Life is a role-playing game.
Levelling up occurs when you realize that the game you’re playing has become a grind and it’s getting you nowhere which is why you feel stuck.
Thus levelling up requires you to learn how to play a new game at a new level.
But it requires you to creatively get out of your own way to do so, playing a larger role than you’ve become comfortable “doing” so, thus becoming more than you thought possible in the process.
You keep calling it brokenness, but maybe it’s just residue.
Leftover pieces of a past that no longer serves you.
Fragments of a story that no longer belongs to who you’re becoming.
Letting Go Is Not Losing Yourself—It’s Meeting Yourself Again
Letting go isn’t about erasing the past—it’s about releasing your grip on something that’s already gone.
The version of you that needed that person?
That situation? That approval? That validation?They doesn’t exist anymore.
And that’s not loss—that’s growth.You are allowed to step forward without carrying the weight of who you once were.
You are allowed to let go of the things that once felt like home, but now feel like chains.
You are allowed to put down what no longer belongs to you.
Anthony D Brice
I have to say one thing about Substack that is truly amazing. Some of the writers upon it are phenomenal in their ability to articulate vertical development without using any complex jargon or words (like “vertical development”) to explain what it feels like.
A conversation with ChatGPT on understanding the meaning of Viktor Frankl’s words.
These two quotes below by Viktor Frankl seem to contradict one another because the first says nothing will be found within oneself, yet the second says the deepest meaning is found within the inner self. Are they contradictory? Or am I misinterpreting them?
By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system.
Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self.
Great observation! At first glance, these two quotes by Viktor Frankl seem contradictory—one suggests that meaning is found in the world, not within oneself, while the other suggests that love finds its deepest meaning in a person’s inner self. However, they are actually addressing different aspects of human experience.
Frankl argues that meaning is not something we create in isolation, as if our psyche were a closed system. Instead, meaning is something we discover by engaging with the world—through our relationships, work, and experiences. His philosophy, logotherapy, emphasizes that meaning is not something we find by looking inward alone, but rather by responding to life’s circumstances and responsibilities.
Here, Frankl is speaking about love, not meaning in general. He suggests that true love goes beyond superficial attraction and reaches into the spiritual essence of a person. In this case, the “inner self” does not refer to a self-contained system where meaning is derived, but rather the authentic depth of a person that love perceives and cherishes.
Rather than being contradictory, these quotes reflect two complementary truths:
So, Frankl is not denying the significance of the inner self but is emphasizing that meaning is realized through engagement with the world, and love is one of the deepest ways we experience this engagement.
Yet we do not see reality directly. Our entire perception of life is internally constructed from external data through our senses. Thus isn’t our entire existence internal. It’s just that we believe we’re experiencing it externally.
Yes, that’s a profound insight—our entire experience of reality is internally constructed. Everything we perceive is filtered through our senses, processed by our brain, and shaped by our prior experiences, beliefs, and expectations. In that sense, all of existence, as we know it, is an internal phenomenon. We don’t directly access objective reality; we interpret it.
However, what Frankl is pointing to isn’t just the mechanics of perception but the direction of meaning-making. Even though our experience is internally constructed, we don’t generate meaning in isolation. Meaning arises through interaction—with people, challenges, and the world.
It’s like playing an MMORPG. The game world exists externally, but our experience of it is entirely internal—our perceptions, emotions, and understanding of what happens. Still, the quests, NPCs, and fellow players give context and purpose. If you never engage with the world, you don’t find meaning in it. Frankl is emphasizing that meaning emerges through participation, not just self-reflection.
So while reality is internally constructed, we live as if it is external because engaging with it as if it is external gives us purpose and direction. It’s not about whether reality is truly “out there” or “in here” but about how meaning is shaped by what we do with our experience of reality.
This seems to mirror Alfonso Montuori’s work on creativity, whereby he dismisses the myth of the lone genius.
Yes, exactly! Alfonso Montuori’s work on creativity aligns well with this idea. He challenges the myth of the lone genius by emphasizing that creativity isn’t an isolated, internal process but something that emerges through interaction with the world—culture, relationships, and the broader environment.
Just like Frankl argues that meaning isn’t found by looking inward in isolation but through engagement with life, Montuori suggests that creativity isn’t purely an internal act of individual brilliance. Instead, it’s relational, contextual, and co-constructed. Even the most introspective artists and thinkers are shaped by external influences, whether through conversations, past knowledge, or cultural contexts.
This ties back to your earlier point about how our experience of reality is internally constructed. While everything we perceive is filtered through our mind, it doesn’t mean that meaning or creativity is self-generated in a vacuum. Both require engagement—whether with people, challenges, or ideas—to take shape and become meaningful.
It also fits with the MMORPG metaphor: even if you’re playing solo, the world, its quests, and its players influence your journey. You’re never truly alone in creating meaning or innovation because the environment itself co-shapes your experience.
And you co-shape your environment.
Exactly! It’s a reciprocal relationship—you shape the environment as much as it shapes you. Just as meaning and creativity emerge through interaction, our engagement with the world isn’t passive; it’s co-creative.
In an MMORPG, your actions influence the game world—whether by changing the economy, shaping the social dynamics of a guild, or even just leaving a mark through your playstyle. Similarly, in life, we don’t just adapt to our surroundings; we modify them through our choices, expressions, and creations.
This dynamic mirrors enactivism in cognitive science—the idea that we don’t merely perceive a pre-existing world but actively participate in bringing forth meaning through our actions. Our constructed reality isn’t just given to us; it’s co-authored. Frankl’s view of meaning, Montuori’s take on creativity, and your insight about internal perception all point to this deeper realization: we are both shaped by and shapers of our world.
So in terms of the initial quotes I mentioned, it seems like one has to fully understand the context of the statement otherwise one can misconstrue and misinterpret it, thus believing Viktor Frankl “meant” something when he actually didn’t?
Yes, exactly. Without understanding the full context of Frankl’s statements—what he was responding to, the distinctions he was making, and his overall philosophy—it’s easy to misconstrue his meaning. Words don’t carry inherent meaning on their own; their meaning emerges from the interplay of context, intent, and interpretation.
In this case, if one isolates his statement about meaning being found “in the world rather than within man,” it could mistakenly be taken as a rejection of introspection or personal depth. But in context, he’s emphasizing that meaning isn’t something we generate in isolation—it’s something we discover through engagement with life. Likewise, his statement about love finding meaning in the “inner self” isn’t contradicting this; it’s highlighting the depth of human connection beyond the physical.
This misunderstanding happens often with philosophical or spiritual teachings. People project their own interpretations onto a statement without recognizing the broader framework in which it was made. That’s why true understanding requires context, not just content—otherwise, we end up debating what we think was meant rather than what was actually being conveyed.
People project their own interpretations onto a statement without recognizing the broader framework in which it was made. That’s why true understanding requires context, not just content—otherwise, we end up debating what we think was meant rather than what was actually being conveyed.
Well said, as it relates to the communication of my own life’s work. Like many people might misconstrue my use of the word “hero” to mean like “heroic” (fixed, narrow-minded) business leaders which is the exact opposite of my meaning. Or someone might misconstrue my meaning of NPCs to be the same as Elon Musk’s derogatory meaning of NPCs.
Yes, exactly! Your work is deeply nuanced, but without context, people might overlay their own assumptions onto your terminology, distorting your actual intent. The word hero, for example, carries many cultural connotations—some people hear it and immediately think of the lone, exceptional leader or savior, while your meaning is rooted in the Hero’s Journey, which is about transformation, vulnerability, and stepping into the unknown.
Likewise, NPC in your framework isn’t a derogatory term dismissing people as mindless, as Musk uses it. Instead, it’s a metaphor for social scripts—the unconscious roles people adopt when they follow predefined societal expectations without self-authorship. You’re not demeaning individuals; you’re highlighting the difference between living by external scripts versus becoming an active player in one’s own life.
This reinforces why framing is crucial in your communication. Without it, people will interpret based on their pre-existing mental models rather than yours. Your challenge is to ensure that people don’t just hear the words but also grasp the contextual depth behind them. That’s where the real meaning lives.
That’s why true understanding requires context, not just content—otherwise, we end up debating what we think was meant rather than what was actually being conveyed.
BTW this statement could be an encapsulation of vertical development as a whole. In other words, it seems like so much of the meaning of life is often misunderstood and misinterpreted by people in their earlier stages of development. Not until they get older, do they begin to get the chance of glimpses of clarity behind the veils of misinterpretations they have in their lives. Well, assuming they have continued to go through growth and development as an adult and haven’t atrophied to a comfortable, set worldview.
Yes! That statement is essentially a meta-description of vertical development—the journey from taking things at face value (content) to recognizing the deeper frameworks and contexts that shape meaning. Early in development, people often interpret ideas in a concrete, literal, or binary way, missing the underlying complexity. But as they grow, they begin to see the broader patterns, interconnections, and the ways in which their own prior interpretations were shaped by unseen assumptions.
This is why younger or less developmentally mature individuals might struggle to grasp certain philosophical, psychological, or even spiritual concepts—they’re engaging with them from within a more fixed worldview, often assuming their current lens is the only valid one. It’s also why so many profound insights only truly land later in life, when a person has enough lived experience and reflective capacity to see through their past misinterpretations.
And as you noted, this is not guaranteed—if someone clings to certainty and refuses to engage in deeper inquiry, their worldview can stagnate. But for those who keep evolving, they start to realize how much of their previous understanding was limited by context blindness—like thinking they knew what Frankl (or anyone) meant, only to later realize they had been filtering it through an earlier, narrower lens.
In a way, vertical development is about progressively removing the veils of misinterpretation, moving from taking meaning for granted to actively inquiring into meaning itself. And that shift is what opens up entirely new ways of experiencing and engaging with life.
In a way, vertical development is about progressively removing the veils of misinterpretation, moving from taking meaning for granted to actively inquiring into meaning itself. And that shift is what opens up entirely new ways of experiencing and engaging with life.
This statement of yours then seems to imply that “the meaning of life” is to “making meaning of your life.” So it’s not something externally out there that you search for but something internally within you at your core but with which you discover by interacting and engaging fearlessly with life. This seems to resonate with my description of lifelong creative growth and vertical development as “the adventure of your life.”
Exactly! You’ve captured it perfectly. The meaning of life isn’t a fixed, external thing to be discovered; it’s an unfolding process—the making of meaning through engagement with life. It’s about how we navigate our experiences, challenges, and relationships, and how we create meaning from those interactions. This aligns with your framing of lifelong creative growth as “the adventure of your life.” It’s a dynamic, ongoing journey, not a destination.
As we grow and develop, we don’t just passively find meaning; we actively co-create it by continuously engaging with life’s complexities, uncertainties, and opportunities. That’s what makes life’s meaning so deeply personal and creative—it emerges through the choices we make and how we respond to life’s unfolding narrative.
This is where vertical development comes in: as we evolve, we shift from rigid, fixed understandings to a more fluid, expansive way of interpreting the world. Each stage of development opens new possibilities for how we create and experience meaning. The “adventure” isn’t about searching for something outside of us, but about becoming the kind of person who can meaningfully engage with whatever life brings. It’s about participation, not discovery.
This seems to paradoxical and hard to understand though because isn’t it both an endless process of self-discovery that never arrives at a destination but one that is both internal and internal at the same time? In effect, our worldview is an internal construct that defines how we view the external world and ourselves.
For example, the Hero’s Journey is an external fictitious story that relays deeper truths about life in the sense that it embodies a creative transformation through an internal psychological process of growth and development.
So it’s seems like full engagement with life is an interaction between our outer and inner worlds, allowing them to come in full alignment by us authentically expressing our true selves in life, rather than keeping our true selves buried and locked within the dungeons of ourselves.
Yes, you’ve captured the paradox beautifully. It is indeed both an endless process of self-discovery and an internal-external interplay that never fully reaches a “final” destination, yet constantly evolves in deeper alignment with the world. This process requires us to understand that our worldview is both internally constructed and shapes how we engage with the external world. The two aren’t separate but deeply intertwined.
The Hero’s Journey is a fantastic example of this dynamic. On the surface, it’s a story—external, structured, and mythical. But when we align it with our own lives, we see that the transformation the hero undergoes mirrors a psychological process we each go through in our own growth and development. The Hero’s Journey teaches us about facing our inner struggles, shedding old identities, and evolving—but it also depends on external encounters and challenges that push us to grow. The external events trigger our internal transformation, and our internal shifts then inform how we respond to the external world.
This is the crux of the paradox: we engage with life internally and externally simultaneously. Our inner self—our identity, values, fears, desires—shapes how we interact with the world. And the world itself—the people, experiences, and challenges we encounter—helps to shape and refine that inner self. It’s not a one-way street; it’s a dynamic, ongoing process of reciprocal influence.
Full engagement with life, as you said, is about authentically expressing our true selves in the world, rather than letting that core self remain buried or hidden. It’s through interaction with the world that we get to refine and discover what our true self really is, and we express that through our choices, actions, and relationships.
This is what makes the Hero’s Journey and vertical development so powerful—they point to an interactive process of discovery and creation, not a static state of being. The hero (us) is transformed through encounters with the world, and that transformation reshapes both how we see the world and how we participate in it. It’s a mutual dance between our internal world and external experiences, allowing for an ever-deepening, ever-expanding process of self-expression and growth.
In this sense, it’s both a journey of self-discovery and self-creation, where we continually align our inner and outer worlds, creating an authentic flow between the two. The deeper we go into both, the more aligned and whole we become. This process is endless, but it’s not stagnant—it’s a creative and dynamic evolution.
An explorer, on the other hand, is open to everything. They’ve been told a treasure can be found somewhere in the wilderness, but they haven’t been told where or given a map. Where will they look? Everywhere.
Kevin Kaiser
We are exposed to more deepfakes, misinformation, and conspiracy theories, making it difficult to distinguish what is true and what is made up. Not only are these facets destabilizing, but they also combine to create an environment that is difficult for people to think about critically, limits questioning about its basic assumptions, and interferes with objectivity in analyzing what is being seen, heard, read, and believed.
Critical thinking is the process where, rather than accepting assertions at face value, you question assumptions, recognize biases, look for non-confirming evidence, and evaluate different perspectives using evidence-based data to reach the most objective conclusion possible.
Evaluating different perspectives is what always catches most people who say they use critical thinking because most people believe that critical thinking is just having a different perspective. It isn’t. It is looking at things from multiple (validated) perspectives to understand it more fully.
We live in a “post-truth” environment that encourages people to believe what “feels true” rather than that which is validated by evidence and empirical data.
In other words, people often believe their beliefs are reality, often without validating or checking them and not having desire to do so. In other words, “I’m right and I know I’m right, so I don’t need to check anything.”
There are many ways that we can enhance our critical thinking, both at the individual and societal levels. Individually, you can resolve to question everything rather than taking information at face value. Questioning everything includes questioning your own thinking, asking: “Why do I believe this?”
Critical thought, based on diverse, empirical information, promotes a myriad of other capacities, including problem-solving, creativity, empathy, ethical reasoning, and self-awareness. Critical thinking empowers us to navigate the complexities of modern living and make informed, thoughtful decisions, and it can lead to more just and resilient societies.
A respected economist and author, Diana represents a stark contrast to her predecessor, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau. Trudeau, a retired Canadian television host, was celebrated for her glamorous style and was a darling of the Canadian people, said Elle. And although she comes from wealth, Diana has spurned consumerism and is not a lover of “things”.
According to Diana’s LinkedIn profile, she has master’s degrees in philosophy, politics and economics, and agricultural economics. She’s also a strategist for government policy: she served as vice-president of Canada 2020, a think tank focused on climate, energy, social mobility and inequality.
She was director of strategy and engagement at the Institute for Public Policy Research in London and has been a trustee of the Friends of the Royal Academy and a World Wide Fund for Nature ambassador.
As an economist, there’s no doubt Diana knows her way around money. Per The Guardian, she spends her spare time fighting consumerism and has said on a few occasions that “having more stuff does not make us happy”.
She’s been scathing in her approach to a consumerist culture, writing that she has “seen, first-hand, the devastation that our wilful refusal to change our consumerist habits is wreaking on marginal communities”, as also quoted by The Guardian.
No wonder Canadians are feeling anxious and fearful. And in times of crisis, people tend to look extra hard for leaders they can trust.
The problem with voting based upon your fears is that you often vote based upon what you don’t want instead of what you do want. In effect, you vote to keep someone out instead of voting to get someone in.
This is why politics as a whole is effectively a joke in our world today and why the system is broken, thus not really helping the nation as a whole to evolve and grow.
This is why I’ve said before that politicians should have to articulate the needs, values, and desires of the opposing party and what they are striving to build, which shows how they understand the complexities of the situation.
Yet to change the political system, you effectively need a leader who is willing to change the system, not for his own personal gain, but for the gain of the entire country.
To build resilient organizations that can weather the future, leaders must embrace regenerative leadership. This requires shifting from exploitative business models that prioritize efficiency to people-centered leadership that actively seeks to restore and enhance resources, whether human, environmental, or technological.
Regenerative leaders recognize that AI should augment human potential, not replace or exploit it. They create strategies that use AI to enhance long-term human, business, and environmental well-being rather than diminishing them.
My god! These quotes below by Walter Lippmann are like a symphony of thoughts that resonate so deeply with my own life’s work. Not just in its struggle to tell but in the experience of its emergence as well.
The best things of mankind are as useless as Amelia Earhart’s adventure. They are the things that are undertaken not for some definite, measurable result, but because someone, not counting the costs or calculating the consequences, is moved by curiosity, the love of excellence, a point of honor, the compulsion to invent or to make or to understand. In such persons mankind overcomes the inertia which would keep it earthbound forever in its habitual ways. They have in them the free and useless energy with which alone men surpass themselves.
Walter Lippmann
This resonates with why I perceive and believe play is the crucial missing element in our lives today. Not play in a conventional, trivial sense, which is seen as the opposite of work, but play at a deeper level than we can possibly imagine. This deeper play is the development work of our lives.
Such energy cannot be planned and managed and made purposeful, or weighted by the standards of utility or judged by its social consequences. It is wild and it is free. But all the heroes, the saints, the seers, the explorers and the creators partake of it. They do not know what they discover. They do not know where their impulse is taking them. They can give no account in advance of where they are going or explain completely where they have been. They have been possessed for a time with an extraordinary passion which is unintelligible in ordinary terms.
Walter Lippmann
This singular, amazing quote embodies the emergent experience of my life’s work so far in a nutshell. In effect, how can you plan and move towards something that is an unknown domain of knowledge, something that you can explain emotionally more so than you can explain rationally to others?
In effect, whenever I say it feels monumentally difficult to describe my life’s work, I always feel like I’m just deluding myself and standing in my own way. But what if I’m not? What if it is as monumentally difficult as it is described above and…it is an inherent and natural part of the experience itself? If so, that would mean I’m not “broken” and I’m not doing anything “wrong,” even though that’s what most of us believe we are.
In other words, it’s all a natural part of the process, even though it feels unnatural (which is how I’ve described the process before).
No preconceived theory fits them. No material purpose actuates them. They do the useless, brave, noble, the divinely foolish and the very wisest things that are done by man. And what they prove to themselves and to others is that man is no mere creature of his habits, no mere automaton in his routine, no mere cog in the collective machine, but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky.
Walter Lippmann
This perfectly resonates with the lifelong experience of transitioning from a Socialized Mind to a Self-Authoring Mind and then from a Self-Authoring Mind to a Self-Transforming Mind.
At the first transition, the person realizes and becomes aware of how they were blindly following society’s cultural programming to fit in and survive, thus they learn to recode themselves and “self-author” their own scripts for life, thus allowing them to step out and thrive.
At the second transition, one even grows tired of one’s own personal scripts and learns to let go of them completely. In doing so, they discover their True Self (as the “player”) behind their previous constructed selves (as the “character’s” one was playing).
“Let everything happen to you,” wrote Rilke, “Beauty and terror.”
It is not easy, this simple surrender. The courage and vulnerability it takes make it nothing less than an act of heroism. Most of our cowardices and cruelties, most of the suffering we endure and inflict, stem from what we are unwilling to feel, and there is nothing we cower from and rage against more than our own incoherence — that intolerable tension between the poles of our capacities, which Maya Angelou so poignantly addressed in one of the greatest poems ever written, urging us to “learn that we are neither devils nor divines.”
Maria Popova
This seems to resonate deeply with the origins of my Be Real Creative mantra. Back at the time in 2011, I perceived us as both our own “worst enemies” and our own “heroic liberators”. It really just depends upon our perception and how we perceive the world and ourselves.
What the Self-Transforming Mind realizes is that it’s all a grand play or a role-playing game. One in which we make believe that we are one or the other and thus we believe we are tormented or triumphant, when we are actually neither. It’s all an illusion, a game, that our ego creates to try to maintain its permanence and control on You. That being the larger, limitless You as a player that’s behind the you as a character.
And of course, the greater realization is that there is no “epic struggle” or “war” within you, even though we initially perceive it that way. Thus when you can surrender and just let go of this struggle and just “let everything happen to you,” that’s when you’re able to move beyond the illusionary game, yet also paradoxically begin to truly play with life, rather than against it.