I just realized something that has been sitting under my nose the entire time but I wasn’t really aware of it until today.

I’ve mentioned before that the progression of my life’s work evolved in the following way.

Work Isn’t Working > The Future of Work > Creativity > Vertical Development > Life’s a Role-Play Game

Previously I viewed these as different knowledge silos. Yet at the same time I recognized that they represented different disciplines that each have their own disciplinary language as well.

The obvious thing that I just realized today is that these are different interpretations or lenses for understanding my life’s work. Put another way, they are different perspectives of the same thing.

This mirrors what I’ve been noticing in the past, that being that I’m seeing different notable authors all talking about the same thing but from their own different disciplinary languages and perspectives.

But I just never realized my own work mirrored this as well.

What does this change?

Well before, my goal was to interlink each of these knowledge silos with each other, showing where their aspects related one another. Now though, I realize that each needs to be fully comprehensive on their own as an interpretation of my life’s work, speaking from their own disciplinary language (although interlinking between them can be added later as well).

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke

One does not understand one’s life before one lives it.

One understands their life by actually embracing the adventure of living it.

This is the adventure of your life.

Your questions are your quests that have to be lived and experienced to eventually be answered.

Then, when we are ready to listen deeply, we can listen without interrupting. If we try to interrupt or correct the other person, we will transform the session into a debate and it will ruin everything. After we have deeply listened and allowed the other person to express everything in his heart, we’ll have a chance later on to give him a little of the information he needs to correct his perception —but not now. Now we just listen, even if the person says things that are wrong. It’s the practice of mindfulness of compassion that keeps us listening deeply.

You have to take the time to look and see the suffering in the other person. You must be prepared. Deep listening has only one purpose: to help others suffer less. Even if the person says wrong things, expresses bitterness, or blames, continue to listen compassionately for as long as you can. You may want to say this to yourself as a reminder:

I am listening to this person with only one purpose: to give this person a chance to suffer less.

Keep the one purpose of deep listening alive in your heart and in your mind. As long as you are inhabited by the energy of compassion, you are safe. Even if what the other person says contains a lot of wrong perceptions, bitterness, anger, blame, and accusation, you are really safe.

Remember that the other person’s speech may be based on prejudices and misunderstandings. You will have a chance later to offer some information so that he or she can correct his or her perception, but not now. Now is the time only to listen.

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Communicating

One of my main weaknesses is this need to correct a person’s misperceptions, even if that person isn’t even ready to accept that they have a misperception. Yet at times, I do catch myself and don’t fault the person for their misperception because I realize they are lost within them due to something they are suffering with which can blind them.

For example, the recent mid-term elections results are a perfect example of this. It can be easy to cheer and be happy that people in America are finally waking up to who Trump truly is but we can’t forget why they voted for him in the first place. It’s because the Democrats before him weren’t addressing deep systemic issues that needed addressing in America (similar to what Mark Carney is beginning to try to tackle in Canada).

So many people might cheer and say Trump is finished, so everything will be better now, but I doubt it. He will probably continue to be a distraction till the end of his term which will only stand in the way and delay Americans from truly understanding and addressing the deeper suffering in their country which is the real issue at heart.

We tend to think we already know and understand our loved ones very well, but that may not be so. If we haven’t understood our own suffering and our own perceptions, how can we understand the suffering of another person? We shouldn’t be too sure that we understand everything about the other person. We have to ask, “Do I understand myself enough? Do I understand my suffering and its roots?”

Once you have some understanding and insight into your own suffering, you begin to be better at understanding and communicating with someone else. If you can’t accept yourself—if you hate yourself and get angry with yourself—how can you love another person and communicate love to him or her?

Self-understanding is crucial for understanding another person; self-love is crucial for loving others. When you’ve understood your suffering, you suffer less, and you are capable of understanding another person’s suffering much more easily. When you can recognize the suffering in the other person and see how that suffering came about, compassion arises. You no longer have the desire to punish or blame the other person. You can listen deeply, and when you speak there is compassion and understanding in your speech. The person with whom you’re speaking will feel much more comfortable, because there is understanding and love in your voice.

Coming home to ourselves to understand our suffering and its roots is the first step. Once we understand our suffering and how it came about, we’re in a position to communicate with others in such a way that they also suffer less. Our relationships depend on the capacity of each of us to understand our own difficulties and aspirations and those of others.

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Communicating

For the longest time, I thought that the words know thyself were just about understanding our passion, purpose, and vision in life, thus allowing us to share our unique talents and perspective with the world. But the above quote really woke me up to the fact that the greatest gift we can give is knowing the underlying roots of why we suffer in our own lives. Because in doing so, we can deeply relate to others and understand why they suffer in their own lives as well.

At the same time, I’ve also wondered how such deeply evolved individuals can have such compassion and love for others, to the point that they see no separation between themselves and others. It is because they can deeply relate to the pain and suffering of the other person to the point that they see them as just a reflection of themselves.

Authenticity implies a way of being in the world wherein you remain true to the spirit of who you are at the soul level. The needs of the ego drive the first part of our lives. Then, if the conditions are right (you are able to master your fears, individuate, and self-actualize), the soul takes over and drives the second part of our lives.

The ego is like the shell of an acorn; the soul is like the seed in the core. Only when the conditions are right does the shell decompose so the core can break through to allow the acorn to become an oak tree. Only when we express our authentic self can we become all we can become. Learning to lead yourself is the process by which you uncover and express your own authenticity.

Richard Barrett, The New Leadership Paradigm

In a little over a month, I’ll be 61.

Yet 25 years ago, my conventional life got upended, leading me on a meaningful adventure I never would have imagined possible at the time.

In the midst of that adventure, I never seemed to progress as fast as I wanted to do so, yet in looking back upon it now, I’m often amazed at how far I’ve come.

In fact, it seems like an entire lifetime in itself, those 25 years.

Yet the 25 years before even that seemed like another lifetime in itself.

It begs the question. Will the next 25 years of my life, to the age of 86, feel like another whole lifetime in itself?

If so, what new experiences and growth will I undertake to make it feel like a whole new lifetime?

It’s funny. At one point in my life, I said that I was dying to feel alive.

Will I fully be able to experience the breadth and depth of life in this third lifetime, allowing me to have felt fully alive enough within it before I leave this life at the end of it?

I wonder.

Hmmm, or perhaps that is the process itself to feeling alive.

“I wonder.”

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.