring gaps of opportunity within uncertain times.

Entrepreneurship has never been about possessing a crystal ball. It has always been about identifying possibilities before they become obvious, making calculated decisions with incomplete information and moving quickly enough to turn an idea into something real. AI hasn’t changed that principle; it has amplified it.

In a market changing this quickly, the ability to learn, adapt and deliver may prove more valuable than having the perfect plan at the outset.

Don’t assume the biggest companies have already thought of everything, and don’t confuse the absence of certainty with the absence of opportunity.

The future of AI is not a finished product waiting to be purchased. It is a rapidly developing landscape in which new possibilities are emerging, old assumptions are being challenged and the rules of entire industries are being rewritten.

There will be winners and losers, extraordinary successes and spectacular failures, but the real opportunities will belong to those prepared to explore, experiment, innovate and execute while everyone else is still debating what might happen.

The game has changed. The question is no longer whether you can afford to wait for the future to become clear, but whether you can afford to sit on the sidelines while somebody else builds it.

Jonny Caplan, Nobody Has a Bloody Clue Where AI Is Going. And That’s the Opportunity.

This perfectly mirrors growth and development within life as a whole.

When our lives feel like they are falling apart during challenging times, it is often because life is trying to show us larger possibilities and potentialities through the cracks and gaps of it. In other words, until your existing expectations, assumptions, and beliefs that collectively form your current identity begin to stop working, you will never ever question them and quest beyond them.

So life challenges are actually here to help you grow and develop beyond your existing sense of self, yet it requires stepping into uncertainty to do so.

Scott Hutcheson on how AI may be allowing people to do more work but it may not be making work more sustainable, as that would require a new work operating system that actually transforms the way we work.

AI made more work possible, but that did not necessarily make work more sustainable.

Employees are adapting to new capabilities while the systems around them remain largely unchanged. Technology increases what individuals can accomplish, but organizational friction can prevent that capability from producing greater value.

These measures are harder to capture than hours saved or tasks completed. They are also closer to what determines sustained organizational performance. The larger opportunity presented by AI is not simply to accelerate individual work. It is to improve the relationships, responsibilities, and decision processes through which people create value together.

Making everyone more productive may improve today’s numbers. Making the organization more capable can change tomorrow’s possibilities.

Scott Hutcheson, Companies Aren’t Really Transforming Work With AI

This is a perfect example of what happens when businesses focus on using AI for just horizontal development rather than for vertical development (but primarily because they’re not even aware of vertical development in the first place).

Transforming the very identity of the people, the way they relate to one another, and the way they operate with one another is what makes an organization more adaptable, thus allowing it to embrace newer possibilities that once may have seemed impossible before (such as giving workers more autonomy and agency).

AI can actually assist with this vertical development of the organization, and the people within it, but it requires making AI aware of this larger context as the primary intention of the work.

Seth Godin on how what’s keeping you stuck trying to solve a problem often isn’t the problem itself but rather a bunch of heavy, entangled baggage we need to let go of.

We often stay stuck because we confuse situations we must accept with problems we can solve, while dragging along old identities, imagined expectations, and sunk costs. Getting unstuck means seeing the problem clearly, deciding what the work is for, and letting go of whatever no longer serves that purpose.

It’s simple because it helps us see what’s right in front of us, and it’s hard because once we see it, we have to do something with what we learn.

We’re stuck because we are entangled, like a knot with ropes linking and circling each other that we can’t discern. We are entangled with all sorts of nonsense, real and imagined, and what we need to do is figure out whether the multiple things we want are “buts” (which means they are mutually exclusive) or “ands” (which means they point us in the same direction). “I want to run the marathon, but I don’t want to get tired.” That “but” paralyzes us. “I want to run the marathon, and I’m eager to get tired” pushes us in exactly the right direction.

Jackson Pollock wanted two things at the same time. He wanted to be a creative working on the edge, but he also wanted to be embraced, celebrated, and successful. He forgot how long that took the first time. “I want to come up with something innovative, but I don’t want anyone to misunderstand me.” You can’t have both at the same time. We must do one thing at a time. We can do many things over time. One thing at a time. We have to let go of the buts.

We also get entangled with identity: who we think we are, who we think we should become. How do we forgive ourselves for not becoming that person? That person in our head might be disappointed in the short run, but they are not you. You are not the imagined identity. You are the person here to make something better.

So many people are caught. Many people don’t actually have the privilege and agency to make choices. Many people can’t do what you might be able to do right here and right now. They are caught with real walls, not unexamined ones. But each of us, if we have the chance, the shot, to show up and make a ruckus, to make things better, to lead—those are problems worth solving. Thank you for the work you do. Thank you for the work you’re about to do. We need you. Keep making a ruckus.

Seth Godin, What’s keeping you stuck isn’t the real problem

The wanting to do something innovative but not wanting people to misunderstand me is so bloody me. I’m slowly starting to let go of this by realizing it’s just part of the process I have to accept and step into as part of the adventure.

Andrew Holecek on falling into your deeper self, the you beyond what you’re doing.

Who you think you are is defined by what you do. Who you really are is revealed when you finally stop doing. The very structure of the self is radically threatened when it’s sent into the dark.

But the more time you spend in there, what a surprise, the more you become familiar with the darkness. You relax, you slow down, you surrender. And then the mind starts to fall into itself.

You’re basically opening the walls, expanding the walls of your perception box.

And that’s where the gold takes place. You’re forced to make this radical introduction to who you really are. So you enter this environment that brings about this kind of dissolution of self-structured identity. You have disappeared to become nothing. You drop even below that. Now you’re below the surface structures of your storyline.

And so therefore, the invitation and revelation is, can I hold this level of openness?

Andrew Holecek, The shock of doing nothing

Dr. James Hollis on the exploration of meaning and purpose within the curious depth of ourselves.

You know, if if we run from our inner calling or you know, predilections, um we might live a safer life or a more comfortable life, but it will not contribute that chip to the mosaic that was the possibility. Most of the people that we would admire in history didn’t have easy lives. They had very difficult lives, even martyrdom. But we admire them because they embodied something within that was their truth.

As long as we’re curious, that spark is alive within us and and to to be able to pursue those questions.

It’s it’s about finding the meaning of your suffering. And and when you do that, then you have this deep sense of purpose and the rightness. There’s some something inside of you. I talked about those different modalities of of access to what’s going on in our depth. When they are in aligned, you you know the difference.

You feel it. It’s It’s called the flow or it’s called that sense of meaning or or or purpose.

But to say, “All right, what is it that is really calling to me?” And I’m not talking about a career necessarily. I’m just talking about a mode of curiosity or a mode of being or mode of exploration.

This perfectly mirrors “the call to adventure” within Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. And it touches on finding your bliss as not something blissful but rather something that can entail suffering from which meaning and purpose emerges from it.

This is similar to the experience a mother goes through in giving birth to their child. The end result is bliss but the experience is anything but blissful, as it is full of suffering. In the same way, we are giving birth to a larger sense of ourselves.

Santiago Barraza Lopez describes how AI is transforming his relationship with uncertainty.

Accepting uncertainty became the only way forward

For years, I had measured my professional progress by how much I knew and how confident I felt about my abilities. AI challenged that completely. I began to question whether being good at my job meant knowing the latest developments or simply knowing how to adapt as everything changed. It was uncomfortable to accept that experience and hard work might not always provide the certainty I was used to.

I also started questioning how much of my personal time I was willing to sacrifice to stay relevant. I didn’t want every conversation, evening, or weekend to become another opportunity to learn or talk about AI. I began making a conscious effort to disconnect after work, even if that meant missing an announcement or falling behind on the latest developments. For the first time, I was choosing not to know everything.

I don’t regret moving into AI, but I no longer feel as certain about the decision as I once did. The technology isn’t going to slow down. All I know for sure is that we are living through one of the most important inflection points in recent history, and perhaps that’s what makes it all so overwhelming.

Santiago Barraza Lopez, I Work in AI, but I’m Burned Out and Can’t Keep Up

This is similar to how I intuited before that the rapid change in our world will become so prevalent that it will no longer be possible to just ride it out until the current wave of change subsides because the waves will be repeating quickly and even overlapping each other. Instead people have to evolve and learn how to live and be comfortable with uncertainty as a normal part of life. Not by chance, this is one of the characteristics that evolved individuals in the latter stages of adult growth and development learn to embrace themselves. So it seems like the times are necessitating the need for these evolved individuals.

Ryan Gottfredson describing the evolved leadership capacities of a Self-Transforming Mind (Mind 3.0).

The ability to operate at a controlled pace. With a refined internal operating system, rarely will you find these individuals rushed. They create space for themselves, relationships, problem solving, learning, and mentoring others. They are resistant to getting caught up in day-to-day urgent needs.

Ryan Gottfredson, What is Vertical Development

I think for many of us, our lives may feel like a constant race. We might often say to ourselves, “Once I reach this point and achieve success with this, then I’ll slow down. But for now, I can’t.” Yet for evolved individuals described above, they realize the destination is just an illusion. There is only the here and now, what you do in the moment. So it’s more about your daily process that achieves outcomes for you, rather than trying to focus on and reach an outcome as a destination or end state.