On Living Powerfully

Let us begin a conversation about the source of power: about ceasing to fight the current of life, and then about the stand that makes meaning of it. To live powerfully is to meet the mystery we cannot master, and to answer it with a life we are willing to be measured by.

We are not as smart as we think. But if we pay attention, we can see that there is always something shaping human destiny, something invisible moving all action, all resistance, all breakdowns. This something cannot quite be said. Sometimes we call it luck. Sometimes we call it God. Sometimes we call it the economy, and we keep inventing new metaphors to explain the same invisibility.

However educated we believe ourselves to be, if we are honest, that something remains nameless. And while we cannot say for certain how the nameless works, we can see certain patterns, and if we are fortunate, we can learn to tune into them. We can see that fortune favors the bold and that life rewards ambition. We can see that gratitude cures victimhood, and that forgiveness is the master move a person can make in a life. We can see these patterns clearly. But how it all actually works, we do not know.

And the moment we look honestly at existence, at consciousness, at what a human being even is, it becomes suddenly clear that the whole matter is mysterious. Who we really are, where we have come from, where we are truly going, we do not know the answers to these as facts. And yet it is obvious that something is animating us, running everything within us, and that it is intelligent beyond intelligence. Our first task as human beings is simply to acknowledge this, that human existence is mysterious, that we cannot finally know how to live or what to truly want, and to make peace with the anxiety that this insight stirs. Everything we know about ourselves, after all, is a story. And here is the turn this whole Briefing is built on: we do not escape that mystery by conquering it. We answer it. We live powerfully by making meaning out of a life whose meaning is not handed to us, by taking responsibility for what we confront, and by taking a stand for what matters in the face of it.

Those who pretend they have it all figured out tend to lead violent outcomes and long, quiet unhappiness.

IThe disaster of fighting against life

When we do not appreciate the mysterious nature of life, we want to be certain. We want rules and formulas and structures handed to us by others, because we have decided that life is a thing to be organized, used, established, controlled. And there is a part of us that must do some of that. But if we really pay attention, we see that life is carrying us on its own. Given where we are born, given where we go, life keeps carrying us and keeps opening one opportunity after another in front of us, and much of it happens through no fault and no doing of our own.

Here is the greatest disaster of a life. That we fight against it. We isolate ourselves from life, we trap ourselves in boxes, and we mistake the box for life itself. When we say no to life this way, we get cut off, and we fill up with complaint and victimhood and grievance. But when we allow life to happen to us, our participation becomes more joyous and more fruitful. We do not control the wave. The wave was here long before us. But if we appreciate the unpredictable nature of life rather than letting it dampen us, we can let that very unpredictability work in our favor. The work is not to master life. It is to stop fighting it, so that it can carry us.

IIFeeling the wave

Think of power as the power of a wave. You did not make the wave. You pressed no button to summon it. It arrived, and your only real choice was whether to feel it under your feet and ride, or to be knocked down by it. This is the power that is beyond you, and the leaders who live powerfully are the ones who learn to feel it.

Sometimes large companies with enormous budgets imagine they can manufacture the wave and then ride their own creation. It rarely works that way. What is artificially made dies quickly. The real waves are long-running historical occurrences, the genuine concerns and accumulated histories of human beings coming to fruition over time. So we need an appreciation for emergence. And when an emergence arrives, we tend to get trapped in trying to understand why it came, the reasons behind it, and in doing so we miss the only question that matters in that moment, which is what to do with it, how to take the opportunity that is right in front of us. We try to force life into an ideal box, and life does not want to be in an ideal box, and so it pushes us back down.

Anything artificially made dies quickly. The real waves are the histories of human beings, coming to fruition.

IIIWorking with mystery

So the question for a changemaker is not how to solve the mystery. We will not solve it, and we can leave the figuring out to the scientists. The question is how to navigate it. How to feel the waves under our feet so that we are working with the great unknown rather than against it. How to let this mystery help us through the breakdowns that have no clean solution, and find satisfaction even in impossible situations.

Let me be honest, against everything the gurus promise. The mystery does not work on our command. It will not perform on demand. But there may be conditions we can create for ourselves in which our life becomes an expression of what really is, that great unknown, intelligent beyond intelligence. The people who learn to tap into this power live powerful lives. They meet dissatisfaction with everything they have, and they refuse to fall into being victims, the unblessed, the ones life forgot. They counter it with their whole being.

So this is the heart of the invitation. Wouldn't you want this power working with you and not against you? Wouldn't you want what is invisible, what is intelligent beyond intelligence, on your side? You cannot command it. But you can stop fighting the wave. You can cultivate gratitude where there was victimhood, and forgiveness where there was grievance. You can meet emergence with action rather than endless explanation. You can make peace with not knowing, and let life carry you. That is what it means to live powerfully. Not to master the mystery, but to learn to dance with it.

But do not mistake this for drifting on the wind. Feeling the wave and working with the mystery do not leave you adrift. They open your eyes to what the mystery is placing in front of you. The breakdowns that arrive, the things that seize your attention, the indignities you find you can no longer walk past. These are its invitations. And the stand you take in the middle of the drift is what makes a powerful life real.

IVTaking a stand

Living a powerful life depends on doing deeply meaningful work. And deeply meaningful work begins with taking a stand. A stand is a declaration of what you will make matter, of what you name as the greatest possibility and ambition of your life. A declaration does not describe the world. It commits you to one. And here is a pattern I have watched my whole life: the nameless something we have been discussing responds to declaration. What you bring to the world is what the world brings to you. The wave supplies the power. The stand is how you ride it.

Most of us make only small promises, promises that do not scare us, and this is how we come to live beneath our potential. To live your full potential, make a serious promise of real consequence to some community of people, in some domain of life. Fernando Flores taught me that entrepreneurship is a form of public service, an offer of care made to a community. Care is the secret of power. A stand mobilizes that power in service.

And life keeps presenting us with events and anomalies that perturb our worlds and disrupt our routines. These disturbances are not punishments. Each breakdown is an opening. The person with a stand reads the invitation. The person without one reads only the insult.

In The Religion of the Future, the philosopher Roberto Unger names the danger that waits for everyone who declines this work. He calls it mummification. Character and circumstance slowly form a mummy around each of us, a set of roles with ready-made scripts for how to speak, feel, and act, until we can no longer tell the mask from the face, and we resign ourselves to routine, dying a little at a time inside the shell. Of the great defects of human life, our mortality, our groundlessness, our insatiability, and our belittlement, Unger holds that only the last can be overcome, and that it is overcome in one way: by giving ourselves to large projects of transformation. When we give ourselves to the largest work we can find, we stop acting as functionaries of our age, and we come to life. A task is not large because the world applauds it. It is large because of the life it gives back. We are, Unger writes, “most fully ourselves when we seek to change some part of the world,” and in seeking to change the world, we change ourselves. Most people, even those on whom fortune has smiled, choose undertakings that are too small. They shine where it is safe, in worlds sized to their fears, and arrive at their deaths never having lived at full size.

A stand is the refusal to die in installments.

My own stand is the transformation of humanity in this turning of eras. The work that follows from it, building bridges between people stranded in different worlds of sense, what we call disclosive spaces, and helping them make sense of each other, has given me the greatest adventure of my life. And the stand delivered my question, the one I keep on the wall: how do we remain human beings, living and working with dignity, in the era of AI?

So this is an invitation to think. What will be your stand? What waste or monstrosity in your world will you no longer walk past, and now take it upon yourself to confront? You may not know what to do. Your capacity may be limited. That disqualifies nothing. What to do germinates from the stand. You declare yourself a beginner, you learn to learn again, you cope again, and you begin to move. And the stand will deliver you a big question that shapes your journey and your path. A human being with no serious question is sleepwalking. Hold your question in front of you for a long time. Answers will come at you quickly. Do not invest in them too soon.

So here is the last question of this Briefing, and you have one life in which to answer it. What will you stand for?