That should strike us as strange. But a peek behind the rusty cabin in the woods reveals a theory. The surging popularity of horror isn’t a random cultural fad. It represents a psychological pressure-release valve for the existential anxieties many are feeling.

The Time To Be Alive

As a history major, I love imagining what it would have been like to be alive during the conquest of Alexander the Great. Or when the Great Wall was being constructed during the Ming Dynasty. Or to have listened to Winston Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons in 1940. But a few seconds into my imagination, I realize the fantasy should remain fictional.

In any of those eras, I would almost certainly a) be dead by my age b) have no voice or rights, as a woman and c) have lost several children and loved ones to diseases during my younger life and d) generally live a very difficult life. That’s not to say that it wasn’t possible to have a wonderful life if you lived at any point in history before 1950. But just that you would have undeniably suffered more loss and hardship, and less time and space to dream, love, think, and enjoy freedom.

Fear wasn’t a topic for horror movies for most of human history. It was daily life. A failed harvest would lead to famine and death. A young child’s fever would take them too soon. A wild animal bite would cost you a limb. The threat of bodily pain and human suffering was imminent and fear of it was justified.

By almost every measure, humans have never been safer. We live longer:

More people than ever have access to material goods they desire:

Fewer people face the threat of water-borne diseases:

And more people have access to the right to vote:

Of course there is room for improvement in all of these indicators of human progress, and positive indicators are not distributed equally. But there is no denying the reality that these global measures are markedly better than 1000 years ago.

And yet the narrative we keep hearing and feeling is that we’re living in the worst time ever. And that we need to escape the horror of it with more horror.

A Tale Of Two Realities

I’ve been thinking often about Charles Dickens’ first few lines of A Tale Of Two Cities recently. I don’t pretend I’ve read the whole book. I haven’t. But I do love the opening:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

I think of his words as I reflect on how we are able to see both humanity’s huge progress and huge anxieties at the same time.

Both the narrative that we are better off than ever before, and that we are suffering more anxiety than ever before can co-exist. Our baseline of worry has shifted from the physical to the abstract: automation, institutional decay, the slow erosion of meaning, all give us nightmares.

These abstract threats are actually more complex than the tangible threats of hundreds of years ago. They are harder to capture. We cannot develop a vaccine to eradicate the feeling of becoming obsolete to AI models. We cannot outrun declining trust in institutions. And we can’t develop new pest-resistant crops to combat algorithms that bolster extremism.

Which explains why horror has moved from the genre margins to the cultural center. Horror does something the news cannot. It gives the formless a body. It takes lingering dread and personifies it into a trapped monster in the basement. The abstract becomes something that can be understood, outwitted, and survived in under two hours.

The Horror Bleed Into The Workplace

That dread doesn’t dissolve when we’re done with the horror story. We feel it at work on Monday. You listen to the bombastic news. You get stuck in a social media algorithm feed for an hour. And then you observe an agent finish in an hour what used to take multiple days. It’s understandable to find yourself asking: what am I here for now and in the future?

Our Industrial Revolution systems tend to answer this question in the language of output. What did I produce today? How many documents, lines of code, closed deals etc. When we continue to measure people on work a machine increasingly does faster, every dashboard becomes a verdict on their relevance. This approach doesn’t contain the dread. It encourages it.

As a leader, you have the opportunity to use the same approach horror stories do: give the formless fear a shape. A few ways you can do that:

#1: Measure agency instead of activity

“How much output did you produce?” is an Information Age question. “What did you make clearer?” is an Intelligence Age question

Once a month, run a Problem Audit. Each lead brings three things:

• an expensive assumption the team disproved

• an ambiguity they turned into a constraint

• something they chose not to build

Avoid rewarding # of features launched or other velocity metrics that machines are now taking over. Agency rewards human leadership paired with machine intelligence.

#2: Ask where work should slow down

When output is instant, we are all less trusting of digital products as they are no longer an indicator of effort. Trust is drifting towards what is slow, physical and deliberate.

Require certain activities or meetings to be device-free. No laptops or phones allowed for an hour. Use whiteboards and paper notebooks. Photograph the board at the end and call that the record.

Speed belongs where mistakes are cheap. Friction belongs where they aren’t.

#3: Show up as an Intelligence Age leader

Most people on a senior tech team don’t need to be told how to do their work. What they need is a clear account of what is changing around them and why their work still matters.

Start each team meeting with ten minutes of context before any status updates. Say what has changed in the market, the company or the technology since you last met. Explain what that means for this team’s priorities. Then say what isn’t changing, because that is the part people most need to hear and the part leaders most often leave out.

Hold The Two Realities Together

Horror works because the story ends. The audience walks out still a little unsettled, but the fear has had a shape and a conclusion, and that makes it easier to carry.

Leaders can’t promise their teams an ending to one of the realities. The existential fears people have are real, and pretending otherwise would drive even more mistrust. What you can offer is a clearer picture: what the team is responsible for, which decisions deserve time and care, and why the work matters to someone with physical world context.

As machines take on more of the execution, that clarity becomes one of the most useful things a leader can give.

What is the unspoken worry on your team right now, and when did you last say it out loud?

Wild Growth 🌱 Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Building with AI: Great talk and practical tips from Katie Dill on how to use AI to build with intentionality.

2. Read: Speaking of horror stories, genetically modified warhounds are coming to a battlefield near you.

3. Orient Express: Simulate being on a train. This made me nauseous but also nostalgic of a time when I took the train daily.

4. Colors: An interactive 3D map of colors. This is awesome.

5. Holidays: There is so much beautiful kitchenware for the holidays right now, like this loaf pan.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading Wild Growth when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and let me know what you’d like to read next.

How do you negotiate multi-year deals when the underlying technology updates weekly? I sat down with Neal Pancholi, Managing Director of Global Partnerships for Google DeepMind and Gemini, to break down what it really looks like to negotiate when neither side has all the answers.

In traditional enterprise tech and search distribution, leverage was clear and costs were predictable. Today’s AI partnerships look fundamentally different. Compute capacity costs are steep, frontier capabilities change continuously, and no one has a manual for what ecosystem distribution will look like three years out.

Here are the key takeaways for leaders building and negotiating in uncharted spaces:

Key Insights

1. Optimize for the second deal, not the first: A partnership is an ongoing iteration rather than a signing ceremony. Locking in rigid, defensive protections because you are afraid of uncertainty usually guarantees a brittle agreement. Define the shared outcome first, align on mutual upside, and build a cadence that allows both sides to renegotiate terms as the tech matures.

2. Beware of vanity metrics: Early AI distribution often tracks surface metrics like developer API calls or bulk seat access. Durable value comes from product stickiness and rapid customer feedback loops. If a model isn’t solving a core user problem, raw distribution numbers mask churn.

3. The shift from defensive redlining to shared humility: Experienced dealmakers tend to lean on muscle memory: knowing every liability lever, indemnification clause, and standard concession. When building entirely new paradigms, the most effective posture is admitting what you do not know. Bringing transparency and curiosity across the table builds the trust needed to navigate ambiguity together.

Timestamps

00:00 – Introduction

02:15 – Rapid fire: deal philosophy and corporate buzzwords

06:38 – Why AI distribution looks nothing like search

09:00 – Measuring genuine adoption vs. surface-level volume

10:48 – Structuring multi-year agreements amidst model velocity

13:00 – Probabilistic risk assessment without a precedent

16:10 – The role of humility and context in high-stakes negotiation

18:34 – Unconventional personal workflows with Gemini

20:07 – Developing apprenticeship, creativity, and the next generation of dealmakers

How is your organization rethinking multi-year partner agreements or risk models as foundation models continue to evolve? Let me know in the comments.

Wild Growth 🌱 Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Nature: If you need a smile on your face, check out comedy wildlife photography finalists.

2. Read: Looking ahead, What will we use our minds for? by

3. Halloween: Costume inspiration from NYMag.

4. Days of Christmas: Remember when advent calendars were low-quality chocolate? (at best) I fear we’ve reached maxxx-advent-calendar with $200+ versions with teas, jams, pastries, legos, and chili oil. They are fun though.

5. Baking: It’s cozy baking season! I’m not a fan of most cakes but it’s hard to beat Sticky Toffee Pudding, and Joshua Weismann’s recipe specifically.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading Wild Growth when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and let me know what you’d like to read next.

When I was a teenager, I used to think I was a strong writer. My teachers would give me high marks on essays. I had a pretty good internal thesaurus and liked to pepper in esoteric words (which I thought made me seem smarter). So when I submitted my first essay in a history class at university, I was livid when it came back riddled with red ink, and a C grade. I had spent hours crafting the narrative, researching my points, and choosing my words carefully. I decided to seek live feedback from my professor, Dr. Olga Litvak, to learn what I was missing. Translation: I was ready to defend myself.

Choosing my words carefully as I sat in her office, I barely made any sense with all my preamble as I tried to ask her what she didn’t like about my essay. She didn’t beat around the bush. She told me my writing was verbose. I wrote in five sentences what I could have written in one. I used words that were overly complicated (like “esoteric”) which made my writing harder to read. In short, I overdid it. She offered to review a second attempt. My next version took me longer. Not the writing. But the thinking. I had to clarify what I actually wanted to say in the essay. In plain English. Without embellishment. The word count decreased by half. My grade jumped two letters.

Dr. Litvak continued to help me refine my writing style. I continued to receive red strikethroughs on every assignment. But they lessened throughout the semester. She taught me how much clearer we can communicate with less. Even though it took more out of me to use fewer words.

Tools (And Slop) Everywhere

We’ve never lived in such a bountiful era for communication tools. We can write fully structured emails with the click of a button, produce lengthy prose with one prompt, and build proposals with a few sentence fragments. All while mimicking the style of whomever we want, from any time in history. But as Dr. Litvak’s harsh red pen showed me, speed and quantity don’t typically yield more clarity. In fact, research from UC Berkeley and Google’s DeepMind analyzing over 2 million scientific paper blurbs showed that those written with the help of AI tools were 100-200% longer, and over-explained perspectives with excessive filler words.

But we’re able to produce significantly more content and at faster speeds with AI: Self-reported estimates show that workers using AI produce 77% more content and are able to increase their speed of creation by 59%. So how are you supposed to write well if you’re under pressure to produce more, and faster?

Using AI. To Write Less.

Communicating clearly wasn’t easy before AI. In fact, humans overestimate how well we are understood when we communicate. My favorite study on this topic is from Stanford psychologist Elizabeth Newton. In 1990 she asked volunteers to tap well-known songs like “Happy Birthday” on a table, for a listener volunteer to guess. She asked the tappers to predict the likelihood the listener would guess correctly beforehand. They predicted they’d be understood 50% of the time. Listeners guessed correctly 2.5% of the time. Her thesis was that the tappers could hear the melody in their heads, assuming that the listeners could do the same. Which is exactly what happens when you communicate with others.

The best communicators keep it simple: they know what they want to say. And they say it plainly. It’s really that simple. And that hard.

So why do the supercomputers in our pockets make communication less simple and less plain? When left alone, AI tends to add words, not remove them. Models are trained to predict the most statistically probable and structured response, defaulting to a highly patterned, essayistic formula. Models are honed to answer comprehensively and authoritatively, which leads to overexplanation. Unless you intervene (through direction, or with your own red pen), your AI writing will be as clear as you tapping “happy birthday” on a desk, and expecting the audience to hear it.

5 Tips To Communicate More Clearly In Writing (With AI)

The clearest writing will always come from you. I know that’s slower and less “productive” than using a model, but it’s reality. If you do use AI, you can train your agent to write and edit with more clarity using these five tips:

#1: Know your point. Put it first.

Great speechwriters start with the argument, not preamble. Before you send your next email, ask yourself: can I state my point in a single sentence? If so, make it your first sentence. If not, don’t send anything until you know your point.

Before: “Hello Arun, Following up on our discussions over the past few weeks regarding the vendor evaluation, I wanted to share some thoughts…”
After: “Hello Arun, I recommend Vendor B. It’s 20% cheaper and ready by Q1. Details below.”

When I worked at Google, I was a big fan of the TL;DR (too long; didn’t read), that we used all the time to clarify the point up front. It helps ensure the reader is primed for the rest of the message.

Prompt: Paste your draft into your model and ask: “In one sentence, what is this message communicating to the reader? Where does that sentence first appear?” If the AI can’t find your point, or finds it far down in the draft, your reader won’t either.

#2: Write to one person.

Stephen King writes every book with an ideal reader in mind: his wife Tabitha. Speechwriters do the same. Picture the specific person reading. What do they already know? What do they need to decide? Cut what they don’t need; spell out what they have no context on.

Before (written for everyone): “Per the Q3 OKR review, the CX workstream is off-track on NPS due to SLA slippage in T2 support.”
After (written for the SVP of Sales): “Customer satisfaction dropped this quarter because our support team is taking too long to reply. Fixing it will cost $80K in new hires.”

Prompt Define your one reader. “Read this as a [busy SVP of Sales who wasn’t in our team meetings]. What’s confusing, what jargon don’t you know, and what question would you reply with?”

#3: Show you understood before you respond.

In his book “Supercommunicators” Charles Duhigg calls out the importance of looping for understanding. Restate the other person’s point before making your own. One sentence of this prevents long threads of people talking past each other.

Before: “I don’t think that approach will work.”
After: “You’re worried the timeline leaves no room for testing. Fair concern. I’d still prioritize shipping in March to hit our Q1 goal, with a two-week buffer for QA.”

This might increase your word count in the short-term. But it will decrease words and confusion across the whole thread.

Prompt Before replying to a tense email, paste it in and ask: “Summarize this person’s main concern in one sentence, and tell me what they might be worried about that they didn’t say.” Then make sure your reply addresses it.

#4: Use plain words, then cut 10% of them.

This is for all you corp-speak linguists out there: the first word that comes to mind is better than the fancier one. JFK’s speechwriter Ted Sorensen held to a code of short words and shorter sentences. Filler hedge words like “just,” “maybe” and “I think it might be worth considering” should be the first to go.

Before: “I just wanted to gently flag that it might be worth revisiting the budget.”
After: “Let’s revisit the budget.”

If you find the second version too direct, you may identify with a cultures that biases to a certain code of communication. In my experience, clear and direct communication is the most universally understood.

Prompt Ask for help to flag, not rewrite: “Highlight every hedge, filler word and piece of jargon in this draft. Don’t rewrite it. I’ll make the cuts.” Doing the cutting yourself keeps your voice and builds your own habit.

#5: Make it concrete and end with a clear ask.

People remember specifics, not abstractions. Close every message with exactly what you need, from whom, by when. Resist the urge to keep it vague, hoping that makes you seem less demanding.

Before: “Let’s prioritize responsiveness to customers. Who can help with this?”
After: “A customer waited nine days for a reply last week. Starting Monday, our target is 24 hours. Maya, can you draft the new triage process by Friday?”

If you don’t yet have clarity on your ask, go back to #1, as you will need to reconsider the point of your message.

Prompt: Ask: “After reading this, what exactly would the recipient do next, and by when? If the answer is unclear, tell me what’s missing.”

Dr. Litvak’s red pen didn’t feel great at first. But it led to clearer understanding. Clarity is kindness, and directness is respect.

How do you stay clear and direct in your communication? Share your own tips and tricks in the comments.

Wild Growth 🌱 Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Birds: Check out the bird photographers of the year. No words for how cool these are.

2. Play: Solitaire. Old school version. I miss those sounds.

3. Read: How leaders combat pessimism during trying times. Great tips in here.

4. TV: Is the world ready for a darker take on Mary Poppins? So much for a spoonful of sugar.

5. Get Cozy: A cotton fall blanket to keep you warm. Love the colors.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading Wild Growth when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and let me know what you’d like to read next.

The Power Of The Machine As Mind Metaphor

The metaphor of the machine as a human mind goes way back. In 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts built a mathematical model of a switch that turns on or off depending on its inputs. They could have called it a node. A unit. But instead they called it a neuron. Despite the fact that it didn’t operate like a human neuron at all. Fifteen years later, John von Neumann, one of the inventors of modern computer architecture, spent his final months writing a book called The Computer and the Brain. He laid the two side by side, memory next to memory, processing next to processing. And then, almost in passing, he noted that the brain seemed to run on something he called a peculiar statistical language, nothing like the machines he’d spent his life building. He made the comparison and doubted it in the same breath. But the language of RAM and processing stuck. Humans love to see themselves in the world around us. And computers are no different.

What Truth Is There To Comparing Machines To The Human Mind?

A computer has an engine. One process, however distributed across chips, ultimately answers to a single objective, the thing it was built to optimise. In 2017, a trio of neuroscientists, Eisenreich, Akaishi and Hayden, published a paper with a title that says the quiet part out loud: Control Without Controllers. They went looking for the seat of executive function, the region of the brain that must, surely, be in charge of the rest. They didn’t find one. What they found instead looked like flocks of starlings, colonies of ants, systems where order emerges from thousands of local exchanges rather than a single command.

Jeff Hawkins, in his book A Thousand Brains, found something similar from a completely different direction. The brain’s outer layer isn’t one processor. It’s made of many thousands of columns, each running its own complete model of whatever it’s sensing, each with its own vantage point. There’s no head office collecting the reports. The columns vote, and the vote is the thought.

No engine. No head office. No single light switch.

Start with the neuron itself, since that word did so much of the heavy lifting. In 1888, a Spanish scientist named Santiago Ramón y Cajal peered through a microscope and saw something the field had been arguing about for years. The prevailing belief was that the nervous system was one continuous web, a single tangled net with no clean edges. Cajal saw otherwise. Distinct cells, gaps between them, individual units doing individual work. He was right, and the discovery earned him a Nobel Prize in 1906.

Here’s the part that got lost on the way to 2015. Cajal’s discrete little cells were so easy to draw as circuitry, so easy to imagine wired together like a switchboard, that they became evidence for exactly the picture he never intended. Separate parts, connected in sequence, looked like the sketch for a machine. It took the field another fifty years to build that sketch into McCulloch and Pitts’ switches, and another fifteen after that for von Neumann to lay it next to his own architecture and half believe it.

What none of that lineage got right is where the control sits.

A Forest Vs. A Plantation

The comparison of artificial intelligence models to the human brain bears resemblance to comparing a plantation to a forest. There are some basic similarities, especially at a surface level. But they operate fundamentally differently.

A plantation is typically rows of a single plant species, grown for a key purpose, tended toward a single number, board feet of timber, tonnes of yield. Every tree is doing the same job in the same way. Efficient, predictable, and entirely dependent on a central operator to decide what success looks like.

A forest is messier, and harder to predict. Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist, spent decades tracing how trees pass carbon, water and warning signals to each other through a mesh of fungal threads below the soil. The most connected trees in that mesh, sometimes called mother trees, aren’t in charge of it. Resources move by relationship, not by central decision-making.

A neural network, whatever its name suggests, is the plantation. Our brains are the forest.

Why Are We So Sure About Humans Having Better “Taste and Judgement”?

I hear a version of this question in almost every coaching conversation about AI right now. A leader trying to figure out what to hand off and what to protect, and landing, almost by reflex, on “well, humans will always have the judgement, the taste.” I’ve said some version of that sentence myself. It’s worth asking where it actually comes from, rather than repeating it as fact. Why would a forest-like human brain be better at something than a structured plantation?

Our judgement carries consequence in a way a model’s doesn’t. We’re the ones who have to live inside the outcome, so the choice feels weightier, and weight gets mistaken for a special kind of knowing. Some of it is just structural blindness. You feel your own reasoning arrive. You can’t feel a model’s, so opacity reads as absence, even when something similarly complicated might be happening underneath. And some of our belief is the next line of retreat. Calculation stopped being uniquely ours. Then writing. Then strategy. “Taste” is simply where we’ve pitched the tent this year.

None of that proves what a model can or can’t eventually do. It mostly explains why we’re so attached to the story.

Claiming exactly what humans do better than machines feels premature. That conjures a scoreboard I don’t think anyone can read yet. Instead I keep wondering what is happening differently in our minds. Your brain keeps rewiring itself while you read this sentence. It has a structure with no single engine, where the outcome is voted on by thousands of semi-independent parts rather than issued from the top. A forest, still growing underground, rather than a plantation left to yield ripe fruit.

For a leader trying to decide what to protect and what to delegate, that’s a more useful place to start than what humans are better at.

When we say someone on the team has good judgement, what are they actually doing that we've never had to name before?

Wild Growth 🌱 Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Dream: What do you dreams about being back in school actually mean?

2. Play: Be the Asteroid for a change and escape the spaceship.

3. Bake: For those of you in apple season, the honey roasted apple sauce is a great way to use up older apples and make your home smell incredible.

4. Cheers: The heatwave in France will make the next batch of Champagne 2% more alcoholic. Weekend mimosas just got more dangerous.

5. Welcome Home: If you love the snow but live somewhere where you don’t see it, this winter doormat will put you in a festive mood.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading Wild Growth when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and let me know what you’d like to read next.

We ask leaders the question of “who do you want to be when you grow up?” their whole careers, just with different phrasing. What do you want your next role to be? What kind of manager will you be? It assumes identity is something you invent or click from a drop-down menu. But no Oak tree decides to be an Oak. No Willow chooses to flex its wood. A tree’s growth pattern is already written into it long before anyone asks what it wants to be. Research shows that humans are remarkably similar in our growth patterns; our neural pathways form from a young age. Even Carol Dweck, who pioneered the Growth Mindset, admitted it has a ceiling. Effort shapes what grows. It doesn’t decide what’s planted. The real work isn’t inventing an answer to “who do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s noticing what you’ve been growing toward all along. Even while trying to become something else that pleases others.

This week, ask yourself:

1. What have I been doing for years without being asked to?

2. What did I quietly stop doing because someone once told me it shouldn’t be my priority?

Take a few minutes to write behaviors and skills in both lists. The overlap between them is closer to your natural growth pattern than any job title you’d give a stranger at a cocktail party.

What have you already been growing into, before someone asked what you wanted to be next?

Wild Growth 🌱 Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Fun: Draw any random human life. Ever. I drew a girl in 350 CE in the Deccan Plateau (modern day India). Likely married at 15, birthing 6.5 children and dying at 26. Give extra thanks for your life today.

2. Playtime: 10 Common Toys From The Middle Ages. Little Timmy is getting a toy jug at his next birthday party and he’s going to love it.

3. Work: Snoop Dogg’s ice cream brand, Dr. Bombay, is looking for a 3-month contracted international ice cream taster. Live the dream.

4. Buy: These spooky Halloween glasses are so fun.

5. Bake: This recipe for Honey Cake is a great find from . Perfect for Rosh Hashanah, for those of you who celebrate, or any other time.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading Wild Growth when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and let me know what you’d like to read next.

As a leader, she felt a responsibility to have a clear point of view. But she wasn’t sure what hers was yet. She felt stuck. She asked me why this topic, more than anything else in her fifteen years leading teams, was sparking such extreme points of view? I found her question profound, and have been thinking about it since.

Shifting from Dissection to Observation

As we unpacked her team meeting, we observed that both camps were doing the same thing. They were dissecting the problem, and predicting outcomes of their decision on the teams and business. They were thinking like chess players, just as modern STEM education trained them to employ. This is also the approach AI models have been built on. A transformer is, at its core, a prediction engine. The most analytical way to make sense of the world.

Since models have been trained on human created data (even if a model created the data; the original source was a human), they tend to mimic to human analysis. Which is heavily biased to attributing outcomes to human attributes and behaviors, not chaos, fate, or spirituality. You can read more about this bias, and why it’s so pervasive in my post on the Attribution Error . Since we over-credit what we control and underweight the environmental factors surrounding us, our instinct when leading through the age of AI is to process our feelings with analysis.

The Analysis Hammer Looking For A Nail

Have you faced a difficult personal situation recently with a co-worker, family member, or friend that overwhelmed your emotions, where you turned to your favorite LLM as a discussion partner? The model, trained as an analytical confidante, likely gave you calming responses, ideas, and ways to process what you were going through. “That must be hard for you. Have you tried A or B?” If you are someone who deals with emotions through processing, with an LLM, a friend, a spreadsheet, or watching videos, you are likely the ideal customer for engaging in AI (as a supporter or dissenter).

Emotional situations are often the most complex to solve with purely analytical thinking. When we end a tough call with a co-worker, partner, child, or parent, we often experience tightness in our bodies. Deep emotion that is linked to distant trauma, we don’t understand. Processing the situation with an LLM (or turning to scrolling videos, a podcast, or other content) is the equivalent of putting a bandaid on a deep wound. It might offer a quick fix, but the underlying lesion is still raw and exposed. And the longer you wait to deal with it, the more likely you will pay the price.

Quieting The Mind To Hear The Body

I’ll admit, I am an analysis addict. I love to think. About anything and everything. In fact, I struggle to switch off my mind. Music, podcasts, or videos are almost always on around me. I tell myself they help me process. But I also know that they are comfort blankets. When I first worked with a coach who invited me to close my eyes, breathe deep, silence my thoughts, and tell her what my body was feeling, I remember giving her a look that said “That is not for me. Can we stick to the topic at hand?”.

But many years into coaching practice, consistent strength training, and somatic and neuroscience courses later, I’ve come to appreciate how much getting out of our own heads can help us move forward with more clarity. And I now use these techniques for myself, and with clients. Brain scans of people who meditate regularly show a marked difference in their ability to regulate their amygdala, and stay calm under high-pressure stimuli. Of course, as an analysis addict, I tout the benefits of quieting the mind with data :P.

If, like me, you struggle to quiet your analytical mind and LLMs actually heighten that noise, here are five tools I employ regularly that actually work. Especially for people who love to think:

Five Tips to Quiet Your Mind, In Five Minutes Or Less

All workplace appropriate, all under 300 seconds:

1. Got 5 minutes? Take a quick walk. Leave your phone behind and walk outside, around the building for five minutes. No headphones, no podcast, no other tasks. You can handle disconnection for 300 seconds.

2. Got 2 minutes?, Try Two Feet / Two Hands. Before or during your next tough conversation, place both feet on the ground and clench / release your toes for 120 seconds (or clench / release your fists, if that’s better for you).

3. Got 1 minute? Take five deep breaths before the laptop opens. Notice what your body feels, tight shoulders etc. Notice them before your jump into thinking mode for the day.

4. Got 30 seconds? Name the feeling, not the narrative. When you notice a conversation triggers you, describe the physical sensation first (a tight chest, a warm face) before you start to analyze what actually happened.

5. Got 10 seconds? Grab two ice cold cans / bottles and hold them to cheeks briefly. A blast of cold interrupts rumination fast. Bonus: hydration keeps your body fueling your brain.

These methods are not meant to replace analysis. Nor are they “anti” or “pro” technology. They are simply intended to interrupt your thinking on a topic just long enough to let your deeper self through.

It could be a sensation, a hunch, or an instinct you feel. And it is definitely something your brain or most advanced model can’t surface.

What is your body telling you that your brain / LLM can’t?

Wild Growth 🌱 Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Geography: Guess the country of the day by proximity. Love web games and keeping my geo knowledge up (South Sudan became independent in 2011!).

2. Farewell: Messi officially retires from international football. Will miss watching that explosive energy.

3. Aliens: NASA reports a floating jellyfish-like object on Mars. The truth is out there.

4. Cook: It’s officially September which means pumpkin-spice-everything, which makes me queasy, as it’s often artificial. This pumpkin bread recipe from Molly Baz is incredible (uses fresh ginger) and easy to make.

5. Woodwork: I’m a big Nick Offerman fan and enjoyed this interview. I’m thinking of getting into woodworking - has anyone out there done that later in life? Any tips for an aspiring carpenter?

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading Wild Growth when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and let me know what you’d like to read next.

One thing I didn’t love about growing up in London (and I know it’s cliched to say) is the weather. Not for the reason most people say: “it’s always raining in London.” I never found that to be true. What got to me was that London never had consistent seasons. Spring and summer could pass in weeks of grey. Winter stayed mild enough that a proper coat felt unnecessary. It was the unpredictability that threw me off.

When I moved to New Jersey at eighteen, the humidity that first summer drained me, remarkably consistent for weeks. Then October arrived. The leaves turned ochre and rust. The air chilled. Winter brought snow and bone-numbing wind. When I went to field hockey training runs, I couldn’t throw on any old workout clothes. Walking to class was an ordeal. The season forced us to change behaviour and slow down.

The seasons were often uncomfortable physically. But the boundaries they set had a real mental upside. No A/C in our dorm room meant we were outside more, socializing, waking earlier. The bitter cold meant we studied indoors and nested in libraries.

Seasonality of Work

Spring brings budding and new growth for saplings. Summer is when trees do their hardest growing, though the heat also risks leaf rust and pest sprawl. Autumn is for storing water and nutrients, before the frost of winter, when even evergreens go into hibernation to rest and recover for the growth to come.

We follow something similar in our work. Not in sync with Earth’s orbit, but a flow of peak growth and rest, often forced by burnout when we ignore it. These seasons can last months, years, sometimes decades. The hard part is recognizing which one you’re in, so you can make the most of it, and ask yourself what season lies ahead.

What Season Are You In?

On Earth, our trips around the Sun and axis determine our seasons across the world. Seasons can come early or late. Bring surprises or consistency. Overall, they are predictable and a have been a critical milestone marker for humans throughout history (from farming, to religious observations, to quarterly earnings reports).

Our seasons don’t map neatly to age. Youth is often assumed to be spring and summer, retirement autumn and winter. But increasingly, we’re freer of that logic than ever. A menopausal mom in her late fifties might be in her spring, starting a new business and learning nonstop. A fit young man in his twenties, facing a family tragedy, might be in winter, needing rest to reassess what matters to him. There’s no order of operations for career seasons. But there are clear signs of which one you’re in, and knowing them helps you move through with more intention and ease.

Here’s what to look for, and the questions to ask yourself:

Spring 🌸

You find yourself waking up and sleeping, with curiosity ringing in your head. You are hungry for new skills, wondering about a role or project that hasn’t settled yet. You have big goals and not much clarity on how you’ll hit them. Your focus is on building enough structure to move forward, without over-defining too soon.

Common Examples of Career Springtime

• You’ve taken on a new or expanded role

• You’re starting a new venture

• You are itching to do one of the above and are ready to get started

Questions to Ask Yourself

• What skills or behaviors do I want to have grown in, once this season ends?

• Where am I saying “yes” out of fear, not clarity?

• What would I build now, if I knew it would still be taking up my time in a year?

Summer ☀️

You don’t have time to notice it, but you are firing on every cylinder. Accomplishments are piling up faster than you can register them, and your calendar looks the same every day: full. You’re closer to overwhelmed than you’d admit.

Common Examples of Career Summertime

• You’re knee-deep in a big product launch / deal negotiation / project GTM

• Your business is growing faster than you can keep up with

• You look like you’re thriving to others, but you’re barely keeping it together

Questions to Ask Yourself

• What am I sacrificing during this season, that I’ll want back later?

• If this pace continued for another year, would I like what I’ve become?

• What’s one thing I could drop this week, without anything breaking?

Autumn / Fall 🍂

Bear with me; I still say “Autumn” but I know many of my readers say “Fall”

You’re mindset is focused on finishing more than starting. Reviews and retrospectives have replaced kickoffs. You’re asking “What worked well, that we can scale?” more often than “What’s next to build?”. You are focused more on risk-mitigation to protect the crops you’ve reaped, than new growth.

Common Examples of Career Autumn / Fall

• You’re optimizing and scaling what’s already working

• You are looking for ways to automate more of your business operations

• You have some hard calls to make on what to drop or change

Questions to Ask Yourself

• What is this season teaching me that I don’t want to forget?

• What am I willing to let go of, before winter makes the decision for me?

• Where do I need to adapt, and where am I avoiding a hard stance?

Winter ❄️

Your brain is more foggy than usual. You’re bored, or restless, or daydreaming about other jobs, or big pivots. Resources are scarce and promotions are few and far between.

Common Examples of Career Autumn / Fall

• Your role has become so easy for you, you could do it in your sleep.

• You know you need a change, but you’re too overwhelmed to decide what to do first.

• You don’t see a clear path forward in your current role / business.

Questions to Ask Yourself

• What is this quiet trying to teach me about myself and what I value?

• Am I intentionally resting, or am I stuck against my will?

• If nothing changed for another year, could I live with that?

None of us choose our season in a vacuum. A layoff, a birth, a death, a market shift, and you’re somewhere new without warning. But knowing which season you were just in tells you something about yourself, and where you might want to head next.

This week: name your season. Then ask what would look different if you stopped fighting it.

What season are you in?

Wild Growth 🌱 Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. RIP Dolly Parton: Beautiful tribute to the country music icon we lost this week. Coat Of Many Colors is one of the first songs my daughter would request we play on repeat.

2. Read: Whatever happened to the short story? It was replaced by the short-form video. Like most things in this world, it will likely come back anew.

3. Nostalgia: The Most Popular Movie The Year You Graduated High School. Would be fun to do a scatter graph of the key messages from these movies and see what has (or has not) changed.

4. Clean: The Real Reason Your Kitchen Is a Mess. Great tips from , including an excellent chicken / veggie marinade that I make a version of, every week (I replace the turmeric and cumin for 7 spices and ground coriander; Lebanese style)

5. Food: KFC China releases Oreo Fried Chicken Burger. Alternative menu name: “Capitalism: How Far Is Too Far?!”

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading Wild Growth when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and let me know what you’d like to read next.

"It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end." - Pangloss, Candide, Voltaire (1759)

In his 1759 satire Candide, Voltaire conjures a delusional philosopher Dr. Pangloss. Like a tortured cartoon cat, Pangloss suffers constant malady. He contracts syphilis and loses an eye and ears in the process. He is sentenced to death and narrowly escapes a hanging. He is beaten and enslaved. And yet through it all, he is a dogmatic optimist. When disease, disasters, and war rattle him and others, he attributes all misfortune to a cosmic benefit to society. When asked by Candide after he’s freed from enslavement if he still believes everything is for the best, he doesn’t budge his perspective. He would rather suffer in a miserable world and attest that it is perfect, than face the intellectual embarrassment of admitting his philosophy was flawed. Voltaire’s story ends with Candide rejecting Pangloss’ theorizing, in favor of practical, meaningful garden cultivation, to improve his immediate surroundings.

Control And The Attribution Error

Voltaire lived during a time when attributing human experiences to behavior, fate, folklore, and characteristics was the norm. In Candide, he rejected this norm, but also showed us, through Pangloss, why it’s so powerful. Humans tend to attribute outcomes to what we can make sense of and control Because control brings us comfort. Whereas admitting that factors beyond our control (luck, environment, faith, randomness) have a huge role to play in our lives, and the lives of others, is uncomfortable. Even if admitting this might actually lead us to make better decisions. This is the Attribution Error at work.

The Attribution Error is a cognitive bias that leads a person to incorrectly explain the underlying causes of a behavior, outcome, or event. These errors typically distort reality to protect a person's ego, defend their social group, or create a false sense of control over an unpredictable world. The classic example leaders use is how we often attribute someone being late to factors in their control (bad planning, disrespect, or absent-mindedness). But if we are late, we are more likely to attribute the situation to factors out of our control (bad traffic, other people).

The Founder & CEO Fallacies

Look closely and you’ll see that the Attribution Error is as alive and well in 2026 as it was in 1759. In Silicon Valley, success is almost always attributed to relentless work ethic. Because we can control it. Since many founders who built successful companies claimed to work north of 70 hours a week, the narrative has become you only achieve success through late nights and working on weekends.

But plenty of founders who worked just as hard, for just as long, with just as much conviction, failed. We don’t hear about them because failure doesn’t get a TED talk or a Forbes list. Investigate some known startup failures and notice that what separated them from the winners usually wasn’t grit. A good idea launched a year too early or too late sinks the same effort that, launched at the right moment, becomes a unicorn. Instead, we credit the hustle, because hustle is the part you can see. Timing only shows up in hindsight, and sometimes not even then.

Research suggests the hustle itself works against people past a point. Productivity per hour drops sharply after roughly 50 hours a week and keeps falling from there. Someone logging 70 hours may end up producing about what someone at 55 does. If that’s right, the extra hours aren’t neutral. They might be quietly working against the very outcome we praise them for. What’s to say that some of the most successful startups in history might have been even more successful if their founding teams got enough sleep?

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman examined a similar fallacy about CEOs of public companies. He noticed that if a CEO’s company has a good year, they are labeled flexible, methodical, decisive. etc. But a year later, the same person, at the same company, making largely the same decisions, will yield worse financial metrics. And now they are labeled rigid, confused, and authoritarian.

Nothing about the person changed. The outcome changed and we worked backward from it to invent a personality. Kahneman calls this the “halo effect”. He notes that researchers followed up on Fortune’s “Most Admired Companies” over the next twenty years, and the worst-rated firms on that original list beat the most admired ones on stock returns.

The Myth Of The Alpha Wolf

When it comes to attribution, humans are particularly attracted to the idea of the “one” influencer having outsized impact on the many. The CEO. The Leader. The Underdog. The Alpha. The idea of a winning animal fighting its way to the top of the pack comes from research on captive wolves. These unrelated adults were thrown together in an enclosure, which produced exactly the forced aggression you’d expect from strangers under stress in a small space.

But when researchers finally studied wild wolf packs, the alpha model fell apart. A wild pack isn’t a hierarchy of rivals. It’s a family. Parents and their offspring. There’s no fight for the top because there’s no contest to begin with. The biologist most associated with popularizing the “Alpha” wolf spent years afterward trying to walk it back in public. The natural world is dominated by examples of community-based triumph, rather than individual heroics.

Even though the research was debunked, the metaphor didn’t fade. We still celebrate “Alpha” culture. There are movies and stories created about the Alpha predator in a pack of kin. But the concept was built on a study of animals under artificial stress that got mistaken for how wolves live in the wild. The metaphor lived on because we are wired to believe that outcomes must be attributed to behaviors and characteristics in our control,

Spotting Your Attribution Errors

The Attribution Error brings us comfort in a chaotic world. Why did my high-performing report come in late today? She must have been dealing with a family issue. Why did my low-performing report take so long to respond to my request for an update? He’s probably slacking off at home.

Of course, historical data offers us insight into likely correlations. A historical low performer is more likely to underperform. But our attribution errors can also deem someone to be a low or high performer in the first place, that might not accurately reflect the data.

Attribution Error Reflections With AI

The next time you’re about to share feedback with a team member, or respond to a proposal from a peer, take a minute to use this method with your favorite LLM:

1. Paste or speak out a perspective you have or have received. Example: “He’s too aggressive in meetings, that’s why the team is disengaged.” Or “This proposal will never work as the person I’m depending on has historically been incapable of delivering results on time.”

2. Ask three questions about it.

   • What cause-and-effect am I implying with this statement?

   • What’s a competing explanation, where this statement isn’t the cause?

   • What would I expect to see if this statement was a coincidence, and what would I need to do to mitigate the risks if it’s causal?

3. Ask one more, about the comparison group (ask your LLM to scan your email and chat history if it has access).

   • What examples showed this same behavior and got a different result?

   • What evidence do I have this is true, or have I never checked?

4. Run your own drafts through a language check. Ask it to list every instance in your correspondence and documents of “that’s why,” “which explains,” “as a result of.” Those are the likely moments where causation gets asserted, often without clear evidence. Reflect whether those instances need to be rethought.

Your LLM is not an oracle. But it can help you reflect and make the right decisions, for the right reasons, going forward.

The alpha wolf was never real. Next time a leadership story feels obvious, it’s worth checking whether it’s actually true, or just the version that happened to survive.

What common Attribution Errors might you be holding on to? Let me know in the comments.

Wild Growth 🌱 Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Travel: 19 Creepy Catacombs Around The World To Visit. I love a good catacomb and need to visit the one under St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC next time I’m there.

2. Read: What makes certain content go viral? From

3. Trivia: Why do we say “pie in the sky”? And what odd song lyrics will people be saying in 50 years that we’re singing now?

4. Decor: Beautiful fall mugs straight out of Hobbiton. I’m a sucker for cozy fall products.

5. Learn: Countries ranked by % of people who have traveled abroad. Surprised to see the US so high and would be interesting to see changes over time in these %s.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading Wild Growth when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and let me know what you’d like to read next.

“It’s always like this; fire drill after fire drill. I’ve figured out how to manage the stress though. It’s just been harder than usual lately. I think I can push through the next couple of weeks and then I’ll be taking a week off in September to recharge. But I need your help to figure out how to deal with the chaos.”

- Joseph (real name changed) VP of Operations, late-stage startup

Joseph (not his real name), a leader I coached, described his current reality in our first session. When we met, he was a year into an expanded role leading operations for a mature security software startup. And he was exhausted. For his first nine months in the role, he effectively navigated the pace and intensity of daily work by telling himself that A) he was still ramping up and B) it’s a busy phase for the company. But for the last three months, he felt like he had little left in reserves. He was seeking coaching to deal with the chaos. He loved the team, and had no problem with hard work. He had joined the company because he was seeking expanding scope at an earlier stage company. He also knew it wasn’t the most stable job market out there. While he was no stranger to operating in high stakes teams (he had competed in semi-professional level basketball for most of his youth, and at some point was on a professional track), he professed that he didn’t love this level of disorder. He felt like he was constantly interrupted. And everything was a top priority.

Threat Response Vs. Culture Of Threat

One year in, he came to believe the fire drills weren’t so much actual threats to the company, but a result of the culture and style of his leadership team. His manager, the CPO, had a high tolerance for urgency and lobbed every late night message from the CEO over as top priority. There was a belief that operating with no roadmap or system was a way to ensure the team addressed customer needs quickly, and that building a process would kill that competitive edge. Joseph experimented with implementing lightweight filters to ensure they were tackling what mattered most to the business, but his manager shot them down, or sidestepped them. He reached a point where he wasn’t confident he could convince his CPO and CEO to shift their beliefs and operating styles. Nor was he sure if that was best for the team. Many seemed to enjoy the chaos; it’s what drew them to the work and the CEO in the first place.

Dealing With Chaos

When I asked Joseph what successfully “dealing with the chaos” looked like to him, he paused and exhaled deeply. He shared that he wanted to succeed, but was worried about burning out and absorbing the whack-a-mole culture around him. He had already noticed himself adopting the same behaviors as his CPO. He divulged that since he was a kid, he valued order and discipline. He thrived in routine and building his own systems, that helped him improve over time. He struggled with extended periods of concentration as a teenager and in college. He found that the best method for him to overcome this was to build clear routines, with minimal disruption. In his previous roles, he thrived managing complex and difficult projects for his teams. Fire drills happened. But they were the exception, not the norm. He could handle them, because he had banked hours of progress and focus time to clarify his perspectives and system response. In this role, he banked hours of whack-a-mole responses, that left him unsure of his perspectives and devoid of any system.

The Cost of Habituation

As we explored Joseph’s natural growth style (the Wild Growth assessment revealed he is a Baobab), it became clear to me that this new role was not his ideal soil. And yet he had been working on this team for over a year. Joseph wasn’t surprised to discover this, but he was unclear how to move forward. He knew the costs of leaving (it had a $ sign in front of it), but he was unsure about the costs of staying. Should he ride it out until he found something better? Should he work to shift to another role in the company? He felt paralyzed to act.

The Power of Hedonic Adaptation

Joseph’s paralysis wasn’t simply indecision . It was the result of what we have evolved to excel at. Humans are incredibly effective at adapting. We adjust to floods, to war, to grief, to pandemics, to a boss who treats every 11pm message like a five-alarm fire. It’s how our species survived a rough history. It is also how we end up staying somewhere we should have left months ago.

This is hedonic adaptation. The short version is that we return to baseline no matter what happens to us, good or bad, the joy fades and so does the grief. Win the lottery, you adjust. Lose the plot at work, you adjust. Your nervous system never checks in to ask if the new normal is actually fine. It just quietly redraws the line and calls it home.

Underneath that redrawing, the body keeps its own ledger. Neuroscientists call it allostatic load: the wear and tear that piles up every time you adjust to a stressor, even when the adjusting is exactly what’s keeping you upright. Joseph wasn’t failing to cope. He was coping so well that nobody, including Joseph, could adequately assess the costs of what was wrong.

How To Know If You’ve Adapted To Conditions That Are Hurting You

Joseph didn’t have a crystal ball to tell him what decision to make. He needed clarity on whether he was adapting to a soil chemistry that would hinder his growth over time. We were able to meet bi-weekly and agree on action items for him to address in between sessions.

If you don’t have a coach to support you, try out a weekly prompt to help you reflect, incorporating your chats, emails, and calendar:

Weekly Adaptation Prompt (drop into your favorite LLM)

Act as my personal growth coach. I’m a high performer at risk of adapting to wrong conditions for me, instead of leaving or changing them. Conditions like a micromanaging boss, slow bureaucracy, or a role that doesn't enable me to grow.

My natural style is [insert e.g. fast-moving / collaborative / deep-thinking], and what drains me most is [insert e.g. endless meetings / lack of autonomy].

Every Friday afternoon, when I prompt ‘reflect’, pull my calendar, email, and chat history from the past week. Then ask me these two questions, grounded in what you find there rather than my general impression of the week:

1. Where did I artificially slow down, hold back, or soften my style just to keep others comfortable?

2. Where did I use my strengths to grow, versus just to survive a bad system and keep a broken peace?

Acknowledge what you find first, then ask for my first reflection.

Conduct this prompt for at least four weeks (ideally twelve) and review the data. If you’re noticing that the results are showing you patterns of adapting to soil that is not enabling you to use your natural strengths on a weekly basis, for multiple weeks, you have evidence that you are adapting to soil that will hinder your long-term growth.

Joseph found that pattern of mismatched soil. He eventually decided to leave his company, and took a senior IC role at another startup, where the culture better suited his natural growth pattern. It took him another nine months to get to that realization and outcome.

The hard part wasn’t spotting a rough patch. Rough patches end. What’s harder to spot is when hedonic adaptation moves the baseline, without asking your permission, until “out of line” becomes just another Tuesday.

When was the last time you reflected on whether you’ve adapted to conditions that aren’t enabling your growth, but might feel comfortable?

Wild Growth 🌱 Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Fun: Bingebuster, the streaming aggregator made to look and feel like Blockbuster. Nice nostalgia for us who still remember checking out movies from a shop.

2. Read: The 50 Best Thrillers of the 21st Century from NYT. Some great ones in here, if you like being scared before bed, including the book at #1 with my all-time favorite opening line (“When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with.”)

3. Belief: How to notice and shift limiting beliefs. While they often form to help us, the silent limiting beliefs we carry often block change, especially as we age.

4. Decor: Yes it is August but this ghostly dishtowel is a fun way to start feeling the Halloween vibes (or mourn leisurely mornings when school starts).

5. Watch: I love a great action movie and this list from is a winner. Mad Max: Fury Road is a 10/10. Charlize Theron was unmatched in that movie.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading Wild Growth when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and let me know what you’d like to read next.

You never quite know what to expect with performance reviews. This one was glowing. Strong, consistent feedback on what he did well. A clear sense that if he left, it would be a real loss. There were some areas of growth too, mostly around adapting his style to different reports (one interview was harder than the rest, with a report who was also unhappy at the company more broadly). I structured the 360 thematically: strengths, and derailers. The message was clear. Plenty to keep building on. A few things to watch.

The 80/20 Rule

Our review of the report followed a pattern I’ve seen before. Despite 80% of the feedback being positive, my client spent 80% of our time on the 20% that was constructive. How was it happening. Who it came from. What led to it. How he might address it. I’ve seen this with every high-performing client I’ve coached. There’s little pull to understand and build on what’s working. But the 20% asking him to change is the weed in the lush garden he can’t stop staring at.

Why We Can’t Look Away From The 20%

Feedback is deeply personal, whatever we’re told about keeping work and identity separate. Performance reviews bring out tears, withdrawn silence, anger, frustration, even when the review is glowing. Most companies train people to contort themselves toward a mould. So we learn to fix the 20%, and rarely think to build on the 80%.

Marcus Buckingham’s research suggests this instinct is bad for business. Strengths-based teams, ones built around unlocking what people do best, are 38% more productive and see up to 72% lower turnover than teams optimized around closing competency gaps.

What Nature Already Knows

Nature doesn’t run this kind of review. Ask a Baobab to grow flexible branches, and it stops thriving in the driest, harshest soil on earth. Ask a Willow to stiffen its wood against the wind, and it cracks. Nature never asks a tree to become a universal “great tree.” It works to give each species the soil that draws out its greatest strength.

Questions To Drive More Growth

In your next performance review, either as giver or receiver, prepare yourself to unlock the greatest growth of your life by asking the following questions:

• What’s the strength I lean on most, and where could I lean on it harder?

• Which of my toughest problems could I solve by using more of what I’m already best at, not less?

• Where haven’t I tried this strength yet?

Questions To Derisk Overgrowth

Our derailers are usually our strengths, overgrown. The connector who can't deliver hard feedback. The fast mover who leaves the team behind. Ask the following questions to ensure your growth is not out of sync with sustained performance:

• Where does my strength, unwatched, tip into a liability?

• Who around me goes quiet when my strength is running hot?

• What would “enough” of this strength look like, versus “too much”?

Takeaway

Next time you’re assessing performance, yours or your team’s, resist the pull toward the weed. Those high-potential branches need your attention more than the flaws do.

What’s a strength you’ve stopped noticing, because you’re too busy weeding?

Wild Growth 🌱 Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Read: The Book of Coffee. Great gift for the coffee lover in your life.

2. Office: The Office Amenity That Actually Improves Teamwork. Definitely resonates. Hint: it’s not a barista.

3. Booker Prize: This year’s top novel contenders for the Booker Prize. Great to see Marlon James in there again. Perhaps one of the most resilient writers ever (his first manuscript was rejected over 90 times…)

4. Decor: What to get rid of in your bathroom to make it look more spa-like. I’ve only just recently discovered that many bath and body products expire. And yet I’ve survived this long without appreciating that.

5. Drink: A beautiful and high quality travel mug, from the people who brought you the beautiful temperature controled kettle. The ceramic interior makes a difference.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading Wild Growth when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and let me know what you’d like to read next.

“Help is the sunny side of control.” - Anne Lamott

I shared that quote with a client not long ago, and it resonated with her so much that she wrote it on a Post-it affixed to her monitor. Lamott’s point, from her book Almost Everything, is that helping others is rarely as selfless as it might seem. Even with the best intentions, we’re often quietly and subconsciously steering people toward the outcome, and reputation, we want.

No leadership pattern I coach runs into this trap more than the one I call the Aspen Grove.

Many Trees, One Species

Aspen Groves look like a forest of individual trees. They aren’t. Underneath the soil, they share one root system, one sap network, and identical genes. Resources move instantly to whichever trunk is under stress. And if fire wipes out everything above ground, the roots survive and send up thousands of new shoots. The colony doesn’t die. It regenerates.

That’s the Aspen Grove leader. The antithesis of the lone visionary at the top. They are the architect of a deeply connected team where information, credit, and resources move generously, instead of getting hoarded. When something breaks, a failed product, a brutal reorg, this leader doesn’t rely on a single hero to fix it. They rely on the strength of the collective root system. This is what makes Aspen Grove leaders so effective.

How Aspen Groves Work

Aspen Grove leaders think with the group, not silently outside of it. Ideas build through shared conversation, not solo insight. This contrasts with the Baobab leader we’ve previously explored. Under pressure, their instinct is to protect the team, which is often motivated by care and protection.

It can also become a liability. I saw this recently with a client, Sonal (name changed to protect privacy), a brilliant, well-liked leader at a scaled tech company. She came to me, exhausted, after weeks of restructuring her team and conducting required layoffs. She’d absorbed everyone’s fear and frustration for weeks, staying “strong” by going numb. She’d started disengaging from the very people she cared most about protecting.

That’s the Aspen Grove overgrowth risk: care becomes conflict avoidance. Empathy becomes absorbing everyone else’s emotions as your own. The desire for harmony becomes an inability to make the call and move on.

Soil Fit For Aspen Groves

The best soil for an Aspen Grove:

• Your mandate is to build or rebuild team culture

• Building trust is measurably tied to performance

• Your organization rewards collective intelligence, and collaboration

The worst soil for an Aspen Grove:

• Your organization demands fast, autonomous decisions with limited input.

• Consensus building gets read as indecision. Competition is encouraged.

• Unpopular calls need to happen often, without delay

Three Questions To Ask An Aspen Grove Leader

1. What decision are you currently delaying because of how it might land with your team?

2. Where has your investment in team harmony become a constraint on the team’s progress?

3. What would you decide differently if preserving the relationship weren’t part of the equation?

Summary

After spending time together exploring her current state and her goals, Sonal recognized that her greatest strengths were getting in her way. She was over-relying on her desire to protect her team, when what they needed was more real talk and space from her.

Her realization didn’t come from working harder. It came from asking what it meant to lead a team well when she couldn’t control the outcome. Her energy came back once she let herself say the hard things, directly and with care, instead of protecting people from them.

If you lead like an Aspen, your strength was never the ability to do it alone. It’s the root system you’ve built underneath.

Where are you tapping into your best strengths to move forward, during tough times?

Where might you be overgrowing your strengths, and need to rein in your need for control?

Wild Growth 🌱 Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Read: Spain won the World Cup but it seems employers lost $17B in productivity (!?). $12B of that impact was in the US. Perhaps starting games at 3pm EST wasn’t the best idea?

2. Ouch: How sore is too sore after a workout? Hint: you’re probably fine.

3. World Cup: The best photos from the World Cup. What a beautiful game.

4. Fun: Write any word with images from nature. Life is more fun, spelled with flamingos and palm tree fronds.

5. Chop: How good are you at detecting AI faces? I’m pretty bad at it.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading Wild Growth when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and let me know what you’d like to read next.

When I was working at an e-commerce startup in Beirut, I often needed our Dubai-based CEO to make decisions for the local business. I remember when I was working to launch our affiliate program. I had shared a proposal with a timeline. I outlined the costs, benefits, risks, and opportunities. I had prospective partners lined up and waiting for my response. Naturally, I expected a go / no go decision in the room, or at most in 72 hours. I remember how frustrated I was when somehow we were three weeks into a decision that I felt should take three days at most. Prospective partners were getting impatient. Our team was getting nervous. My CEO looked, from the outside, like a leader who couldn’t pull the trigger.

He wasn’t stuck. He just went quiet, going deep, running the problem from every angle before he could trust his own conclusion. It had worked at every company he’d built. It was working now, too. It just didn’t look like it was working to me. Because I prioritized speed, and he prioritized depth.

Nothing was wrong with either of us. There was minimal cost to the additional weeks of time. And there would have been a much higher cost of reversing the decision. He was a deep-rooted tree, and I was expecting him to grow like a nimble one.

My experience with him highlights a paradox I’ve been noticing for years. And I finally have a name for it that isn’t just a feeling. So I’m renaming this newsletter, to represent the mission I’m on: to enable leaders and teams to unlock their greatest natural talents, instead of bending their top performers to act like different species.

You’re Not Broken. You’re In The Wrong Soil

Leadership struggles are so often attributed to behavioral deficits or surpluses. Almost every leader I coach has received a similar version of behavioral feedback in every performance review, in every year of their career (and often at school and home). As they grow, the feedback often softens, evolves, and lessens with adaptation and masking. But there is usually a root pattern that surfaces again and again.

As leaders, we often then berate ourselves: “If I could only address this behavioral feedback and become less aggressive / more aggressive / more collaborative / more independent / less flexible / more flexible / communicate more / communicate less etc. etc. I would become the ultimate leader”. As if we are constantly moving the puzzle pieces to find our inner Steve Jobs, Satya Nadella, Indra Nooyi etc. Just one more piece, and I’ll get there!

Minding The Gaps

The list of what to change keeps growing as the bar rises, and is usually unchanging for most leaders. You have natural strengths where your branches grow tallest, and natural gaps where you are less likely to shine brightest. And yet every leader I know is so quick to focus on the gaps. In all of my performance reviews, you could have given me two solid pages of glowing positive performance feedback. And two sentences of constructive feedback. I, like so many I’ve coached, would focus immediately on those two sentences, as if the two pages didn’t exist. And work tirelessly to address them.

But after years as a leader, and coaching leaders, I’ve noticed that leadership struggles are most often a habitat problem, not a performance problem. You’re not failing. You’re planted in soil where your leadership species can’t thrive to its full potential. That’s not to say that every leader doesn’t have room to improve, and address constructive feedback. But that they all too often spend precious time and energy on their gaps, without asking whether they are in conditions where they can unlock their full potential.

From The Wake Up To Wild Growth

The most effective leaders who thrive in this turbulent era will not be those who address the most gaps. They will be those who unleash their greatest strengths, and do the same for others. The Wild Growth framework champions the need for leaders who cultivate teams that include all types of talent and thinkers. Those who process fast and hard, with others. And those who retreat into their inner sanctum, emerging with deep insights. Team members who thrive in stormy skies. And those who yearn for calm systems thinking. Leading with a one-size-fits-all mold, where every team member needs to grow like one species will yield fewer breakthroughs, a higher risk of groupthink, and pest infestation in your forest.

Over the next few months, I’ll be walking through seven growth patterns, species of tree, that describe how different leaders actually process, activate, and grow. Today, we unpack the Baobab.

Species #1: The Baobab

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” — Lao Tzu

Baobabs have a typical lifespan of 2000 years or more. That’s about 20 times longer than an average tree. Their long life is due to their incredibly resilient nature: the ability to store gallons of water to withstand droughts, the pest and fire-resistant bark, and their incredible ability to regenerate and heal wounds.

They are not the fastest movers. A Bamboo tree can grow four times more in a single hour than a Baobab can grow in an entire year (4cm vs. 0.8cm). But the Baobab is continuously processing information, and is often alone when doing so.

Ask a Baobab leader, like my Dubai-based CEO, a hard question and you’ll get silence before a firm answer. Sometimes minutes, sometimes days, depending on what you ask. That silence isn’t avoidance or indecision. It’s analysis. A Baobab needs to reach technical truth before they’ll commit to a direction out loud, and once they commit, it’s real. It holds.

Baobabs tend to thrive in senior leadership roles that demand precision and high stakes decision-making. They are often the deepest thinkers, but can be viewed as slower to jump in the deep-end.

Signs you might have a Baobab species leadership pattern:

• You’ve been called “hard to read” by people who mistake your processing for aloofness

• You’d rather be confident in your thinking in a week, than fast and scrappy today

• You feel a genuine, physical resistance to committing to a position you haven’t fully tested

• Fast-moving rooms drain you. Not because you can’t keep up, but because you’re being asked to skip details you find important.

Wrong soil for a Baobab: a culture that rewards the fastest answer in the room. A manager who reads silence as disengagement. A team that needs constant real-time narration of your thinking and achievements.

Right soil for a Baobab: an environment that gives you room to go quiet, and trusts what comes out the other side. A team that’s learned to ask “when do we need to decide by” instead of “why haven’t we decided yet.”

The overextension to watch for: analysis paralysis, especially in ambiguous situations. Requiring 100% certainty before you’ll let the forest move. The same depth that makes your calls durable can also become a bottleneck if the environment doesn’t give you a deadline to work against.

If you’ve spent your career being told to “just decide now” or “let’s talk it through live to move forward” when what you actually needed was room to think, you’re not broken. You’re a Baobab, and you need the right soil to unlock your best years.

More species coming over the next few weeks. If you want to find out where you land across all seven, the Wild Growth assessment is live now at anbara.com/assessment.

What’s the last decision you were told to make faster than it deserved?

Wild Growth 🌱 Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Read: Happy 250 years America! Some fun facts about July 4th: did you know John Adams believed firmly we should celebrate on July 2nd?

2. Jump: The growing movement of retirees learning parkour in Singapore. Hats off to you brave nimble elders!

3. World Cup: We’re at 8 teams left in the tournament. Loved how many people were watching the England-Mexico game at 3am in the UK. Sad to see the US out after a great run. The World Cup is special. And my Oura ring is detecting elevated stress every time I watch a game.

4. Woah: Nearly 50% of Americans under 30 now live with their parents. I remember how rare that was when I was in my 20s. What will this stat look like in 20 years?

5. Chop: So you want a big-ass cutting board? Read this from before you buy [another] one.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading The Wake Up when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and let me know what you’d like to read next.

- Enzo, a Director at Google who fantasized about life after tech leadership

I grew up in an impatient household. I was taught that waiting in line was for people who didn’t know how to get ahead. I have many memories of seeing my father weave and bob at the airport to find a person he could talk to, befriend, and coax to get us special treatment. And then beam with pride when we were able to skip the line (often just to wait somewhere else later). Whether it was at the airport, on the road, or in the shops, It never seemed to be about getting to our destination faster. It was the act of refusal to accept imposed stillness. It wasn’t until my adulthood that I realized the impact of this modeling on me, and those around me.

On a recent trip to Kauai, we were picking up our rental car from the airport. Our flight landed around 8pm local time, and we were jet lagged. My mindset defaulted to impatience mode. I was rushing us to get on the shuttle, rushing to pick up the car as quickly as possible so we could make the 30 minute drive to the hotel. Rushing to relax. Once we got off the shuttle and made it to the rental car office, my heart sank. There was a long line of travelers and only one clerk. I fumbled with my phone, looking for ways to expedite our exit on the rental company’s website.

In my frantic fever, I was interrupted by my husband taking my gaze with his. “We’re in Hawaii. Breathe.” he said. I immediately unclenched my jaw and lowered my shoulders. What was I in such a rush for? We were on a beautiful island, together as a family. I had nowhere to be but here. My nature didn’t change, simply because my scenery did. And scenery, it turns out, is not the same thing as your soil.

While a week in Hawaii might calm your nervous system.12 months working on a team with a culture that doesn’t serve your unique species will not, no matter how many deep breaths you take. If you are an Oak who craves stable, consistent soil to deliver strong results, and you are planted in a rocky, waterlogged wetland, you will struggle to grow tall. Or if you are a Mangrove who craves processing insights with your team and high stress situations, but you find yourself working as a freelance consultant with few people to turn to to brainstorm, you are less likely to thrive.

Before you can figure out how to maximize your growth potential, you must first identify if you are in the right soil for your species. I wrote a longer post on this topic that will give you a full set of inquiry questions to understand both your species, and your soil. The quick fire questions to ask yourself are:

• Does this work environment let me use my core strengths daily?

• Does it give me energy or take it?

• Are my natural tendencies rewarded or punished?

• Am I learning and growing in directions I care about?

• Do I respect the people being promoted?

If the answer to 3+ of these questions is “no”, you are in the wrong soil. Not the wrong company. Not the wrong industry. The wrong soil for your species. And a beach vacation will not magically fix that for you.

You can shift to soil nearby (e.g. a new role or team), shift to soil further away (a new company, industry, or both), or build a temporary greenhouse as a stopgap (e.g. do what you can to shift your daily calendar and work style). Whichever you choose to pursue, make sure you know what soil is best for your species. Because no matter where we go, we are still there.

Are you changing your scenery, in an attempt to change your soil?

The Wake Up Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Fun: Map the physical story lines in your favorite books in this cool web app.

2. Listen: Who are you, really? Hidden Brain explores the pursuit of self-discovery and why it’s so hard.

3. Film: Google invests $75M to power AI filmmaking with A24. Excited to see the results.

4. Cook: How to butter corn-on-the-cob. Just in time for 4th of July; I’m going to try the slice of bread method!

5. Time: How Americans spend their time and how it’s shifted in the last 100 years. Interesting graphic.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading The Wake Up when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and let me know what you’d like to read next.

“I’m doing well at work. My team is delivering and thriving. I just don’t care about my job anymore. I’m there for the paycheck and I don’t like that.”

This was how a senior PM leader, Devan (name changed to protect privacy), at a scaled tech company opened our coaching discovery call He was receiving positive performance feedback at work. His team was delivering well, and his reports were developing in their careers. Like everyone, he was very busy and working long hours. But he just wasn’t feeling connected to the work like he used to. He didn’t know why, and he wanted help to figure it out.

The more we explored his situation together, it was clear that nobody else really noticed it. But he felt it. He’d stopped having as many opinions in leadership meetings. He stopped pushing back when he thought a decision was wrong. He’d gone quiet in a way that looked like steady and calm leadership to his team.

It wasn’t steadiness. It was the early stages of something I’ve seen in almost every leader who stays too long in the wrong soil. His leaves had started to rust.

Leaves Are A Canary

In a forest, a tree under stress doesn’t wither immediately. In fact, in can take decades for subtle problems to impact the tree roots, and trigger fatal withering. When an issue arises, the tree redirects energy from growth to survival. Leaves often start to change first by curling, rusting, and thinning out. Well before the roots are in real trouble.

Leaders experience the same pattern.

The signs don’t present as problems initially. They show up subtly. You stop volunteering for things you’d normally be interested in. You start editing yourself in rooms where you used to speak freely. You notice you’re doing the job on autopilot. Your system is telling you something is off, even when you can’t name what it is.

Most high-performing leaders are trained to override signals like these. Push through pain. Stay professional. You don’t want to be the squeaky wheel or be seen as “the difficult one”. Especially in an environment where leadership roles are being flattened. So the quiet adaptation continues, until one day you realize you’ve been operating at half capacity for longer than you’d like to admit.

What Rusty Leaves Look Like

These are the signals to watch for most carefully. They’re not diagnostic criteria. They’re early warnings that something more severe is brewing under the surface:

#1: Your curiosity has disappeared

The questions that used to energize you feel like obligations to answer. You’re addressing them, but you’re not interested in them. Curiosity is often the first thing to go.

#2: You’ve stopped disagreeing

Previously, you used to strategize how to push back effectively when needed. But now, you subconsciously calculate that it’s never worth it. You’ve learnt that your perspective doesn’t land here, so you’ve stopped offering it.

#3: You’re exhausted by everyday events

Tiredness after deep work is expected. Tiredness after a meeting where nothing was decided, a conversation that went nowhere, a process that didn’t need to exist etc. is depletion. Your energy is going out and not coming back.

#4: You’ve started making excuses to yourself

You find yourself justifying why you’re staying. Counting down to something. Rehearsing the reasons it’s not so bad. When the internal monologue shifts from “I want to be here” to “It’s not that bad and it’s a paycheck”, the roots are already under stress.

#5: You notice a feedback gap

Your manager says you’re doing great. You feel like you’re disappearing. Both things can be true at once. External performance is easier to sustain than internal spark. It masks the problem from everyone, including yourself, until it can’t anymore.

Season vs. Soil

Not every difficult period means you’re in the wrong place. Some seasons are simply more taxing. If you’re going through a major strategy pivot, a big deal negotiation, or a personal change, that can cause significant leaf damage. The question is whether the difficulty is temporary or structural. A hard season has a curve that you can see the other side of. And you’re still yourself during it, just under pressure.

The wrong soil feels different. It doesn’t shift when the project ends. You feel it in the mundane moments; the Tuesday afternoon meeting that drains you relentlessly, the work that should be easy but somehow isn’t. .

The question to ask yourself to know the difference of season vs. soil: when was the last time I felt like myself at work? If the answer is months ago, that’s a sign that you are in the wrong soil. Not the wrong season.

Treating Your Leaves Like A Scientist

Devan noticed several of the rusty leaf signals. And he initially wondered if he was failing at his job. He consistently received feedback that he was one of the most high performing SWE-turned-leaders on his team. If it wasn’t his performance, what was it? He was struggling because he was experiencing a mismatch in his innate style and his environment.

He is someone who did his best work operating in bursts: high pressure, high urgency, private processing time, and direct communication when needed. His current role required him to process information with others (often in large meetings), to collaborate over a period of months before a launch, and to make decisions via consensus. His habitat wasn’t unleashing his natural strengths.

When he understood that, something shifted. He stopped interpreting the signals as evidence of his own failure and started using them as information. Most leaders don’t have a map for diagnosing their environment. They’ve been given every tool to improve their own performance. But almost none for how to know if you’re in the right conditions unleash that performance.

He took the approach that served him well throughout his life: he started experimenting. With both tactical changes he could make (e.g. the way he prioritized his time and energy on his calendar, meeting and delegation structure, 1:1 document templates etc.) but also with bigger changes (reporting structure, projects he focused on etc.). He realized that by making a few meaningful shifts to invest his energy in the right projects, he was able to operate at speed, and delegate more steady projects to his leads, who were keen for more experience in scaled processes. He started feeling a spring in his step again. His curiosity started growing. And he directed it to the bright spots that brought him energy.

Shedding Damaged Leaves

Damaged leaves don’t require a new environment or a total job change to shed. Certainly not as a first step, and potentially not at all. As a first step, you have to stop overriding the signals, and telling yourself to keep soldiering on.

If you’re feeling any of the leaf rust signals, try using this prompt in your favorite LLM:

“I’m a [role] at a [stage] company. I’ve noticed the following problems in my work life: [include 1-2 things: e.g. I’ve stopped being curious, I’m exhausted by the wrong things]. I don’t want to leave my job. Help me design 2-3 small experiments I could run in the next 30 days to change the conditions around me — not my performance, but the environment I’m working in. Be specific to my role and situation.”

Not all soil problems require transplanting. Some require negotiating for different light, different resources, a different kind of visibility. But some do require a move. You’ll only know the difference if you try experimenting, and see what works or doesn’t. If you still feel rusty leaves a few months after running experiments, that’s a sign you might need a bigger soil shift.

How are your leaves doing? When was the last time you checked on them?

If you’ve been noticing these signals and want to understand them better, the Wild Growth assessment at anbara.com/assessment is a place to start. It maps your growth pattern and the conditions where you’re most likely to thrive. Which makes it easier to diagnose whether what you’re experiencing is wrong soil, or just a hard season.

The Wake Up Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Watch: How did Brazilian football go from super high to super low? Good reminder that past wins aren’t any guarantee of future success (and same with failure).

2. Economics: The best and worst US state economies. Super interesting. Who knew that Louisiana is the biggest exporter state in the US? Not me.

3. Read: Wrestlers match up at libraries to promote literacy. Lucha Libro! What a fun idea.

4. Cook: 15 Strawberry Desserts. That cake is a beautiful way to use up extra strawberries that are on their last legs.

5. Wear: Summer shoes that are comfy, cute, and office-friendly. I’ve loved Rothy’s flats for years, especially that they are machine-washable. Did now know they had kids shoes now!

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading The Wake Up when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and please consider sharing The Wake Up with a friend.

“Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills. You know, like nunchuck skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills.”

- Napoleon, Napoleon Dynamite, 2004

Teenagers have always faced uncertainty about what skills they should be investing in, to help their future selves and relationships. But in 2026, that uncertainty and anxiety about the future seems to be at an all-time high. While many are blaming AI for this, the increase in teen anxiety and depression had been on a sharp rise for years. Research from Zach Rausch and Jonathan Haidt (author of The Anxious Generation) tracking college students and teens found that anxiety rates leaped from roughly 10% in 2010 to over 24% prior in 2023, while depression rates doubled from around 9.7% to 20%. Most researchers associate these trends to the huge rise in screen time, social media use, and subsequent decline in in-person time with social connections.

As with most societal statistics, spending time in-person with teenagers reveals that the reality on the ground is much more nuanced. More young people than ever are aware of how harmful social media is to their mental health, even if limiting their usage is a big challenge. And while AI usage among teens is significantly higher than adults, Common Sense Media research highlights that over 50% of teenagers have little to no trust in the advice or information from AI companions. An 18-year-old I interviewed for my alma mater recently told me that she and a group of her friends had started to keep their phones in grayscale mode (making it far less appealing to scroll and swipe for hours) and spend more in person time together outside.

What Should Young Budding Professionals Prioritize?

With so much uncertainty on the horizon, and the ever-present pull of numbing online content and tools, how should rising graduates think about what relationship-building skills they should be investing in?

I asked a set of current and former business leaders at Google, The Atlantic, Disney, PayJoy, Paramount, Samsung, ServiceNow, and Amazon to share the guidance they would share with teenagers looking to invest in professional relationships. Below are the key themes that emerged.

#1: Know Yourself And Start With Value

While knowing what you bring to the table is a lifelong pursuit, cultivating this skill at a young age is key. Purnima Kochikar, VP of partnerships at Google, invites teenagers to: “[i]dentify what matters to them, what unique value they bring to the table -- and use that as the basis short listing a few people they could add value to. This provides a good starting point for building a relationship.”

Mary Liz McCurdy, SVP of Partnerships at The Atlantic, goes a step further: “Give what you are uniquely good at. Teenagers and young people have a ton of value– they are observant, expressive, fresh eyed (not yet jaded and burned like us :)), have a next-gen perspective– try to cultivate and leverage that authentic POV with someone you are keen to get to know, and offer up that view to that person. Maybe it will resonate and there will be a connection that turns into something real.”

#1: Lead With Curiosity (Beware Of Outsourcing It)

So much of our education system rewards students who have the best answers. This often results in many aspiring young job seekers to focus less on having very good questions. Take the time to be curious.

Raj Ajrawat, Head of Games GTM at Google and author of Dadpreneurial, shares: “The teenagers who become trusted adults are the ones who can ask a real follow-up question. You’ll also notice that the people everyone wants to talk to at a party are the ones who can ask that follow up question and are curious about what the other person is sharing with them, even if you don’t know what they are talking about at all. AI will write the thank-you note. It will not notice that someone seemed deflated in a meeting and check in the next day. That noticing muscle is the entire game.”

Robert Teed, Leadership Coach and former VP at ServiceNow, adds:“Be curious and listen. I tend to like the ‘offer and ask’ approach. The ‘offer’, in this case, is teen’s curiosity. Their ‘ask’ is gaining access to a mentor’s experience and knowledge.”

While asking great questions is highly contextual, here are some evergreen picks teens can pose to a potential mentor they want to learn more about:

• What is your favorite part of your job right now? Least favorite?

• How do you keep learning and growing in your role?

• What has surprised you the most about this industry?

• What is the best / worst advice you received when you were at my stage of career?

#1: Play The Long Game

Jalil Chikhi, Managing Director of partnerships at Google EMEA, puts it clearly: “Listen to learn, connect deeply, built for decades not quarters.” The best relationships are the ones where your face lights up when you see their name pop up on your device. And these often take years to cultivate.

Tim Palmer, SVP of Partnerships at Paramount, and former partnerships leader at Google and Disney, builds on this: “Target building friendships, not just professional relationships. Be intentional, but find a way for it to feel natural. Figure out what you can bring to the relationship, whether that's knowledge, connections, experience, or perspective.”

Raj offers practical guidance on how AI can help the next generation “Build a system to remember. This is the one most adults don’t tell teenagers, and it’s the one I think matters most in an AI-driven future. Your network isn’t your contact list. It’s the texture of what you remember about people. Where they’re trying to go. What they’re worried about. Who they care about. The people who do this well aren’t supernaturally gifted. They have a system, a notebook, a doc, a CRM, whatever, that lets them show up with context every time. AI is going to make this easier than ever. Use it as memory infrastructure, not as a ghostwriter. The relationship still has to come from you….The relationships paying off for me now were started ten years ago with no agenda. That compounding is the whole mechanism.”

It’s Not All Bleak

In a world that is warning us of impending doom and rising uncertainty, approximately every 0.34 seconds, it can feel as if investing in professional relationships is yet another source of stress. A common lament I hear from clients I coach is “I know I need to be networking more, but I’m struggling to push myself to do it.” Networking, a word that inspires dry-heaving for most of us, feels transactional. And it often is.

But the lessons from business leaders in this series highlight that building strong professional relationships can bring us joy, self-discovery, and deeper human connection. Reframe your mindset from making it a chore, to making it a discovery game. Investing in building regular connection habits that lead with curiosity, honesty, and understanding can energize you. And you will be rewarded with compound gains, over the coming years.

If you know a young person who is just getting started in the workforce, consider sharing this series with them and encourage them to try out these suggestions in their next outreach. At best, it might bring them opportunity. And at worst, it will bring them the joy of human connection.

Huge thank you to Raj Ajrawat, Jalil Chikhi, Purnima Kochikar, Mary Liz McCurdy, Jaideep Mirchandani, Tim Palmer, Robert Teed, and anonymous senior leaders for sharing your insights with The Wake Up by Anbara’s Substack’s readers!

The Wake Up Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Wow: A 3D Reconstruction of 1518 Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire (current day, Mexico City, which was built on top of the ruins).

2. Spam: Scammers are abusing an internal Microsoft account to send spam links. Spam is at an all time high. As a small business owner, this is a daily PITA.

3. Eat: The 50 Best Restaurants in North America. Kudos to Canada: 20% of the list is up north.

4. AI: 10 Hacks Every Google Gemini User Should Know. Excited to try scheduled actions for weather clothing recommendations.

5. Clean: Shift, an training data startup, is offering to clean NYC homes for free, to help train cleaning robots. In other news, “free” is a word used a bit too lightly.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading The Wake Up when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and please consider sharing The Wake Up with a friend.

As a kid, I was enamored by Ancient Egypt. I remember attempting to learn hieroglyphics 𓂀𓅃, visiting the British Museum, and reading all about the stories of Egyptian gods. So when I was 13 and my parents shared that we were going on a trip to visit Cairo, and cruise down the Nile, I was thrilled. Beyond the Pyramids and beautiful sarcophagi we saw, my favorite stop was Luxor. Where we learnt about Hatshepsut, the first female pharaoh. I had never heard of her before, and wondered why. The guide told us that after she died, her heir spent decades erasing her name and legacy from history. Defacing temples, destroying statues. Only thousands of years later, did her memory and achievements come to greater light.

Hatshepsut was a prolific and iconoclastic ruler. As the most one of Egypt’s most powerful female pharaohs, she was assigned to co-rule Egypt with her 2-year old stepson, and heir, Thutmose III. She got busy building legitimacy around her own divine narrative. She formed a close relationship with her chief architect, Senenmut, and her trading partners. She commissioned elaborate temples with inscriptions claiming the god Amun himself had proclaimed her pharaoh. She depicted herself in regal male clothing, with a false beard.

While she was busy tending to her own self-image, Thutmose III, who shared the throne with her for over 20 years, was depicted in her monuments in a secondary position. Iconographic analysis of her mortuary temple in Luxor shows she used symbolism to quietly emphasize her dominance over him. She over-invested in self-legitimacy, and under-invested in the one relationship that mattered most. The person closest to her, ultimately erased her from history.

Quiet Relationship Mistakes We Make

Hatshepsut built strong relationships, but not where it mattered most. Her focus on her own image distracted her from tending to her relationship with Thutmose III. In my time coaching senior tech leaders, I’ve noticed that the mistakes that damage relationships most aren't usually dramatic disputes. They're gradual, and quiet. So that when they compound for long enough, they create a silent debt.

I asked a set of current and former business leaders at Google, The Atlantic, Disney, PayJoy, Paramount, Samsung, ServiceNow, and Amazon to share the mistakes they’ve made in relationships and lessons learned. Below are the key themes that emerged.

What’s a mistake you’ve made that damaged a professional relationship, and what did it teach you?

#1: Making It All About Us

Hatshepsut’s temple walls told her story clearly. They didn’t make room for anyone else’s.

In my years of working with leaders, this is the mistake I see most often. It’s the hardest issue to diagnose, because leaders, especially underrepresented leaders, are also told to “own the room”. Know your worth. Tell your story. This pressure can be misinterpreted as an invitation to make it all about you, and nobody else.

Purnima Kochikar, VP of partnerships at Google, learned this at real cost. When a professional relationship went wrong, her instinct was to feel wronged, and to demonize the other person in her mind. The question her mentor asked her cut through everything: “He asked me to walk into the room the next day and ask myself: if it is not about me, what is it about? That simple question allowed me to stop feeling wronged and sorry for myself and empowered me to assess the situation more objectively. Most of the time, people are driven by their own ambitions, fears, and insecurities. You are not the focus of their actions, or their universe.”

Jaideep Mirchandani, SVP at PayJoy and former product leader at Samsung and Google, found a different version of the same trap. His mistake was overcorrection: being too compliant, losing the other person’s respect, then swinging too far in the other direction: “I then tried to offset that by coming across as unreasonable and abrasive. This hurt me in both ways.” Making it about you doesn’t always mean taking up too much space. Sometimes it means abandoning your perspective entirely, and then overclaiming it back.

Once we start making it all about us, we lose sight of the other person entirely.

#2: Confusing Transaction for Connection

Leaders can be responsive, reliable, and completely absent at the same time.

Raj Ajrawat, Head of Games GTM at Google and author of Dadpreneurial, describes this mistake very clearly. Earlier in his career, he prided himself on fast turnarounds. What he missed was the difference between two things that look identical from the outside: “Responsiveness is a transaction. Attentiveness is a relationship. The inbox is the receipt.” The colleagues who actually trusted him weren’t the ones he’d answered fastest. They were the ones he’d noticed most clearly.

Robert Teed, Leadership Coach and former VP at ServiceNow, names a related failure: performative care. Going through the motions of a relationship without the substance beneath it. And one anonymous leader named a related trap: assuming you’re right and sticking to it. “A mistake I’ve made, and see made fairly regularly, is to assume you’re right about something and just blindly sticking to that position. It could be about a recommendation on a decision, an assumption about someone else’s intentions, or many other things. Sometimes it works, particularly if you’re in a position of power, but often it doesn’t and the result is frustration, mistrust, and broken or ineffective relationships.”

Tim Palmer, SVP of Partnerships at Paramount, and former partnerships leader at Google and Disney, adds one more version: being focused only on your own book of business, unable to see the broader context. People remember whether you showed up for the bigger picture, or only for yourself.

Listening to respond is a transaction. Listening to understand is a relationship.

#3: Letting Distance Do the Work

This is the quietest mistake. And often the most expensive. It might look like giving someone space. Like telling yourself you’re too busy to reach out. Like not wanting to make things awkward. So that by the time you notice how much time has passed, the distance has already done its work to damage the relationship.

Jalil Chikhi, Managing Director of partnerships at Google EMEA, learned this at real cost: “I thought misunderstanding could be resolved with time, and no actions. This taught me the importance of addressing issues in the moment.” Tension doesn’t dissolve. It grows. The longer it sits, the more it costs to address.

Mary Liz McCurdy, SVP of Partnerships at The Atlantic, names the mistake of oversharing, when information it isn’t yours to share. It feels like building closeness. Like trust. But it puts both people at risk: “Often, it is not even actionable, just anxiety-provoking. In the long run, that harms relationships more than it helps.” Proximity isn’t the same as trust. Mistaking one for the other is its own kind of distance.

Every tension left unaddressed, every boundary quietly crossed, every check-in deferred, you are making a decision to slowly chip away at a relationship. Without noticing.

Relationships That Erode Can Be Rebuilt

Mistakes in relationships are rarely fatal. The temples Hatshepsut built are still standing. In the moment, mistakes are easy to ignore. But just like how they compound in silence, they can be rebuilt with acts of genuine care.

Relationships damaged by these mistakes often grow back from deeper roots. Some of the most durable ones I’ve seen were built on the other side of a hard conversation, or a decision to stop letting distance do the work.

Which relationship in your professional life right now are you letting erode? Not through a dramatic rupture, but through quiet distance or unaddressed tension?

If your favorite LLM is connected to your inbox, calendar etc., try this prompt to help:

"Review my last 6 months of communications. Which professional relationships have gone quietest: fewest touchpoints, no agenda-free interactions, unresolved threads? Give me a list of 5 names of people with whom I may be letting my relationships erode."

You still have time to turn it around and rebuild.

Next week in Part 3: find out what the best relationship builders would tell someone just starting out.

Huge thank you to Raj Ajrawat, Jalil Chikhi, Purnima Kochikar, Mary Liz McCurdy, Jaideep Mirchandani, Tim Palmer, Robert Teed, and an anonymous senior leader for sharing your insights with The Wake Up by Anbara’s Substack’s readers!

The Wake Up Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Bike: Follow 2.5 month bike ride across America, and her interviews along the 4,200 mile journey.

2. Drive: Get your hands on a new Ferrari Luce EV for a mere $640K, just in time for summer roadtrips! Shares fell 4% after announcement. I don’t think Enzo would have approved of that design.

3. Books: Summer Beach Read season is here!

4. Read: Teen summer jobs in the US are at their lowest in decades. On the plus side, lifeguarding jobs are up 78%.

5. Pack: How to pack a carryon for 10 days, from

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading The Wake Up when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and please consider sharing The Wake Up with a friend.

“It is the time that you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Earlier this month, the wonderful Katherine Westgate invited me to speak on a panel for New York City’s Dalton School’s faculty on the topic of GenAI in education. It was a breath of fresh air to hear diverse perspectives on the role of AI, different from what I hear in Silicon Valley. You could feel the emotion of the moment we’re in: AI will damage kids brains. Upend the entry level job market. Disrupt learning in fundamental ways. But there was also feedback that this moment brings opportunity for the next generation. Opportunity to explore what makes us uniquely human. And to invest in skills we will need in even greater abundance in the years ahead.

Uniquely Human: Relationships

One skill that came up, and is very personal to me, was building and cultivating relationships. Perhaps the most fundamental skill that has enabled human survival and growth. In the AI and social media era, we’re already seeing this skill diminish. A small business owner told me the other day that she finds many younger customers are far more distracted (looking at their phones ofc), and reluctant conversationalists than they used to be. This shift is mirrored in the workplace: a 2024 Forbes Advisor survey found that 53% of Gen Z professionals report a decline in their face-to-face communication skills. A few minutes on LinkedIn reading cold outreach messages highlights just how much is now automated and impersonal.

There’s something about writing about relationship building that itself feels impersonal. Shouldn’t relationships be organic? If we need to define and measure whether we are “following the steps”, doesn’t that make them transactional? However, just because something is organic doesn’t mean it’s not deliberate, hard work. Saint Exupéry talks about “wasted” time intentionally. If it feels productive, it is likely skin deep.

So how do we know if we’re investing in the skills to build strong relationships?

The Invisible, High Bar We Hold Ourselves To

I remember when I was about 2 years into working on partnerships at Google, my dream job, I got an email from the CEO of the startup I used to work at. He was checking in on how I was doing. I was so happy to hear from him. I had thought about reaching out to him many times, but I felt like I had nothing meaningful to share with him. We agreed to meet up for lunch, I shared how much positive impact our time working together had on me. How he helped me communicate more clearly, and get right to the heart of a topic. I also shared how much I was learning at Google. How we sourced user feedback, made decisions, worked across the globe etc. He shared that he was surprised that I didn’t reach out to him earlier. I told him I didn’t feel like it would have been worth his time. He shared: “It’s not for you to decide what’s worth my time. Don’t undervalue yourself.” That hit me hard. And made me realize what a high, fictional bar, I had been holding myself to when it came to reconnecting with professional relationships. Especially with those who were senior to me. I had been making assumptions that they didn’t want to hear from me. When here was a former manager, who was eager to hear more about what was going on in my life.

What The Best Do Differently

Professional relationships, much like romantic ones, are complex. And they take time to build. There is no “quick 10 step guide”. Having worked in partnerships for 15+ years, and now as an executive coach, I’ve had a front row to some of the most effective relationship builders in the world. I asked for their insights on how they do it. In this 3-part series, I’ll share their observations, including what they would recommend to the next generation (Part 3).

Today, we’ll start with the single most important lesson on relationship building from current and former business leaders at Google, The Atlantic, Disney, PayJoy, Paramount, Samsung, ServiceNow, and Amazon.

What’s the single most important lesson you learnt about building professional relationships?

#1: Know What You Bring To The Table

The fictional bar I held myself to with my former CEO wasn’t unique to me. Purnima Kochikar, VP of partnerships at Google, learned this lesson early in her career: “Know your audience: connect as humans by identifying what truly drives the other person and how you can fuel their success. This does not mean you give up on your core values or goals. It means you find a path towards your goals by first understanding and addressing theirs. And in cases, where there is value mismatch, you find others who are more aligned.”

Robert Teed, Leadership Coach and former VP at ServiceNow, put it clearly: “Care about the person, not the persona.” We often restrict our view of a professional relationship to the version of them that shows up in a meeting. Or their title / role. And we fail to see and hear the full version of them as a human. That distinction sounds simple. But it’s hard to put into practice. And makes a world of difference; we all want to be seen.

Jaideep Mirchandani, SVP at PayJoy and former product leader at Samsung and Google, found out that knowing yourself also means knowing when to push back. “Strong relationships require a critical mass of intensive work and difficult disagreements.. In one important instance, I was too compliant and did not push back adequately, which made the other side lose respect for me.” Being present in a relationship isn’t the same as being agreeable all the time. In fact, the people who build the most durable professional relationships bring their full perspective, including the inconvenient parts.

Before your next professional outreach, ask yourself:

• What do I actually bring to this relationship?

• What am I assuming about what the other person wants? Have I ever tested that assumption?

• Where am I making myself smaller than I need to be?

#2: Show Up Before You Need Something. Stay When Things Get Hard.

Tim Palmer, SVP of Partnerships at Paramount, and former partnerships leader at Google and Disney, is direct about this: “if you’re building professional relationships just for business outcomes, you might be in the wrong role.” The no-agenda meeting, the coffee with no ask, the check-in with no agenda aren’t nice-to-have. They represent the valuable “wasted” time Saint Exupéry describes.

And the value of “wasted” time compounds more than we know. Raj Ajrawat, Head of Games GTM at Google and author of , shares that relationships that are paying off years later, started with no agenda and no expectation: “The long game beats the short game, and almost everyone underestimates how long the long game is. The relationships paying off for me now were started ten years ago with no agenda. That compounding is the whole mechanism.”

Showing up consistently also means showing up when things get uncomfortable. Jalil Chikhi, Managing Director of partnerships at Google EMEA, learned this at cost: “I thought misunderstanding could be resolved with time with no actions. This taught me the importance of addressing issues in the moment.” Distance doesn’t resolve itself. Unaddressed tension compounds quietly, and by the time it surfaces, the relationship has already paid the price.

Find out how effectively are you showing up at the right times by asking yourself:

• List the top 5 people who have had the biggest impact on your professional life. When was the last time you reached out them with no business agenda?

• When was the last time you had an uncomfortable conversation with a professional relationship (not a manager or report)?

#3: Listen to Understand. Not To Respond.

This is where most of us fall short. One anonymous leader named the trap precisely: “A mistake I’ve made is to assume you’re right about something and just blindly sticking to that position. Sometimes it works, particularly if you’re in a position of power, but often it doesn’t and the result is frustration, mistrust, and broken relationships. The opposite of this is to listen. Ask questions. Seek to understand where the other person is coming from. And do that first.”

Mary Liz McCurdy, SVP of Partnerships at The Atlantic, adds that real attention extends beyond the conversation you’re in: “How your counterparts treat other people, or handle sensitive information when they aren’t in the room, is a proxy for how they’ll treat you.” What people do when nothing meaningful is at stake tells you everything.

Raj named the potential mistake of confusing activity with attention: “Responsiveness is a transaction. Attentiveness is a relationship. The inbox is the receipt.”

Are you listening to respond or to understand? Ask yourself the following to find out:

• List the last 3 people you had a meaningful professional interaction with, outside of your immediate teammates. Journal what you know about their values, their families (kids names, where they grew up etc.), their favorite weekend pasttimes etc. If you’re struggling deeply with this, you are likely not listening clearly enough.

• When was the last time you learnt new information about the life or values of a professional relationship you’ve had for more than 5 years? If you don’t know, set a goal to find out new information this month.

Find The Joy In Relationships

Tim highlights that these relationships should feel like the primary reward of work, not a cost: “Building professional relationships can make your work fun and interesting. The positive business outcomes resulting from deep relationships come as a side benefit of that.”

I want you to think of a former boss, colleague, or professional relationship that you value. Someone with whom you haven’t interacted in the past 3 years, but from whom you learnt something that stuck with you. Take a few minutes to do the following:

• Send them a message letting them know what lesson they taught you.

• Thank them for that gift. No agenda. No follow up needed.

Not only will you make their day, you will make yours. If a meet up or outcome comes of it, that’s all well and good. But that’s not your goal. Your goal is to show the rose that time wasted on it, is what makes it important 🌹.

Next week in Part 2, we’ll explore one of the richest teachers in professional relationships: mistakes made.

Huge thank you to Raj Ajrawat, Jalil Chikhi, Purnima Kochikar, Mary Liz McCurdy, Jaideep Mirchandani, Tim Palmer, Robert Teed, and an anonymous senior leader for sharing your insights with ’s readers!

The Wake Up Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Listen: Has The New York Times Become a Games Company? Great listen from Freakonomics. Made me think of games differently.

2. Bond: Auditions have begun for the next James Bond. My money is on a new face & name.

3. Garden: There are real health benefits to tending your wild garden. I am trying to get better at keeping my plants alive, with mixed results.

4. Read: The mental health benefits of cleaning. “We sweep dust to remove worldly desires. We scrub dirt to free ourselves of attachments.” Wise words from a monk in Kyoto. Speaking of worldly desires ⬇️

5. Pack: Traveling this summer? Even a 24-hour trip feels more special with berry-patterned packing cubes.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading The Wake Up when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and please consider sharing The Wake Up with a friend.

The Dopamine Paradox

He’s not alone. Across a decade of coaching senior tech leaders, this is one of the most consistent struggles I hear. The ability to focus in deep thought, a core expectation of leadership, is under siege. And, like most challenges in tech right now, people are blaming AI. But this struggle has been worsening for decades: AI is not the source.

Tech attracts expansive thinkers. People who process more, feel more, notice more. Who make connections others miss. Research suggests up to 40% of people in high-intensity tech roles carry neurodivergent traits. These are people who often experience lower baseline dopamine, heightened amygdala “fight or flight” responses, and stronger sensitivity to sensory overload. The people most wired to build the greenhouse of productivity growth, are also the most wired to be overwhelmed by its heat and light.

The notifications, feeds, and re-engagement loops built to fuel that growth keep the light on at full intensity, all day. The species most sensitive to overstimulation are the ones inside it. The industry didn’t design a hostile environment. Yet it ignored that not every species thrives under the same conditions.

It’s Not You. It’s Not AI. It’s Your Soil.

If you’re a Baobab, interruption during a state of flow isn’t an inconvenience. It’s an existential threat to your output and wellbeing. If you’re a Willow, every ping risks shifting your worldview in infinite directions.

Take the Wild Growth assessment to identify your species. Then try one of these this week:

• For immediate relief: Step outside for 15 minutes before your next meeting. No phone. Let your nervous system reset before the greenhouse turns the light back on.

• For structural change: Bring your species result to your favorite LLM and ask: “Given this growth pattern, design me a daily schedule that protects my deep work and works with my natural rhythms, not against them.”

If you’re feeling burnt out and frustrated, and finding yourself pointing fingers at AI, the state of politics, the latest project at work etc., take a pause. Ask yourself: How often am I being interrupted during the day? How much time am I spending online? If you notice that it’s significant, know that the problem is not you or the content you are consuming. You might simply be more prone to burning out in the greenhouse.

How do you cool down when you feel the heat and sunlight crisping your leaves? Let me know in the comments.

The Wake Up Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Read: How Investments Have Shifted By Industry over the past 75 years in the US. Electric power seems to never go out of style.

2. Fun: Magnified Sand From Across The World’s Beaches. There are wonderful humans out there who collect sand and magnify it for our viewing pleasure.

3. Listen: What Makes Judy Faulkner Run? You might never have heard of Epic Systems (not to be confused with the maker of Fortnite). Hear from the founder and CEO of the largest private software company.

4. Read: The history of poppies on Memorial Day in the US / Remembrance Day in the UK.

5. Fitness: What is Hyrox and why is it becoming so popular? If you missed the Crossfit era, it’s not too late to torture yourself for kicks.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading The Wake Up when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and please consider sharing The Wake Up with a friend.

Most of the tech leaders I coach grew their careers during a time of perceived abundance. Faster promotions. Complex projects and new roles to stretch into. Big equity grants for the highest performers. I remember this time well. While supply for interesting jobs meant that high-performers were often tapped to join other teams or companies, managers felt like they had more tools in their shed to support high-performers.

Over the last few years, the tides have continued to shift to a time of perceived scarcity. Promotions have slowed, especially for senior employees. Many teams are dealing with a dearth of new projects and roles, coupled with rapid over-hiring during Covid. Instead of hiring for new roles, leaders are expected to outsource more work to agents. Financial incentives are slowing, to allow for spending on the massive infrastructural costs of AI. New jobs are scarce. High-performers are staying in teams and roles for longer, and feeling “stuck".

Leaders I coach are all asking a similar question: “How do I keep my best people when I can’t give them what I used to?” Those same leaders are asking something parallel about their own careers: “How do I keep growing, when roles and opportunities are scarce, especially at my level?”

The Career Growth Shift

The old model of career growth for high-performers was focused almost entirely on externally visible branch growth. Whether it was your role changing, job promotion, or new opportunities, growth was clear and visible. Not just to others, but also to the individual. You could see yourself growing. Which felt good. It was also easier for leaders to point to specific visible growth markers, and call it a “growth culture”.

But conditions have changed. 127K tech workers were laid off in 2025 and that is only accelerating in 2026 so far. Job postings in tech are down 36% from 2020 levels. Promotion slots are also compressing at most companies, and compensation bumps are harder to approve for managers. For some of the highest performers, AI companies are offering significantly higher compensation in an attempt to secure talent.

Despite this reality, a DICE survey found that 74% of tech workers want to leave their roles, but only 47% think they’ll find something better. Which is resulting in a high portion of your team feeling like they are itching for a change, but also feeling stagnated.

Confusing Wrong Soil With Wrong Person

Tech workers I speak with, who identify in that 74%, are not lazy. Nor are they disloyal to their teams. They still work hard and deliver impact. But they often don’t feel like they are in conditions that support their growth. Unfortunately, many managers (who are still focused on branch growth) label these workers as “checked out”, or misdirect them to “just work harder”. As if additional effort will compensate them for the lack of additional sunlight / water they are promised.

As a leader, you might notice some of your team members are more naturally adaptable to low water / sunlight conditions. These are most often the early adopters of new tech, the self-starters, and “forgiveness, not permission seekers” who might take more initiative, even if it results in a period of chaos. You can learn more about species types and take an assessment here.

Whatever their growth pattern, your high performers don’t have a motivation problem right now. They are eager to grow. They are simply struggling in soil that rewards branch growth, when they need soil that values root growth as well.

Branch vs. Root Growth Culture

Consider two kinds of growing forest ecosystems: those that focus on growing branches, and those that focus on growing roots.

Branch growth optimizes for acceleration:

• Everyone competing for access to sunlight

• The faster leaves can grow tall, the more chance they survive

• Abundant water is critical to survival

• Structurally, trees are fragile, and can become overcrowded

Root growth optimizes for retention:

• Growth is mostly happening underground

• Trees that interconnect their roots survive longer

• Growth can be lateral, and is not always in one direction

• Structurally, trees are more stable, with no wasted inch of soil. Weeds don’t last.

How To Build a Root Growth Culture

To build a Root Growth Culture, that rewards resilient growth, under tough conditions, you need to think differently about incentives. Both as a manager, and an individual.

For Managers, you need to shift how you think about rewarding your high performers. Instead of relying solely on promotions, raises, and new roles, focus on:

• Developmental conversations outside of review season. For you and your team. They should focus not just on outcomes (“I want to be a manager”) but on skills (“I will practice becoming a better coach with x measure of success”).

• Telling someone what you see in them before they can name it themselves.

• High performers used as teachers, not just producers. Pass them the mic.

• Recognize improvements in both skills and impact vs. only recognizing impact.

For Individuals, you need to think about your personal growth under the surface, vs. only recognize visible markers. Instead of focusing on job changes and promotions only in your career conversations with your manager, focus more on answering these questions:

• What am I getting better at? Why does that matter to me?

• What do I want to get better at, but I’m not doing it yet? What can I do differently to invest in that?

• Do I feel recognized by my manager and the broader team? Why / why not?

• If the answer to the above questions is “nothing” / “no”, then you are likely in the wrong soil (see Next Steps).

Employees in cultures that reward getting better at their craft are 30% less likely to leave. That is a stat you can influence deeply as a leader.

Next Steps

• For Leaders: Who on your team is answering “nothing / no” to the individual questions above? What would it cost you to help them shift their answers and help them find growth on your team, without a promotion or a pay rise? If you don’t know their answers, you have not yet cultivated a Root Growth Culture.

• For Individuals: If the opportunity to grow new branches disappeared on your team, what’s left? If the honest answer is “nothing”, the soil is telling you something. If the answer is “the skills I’m building, the people, the recognition etc.”, you might be in better ground than you think.

Are you operating in a branch culture or a root culture? What are you doing to grow your roots? Let me know in the comments.

The Wake Up Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Read: Why some of the best athletes in the world pretend to be someone else. Not for too long, I hope.

2. AI: Usage By US State, By Industry. Spoiler alert: it’s mostly below 20% overall.

3. Ugh: Netflix is launching a vertical video feed. Is any platform not competing for our attention at this point?

4. Listen: I’ve been enjoying the audiobook version of Famesick by Lena Dunham. She’s a great writer with a sad story.

5. Buy: This kettle has been a game changer. Forces you to slow down and enjoy the right temperature.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading The Wake Up when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and please consider sharing The Wake Up with a friend.

I used to be my dad's navigator when I was a kid, as I had a natural sense of direction. Youngest in the car, reading the A-Z, calling the turns. That instinct has all but disappeared.

Mapping technology is doing what technology has always done. Made some component of human behavior obsolete, to make space for something else. Researchers tracking 50 regular drivers found that greater GPS use led to a measurable decline in spatial memory over time. Participants didn’t even notice.

We never do. The decline in one behavior is met with a new growth in another. What behavior shift is happening right now, that we are not seeing?

The Clearing

Every major shift in human technology has followed the same arc. A new tool offloads a behavior or norm. We gain something. We lose something. And the answer to the question of “what makes us distinctly human?” morphs over time.

Before clocks, humans lived to our circadian rhythms. Sunlight, seasons, body temperatures, warm around a communal fire etc.. These were the key triggers for how we planned our time and energy. Over the past century, especially with electric lighting, researchers have found that the natural connection between our rest/activity cycles and environmental light/dark has degraded. We gained productivity. We lost our connection to the earth’s rhythm.

For centuries, oral storytelling was the primary method for humans to share knowledge. Individuals invested deeply in gesture, rhythm, and community recitation. Walter Ong argued that oral storytelling restructured consciousness itself and transformed how we store, retrieve, and generate thought. Once civilizations shifted to written storytelling, we gravitated to more individualized learning, and analytical reasoning. We gained independence. We lost embodied knowing.

Perhaps one of the most transformational shifts many of you reading this went through is the onset of the internet, especially mobile internet. We went from rummaging through bound reams of paper, to sourcing information with a few keystrokes in a search bar. Like other breakthroughs, access to information has had a profound impact on our brains. Researchers at Columbia University found that when people expect to find information online at any point, they stop memorizing the content. They instead memorize where and how to access and recall insights. We stopped valuing knowledge and started valuing indexing and organizing the world around us.

What Grows Back

AI is offloading the human need to index and organize information. Humans can offload analysis and problem-solving to agents so they happen in the background. Early data already shows the impact of this shift. Research published in 2025 found that offloading thinking to AI tools weakens neural pathways for higher-order thought: humans using AI consistently overestimate how much they actually understood of what the tools produced.

Each of these shifts outsourced something we held sacred. But they also made space for new behaviors that helped humankind evolve as a species. What will this technology shift push us to do differently?

Clocks prompted us to form our own rhythm. Writing prompted us to unlock and spread the creativity and insight of each individual human mind. The internet prompted us to expand from knowledge to understanding. AI is prompting us to ask the hardest question yet: what gives humans meaning?

The leaders who thrive in this era won’t be the most efficient at deploying AI in their teams. They’ll be the ones who’ve cultivated a culture of seeking and celebrating meaning. They won’t be organizing a perfectly pruned garden. They’ll be cultivating a wild one.

What type of work is giving you meaning? What other human behaviors will shift during this AI era? Let me know in the comments.

The Wake Up Top 5

What we’ve been loving this week

1. Read: Two runners broke records to run the Marathon in under 2 hours in London! As a London Marathon runner, this made me very happy!

2. Movies: What happened to movie taglines? Fun read with a quiz from

3. Read: Count Your Blessings, But Count Carefully. Great read from Raptitude.

4. Breathe: Should you breathe through your nose only when running? As someone who started running regularly again a year ago, I found this interesting.

5. Buy: Good sale on a basic black tee from Quince.

If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading The Wake Up when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and please consider sharing The Wake Up with a friend.