This essay began at a Men in Progress session, after the prompt “what do you love.” Sitting with the answers in the room, I noticed: before we love multiple things, we love one thing. The rest of this is an attempt to understand why that might be true of more than love.

There is a stage before belief becomes a position. Before you can hold an idea, you have to be held by it.

This is not a metaphor. It is an ontological claim.

When a person first encounters a genuinely new idea — not a variation on something they already think, but something that re-describes reality — they do not evaluate it. They are inside it, provisionally. The idea is not a proposition to assess. It is an experience to inhabit.

Piaget called this assimilation: the new thing gets absorbed into the existing structure. But there is a moment before that, before the organism has decided whether to incorporate or reject, where the new thing simply lands. Lands as a felt disturbance. A kind of cognitive weather.

This is where ontology lives. Not in the conclusion — not in “I now believe X” — but in the initial condition: the world, for a moment, is differently shaped.

Most people use the word “ontology” to mean something academic: a theory of what exists, a philosophical position about the nature of being. But lived ontology is something more immediate. It is the background of givens that a person moves through without noticing, the implicit shape of the world they inhabit.

You do not choose your ontology the way you choose a belief. It is more like choosing a language — except that you do not choose it at all. It arrives first through the body, through early experience, through what was made visible and what was made invisible, through the culture’s unspoken metaphysics. By the time you have enough self-awareness to examine it, you have already been shaped by it for years.

This is what Bourdieu meant by habitus: the system of durable dispositions that shape perception, judgment, and action — formed through accumulated experience, mostly before reflection was possible. The habitus is not a belief you hold. It is the structure through which beliefs become thinkable at all. To speak of “choosing beliefs” in this context is to mistake the surface of a very deep structure.

What this means practically is that whenever you encounter an idea that will genuinely change you — not inform you but change you — you first encounter a specific, embodied version of it. Not the abstract principle. The instance.

You do not first encounter “grief is love with nowhere to go.” You encounter your grandmother’s kitchen after she has died, and something in you reorganizes, and only later, maybe years later, does the sentence arrive to name what happened.

You do not first encounter “power operates through discourse.” You encounter a teacher who told you that your instinct was wrong, and the way everyone in the room nodded, and the slow collapse of your certainty — and then maybe you read Foucault, and you feel the retroactive recognition. The idea was already in your body. The theory gave it a name.

This is the epistemological version of “the map is not the territory.” But it is more than that. The map, in this case, only becomes legible to you because you have already, at least partially, walked the ground.

The Living Idea and the Dead Concept

There is a difference between knowing an idea and being inside it.

You can know that “systems are more than the sum of their parts” as a sentence. You can define emergence, cite Donella Meadows, pass a test on it. And yet the idea may remain inert — a concept you carry the way you carry a fact about a country you have never visited.

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PSA: I'm excited to announce the first online elective at Critical Business School — A Little Death, with Danya Shults, on endings and what they make room for. If you've been curious about CBS but aren't in New York, this is your way in. Four Fridays in May, 1 pm EST. $200, open to the public. Register here.

We are living through a moment when machines can do an extraordinary amount of what used to pass for creative work: write ad copy, generate images, draft strategies, produce code, compose music, and optimize campaigns. Everything that can be reduced to a pattern – everything that operates within known categories – is increasingly automated. By the time you read this, the capabilities will have expanded further.

It is the end of the confusion between creativity and production.

For decades, we conflated the two. Being “creative” meant producing things—ads, designs, strategies, content. The creative industries were production industries with better aesthetics. But production is the execution of known patterns, however skillfully done. Creativity is the act of stepping outside the pattern – introducing something that does not yet have a category, a name, or a market.

Machines can produce. They cannot be creative, because creativity requires the faculty of not knowing – of sitting with uncertainty, of feeling drawn toward something that has no name yet. Machines are architectures of correlation. They find patterns in existing data and generate variations within those patterns. They are extraordinarily good at this. But they cannot step outside their training data. They cannot ask a question they were not prompted to ask. They cannot feel the restlessness that signals something unknown is trying to emerge.

In a world where production is abundant and cheap, creative surplus is the only thing that cannot be replicated. It is the irreducibly human contribution – the thinking that no algorithm anticipated, the question no one thought to ask, the connection between domains that no training data contains.

This is why identifying your creative surplus is no longer a nice-to-have. It is the central question. Development is the only work.

When All Matter Is Available

When all material needs are met – when technology provides, when tools are plentiful, when information is free – our innate tendency toward interestingness and meaning finds its way through new channels. An abundance of utility asks for introspection. A plenty of technology asks for navigation. When everything is available, the question is no longer what can I get but what do I want – and the deeper question: what do I want that I do not yet know I want?

We are living in a moment of extraordinary abundance. Information, connectivity, tools, platforms, AI assistants - all available, all accessible, all overwhelming. The scarcity is not of resources but of attention, meaning, and direction. In such a world, the philosophical question – what matters? what is worth my attention? where is my creative surplus pointing? -- becomes the practical question. It is not a luxury to ask what you practice. It is a necessity because without that question, you will lose time and attention to someone else’s priorities.

This is not abstract. Every coaching session I have conducted eventually arrives at this point. The person has the skills, the network, the track record. What they lack is clarity about their own direction, a direction that their surplus and the ability to keep the world at bay as they listen to it.

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The Block essay that Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha published last week is worth engaging with. The historical arc and the argument that AI can now perform the information-routing function that hierarchy has always performed are real.

There’s a word that appears nowhere in the essay: development. As in human development. As in, the question of whether the people being asked to operate at the edge of a de-layered, AI-coordinated organization are actually capable of doing that.

Hierarchy did two things: the Block piece collapses into one. It routed information — who knows what, who decides what, how context travels up and down the chain. And it routed meaning. It told people what mattered when nothing was clear. It held people inside a legible world.

AI can plausibly replace the first function. That’s the Block thesis. But the second — the meaning-making scaffolding that hierarchy provided — is not a technical problem. It’s a developmental one.

Robert Kegan spent decades mapping how adults make meaning. In The Evolving Self and later In Over Our Heads, he argued that adult development doesn’t stop at adulthood — that the complexity of mind we bring to our experience continues to evolve, or can, under the right conditions. His research found something uncomfortable: most knowledge workers operate from what he called a socialized mind — a self largely constituted by the expectations of the systems in which it’s embedded. Identity, values, judgment: externally derived. The hierarchy told you what to do. The loop closed. A socialized mind could navigate that world well enough.

What Kegan called the self-authoring mind is different. It holds its own compass. It can act without waiting for direction — not because it’s reckless but because it has something stable inside to act from.

Jennifer Garvey Berger, building on Kegan’s framework in Changing on the Job, made a point that’s directly relevant here: the demands of leadership routinely exceed the developmental stage of the people being asked to lead. Organizations promote people into complexity they aren’t yet equipped to navigate — not because those people lack intelligence or skill, but because the form of mind required hasn’t yet developed. The answer, she argued, isn’t better training. It’s creating conditions for vertical growth.

The Block essay describes DRIs owning problems with full authority, player-coaches developing people without hiding in status meetings, and ICs making decisions without waiting to be told. Each of those descriptions assumes a self-authoring person. But self-authorship isn’t a skill you can assume people are interested in. It’s a practice that requires work and attention.

This matters because the instinctive response will be productization. Give everyone an AI copilot. Build tools that make existing people more efficient. Increase output per head. That’s a reasonable response to a productivity problem. It isn’t a response to a developmental one. You can automate the tasks a person does. You cannot automate the development of the person doing them.

Here’s where meaning becomes an economic variable, not just a philosophical one.

In a hierarchy, meaning was upstream of performance but downstream of structure. The structure told you what mattered. You performed accordingly. Leadership was largely about managing that loop — keeping people oriented, motivated, and aligned. In a de-layered organization, that loop has no structural anchor. The person has to provide it themselves. And a person who can provide it — who can orient themselves, hold direction under pressure, and make calls from their own values rather than waiting for permission — is categorically more valuable than one who can’t.

This is what self-actualization looks like when it enters an economic frame. It’s the difference between a person who expands the capacity of every system they touch and one who executes competently within it. The former is curious about development — specifically, vertical development.

Most organizational learning is horizontal: adding capabilities, skills, frameworks. More tools in the same toolbox. Vertical development is the expansion of the capacity to make meaning, not just the content of it. Not increasing what you know, but how you know it.

Garvey Berger’s work describes what that growth actually requires: not more information, not better frameworks, but experiences that confuse the current form of mind enough to prompt a genuine reorganization of it.

Leadership, in this context, is no longer a role or a title. It’s a developmental movement. It’s what happens when a person has enough internal structure to hold direction for others — not because they were appointed, not because they have information others lack, but because they have a self stable enough to be a reference point.

There’s something else the essay passes over. When Block describes what humans do at the edge — intuition, ethical judgment, cultural context, the feeling in a room — they’re right about the list. But they don’t say much about where those capacities come from.

Creative and intuitive capacity exists before language. Before analysis and articulation, there’s a pre-linguistic sensing — a felt orientation toward a problem, an aesthetic response that arrives before the argument for it. The best judgment you’ve exercised in a difficult moment probably preceded your ability to explain it.

This is not something AI can simulate, because AI operates entirely within language. It recombines what has already been said. It cannot sense what hasn’t been named yet. The edge worker Block is counting on is precisely someone who can do that. But that person is cultivated through a specific kind of development — sustained contact with a challenge, a reflection, and the experience of sitting with uncertainty long enough for something to clarify rather than resolving it prematurely.

Block is right that the structural constraint is changing. The question isn’t only whether AI can replace what managers do. It’s whether people can become what the new structure assumes they already are.

That’s a slower problem than an org redesign. It won’t be solved by tooling. And the companies that figure out how to build for it — not just around it — will have something that doesn’t appear on any capability roadmap.

A thoughtful person, operating from an evolving self and curious about their practice, is not a resource. They’re a compounding advantage. And right now, almost nobody is building the infrastructure to produce them.

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Series note: This is the first installment in a 10-week series drawn from Creative Surplus: Identify, Articulate, and Integrate Your Unclaimed Creativity (Revised Edition, 2026). Each week, we’ll walk through one chapter of the book. The first four posts are free. Starting in Week 5, the series will be available only to paid subscribers.

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Most conversations about AI start with what it can do. This one started with what it actually is.

At the first AI Literacy Salon, hosted by In Process Coaching and joined by guests Noa Dolberg (Google’s Material Design), Cherae Robinson (Head of Platform, Flybridge), and (Founder, Deliberate Works), we spe…

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There is a difference between designing a highway system and designing fewer accidents.

The highway system is designable. You can specify it, model it, hand it to engineers, and what emerges will closely resemble what you drew. You can point to the blueprint and say: that is what we are building. The materials are known, the steps are known, the o…

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In a recent AI Literacy workshop, I asked the prompt: *What do you wish an algorithm could predict?* As the answers moved from the practical towards bigger, harder questions, I arrived at a realization I haven’t been able to shake since.

Algorithms cannot predict anything subjective.

That sounds obvious when you say it like that. But the implication…

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I have been running Men in Progress for a few months now. As I reflect on the group and our conversations, I realize that most men who find their way to this kind of work are not starting from zero.

They’ve read widely, thought carefully, and had the conversations that men seldom get to have. They take the question of how to live seriously. And yet…

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Deconstruction is the act of noticing what you’ve had to set aside about yourself to stay legible. Derrida developed it in the 1960s from a simple observation: language is alive. It moves. It generates meaning beyond what anyone intended, pointing in directions its speaker never planned. He called this différance — the idea that meaning is never f…

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Most people think growth means knowing more. More frameworks, more skills, more certifications. But there’s a different kind — one that changes not what you know, but how you know. That distinction is everything.

Robert Kegan, the Harvard developmental psychologist, spent decades mapping how adults make meaning. Most of us, he found, operate from w…

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I started a meta-community in early 2020, just before we all stayed at our desks. The goal, as I wrote at the time, was to build a rehearsal room for thinking – a space where people could show up as a process, not a product. Six years later, I am more convinced than ever that this is the work. Not because the original intuition was right, but beca…

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The first AI Literacy Salon is here — an in-person gathering that extends the weekly workshop.

Join us on March 26th at Index in Greenpoint.

AI Literacy is a space to consider where AI meets human process — to decipher how these tools can shape our attention, our communication, and the ways we work with computers and each other.

Most conversations ab…

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CBS is a school of schools. A space for thinking about thinking — in its actionable sense. A place where thoughtful practitioners can meet others in thinking.

One of its founding beliefs is that creativity exists before language. Everything else is production.

Most educational systems are editorial. They transmit books rather than ways of thinking. They e…

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In this episode, we talk about extended present, time as a place, and artists without art.

You can learn more about Linda’s work here and Kidlit. Leslie’s website is lesliebradshaw.com, and watch out for Leslie’s elective on Critical Business School later this year.

A month ago, Sarah Boris invited me to write 10 resolutions.

I would love to invite you to contribute 10 resolutions for 2026. I am inviting artists, curators, writers, musicians, collaborators and friends to contribute with the idea of building a collective of hundreds of resolutions.

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Who is writing your strategy? How do you navigate your practice and work in a way that aligns with your worldview and personality?

Economically, utility is cheaper and more abundant.
Everyone can do everything, but you’re the only one who can be yourself.

Economically articulating your value is the only way to avoid being automated or, more likely…

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Time and attention are all we have. When do you give attention to your own thoughts, and when do you ask others to do the same?

When we publish on the weekend—or only allow ourselves to imagine more on personal days—we make a loud statement about what work is, and where personal development fits into our economy of time and attention.

Driving change from the tips of our fingers into a new reality requires active noticing (in the back of the house), the rigor to disambiguate it, and economic articulation (in the front of the house).

Unless delicately sensed and vigorously protected, these collapse under the weight of sameness.

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Stefani Bardin and Jonathon Keats in conversation about trees, time, and how nature collaborates with herself.

You can learn more about Stefani and her work. Jonathon’s Wikipedia page has an introduction to his work, and with more detail: longnow.org/centuries, alaskarivertime.org, The Photosynthetic Restaurant, and You Belong to the Universe

If we cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed.
—bell hooks

The last couple of years brought some personal grief. Gratefully, I foun…

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