Category: Identity

I recently wrote three posts on vertical development specifically for Substack (which I’ve now archived on my website here).

Why Is Vertical Development so Important in Our World Today?

Why Should Vertical Development Training Be Accessible to Everyone?

What Is Vertical Development?

These weren’t so much for gauging interest on the topic on Substack, as they were a test of seeing whether I could get into the groove of writing again.

Incredibly, it felt amazing to write these and they just seemed to flow out of me. I basically started writing at around 9 AM in the morning and wrote till around noon and published them each, one day after the other.

After I had completed the final of the three, I really felt good about myself and felt like I had gotten into the groove of writing again.

But after spending the weekend to reflect upon them, it dawned on me that even though these felt great in terms of writing them, they weren’t the voice, tone, and language I was looking for. Of course, what it is that I am looking for in terms of these is what I am still struggling with.

The inability to communicate one’s thoughts is in very truth the most terrible of all kinds of loneliness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If I could put this feeling of what tone and language I am looking for into words though, it would have to be this (along with a video I discovered a couple months back that seems like the perfect metaphor for it).

It would be as though you realized that all of the greatest writers in the world were sharing a secret magical language that in turn allowed you to discover a secret level to life within which lies a whole new world you can adventure within.

And only you have the capability to unlock this world because you are the key to it.

That’s what I want my words to feel like. As though you are uncovering something both mystical and magical at the same time, a deeper truth to life that most people are completely unaware of, one that opens a way to a whole new world by opening it within you first.

This is what vertical development feels like to me when I don’t have to describe the technicality of it. It shouldn’t feel like your reading a dry, boring, technical computer manual on how to upgrade your brain. It should feel like a wondrous playful adventure to a new world of possibilities, one that gives you a collection of moments and experiences that transform your entire worldview and entire way of being.

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Joseph Campbell

It’s time.
This world has waited for your arrival.
It is you.
You will open the door.
Because you are the chosen.
All those moments.
It’s a new adventure.
Just for you.
Come in.
You have a game to play.

My perception of my problem before last week was that I felt incapable of articulating what vertical development was because it is something very complex to communicate and understand.

However, what this did was make me believe that I was incapable of doing so because I wasn’t an “expert” enough to do so (even though I had been researching it for years). So articulation became an impossibility for me that I believed and in turn feared.

Yet last week, I realized that my problem wasn’t the problem but rather my perception of the problem was my problem. Why? Because my perception was inaccurate.

I can articulate what vertical development is. I just wasn’t doing this because I was so focused on understanding the relationship between the different aspects of it as objects of knowledge that I avoided doing the obvious. That being articulating the very objects of knowledge themselves.

Once I reframed my perspective, suddenly the invisible became visible and I laughed at how I had been blind for so long. And suddenly, I could articulate because I believed I could. This is what it feels like get out of your own way.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been highly active on Reddit discussing the issues with Sonos speakers and the fiasco that occurred earlier this year when Sonos “upgraded” their app, causing it to malfunction for a ton of their users.

This got me thinking the last day or so that when I reflect back on my life, I’ve been highly active as an advocate for communities in the past.

Back near the end of the 1990s, I was an end user advocate for gamers, both as a gamer but also as a person who built sites and communities for gamers within the gaming industry at the same time as well.

After the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, I was an advocate for people who had been laid off so carelessly from it.

Then over the past decade or so, I’ve been an advocate within a couple of gaming communities again, both in terms of trying to drive change within the communities but also trying to drive a change with the developers of the games as well.

All said done, I found that when I’m backing a cause, I can become quite passionate and voraciously driven, especially if it’s an us vs them situation.

But reflecting upon this the other day, I realized that one of my deepest causes doesn’t really have a specific “them” to rally against. Why? Because it’s not so much a singular organization but rather an organizational mindset.

Even more so, what this means is that the “enemy” isn’t out there so much as it is within you, a part of your own mindset. So how does one become an advocate to fight against a limited, outdate mindset, when it’s not represented by a singular organizational body but is embedded collectively within the work world which is in itself embedded within your mind?

This touches upon what Alvin Toffler said about the future being about learning how to unlearn. The enemy isn’t out there. It’s within us, within our minds. It’s a narrative and belief that we need to let go of, yet most people are completely unaware of it.

Again, I know how to rally people into a community and advocate for them against an external entity. But when the entity is a belief within you, how do you rally against that?

Last night and this morning, I was reflecting upon something about my struggles in expressing myself.

My problem isn’t writing content. My problem is organizing my content.

Like even my last few posts I’ve written, after I write the post without much issue, I often get stumped as to what to categorize it as, so I just toss on some category and hope for the best.

This relates to what I said before in that I feel like I have all the pages for a book but they’re not in any order or structure and I struggle to figure out that structure.

Here’s another example. I can talk about the Hero’s Journey. I can talk about creativity. I can talk about vertical development. Where I freeze up is when I try to organize and structure the relationship between these things.

That’s what I need to focus on and work on.

So when I hear people say just focus on what’s in front of you and produce something. That’s fine. I can do that. That’s easy.

Taking what you’ve just produced and connecting it up into a bigger picture. That’s the hard part.

In effect, if I write multiple articles everyday for a week, I don’t feel productive in expressing myself unless I can take those articles and build something from them by showing the relationship amongst them, thus revealing this bigger picture and deeper meaning.

If I can’t do that then writing the content itself seems pointless, even though I can do it fairly easily.

I just realized something that seems so obvious now.

I’ve been diligently try to share my growth and development upon my site here because I believe that people can possibly learn from it (especially the deeper, paradoxical aspect of the journey).

But what I just realized is that a lot of my writing here is just talking about the output of my process rather than the process itself.

In other words, what are the core principles that make up my process?

Am I even aware of what my process is? Am I just intuitively winging it?

I think I’ve touched upon this before in that it’s easy to share knowledge about something, like what is vertical development, but practicing vertical development is a completely different story. And then actually trying to share that practice with someone else, who is unfamiliar with it, is even more complex.

But this is what I need to be focusing on.

The other day I woke up early, got out of bed, and started creating an outline of my Life as a MMORPG framework, breaking it down into a Player’s Handbook, which embodies the Hero’s Journey, and a Campaign Guide, which embodies the stages of development that one traverses within oneself using vertical development.

I’ve done this somewhat sparingly before but what I’ve finally realized today about it, that’s different from the past, is the way I’ve created the descriptions for each point in the outline. And it touches upon this struggle I’ve had in trying to describe things using the head, heart, and hands approach of communication.

What I realized is that my difficulty in the past was in trying to keep each aspect of the communication method separate, when in fact I should integrating them all as one. And when I realized this, I realized that that is what mythopoetic language does. It’s describing the literal but by using symbolic and metaphoric means.

Deciding to see what an example of this would look like using my Life as a MMORPG framework, I asked Google’s Gemini AI to use mythopoetic language to describe life as a roleplaying game using the levels of consciousness within vertical development. Here’s what it wrote (with a few tweaks by myself). And I have to say, this is very close to what I’ve been striving for in creating a voice that integrates and encapsulates the identity of myself and the identity of my work.

In the grand roleplaying game of life, we begin as inexperienced adventurers, our consciousness a mere seedling. Each decision, every challenge overcome, and every lesson learned grants us experience. This experience doesn’t unlock flashy spells or mighty weapons, but something far more valuable – a greater awareness of life.

Just as a roleplaying game character might climb from a lowly warrior to a legendary paladin, so too do we ascend through levels of consciousness. The petty squabbles and fleeting desires of our lower levels give way to greater understanding and clarity of purpose. We begin seeing the interconnected web of existence, the ways our actions ripple outward, shaping not just ourselves but the world around us.

Obstacles, once viewed as insurmountable, become quests to be undertaken. Mistakes aren’t failures, but opportunities to refine our character, tweaking our internal stats of compassion, wisdom, and resilience. We unlock hidden dialogue options, finding the courage to converse with our own shadows and the empathy to understand perspectives far different from our own.

Leveling up in the game of life doesn’t make it easier. The challenges become more complex, the stakes higher. But with each level gained, we perceive the playing field with greater depth. We see the hidden paths, the subtle strategies the universe employs. And, most importantly, we realize the game isn’t about reaching a final destination, but the epic experience of the journey itself.

Conversations with Gemini

There’s something that Rupert Spira mentioned in a video of his that stood out for me, when reflecting upon it.

When it comes to poetry, we should not demand that the poet uses words in too literal or rational a way. The words of a poem don’t operate on the rational mind, they operate on a deeper level.

Rupert Spira

This reminded me of something I touched upon before. That this “language of keywords” which was revealing itself to me over time, seemed very similar to mythopoetic language which is sometimes called the soul’s language.

It’s funny because I’ve said before that if life is a MMORPG, I feel like a Bard because I seem focused on identity and meaning, enjoying helping people and businesses to clarify their identity and communicate it meaningfully to their customers.

But what I realized about this all is that my language of meaning making, which helps me communicate things beyond the literal or rational in a deeper way, is the language of MMORPGs (which just happens to closely mirror the language of the Hero’s Journey as well).

My life over the past two decades has changed dramatically.

It has also integrated itself, more and more. In fact, the more my life’s work integrates itself, the more it is doing so by integrating more of my life’s story and the experiences within it.

Let me explain what I mean.

Work Isn’t Working

Back in 2001, when the Dot-Com Bubble burst, I realized that the concept of work wasn’t working for me anymore and I wanted to find a newer way. As the years passed by, I began to realize that more and more people were feeling the same way as I was and they were looking for a new way as well.

A few years back with the pandemic, this became even more apparent to a lot of people, as they began questioning their beliefs and assumptions about the work world and started seeking other ways of working as well.

The Future of Work

In the mid-2000s, I started discovering other people who were searching for a new way of working and over time, this new way of working emerged as The Future of Work.

While more and more books explained this future of work and even what it looked like, what seemed to be missing was how to get there though.

Social Innovation

When the term social business emerged in the latter part of the 2000s, I realized that businesses needed to not just technologically innovate, in terms of their products and services, but they needed to socially innovate in terms of how they operated, both internally with regards to their employees and externally with regards to their customers.

But again, the question was how can these business transform themselves, so as to socially innovate?

Creativity

In the early 2010s, I realized the obviousness of my questions that I was questing towards and realized that it was creativity itself, applied to our very sense of selves, that could help us to socially innovate.

This was a massive leap for me, as it finally gave me a process which could be used in transforming ourselves, thus allowing us to travel to The Future of Work by each of us undergoing a journey within our selves.

The Hero’s Journey

The more I explored creativity applied socially to ourselves, the more I was seeing connections between what I was learning and my past experiences in building communities online around video games. In fact, it almost seemed like there was this language of keywords emerging, that were cryptically guiding me to something much bigger.

What I realized though was that this language mirrored Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. So much so that I soon realized why. The Hero’s Journey is actually a metaphor of the psychological journey within ourselves that we undergo to grow, evolve, and transform ourselves.

Thus the inner journey to The Future of Work is the inner journey of the Hero’s Journey. They are one and the same. Now I had a metaphor which could be used to help people understand this inner journey and the paradoxical experiences one would encounter in undertaking this journey.

But something was missing from my work. While creativity is how we can transform ourselves and it’s embodied by the Hero’s Journey, it became evident that we are all different stages of social development and growth. In fact, with regards to The Future of Work, leaders and followers both needed to creatively transform themselves to work within this new world. So people couldn’t expect their leaders to level up and save them. They had to level up as well, so as to save themselves.

So how can creativity, embodied as the Hero’s Journey, help different sets of people at different stages of development? It can’t. You need something else that can help people understand the different psychological, inner terrain they are going through, compared to someone else. This is where vertical development comes in.

Vertical Development

While I had been researching vertical development since the latter part of the 2000s, it really didn’t start making sense as a whole until I started overlaying all of the different knowledge I was learning from it, so as to create a much bigger picture of what was going on.

So if you can imagine our journey to The Future of Work, as a leap from one world to another, with creativity being the process of how we make that leap, then what vertical development does is help us to zoom out and back from that process and realize that life is filled with these transformative leaps of logic. So whereas creativity is the process for achieving growth and development, vertical development helps us understand the different characteristics of each stage of development and accompanying levels of consciousness.

So what I recognized here was that creativity was an integral part of vertical development itself. And the more I reflected upon this, I realized that so many other things were an integral part of vertical development as well. For example, mental health and well-being are aspects of vertical development. In fact, natural growth and development is an inherent part of well-being and if we block this natural growth, it can actually affect our mental health.

But it even went beyond this. Suddenly the deeper I got, the more I realized how so many of the issues within our world today could be resolved if people became aware of vertical development and began applying it to their life. In effect, it is often our beliefs and expectations which limit our perception of the world and often cause problems that arise from this limited perception. In fact, wicked problems are such that they often require “a large group of people to change their mindsets and behaviours to solve them.” In other words, the cause of our most serious problems aren’t “out there” (and thus something we can blame on someone else) but rather are “inside of us” (often of our own doing, unbeknownst to us).

But the more that I began to share what I was discovering about life at a much deeper level, the more it became aware that many people couldn’t grasp what I was talking about because it seemed inconceivable. For example, the basic premise of vertical development is realizing that we don’t see reality directly but instead see a map of reality, constructed from our life’s experiences. If you tell the average person this, they’ll think you’re crazy, even though more and more people within the scientific community are actually proving this to be true today.

Life as a MMORPG

So what I realized I needed here was something like the Hero’s Journey, but something larger than it, to help people metaphorically grasp this bigger picture of vertical development and how it relates to the natural growth and development within our lives. Yet what became the obvious solution to me seemed almost absurd to attempt at first, even though this language of keywords had been cryptically guiding me to it all along. What I began to realize was that life was metaphorically a MMORPG and the Hero’s Journey was the foundational primer for this all along.

You see the Hero’s Journey is effectively a Player’s Handbook for The MMORPG Called Life. It helps you to understand that when you encounter a major life challenge that your current mindset can’t help you navigate, you have to go on an inner, creative journey within yourself, exploring and mapping a new stage of development that lies beyond the horizon of your current mindset and beyond the border of your current worldview.

This occurs because it requires you to question your assumptions and beliefs which begins a quest for you. And this journey will require you to overcome your monstrous fears blocking your way which is really just your older, limited perspective of your “self” that you have to “slay” by letting go of it. But when you do so, you will gain the treasure of gaining newer values which give you the experience of living your life in a whole new way.

But while the Hero’s Journey, as an embodiment of the creative process applied to ourselves, can help us understand the narrative mechanics of The MMORPG Called Life, we need something else. Again, we need something to understand the different inner terrain we will be traversing across. And this is where vertical development comes in.

Vertical development is like a Campaign Guide for The MMORPG Called Life. It helps us to understand the inner psychological terrain we will have to traverse across, thus helping us to understand where we’ve been, where we are at, and where we’re going with regards to our growth and development.

And in terms of expanding the metaphor founded by the Hero’s Journey, it mirrors quite closely with the expansions found with a typical MMORPG. The starting expansion is The Walled City which represents the defensive nature of the Socialized Mind. The next expansion is The Borderlands which represents the Self-Authoring Mind and how we begin to discover ourselves beyond our societal programming. And the final expansion is The Great Wilderness which represents the Self-Transforming Mind, thus allowing us to fully embrace our True Nature that is found deep within us.

An Integration of Past, Present, & Future

As I’ve shown here, the more I integrate my life’s work, the more of my life’s story is integrated within it as well. In fact, when I look back and remember myself as a teenager building my own imaginary world within Dungeons & Dragons, it’s not that different from what I’m striving to do today. The key difference is that today I’m imagining a new worldview which can hopefully make a new world possible.

In rewatching this video below with John Seely Brown, in which he discusses how World of Warcraft players are innovating on a level that most businesses can’t imagine or even achieve, I’ve come to the realization that this is pretty much the essence of what I want to be doing with my life’s work.

But it gets back to this notion of passion, it gets back to this notion of curiosity, and it gets back to this notion that this is an interest-driven phenomenon that unleashes exponential learning of a dimension that’s almost unimaginable any other way.

John Seely Brown

The primary difference between John and myself though is that he’s mainly focused on the innovation occurring within the social organizations (aka guilds) around the game. What I want to do is even go beyond this and utilize the game elements themselves as metaphors to not only help people make sense of how The Future of Work will work but how we will achieve the necessary social innovation via creativity to actually get there in the first place.

For example, in massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), players level up their character within the game, thus gaining new capabilities that enable them to take on challenges of increasing complexity. For society to reach the The Future of Work, we also need people to level up their consciousness, thus gaining new capabilities that enable them to take on challenges of increasing complexity as well. That’s because The Future of Work is effectively “a whole new game” that’s paradigmatically different from our conventional World of Work, thus requiring people to change the way they perceive their world and themselves as well.

A new paradigm, informing a different way of experiencing and working in the world, will require the development of different capabilities than most of us have now. These capabilities are difficult to acquire or sustain outside of a community and culture within which mutual support and learning can occur. The trick is to build or evolve culture at a level that doesn’t simply reproduce old patterns of thought, and this requires the development of consciousness. Consciousness, in this context, refers to the ability to recognize different levels or orders of world.

Carol Sanford, Indirect Work

However while our approaches might differ, I think the primary method that John Seely Brown is so effortlessly using is one that I’ve been struggling to find and replicate myself, that being lightly touching on the game elements as an opener but then deeply describing their translated meaning afterwards. For example, he talked about a typical “guild” doing a “raid” within World of Warcraft but then translated what that means for innovation within the workplace, describing how the self-organizing social structures of these online communities are allowing them to do unprecedented things compared to the conventional World of Work.

All said and done though, if you had told me a little over two decades ago that today I was going to be standing within this liminal space between MMORPGs and The Future of Work, I probably would have said you were crazy. That’s because at the time, while initially building online communities around video games personally on my own, I had successfully made the jump to professional work as a Senior Web Development building online community hubs around video games for some of the largest video game publishers, such as Sierra, Activision, and Konami. So my life looked like it was perfectly on track and going in the right direction, with nothing to stop me.

But when the Dot-Com Bubble burst shortly afterwards in 2001, imploding my entire life and work, that’s when I began questioning the way that work worked altogether, leading me on a quest of researching The Future of Work, social innovation, creativity, and vertical development which strangely enough over two decades lead me full circle back to the innovations I had previously experienced within these video game communities. Like John Seely Brown said, “there is something going on here” in these spaces with people playing in these “complex worlds” and I hope to reveal just that in the days ahead.