Lovely Human,

Someone asked me last week what courage looks like at this stage of my life and career. Not the cinematic kind. The Tuesday-morning kind.

Here is what I keep coming back to.

The courage right now is the courage to protect the thing that makes me valuable in the first place.

You are the product. Your taste, your pattern recognition, the fact that you can walk into a room and know what the org actually needs before the consultants finish their slides. That is not a renewable resource. It runs on your nervous system.

So the first courage is the audit nobody else will do for you. What gets your best hours, and what just gets your panic hours? The work that matters deserves the best hours. The people who shaped you deserve the best hours. The flock you are building deserves the best hours. A lot of the rest is noise wearing the costume of obligation.

The second courage is staying in your lane long enough for the compounding to hit. Seven years in, you have a framework, a community, a client list, and a voice people trust. That is not the moment to chase a shiny new thing. That is the moment to go deeper on the one you have already planted. Focus is not the opposite of curiosity. Focus is what makes curiosity productive instead of expensive.

But here is the tension you already feel.

The third courage is the permission to experiment publicly. Not pivot. Experiment. Try the format you have not tried. Run the unscripted Thursday. Say the thing you have been softening. Put the idea out before it is finished. You have earned the right to be wrong in public. Most leaders at your stage are too scared to use that permission, and then they wonder why they went stale.

And the fourth, the quietest one, is the courage to let some things die. Not everything that got you here deserves a seat at the table of where you are going. Some relationships. Some products. Some obligations. They do not need a funeral. They need an exit.

Just remember… your soul is a limited-edition asset. Allocate it like a portfolio manager.

You are the product. That is not a renewable resource. It runs on your nervous system.

You have earned the right to be wrong in public.

Not everything that got you here deserves a seat at the table of where you are going.

Religious Focus this month- Taoism

We explore a unusual religion each month not to convert anyone to change believe , but to open up our vision board on how we all of us process joy, suffering, peace and this incredible journey called life.

Taoism (also spelled Daoism) is a 2,500-year-old Chinese tradition, both a philosophy and an organized religion, traditionally traced to a sage named Laozi in the 6th century BCE. Its foundational text, the Tao Te Ching, is one of the most translated books in human history. Tao means "the Way," not as a destination but as the natural grain of how the universe actually moves: rivers go downhill, seasons turn, things ripen and fall. Taoism is the practice of stopping your fight against that grain. Its core ideas are deceptively simple…. effortless action: doing only what aligns with the moment, never forcing.

The cook who never sharpened his knife

In a tea farm carved into the mountains above Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan, a woman named Mei watches an old man pick leaves.

She has flown in from San Francisco. Her shoulders are still wearing the airplane. Her phone has not been on for thirty-six hours and she keeps reaching for it the way you reach for a missing tooth. She came here because her grandmother left her this farm, and because somewhere between her last quarterly review and her last failed sleep, she stopped knowing what she was building toward.

The old man is named Wu. He has worked the farm for forty-one years. He is moving down the row of tea bushes the way water moves down a riverbed. Not fast. Not slow. Just inevitable.

Mei tries to help. She watches him for a minute, then starts plucking leaves at the next bush. Within ten minutes her back is on fire. Within twenty, her fingertips are raw. She glances at Wu. He has somehow tripled her output without seeming to hurry.

"You are picking the wrong leaves," he says without looking up.

She stops. He walks over. He shows her a leaf. Then he shows her another, almost identical one, and shakes his head.

"This one is fighting you," he says of the second leaf. "It is not ready. You are pulling. You are using your strength. The tea will be bitter."

She tries again. This time she watches the leaves first. She lets her hand stop wanting one in particular. She picks only the ones that already feel ready to leave the bush.

By sunset her bag is heavier than his. He doesn't comment.

Later, by the small fire he has built outside the storage shed, she asks him how it is possible to do less and produce more.

He tells her about a cook from a very old book. The cook's name was Ding. Ding was famous for cutting up oxen so smoothly that his blade never dulled. Other cooks were sharpening their knives every month. Ding's blade had been the same for nineteen years.

Someone asked him how. Ding said, "I do not cut through bone. I do not cut through tendon. I find where the spaces already are. My knife slips into the gap that is already there. I am not the one doing the cutting. The ox is showing me the cut."

This is wu wei.

It is usually translated as "non-action," which is a terrible translation. It does not mean doing nothing. It means doing only what aligns with the grain of the moment. It is the difference between forcing a door and turning the handle. It is the difference between picking every leaf and picking only the ones already leaving.

For a leader, this is not a permission slip to coast. It is a much harder discipline. It asks: where am I cutting through bone? Where am I dragging a project that wants to die? Where am I in a meeting that has already ended? Where am I picking the leaf that is fighting me?

The cost of forcing is not just exhaustion. It is the dulling of your blade. You spend your edge on resistance instead of on the work that wanted to happen anyway.

Guiding question:

Where in your week are you cutting through bone, when there was already a gap right next to it?