If you're an outlier, high in compassion, creativity, abstract thinking, courage, or standard of quality, you will feel rejected, unloved, and misunderstood. There is no significant history of people like this having easy lives. Keep going anyhow.

Feeling purpose is about knowing what you want to protect. Living purpose is about actually protecting it. Living purpose can and will hurt you. That's exactly the part that'll make you proud later.

Give these some thought (and feel free to use these same questions to evaluate others...a fun and validating exercise).

We can all learn from this exercise. It isn't a failure to realize that we can improve. It's a failure not to.

What are your actual, held, and demonstrated beliefs about decision quality, output quality, and treatment of human beings? Those beliefs are going to come out, and they are standard-setting for the team. Most leaders believe ludicrous things in these areas.

2. Mental model for results generation - what is causal of the most important outcomes? Again, very few people have a remotely-robust or accurate understanding of this, therefore the mental model for applying leadership force is light and/or flawed.

1. Belief in what it's all about - why do you lead? What does your job exist for? What *is* your job? 90% of people have an objectively-incorrect answer to this question.

You will lead based entirely on your beliefs, assumptions, and mental models. All leadership problems are flaws within these models. Predictable, preventable flaws. The key things to self-assess:

(I am not making this up. People working off of dopamine and cortisol highs are literally, testably, 30% less intelligent. They are more impulsive, defensive, stubborn, and insane).

The main benefit of infusing purpose into work is that it increases everyone's IQ by about 30%. Literally every idea, reaction, decision, and refinement will be 30% better, all day, every day. Look no further than lack of purpose as the root explanation of most error.

And I hate that suffering. I hate it more than you can possibly imagine. So I do a lot of stuff and I help deeply good people in a lot of ways. And they win. And the bozos don’t. So we all win.

And those bozos, in turn, make it harder for the deeply good people to win. That is the ultimate source of the suffering you feel. Bozo leadership is antithetical to deep goodness, merit, talent, intelligence, authenticity, vulnerability.

This is the fundamental backdrop of why there are so many bozos in leadership roles.

Almost everyone is flying blind, knowing none of this and taking wild guesses. And the good humans ironically learn slowest of all. They cling to hope while more strategic humans see clearly how things are working around them.

At a deep level, many things finally become clear. What intentions are, how they affect us, and how we change from one intention to another. How focus works and what that means for ourselves and leading others. What ability actually is and what makes a human more able.

My personal belief is that the only way to get this right is to look at human science. To go right to the brain itself, where all the action happens. Once you understand how the brain works, everything changes.

What deeply good people need is a real education. Not theories. Not calloused “wisdom.” Sharp, perceptive, useful metal models and tools.

These incorrect assumptions surface as miscalculations. Deeply good people are constantly surprised and disappointed. In the job search, as leaders and founders, when pitching projects, when selling.

Deeply good humans have a lot of incorrect assumptions. And they have a lot of hesitation to challenge those assumptions because they feel unkind to challenge. They don’t realize that there is a third option they don’t see. One that is both accurate and not cruel.

I have a weird job. On the surface, it looks like a lot of random stuff. But it isn’t random. It’s all about helping deeply good humans win. But deeply good humans need multiple tools for this to happen.

In SF and have some spare time today/tonight. Shoot me a DM if a coffee or chat sounds fun!