Polymathic Being

The Science of Good Enough

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 08:02:56 GMT

Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.

Today’s topic is Part Ten in the Keys to Innovation series, continuing to explore how to unlock your capability both personally and professionally. The Science of Good Enough helps to put aside the fear of imperfection, bracket the outcome against continuous maturation, and reduce the overall effort of success.

When I started my Master’s Degree in Systems Engineering, the first thing the professors said was that this discipline was “The Science of Good Enough.”

On the one hand, that sounds uninspiring, as we love to be exceptionally confident in the details.

On the other hand, it’s perfectly reasonable and the most intelligent path forward because we suck at actually getting the details right.

The thing is, regardless of how you feel, it’s absolutely true. The 80% solution today is significantly more useful than the 100% solution that never gets out. This is true for engineers, writers, and everyone else. You just have to start moving and learn to adapt along the way.

Case in point: when I started my Systems Engineering program, I was told to kiss my family goodbye for the next three years, as every extra moment would be dedicated to the class. Given that my youngest was 2 months old and my other two were toddlers, that wasn’t going to work out for me. So I had to figure out how to reduce that load.

The trick was easy, I embraced ‘good enough’ and the number of hours I spent on my school work was roughly 30% less than my closest peers and upwards of 50-75% less than the hardest workers. As a result, I was not only able to spend time with my family but also manage to complete building our house, an endeavor in which I had taken on a sizeable portion of the finishing work.

But what about my grades?

I graduated with Honors. Straight A’s. Top of the class. (Which I’d never done before)

I wasn’t sacrificing my quality to cut back on the time. I ensured I understood the expectations, started the work early, got feedback from my professors, and challenged my teammates not to overthink things. I was emulating lazy leadership, and it was what my family and everyone else needed.

For example, in one class, we had a team member who constantly wanted to add just a bit more. More complexity, more polish, more features, more… It was easy for him to suggest it because the weight of execution was spread amongst the rest of the team. But when I finally put my foot down and said, “Go for it, we won’t stop you, but we aren’t going to help.” Suddenly, the ‘good idea’ became too much work for him, and he stopped demanding it. We still got an A on the project.

When we hit our capstone class, this was the crucible that everyone really feared, as it generally consumed the teams for a full 20 weeks. I sat at the table of our first team meeting and laid out the project expectations and grading rubric. I told them that this effort’s goal should be ‘good enough.’ I explained that we needed to take the pressure off the team, and how Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast helps maintain our sanity.

The team agreed and held tightly to that and by the time we finished, with our A in hand, and talked to the other teams, we found that, by total hours, we were 30% fewer than the next group and 50% fewer than the other two and our work wasn’t any less quality, we just stuck a pin it it when we hit good enough and moved forward. Let’s flip that another way. Two teams put in twice as much effort with zero additional outcome. To be fair, their solutions were more complex, but that wasn’t valuable.

Finding Balance

There’s a balance here, though, as I’m also constantly pushing back on teams that want to Fail Early, Fail Often, or any other Silicon Valley mantra. I hate the idea of multiple course corrections and no voyage planning. “Not my circus, not my monkeys” doesn’t fly for me either. I’m frequently pulling proofs of concept out of the weeds to ensure they’re successful, as they lost focus trying to prove it’s good enough that they're forcing it to work on such a simplified problem as to be irrelevant.

That’s because “The Science of Good Enough” needs to be paired with two other mantras I learned from my core discipline of Operations Research:

“Answering the ‘Why’ before the ‘What’ or ‘How.’”
“The Science of Better.”

These two ideas provide a nice bracket because ‘good enough’ only works when coupled with a clear ‘why’ and a method for improvement. These provide the goal-line from which you can measure both ‘good’ and ‘enough.’ That’s why the grading rubric and project instructions were so important in the Systems Engineering course.

Further, saying ‘good enough’ didn’t mean we were done because Operations Research, as “The Science of Better,” is constantly improving processes.1 This adds an iterative loop where you start with the core idea, get it good enough, and then move forward. However, when you find an issue, you can cycle back and make incremental improvements because you keep yourself loosely coupled to your idea and are willing to adapt. This is a core element of Agile program management as well.

Now, add in a little speed, and you’ve got the major elements of F.I.R.E. - Fast, Inexpensive, Restrained, Elegant. For the project, the expense was our personal time, and the others were the means by which we bound the effort. Because we tried to keep it inexpensive in our time, we focused on rapid, iterative, yet restrained execution that provided a usable and elegant design, a feature our professors regularly complimented the team on over our peers.

In Application

I used an example from my education to illustrate “The Science of Good Enough” because it immediately demonstrates its power. However, if you click through the rest of the Keys to Innovation, you’ll find that pattern emerges over and over throughout most of my career. It’s baked into everything from Lazy Leadership to the idea that Polymathy doesn’t require exceptional expertise to add value.

And it goes deeper: even among writers, too many are terrified to publish something imperfect and so never publish at all. The consequence is that their good idea never matures into a great idea through refinement and exposure. The same is true in every single domain and discipline. Simply put, the Science of Good Enough is a philosophy that can be applied anywhere when bound with answering the Why and ensuring continuous improvement.

You’re also in good company if you give up the demands of perfection:

Voltaire: “The perfect is the enemy of the good” (or “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien”).
Salvador Dalí: “Have no fear of perfection—you’ll never reach it”.
Confucius: “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”

So find that balance between the “Science of Good Enough,” “Answering the Why before the What and How,” and the continuous iteration of “The Science of Better.” In doing so, you’ll unlock new innovation while maintaining momentum and remaining agile in your execution. It’s not unbound innovation, it’s “Good Enough.”

When are times when good enough has worked out better than perfect for you? Leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!

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Also, check out the Keys to Innovation for other great topics.

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Introspect Don't Project

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:01:02 GMT

Today’s topic addresses our desire to change the world as we see best while failing to change the one thing we can: ourselves. This is where these topics become so important because the real work is facing what we see in the mirror and recognizing that we have the power to fix what we see… as long as we understand the reflection.

A core tenet of Polymathic Being is that I work hard to apply everything I write about to myself, long before writing about it for you. These counterintuitive insights are refined through my own application and, if you ask, I can provide dozens of examples where I’ve been there, done that, and faced the challenge of changing as I may suggest.

Whether it’s algowhoring, psyops, fear porn, lazy leadership, etc. I’ve been there. Those stories are as much about me as they are the people I use as examples. More importantly, I don’t write to correct them but to see in them what I want to excise from my own life. How can I help you live a better life if I weren’t willing to do the same?

It’s like an alcoholic counseling AA, a drug dealer counseling addiction, or a Six Sigma Expert whose business is run by bubble gum and baling twine.

Yet, it shouldn’t surprise us that much. In fact, we explored in Looking Into a Mirror, the most voracious denouncers of racism, homosexuality, etc., are themselves the most racist, homosexual, etc. What they rail against isn’t a reflection of reality but what they see in the mirror.

But guess what? That’s easy to see in other people, but we need to flip this around because if you don’t like what you see, you really have to look harder at what you’re looking at! Because that’s probably you. Most likely projecting.

Projecting

You expect from others what you expect from yourself.

In the social sphere, we see projecting all the time. “Should,” “could”, and “ought” are all powerful words, but words that lose their power when it’s you that should, could, or ought, but you either push that expectation on others or look to legislate that behavior through government. Simply put, you expect from others what you expect from yourself, and if you’re unwilling to be the change, you can’t imagine anyone else is either.

And if you think that last part is out in left field, consider what we explored in Agency vs. Addiction, where entire groups demand legislation instead of nurturing agency and accountability. Their tagline is: “It’s not you, it’s them.” It’s a complete abdication of agency for all behavior and change with no introspection.

Another example of how their moralizing is exploited for the gain of others is this great essay on how sex drives innovation from where he describes:

This is called the Bootleggers-and-Baptistsdynamic: Baptists seek to use the government to outlaw things they find morally objectionable. Bootleggers support this, because it creates business opportunities outside of legal scrutiny. Lawmakers and bureaucrats love it, because it allows the extension of their own private power, giving them opportunities for self-enrichment (via corruption) and the plenary power to persecute their political enemies (or simply those of whom they disapprove).

Unfolding the World

Technology's Dirty Little Secret

This is a part of my Reconnecting With History series. I no longer write in this series as regularly as I once did, because well-written entries sometimes provoke a storm of garbage that I don’t always have the time or energy to deal with. However, the importance of this topic has been impressed upon me by many of your comments on my notes and submitted…

a month ago · 31 likes · 2 comments · J. Daniel Sawyer

Key to all of that is projection and zero introspection, while the entire time, the thing we’d like to avoid manifests itself more deeply in our lives, and we are lulled into a sense of complacency as our moral outrage makes things worse.

That’s because projecting is easy. It’s visual. It’s loud and self-aggrandizing. It’s the easy path that demands accountability from someone else, typically on topics like politics that rarely impact those who are projecting. That’s because the true change you want to see is actually within yourself. And that’s hard.

Introspecting

This is where the most powerful tool comes into play. You’ve got to introspect. You have to look at what you dislike and try to find it in yourself first. This isn’t a new insight, as the most famous for us is probably Matthew 7:4-5: “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

And almost all other traditions have similar sayings:

Buddhism: “Easily seen is the fault of others, but one’s own fault is difficult to see.” - Dhammapada 252–253.
Confucianism: “What the superior man seeks is in himself. What the mean man seeks is in others.” - Analects, “Wei Ling Gong,” passage 22.
Islamic tradition: “When you want to mention your companion’s faults, remember your own faults.” - Ibn ʿAbbas in Al-Adab al-Mufrad 328.
Stoicism: “An uninstructed person will lay the fault of his own bad condition upon others.” - Epictetus, Enchiridion 5.
Taoism: “He who knows other men is discerning; he who knows himself is intelligent.” - Tao Te Ching 33.
Bahá’í Faith: “Magnify not the faults of others that thine own faults may not appear great.” - Bahá’u’lláh, The Hidden Words

So, if you struggle with this, that’s typical human behavior that has been admonished for thousands of years. However, that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. There’s a reason I used the word admonished because it is a big problem.

Taking Action

So with this in mind. What do we do about it? Let me start with my own example:

Years ago, a much younger, less mature Michael was working with a fellow who was driving me nuts. His tone, condescension, and general attitude just rankled me. However, something was niggling in the back of my mind: the feedback I’d been getting recently about similar behaviors in myself.

It was surprisingly painful, but I realized that I had the tendency to do the same things. I brought this up to a coworker who was coaching me, and they paused, smiled, and said: “Yeah, that’s pretty accurate.” Talk about a slap of cold reality right in my face. I was chafing over the exact same behaviors that others chafed at with me.

The final nail in the coffin of my own justifications for this behavior came when I tried to gently explain to the other man my frustration and how I could see it in myself. His response doubled down on the bad behaviors and showed me just how much of an ass I could become if I didn’t introspect. That taught me how to find the triggers that I dislike, and instead of demanding others fix it, I look for them in myself.

It’s a painful process because it forces me to concede that my intent does not always match my actions and the corollary, that my actions or my demand for action from others, is a tell on myself and my own inadequacies. This first part is easier to accept. That last part is brutal to face.

And most won’t face it. You see the cognitive dissonance all around you with the added bonus of the self-righteous projection. This is the easy path to living. It’s the one that feels good, demands nothing of you, and cloaks the problem as someone else’s. It’s also emotionally stunting, reactive, and unfulfilling as evidenced by the angst oozing from the pores of every social media platform.

Let’s break this down into a few simple steps.

When you don’t like something you see, introspect and find it there.
When you think it’s someone else’s problem, it’s probably yours.
When you recommend a behavior change, make sure you are modeling it first.

At a minimum, you’ll slow the reaction, let the situation develop, and diffuse the tension. Maybe you’ve done the right thing in general, but there’s always something to learn. However, most often, you’ll find a plank in your own eye, blinding you with cognitive distortions. You’ll learn that you know nothing and that the best way to improve the world is to be the change you want to see. That’s the power of introspection over projection.

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Involve, Align, and Empower

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:01:55 GMT

Today's topic dusts off some critical leadership lessons from my time working in Lean Six Sigma that I’ve incorporated into every job I’ve had since. It’s a critical lesson in both leadership and followership to ensure we are involved, aligned, and empowered.

When I was a Raytheon Six Sigma Expert, one of the principles that I appreciated the most was “Involve, Align, and Empower Employees.” It resonated because, in so many organizations, the pursuit of quarterly profits makes it feel like employees aren’t considered beyond just cogs in a machine to print money for someone else.

And to be fair, that wasn’t even untrue of Raytheon during my time, which made the aspiration for that principle more important. Back then, there were frequent complaints that employees lacked loyalty. This was a problem for two reasons. First, frustrated employees were leaving for 30% pay raises (which means the company was underpaying them by 30%), and second, we’d hire their replacements from other companies, paying them 30% more than the employees who stayed!

Neither group had skin in the game to fix the problem, and so the frustrations grew. and very few embraced the idea of Involving, Aligning, and Empowering. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to immediately see this trifecta has value. Yet, for something that would grow a workforce, open your company to new, fresh ideas and innovation, and engender the loyalty companies thrive on, it’s shocking how few companies and leaders can actually pull these three concepts together. Let’s start diving deeper with Involve.

Involve

I’ve run many teams in my career, but the one that taught me the most was a team of 16 direct reports, all but two of whom were under the age of 30. The interesting aspect is that a decent number of them were outliers in their areas; they didn’t quite fit into their old teams. The rest were fresh from college. My team was seen as the place for both the newbies and the disenfranchised, which, you’d think, might be a bad mix.

The opposite was true. I’d learned enough about working with divergents to know that asking a fish to climb a tree was stupid for both of us. So I involved my divergents in the solutioning and team growth. Instead of letting them bitch, I told them to figure out how to solve the problem. One fellow came back a few weeks later, a bit chagrined, and said he had learned a lot more about why the systems that had frustrated him existed. That didn’t mean they shouldn’t be improved, but instead of trying to rip everything out, he began to appreciate why they were there, which is a key function of the concept of Chesterton’s Fence, namely, don’t rip something out before you fully understand the reason they exist. It took involvement for him to see this.

Involvement includes more than just the team. In another improvement project I led, I was told to avoid working with a guy named Joe. He was, apparently, a pain in the ass to deal with. However, Joe was also at the center of why so many projects failed in that area in the past. So, I ignored the advice and brought Joe onto the team, and quickly recognized why that advice had been given. But, unlike the others, I involved Joe. When he complained, he got the chance to fix it. When he railed against past efforts, I put him in charge of leading this effort.

I forced Joe to have skin in the game and an opportunity to put his fingerprints and ideas on things. In the end, Joe became a huge advocate for me and one of my biggest supporters of improvements in his area. He went from always being a resistor to an early adopter of a new system because he was involved. I just had to make sure he was aligned.

Align

Over the years, I’ve learned that leaders love to tell themselves stories that take the effort of leadership off their shoulders. One of these stories is the idea that “The people doing the work know what they need to be successful.” Ironically, it’s an element of involving and empowering, which is good, but it comes with the abdication of alignment.

Yes, the people doing the work know the work better than most. But that can be a problem as well because they often only know the work they know, and they’ve never considered other options. It’s like the Henry Ford quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Too often, the people doing the work don’t know how to be successful, especially when true success requires a paradigm shift.

This is where alignment is so important. I don’t dictate, but I do ensure everyone knows the common direction we are pulling and, most importantly, the why. This also doesn’t mean I’m the only one with the vision. As we read in Lead as if You Won’t Survive the Engagement, the best leaders have instilled alignment in their teams so that their performance continues long after they’ve left.

One way I’ve done that is to ensure we provide leadership with two things:

Situational Awareness: Leaders need to know where we are and what we are doing. This helps them ascertain the situation and where you’re headed, and, done well, helps them point out the risks and opportunities before you see them.
The ability to put their fingerprints on the work: You want your leaders to have skin in the game for your work. I ensure my leaders are involved as much as I involve my teams because, if they aren’t, it’s too easy for them to avoid accountability.

The best leaders I’ve had have done both. I had one leader who loved to hear what I was up to and problem-solve with me. Sometimes he didn’t have much to add, but even though he wasn’t sure of the solution, he'd provide top cover when stakeholders were upset about a change. He was also unique because his view was “If you’re not pissing someone off, you’re only average.”

This is where alignment meets empowerment and shows how it’s greater than yourself. It also forces you to set aside your own ego so that you can truly empower your teams.

Empower

Your teams need energy to improve performance. No one would suggest that for a car to go faster, you don’t need more energy, but we seem to ignore this critical idea in business. David Mann, in the book Creating a Lean Culture, builds on the car idea where different tools can help leaders add that energy. He describes four elements:

From “Creating A Lean Culture” by David Mann

The engine is Leader Standard Work. It's the most difficult tool I’ve ever gotten people to use, and it’s not difficult because it’s complicated. It’s difficult because it requires accountability. It also requires alignment because most of the chaos is driven by different layers of leaders pulling in different directions.
The transmission is the set of tools that help make the processes and systems visual. This helps inform decision-makers when to shift .for the conditions of the effort.
The gas pedal is the daily accountability process. This isn’t micromanaging; this is giving the space to involve and align your team members so that you can step on that gas to empower them.
Lastly, none of this works without the fuel of discipline. Simply put, without discipline, you cannot empower anyone or anything. I can’t emphasize this enough because without disciplined execution, you’re just never going to move the needle.

Back to Joe, I empowered him, and as he saw continuous improvement, he realized that the structures he hated before weren’t a problem with structure writ large, but with systems that weren’t adding value and processes that didn’t have accountability. When this was solved, he became a very loyal team member

To empower, you must provide accountability mechanisms so that, as you go faster, the entire car doesn’t fall apart around you. With that structure, you can be adaptable in your execution and continue to improve the team’s performance as you go.

Summary

It’s not hard to see that without all three, you’ll have an imbalance. Involving without aligning and empowering is an abdication of leadership. Aligning without involving and empowering is dictatorial. Empowering without involving and aligning is chaos and just pours gasoline on an existing conflagration.

When you balance all three, two things occur. The first is that your employees become more loyal to the organization as they see themselves in the processes and systems they helped create. The second is that you see more loyalty from the leadership who have invested themselves in the same things. Both sides now have, as Nassim Taleb says, skin in the game, which creates a better work environment.

This balance of ideas can be applied quickly, no matter if you’re a formal leader, a project manager, or an individual contributor. As you start to look at the work around you. Are you involved, aligned, and empowered? Are you involving, aligning, and empowering others? If the answer is no, start looking in these areas to make your work experience significantly better! You’ll also find that this is an amazing way to build loyalty within your teams.

I’d love to hear from you! When have you experienced either the negative or positive aspects of being involved, aligned, and empowered? Leave a comment below!

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You may also recognize that this is very related to providing Direction, Energy, and Accountability. However, there is enough nuance and a slight change in the frame of reference for the two to stand alone and work together. I’ve found great success in balancing those two trifectas depending on the teams as they work together exceptionally well.

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Becoming a Man

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 08:02:41 GMT

Today’s topic challenges us to rethink our expectations of men and demand more than the trappings that society tells us mark manliness. The reality is something much harder, much deeper, and much simpler; you have to die. Let’s dig in and find out how our culture has failed to mature boys into true men.

Over the past years, we’ve spent a decent amount of time understanding the feminine, whether it’s Rediscovering the Goddess, recognizing how we are Breaking the Cycle, the risks of Toxic Empathy, exploring the unique Heroine’s Journey, Rat Race Feminism, Clothing and Sex, and The Beauty Quandary.

We’ve also compared feminine Chaos vs. masculine Order and the need for our society to Embrace Bromance as part of healthy masculinity. Today, were going to laser in on the critically important foundation of how to grow strong, healthy, and capable men. Thankfully, it’s simple and only requires one thing: Death.

This requirement is interesting because it is not a demand for men and women; only men. As we discovered in our studies of the feminine, Joseph Campbell, in Goddesses - Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, wrote:

The implication is that in embodying the divine, the female operates in her own character, simply in her nature, while the male magic functions not from the nature of the men’s bodies but from the nature of their roles in the society.

A woman is already complete in who she is, and is the embodiment of nurture. A man, on the other hand, is defined by his vestments, position, and status. However, to get to that point, the boy must be separated from the nurturing and die to those very markers of status. Travis Neville 1, writing The Death Rites of Passage, hits at the core of what we are describing:

A boy does not become a man because he turned eighteen. He does not become a man because he can grow a beard, deadlift four plates, sleep with women, pay taxes, or post gym selfies under a Bible verse. He becomes a man when something in him dies.
· When entitlement dies
· When softness dies
· When self-indulgence dies

Travis Neville Author

The Death of Rites of Passage

A boy does not become a man because he turned eighteen. He does not become a man because he can grow a beard, deadlift four plates, sleep with women, pay taxes, or post gym selfies under a Bible verse. He becomes a man when something in him dies…

a month ago · 29 likes · 8 comments · Travis Neville Author

Think about that for a minute: being a man isn’t about a thing. It’s about dying to everything. It’s separating from the softness and luxury of life and learning just how little it matters in the scheme of things. You must die to become a man.

And humans have known this for a very long time and embedded it in our male initiation rituals. Some of them are symbolic, and others were very, very real as describes in How the Plains Indians Can Help Defeat Modern Anxiety.

To summarize, the boys, already exhausted from going four days without food, water, or sleep, are painfully pierced with wooden splints, lifted by the skin, weighted with buffalo skulls, and spun until they pass out and are considered symbolically “dead.” After that, the boys are dragged in a final race until the splints are torn from their bodies, with no one allowed to help them. The whole ritual is meant to represent suffering, death, and rebirth, so that the boy who survives it is no longer seen as a child, but as a man. (fun fact: I took this narrative and adapted it to the third book, Rebirth, of The Singularity Chronicles, which I’m in the middle of writing.)

The point is that the boy had to die, almost literally. Joseph Campbell, in the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, details the process of Australian aborigines using the rites of circumcision to literally ‘cut’ the boy away from his mother and the other women. Campbell references previous anthropology where the tribes have a blood-letting ritual where upwards of two quarts of blood are taken from the men, which the boy drinks. This represents the reminder to the men of their constant sacrifice and an introduction to the boy of his future obligation. If the boy rebels or disobeys, the old shaman slices a vein and kills him as unfit for manhood.

These rites of passage shock our modern sensibilities, yet we currently have nothing anywhere close to this sort of maturity. Back to Travis’s essay, he says that, “Most modern boys are not suffering from a lack of affirmation. They are suffering from a lack of confrontation.” He begs us to offer our boys challenges as simple as a wilderness trip with no comfort, a physically brutal challenge, manual labor with a purpose, or a period of fasting, silence, and discipline.

We’ve come so far away from adversity that a hard backpacking trip is good!

For me, my major initiation was Ranger School. It’s known as the hardest leadership training on the planet, and they stress you physically and mentally to simulate the stress of combat while grading your ability to lead. Likewise, Sam Alaimo is a Navy SEAL with a distinguished deployment record. He and I write from the experience that this suffering, this incredible adversity, made us stronger and more resilient. He’s got another great essay, Why We Should End Self-Care And Embrace Hardship, which shows how our nature is designed for adversity and is well aligned with my own analysis on Trauma and Antifragility, where avoiding challenges makes us weaker.

And weak is a great way to describe so many adult-bodied boys, chasing the ‘mano-sphere’ of bullshit, trying to flex nuts while ignoring that it’s humility and self-sacrifice that make a strong man. Most of the conflict I see today in men is that they never faced their hardship, and so they’ll always suffer hardship.

We have boys, LARPing (live action role playing) mahood through video games, pornography, social media, and gymnasiums, in a facsimile of the call to duty. They’re sensitized to be kinder, gentler, softer, yet not realizing that true sacrifice naturally brings those things. They’re INCELS (involuntary celibates), depressed, and despised. They’ve never Stared into Evil, nor have they died to the childhood ego.

They’re not men.

The process of becoming a man is captured in the Hero’s Journey, where a man is called to adventure, separated from the old life, forced to face fear, stripped of pride or comfort, and pushed into some kind of symbolic death. That death usually does not mean literal death, but the death of the old self, the childlike self, or the false self. What comes after is rebirth, where the person returns stronger, wiser, and no longer the same person they were before.

So, when does a boy become a man? When entitlement dies, when softness dies, and when self-indulgence dies. Simply put, it’s when the boy dies.

What’s fascinating is that this pattern also exists with psychedelics, where you’ll face your inner demons and have your ego destroyed. The reason they call high-dose psilocybin a Hero’s Journey is that it follows the same pattern. When people have a ‘bad trip,’ what really happens is that they wanted a trippy trance and ended up ‘seeing Jesus, ’ and they tried to avoid it. They didn’t face their hardship, and so they could never be reborn as something stronger. What I see in today’s society is too many men living a ‘bad trip’ every day of their lives.

It’s important to note that this hardship, this death of the hero’s journey (both types), doesn’t make hard men. Hard men are fragile. What this makes is resilient men. Those who know how to balance the contradiction of the Meek Warrior where we:

So, be a warrior. Be capable. Be a warhorse a child can ride to battle. Be the master of your mind and body. Claim your agency and don’t allow manipulation. Grow others around you to be as capable as you. Demand capability from those you love while holding yourself to a higher account than anyone else.

You can’t do this without dying, and that’s the best way to think about it. It’s no surprise, then, that this death-and-rebirth motif exists in almost every religious tradition, from Christianity to the Greek gods to the Egyptian Osiris to even Hinduism and Buddhism, where enlightenment comes from the separation of the earthly ego.

When you do this, you’ll be reborn with the recognition that none of the things we ascribe as markers of manhood are necessary because it’s not about what you are, but who you are. Dying allows you to shift from chasing those things to being those things. You can’t be a hero without the journey, so become a man and die. Die to the entitlement, softness, self-indulgence, and ego.

‘Rehearse for death’: he who says this is telling us to rehearse our freedom. One who has learned death has unlearned slavery — Seneca, Letters, 26.102

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.
- 1 Corinthians 13:11

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Sympathy -> Empathy -> Resiliency

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 08:02:48 GMT

Today's topic is a collaboration with another great writer on Substack, focused on how sympathy is being labeled as empathy, then weaponized, and how we can mature our sympathetic responses into true empathy and, ultimately, emotional resilience.

Intro

Today I’m pleased to introduce from . He and I have been interacting for a while, wrangling with a challenging topic that pokes at the misunderstandings of Sympathy, Empathy, and Resiliency. Over to Kyle to kick us off on the mislabeling of sympathy and how we need to mature into true empathy.

An older man in ragged clothes sat next to a bucket as my father and I walked toward our destination in downtown Dayton, Ohio. As we passed, I locked eyes with him. His face was gentle, even though his features were rough. He said, softly, that he was hungry and then asked if we had any money to spare. I looked to my dad, who kept his awareness focused on our surroundings while continuing to walk as he held my hand on the crowded sidewalk. This man was clearly suffering, yet my dad and everyone else walked past him as if he didn’t exist.

I was troubled and confused. Asking questions about why we didn’t help, what homelessness means, and how one could get into such a situation only furthered my frustration. We didn’t make it much more than a block before I broke down and began crying. My dad stopped, hugged me, and then proceeded to walk me back to the man so I could give him ten dollars. I still remember the genuine appreciation in the man’s face and words before we parted ways.

This was the early 1990s when I was around six years old. If I had seen a homeless person prior, I didn’t realize it. Without an understanding of the complexities behind homelessness on a macro scale and not knowing all the charitable things my father was doing to help people less fortunate, I was fully absorbed in the moment and the overwhelming emotions that come from seeing another human hurting. I needed to help to ease his suffering.

Fast forward fifteen years, and I’m sitting in Counseling 101, a core requirement for a major in psychology at The Ohio State University. Rather than lecture on counseling methods, this class involved facilitated application in simulated sessions to progressively build techniques. On day one, we were told to reflect on past or current struggles that we were willing to share. Students were then assigned to be counselors and clients as aides observed the rotating twenty-minute rounds. Every one of the student counselors, including myself, attempted to be problem-solvers. Once we believed we understood the issue, we immediately began offering solutions such as reframing techniques, resources for support, and practical methods to overcome the adversity. Few questions, all answers.

At the end of each class, instructors would debrief observations from the day and then begin to progressively offer concepts, techniques, and considerations to encourage connection with those we desired to help. While I took away many lessons from this ten-week course, they all can be boiled down to learning the distinction between empathy and sympathy.

The American Psychological Association (APA) defines sympathy as feelings of concern or compassion resulting from an awareness of the suffering or sorrow of another. Empathy, as defined by the APA, is understanding a person from their frame of reference rather than one’s own.

Sympathy is getting another person’s head into yours. It’s absorbing another’s observed state based on assumptions. Empathy is getting out of your own head. It requires removing all of your own biases, opinions, assumptions, and even experiences so you can consider the perspective of the other person.

Sympathy is concern, whereas empathy is curiosity. Sympathy leads to action, while empathy leads to questions. These two terms are often used interchangeably by many, but the distinction matters.

Sympathy is the starting point. We must care.

Empathy is the enduring process of putting effective caring into productive action.

Resilient Mental State

Empathy vs Sympathy

Sympathy is sharing the feelings of another or becoming emotional when seeing someone else experience emotion…

2 years ago · 1 like · Kyle Shepard

Back to Michael because here’s where it gets interesting. Sympathy, also known as emotional empathy, vs. the cognitive empathy we’ve been discussing, is useful but can get weaponized very quickly if we aren’t careful, as we explored in Toxic Empathy. There, we found that not getting out of your brain, or worse, letting another’s emotions flow through you, when coupled with fear, turns into something dangerous.

That’s because sympathy is easy. It doesn’t actually require you to do anything. You don’t even have to be aware of it, you just have to feeeeeeeel and as we can see in the raging online, there are a LOT of feels.

If you remember from Elephant Riding, we are an emotional elephant of low brain function, ready to stampede through the jungle long before our rational rider, our logical prefrontal cortex, even gets the signal to make sense of it.

You are naturally sympathetic, but will lose yourself if you can’t empathize. You end up feeling too much, losing control of your own body and mind. In fact, as Kyle reminded me, the appropriately named sympathetic nervous system is responsible for activating the stress responses most of us deal with daily.

We have to step through sympathy because chronic sympathy triggers the nervous system just like chronic stress, and that wears on the mind and body. Compassion fatigue, emotional exhaustion, distancing, sleep disturbances, unproductive attitude, and decreased performance are all signs of burnout resulting from mismanaged and/or unrecovered stress. This is an issue with overly sympathetic people and providers.

So much so that Paul Bloom makes a great case Against Empathy altogether and focuses on rational compassion with dozens of examples where sympathetic responses, like Kyle’s from earlier, can lead to worse outcomes. The uncomfortable truth is that the homeless man probably didn’t use the money for food. Food is easy for the homeless to get. Drugs, on the other hand, require cash. Kyle’s sympathy and his father’s money very likely made things worse.

In Bloom’s book, he discusses emotional empathy (i.e., sympathy) and argues that there are better terms to describe what you want, such as love, compassion, care, etc. He goes into great detail showing how, time and time again, sympathetic people, when caring about a specific person, will break rules, cut lines, and accept the literal deaths of many others for the sake of the one they sympathize with. A quick scan of the social landscape shows this in the debates about transgender issues, immigration, homelessness, racism, and more, where both sides’ sympathy is used as leverage. The result is torrents of stress flowing from every position.

Empathy, cognitive empathy, on the other hand, endures. It’s a skill that allows for connection and guidance without necessarily causing stress.

Undergraduate Kyle, in Counseling 101, applied sympathy during his simulated sessions. He needed to help them solve their problems as soon as possible. Deep care and concern for others are powerful. It’s also taxing and unsustainable. We often can’t solve most other people’s problems.

This is why empathy is extremely beneficial for providers, caregivers, leaders, parents, coaches, spouses, teammates, and friends. Encouraging agency in others to solve their own problems requires connection, understanding, and guided conversation to allow them to reach their own conclusions. Kyle describes it further:

Empathy is curious. Sympathy is concern.
Empathy is understanding. Sympathy is emoting.

Emotions are what make us human - they are different colors of the stress response that drive our functioning. Emotions, however, suppress the ability to be rational. Emotions require management and recovery in order to sustain performance and prevent burnout. Empathy, on the other hand, is simply a skill for connection.

Lest you think this is easy, remember what Robert Heinlein says: “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.” Knowing this and the difference between sympathy and empathy, we can begin to mature toward resiliency.

Resilient Empathy

We need to mature from sympathy (low brain) into empathy (high brain) so that we can build resiliency and not be the targets of manipulation designed to trigger our actions to the desires of others. Resiliency is the ability to function with, recover from, and grow because of stress.

That stress we talked about earlier, from sympathy, can be harnessed by empathy and grown into resiliency, just like we build our muscles, memory, and immune systems by exposing them to stress. Let’s look at how to mature from fragile emotional empathy, that sympathetic response, into something more resilient. To do that, Kyle and I realized we are back at the core of Polymathic Thinking:

Insatiable Curiosity - Going beyond the simple story that’s provided and exploring deeper. This will allow you to get into the life of the person you are engaging with and will also allow you to get deeper into the truth of larger issues. You’ll find common themes that contextualize the situation and tone down your sympathetic reaction, letting it turn into a proactive contemplation.
Humility - Kyle’s action to the homeless man was, fundamentally, selfish. He didn’t know the whole story, yet his reaction gave a big reward of dopamine. So much so, that memory is core to him, and he admits, “my memory makes me think he looked clean in that way [drugs]. All his teeth in order, eyes pure, just old and hungry. Who knows, though.” Humility recognizes the rose colored risks of dopamine and tempers the hero complex.
Intentional Reframing - Are there other, and likely better ways to achieve your goals? Goodwill donations killed the African textile industry. NGOs have no incentive to fix systemic issues. Even organizations like World Vision end up creating perverse incentives that perpetuate the very poverty they aim to end. Ironically, “greedy” free markets have done more to end poverty than any sympathetic charity donation.

Tying these together with my own homeless story. Back in the day, I took the charter from the bible of caring for the poor seriously and always carried cash on hand for the panhandlers. However, I got curious when I started to see more and more of them on the street corners and realized there was a lot more going on. When I forced through the emotion and started looking in their eyes, I saw how low these folks were, while their bags were typically stuffed with food. It was humbling to realize my actions were selfish when I reacted to the superficial, and the dopamine evaporated in the face of the truth.

I started to reframe and realized that I could donate to the addiction centers, advocate for enforcement of encampment laws, and volunteer at the homeless shelters. I converted my sympathetic response, and the easy dopamine hit of handing out cash, into empathy, and my town is finally starting to take action to actually help the homeless, vs. enabling their lifestyle through sympathy. As a result, the entire community is becoming more resilient.

Resiliency also isn’t love and rainbows. It requires enforcing standards, helping the homeless regain their own agency, and holding accountability to sobriety to begin that healing. It’s no irony that sympathy and drugs both have dopamine in common, and resiliency heals through challenge, not dopamine.

And this is a healthy progression because Kyle argues that the most important attribute one can possess is giving a shit. If you don’t care, you won’t act. The second most important attribute, he says, is not giving too much of a shit. Caring has limits. If you care about every potential source of concern, you’re going to burn out.

However, when you empathize, you allow yourself to view each moment, problem, and person uniquely, without taking on its emotional weight yourself. Problems always look manageable on the outside. It’s easier to perceive adversity rationally when you aren’t the one reacting to it emotionally.

This is why we have to transition from sympathy to empathy. As we do so, we’ll become more resilient in our lives and create more resilient response systems that actually solve the problems we care about. Sympathy -> Empathy -> Resiliency.

If you liked this topic, I recommend you subscribe to Resilient Mental State, where Kyle explores these topics along with functional fitness and other resilient mindsets.

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The Awe of Sondering

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 08:01:16 GMT

Today’s topic zooms out to a macro view of life to appreciate the sheer number of different lives and experiences, then zooms back in to explore how little actually separates our worlds. It’s a great technique for gaining perspective, humility, and humanity while appreciating our diversity and uniqueness.

Last year, I flew into Los Angeles, California, coming in through the San Bernardino Valley from the east. As I passed over the sprawl of humanity, I was struck with awe at what we humans have created. It’s a thick network of communications, transportation, logistics, and people… millions and millions of people.

During the day, my brain flowed with images of regular people, living their lives, running mundane errands, each lost in their own thoughts, busy with their own lives, and planning their own futures.

At night, that same flight takes on a different dimension as the city lights up and headlights flow between systems like electrons. In fact, the city at night looks a lot like a circuit board, with its grid pattern, dark spots of massive warehouses, and the constant, unending flow of life.

It’s those lives that leave me in awe because, as I sit at the macro-level, separated by thousands of feet, I realize I’m looking at a snapshot that’s deeper than anything I can imagine at once. This is where I love the idea of Sondering:

Sondering: The profound realization that every random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, filled with their own stories, struggles, and history, even though they seem like background characters in your life.

As we encounter people in person, it’s often easy to see how they weave into your story, and they become part of the complexity of your existence. Online, it is less so, but they’re part of your world, and so, you accept them as part of your reality.

But the folks I’m flying over? They don’t know me, and I don’t know them, and each one of them has a life as complex as my own. There are authors, and innovators, and clerks, and mothers, fathers, lovers, haters… Every type and personality I could imagine exists down below, and very likely, none of them know I exist.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

It’s awe-inspiring for me and quite humbling to consider that my place, as important as it is for my family and me, is inconsequential to any of them. They have their own lives, dreams, and ambitions, and they’ll succeed or fail, and it will have nothing to do with me.

I don’t matter in their lives because their lives are as vivid and complex as my own. It’s kind of incredible to think about how many people that involves not just over a city in California, but across the entire world!

Yet, the inverse is also true. My life is vivid and complex. I have my family and my children. My friends and my coworkers. I’m connected to 7,000 of you subscribers across 124 different countries. Each week, I get to share counterintuitive insights and weave together ideas across domains and disciplines.

And each of you has a uniquely vivid and complex life. You’ve got your own family, relationships, loves, fears, worries, celebrations, adventures, and successes. This last part is important to understand because we love to measure ourselves against each other without understanding that success is, and should be, defined differently, based on your unique situation.

What’s fun is realizing that we could pass each other on the street and never know it. I may have flown overhead on my travels, and you never looked up. We may only cross in the ether through these essays, yet a common thread runs through us in curiosity and lifelong learning.

But there’s an even more fascinating idea captured in the theory of Six degrees of separation, which postulates that any person on Earth can be connected to any other person through a chain of acquaintances with no more than five or six intermediaries.

Think about that! In the awe of Sondering, of realizing the complexity, beauty, and diversity of the lives around us, there’s the very real connection that we have with everyone. Or, at least, the proximity to collapse that perceived difference into our own social networks. This is the superpower of humanity in that we are social beings and would be better described as Homo Socialis (social man), not Homo Sapiens (wise man)

We can collapse those differences with a simple conversation on the airplane, even an unspoken exchange of understanding with a frustrated parent, a small nod of acknowledgment when someone makes space in an elevator. Something as simple as a little joke to break the ice on a conversation demonstrates that, however different we are, we are a few words away from converging our worlds into a larger network, even if it’s only a temporary connection.

Yet, never underestimate the power of those temporary connections because, as one serendipitous conversation I had with a woman on an airplane demonstrated, sometimes it’s the simplest of engagements that can have profound impacts on your life. In that case, a conversation bloomed and, for a moment, our vivid and unique lives crossed. I was able to connect many of the ideas we explore here, and she learned that we just have to let go of our boundaries sometimes to Ask for and Accept Help. This is the power of homo socialis.

Overall, I find sondering to be humbling and contextualizing for who I am in the world amongst everyone else. At the same time, I also find it empowering that we are so close through our social connections. We aren’t alone, and we are surrounded by others who have rich experiences we can learn from. I love that I get to share part of your world through these essays, and I value that connection immensely.

As I fly overhead, I wonder which of you readers is down there, what your lives are about. What mundane or exciting things are happening? What dreams and aspirations do you harbor? What food do you plan to cook? I love how that collapses the differences we have into a shared humanity through the awe of sondering.

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Fulfill Yourself

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 08:02:18 GMT

Today’s topic applies the Polymathic Mindset by first exploring how it’s neither new nor unique across cultures. We’ll then show how embracing polymathic ideas from India can broaden our horizons and lead to a more fulfilling life.

Intro

Today, we view the polymath as either a unicorn or, worse, when I aspire to become one, people react with hostility, weaponizing it as a pejorative. It’s viewed as such an abnormality that it feels almost pretentious to claim the title! The thing is, in the ancient world, the polymath wasn’t exceptional; they were normal. They weren’t an outlier; they were common. More importantly, the polymathic mindset is a great way to really fulfill yourself across multiple dimensions, and we’ve lost something critical with our modern specialization.

This is why I’m teaming up with , another advocate for the polymath, after seeing her LinkedIn post highlighting that, on the Indian subcontinent, the ideal scholar was a Bahuśruta (बाहुश्रुत), a person who had “heard much.” The prevalent oral culture made this quite literal because, in order to be educated, you had to carry stories, law, medicine, poetry, mathematics, cosmology, and ritual inside of you.

In that culture, they prized the person who practiced the 64 Kalāḥ or sixty-four arts. Music and logic. Cooking and astronomy. Martial training and rhetoric. While we treat these as hobbies, they treat them as expressions of Vidyā; knowledge as a unified tree.

This idea isn’t uniquely Indian either. The Greeks called it Paideia, meaning the full formation of a human being through philosophy, athletics, music, and rhetoric, and fused it into what we call the 7 Liberal Arts of the Trivium and Quadrivium

The Confucian world shaped the Junzi who mastered ritual, archery, calligraphy, mathematics, and music. A Confucian master wasn’t a singular expert but a broad practitioner and highly valued in the culture.

The Islamic Golden Age produced dozens of famous polymaths like Ibn Sina, who , author of The Polymath, the book that named my identity, notes in the article The Intellectual Versatility of the Islamic Tradition that:

Ibn Sina. A Persian physician-philosopher who had memorised the Quran by the age of ten, mastered every branch of Islamic learning by twenty-one, and went on to produce the Kitab al Shifa — a single-handed compendium of logic, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music and metaphysics that scholars still regard as the largest and most varied work of its kind by any individual in recorded history.

Waqas's Substack

The Intellectual Versatility of the Islamic Tradition

Inkwell from the 10th century AD Middle East (Khalili Collections…

2 months ago · 11 likes · Waqas Ahmed

Renaissance Italy is the best known in our culture and gave us the Uomo Universale, , the Universal Man and we currently refer to polymaths as Renaissance Men (which I dislike because polymathy is a stronger inclination among women, and many famous polymaths were women. Also, those folks we think of in the Renaissance described themselves as Polymaths.) Regardless of the title, the Renaissance was driven by those who mastered many disciplines and explored new domains with insatiable curiosity.

The point is, across civilizations, the belief emerged that the fullest human being is wide and that was valued over the millennia… until recently.

The Shift to Specialization

Ironically, after the Renaissance, through the Industrial Revolution, and accelerating in the 1900s, we came to see depth and breadth as opposing forces. We were told that we must master one thing and, to do that, we must ignore everything else. It began slowly and then accelerated, largely due to the explosion of information and the economics of knowledge.

That’s because, after the printing press and the Scientific Revolution, knowledge expanded beyond any one mind’s capacity. The Industrial Revolution further rewarded division of labor, a logic formalized in The Wealth of Nations. Universities also reorganized around research specialization, especially under the model of Humboldt University of Berlin.

Consequently, depth became economically, rationally, and institutionally enforced. In optimizing for precision and scale, we gradually replaced synthesis with efficiency. The thing is, specialization is a powerful tool. It built modern medicine, engineering, and computing, among many other disciplines.

But that tool became an ideology, and we began to assume that, to be serious, we had to be narrow. Depth became the virtue, and breadth meant to lack rigor, focus, or dedication. Worse, it became a liability. “Jack of all trades” shifted from a compliment to a dismissal as experts sought to protect their domains through credentialism and gatekeeping.1

But this isn’t the best way to solve complex problems, and it never was. Complex systems require integrative thinking, and fragmented disciplines constantly struggle to see whole patterns. The ancients understood that synthesis is the highest intellectual act, and we are only just now rediscovering that.

Learning from the Ancients

Back to Aksinya, she pointed out that the Bahuśruta relied on the harmonization of Samanvaya (समन्वय) and involved drawing disparate strands into a coherent understanding. The ancient Indians knew this and had even more terms that beautifully illuminate the polymathic principles from different angles:

Jijñāsā (जिज्ञासा): the burning desire to know and inquire. This is the root drive of any polymath. It’s a restless intellectual hunger. It appears prominently in the opening of the Brahmasūtra. (I call this Insatiable Curiosity)
Medhā (मेधा): retentive intellectual power, the capacity to hold and integrate vast knowledge. A Medhāvin is one who possesses it.
Kuśala (कुशल): skillful, expert, capable, carrying a connotation of practical competence alongside theoretical knowledge.

Wrapped back with Samanvaya, these ideas aren’t an accumulation of knowledge; they’re the integration of it, and integration feels different than specialization. It feels alive.

How alive? This leads us to Pratibhā (प्रतिभा), which is spontaneous creative insight, and almost always arrives at the intersection of disciplines, not at the bottom of a single well. It’s the birth of new ideas through the fusion and confluence of disciplines.

This isn’t some romantic nostalgia of a bygone era either. It’s a cognitive stack that we can pick up and apply today. It’s Curiosity, Retention, Skill, Insight, Integration, and it’s fulfilling both professionally and personally across all cultures and careers.

Why Stretching Wide Feels Fulfilling

The best part is that breadth isn’t just productive; it is existentially satisfying. To understand why, it helps to recognize that the brain is a network, not a silo, and a mind exposed to multiple domains builds more associative pathways. The more varied the inputs, the richer the combinatorial possibilities, where stretching wide multiplies the energy to find new insights.

It also solves a critical problem that happens with specialization, where, too often, our identity becomes the specialization, and the more you specialize, the more fragile your identity becomes to change. This is why Max Planck describes science progressing “one funeral at a time,” and Thomas Kuhn talks about the dramatic shifts in paradigms, not the gradual improvements science tells us it believes in.

Conversely, a wide identity distributes meaning across multiple domains: intellectual, physical, artistic, relational, and practical, which is harder to destabilize. Put another way, the broader skill set of a polymath is antifragile and adaptable to new information and changing technologies.

Personally, I can attest to this, as I diversified into writing here on Substack, then wrote The Singularity Chronicles, weaving science fiction with science facts, and began teaching Master’s courses in Engineering Management. I am much more fulfilled, with much less angst, when my day job as a Space Systems Engineer can’t fully satisfy me. I’m mastering arts, sciences, teaching, and learning.

And this leads to the final benefit: polymathic synthesis, Samanvaya, produces coherence. Let me break this one down a little bit. In today’s information-saturated world, we tend to think more information is better, but information alone doesn’t reduce anxiety. In fact, as we found in Infobesity, it can exacerbate anxiety.

To deal with the information, we resort to hyper-compartmentalization, which splits the psyche, and that fragmentation produces inner tension. We are literally getting lost in the forest for all the trees and failing to see the patterns.

But when you synthesize across domains and disciplines, you begin to see the patterns that have always existed. You start to find the counterintuitive insights that flip the script on common tropes. We find a lot of sacred cows to turn into burgers, and we learn a lot more about how our brains work.

The synthesis produces coherence, things start to settle, the world becomes legible, and that legibility feels like peace. Each topic I explore here with you on Polymathic Being helps me better understand who I am and how I fit in the world. I’m working to drive coherence, make things legible, and it gives me greater peace; hopefully, it’s helping you too!

And to emphasize an important point on coherence is that an open mind is harder to manipulate, harder to radicalize, and harder to reduce to slogans. Specializing can lead to fragmentation and tribalism, but the Polymathic mindset, especially when applied to our personal lives, can help us see past the divisions and find unity if we can figure out how to assemble ourselves.

Assembling the Self

This is where the counterintuitive point explodes in our brains: Stretching wide isn’t scattering yourself. It’s actually assembling yourself. Think of every new domain as another lens, another dimension of perception that you can intentionally focus on to understand the world around you.

Let’s go back through those concepts from earlier and explore how to grow these capabilities day by day.

Jijñāsā: Insatiable Curiosity - Treat intellectual hunger as a signal, not a distraction. Follow interests beyond your primary field, even if they seem unrelated to your career. A wide life begins by refusing to let curiosity shrink.
Medhā: Retain and integrate - Do not just consume. Summarize what you learn in your own words and deliberately connect it to something you already understand. Retention turns exposure into structure. This is exactly what I do with each essay here.
Kuśala: Embody skills - Practice at least one discipline outside your core identity in a tangible way. If you think for a living, train the body. If you work abstractly, build something concrete. Multiple comeptencies anchors breadth in reality.
Pratibhā: Create collisions - Regularly force cross-domain connections. Ask how principles in one field illuminate another. Insight is often the product of structured intersection, not deeper isolation. Look for similarities before discounting the differences.
Samanvaya: Seek coherence - Make integration the goal, not accumulation. Periodically step back and ask what unifies your interests, and you’ll see that fulfillment emerges when knowledge forms a pattern rather than a pile.

What we are rediscovering isn’t a new idea at all; we are simply remembering that the human being was always meant to be more river than well and that it’s incredibly invigorating and fulfilling.

“Jack of all trades and master of none; but more often better than a master of one.”

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”― Robert Heinlein

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AI: A Reflection of You

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 08:00:23 GMT

Today’s topic holds a mirror to our engagements with AI, reflecting how we view both technology and humans. It’s an inversion that will hopefully help us become more human-centric while improving our relationship with a transformative technology.

At the risk of anthropomorphizing, I’ve discovered an interesting insight into how your use of AI provides a reflection of you. Let’s explore a few human archetypes I’ve consolidated and how I perceive them across my interactions, writing, speaking, and on social media.

First, there are the Tech Bros who regularly misrepresent and inflate what AI can actually do, claiming we are near super-intelligent AGI, the elimination of work, and other fantastical claims. These are led by Sam Altman, Geoffrey Hinton, Yuval Noah Harari, et al. They are easy targets for their hyperbolic statements and casual disregard for the sanctity of humanity. The only thing bigger than their ego is their ignorance, and they regularly mistake the nuance of what makes us human to the detriment of their ambitions.

Equally obnoxious are the Antagonists, like Gary Marcus 1 Phil Koopman^,2 Ted Gioia, and others who regularly misrepresent critical human-centric understandings of things like our trust in technology vs. humans, the fundamentals of plagiarism, or even what it means to be creative. These folks love to mock the tech bros for their confabulations while using the same confabulations to stoke fear and outrage in others. For example, Marcus tends to clutch his pearls when Tech Bros make audacious claims and yet regularly mocks them for falling short of their hyperbole. It makes sense if he’s only going for clicks, but it fails on foundational understanding.

It’s these first two categories that I use in my novel, Paradox, to create the rift between humans, which is then exploited to cause incredible devastation. Thankfully, it’s the pragmatists we’ll explore next who find balance in the end.

Buy Paradox now for just $2

That’s because the AI Pragmatists like , , , , , and who explore the technology with curiosity, find its strengths and weaknesses, and then work to create balance. These are the folks who inspire me to stay focused on human-centric writing, and they understand that AI can Augment Intelligence but can’t replace the power of human intelligence. (if you actually use what you’ve got!)

Then, there are the AI Optimists like , , , and who see AI and other emerging technologies as a potential boon to humanity if we can keep our heads regarding the rest. They share grand visions for how both AI and Human Intelligence could expand over time and are unapologetic about their use of AI while remaining authentically human-centric.

While these initial four groupings of Tech Bro, Antagonist, Pragmatist, and Optimist have pros and cons, and can, for the most part, entertain debate and criticism,3 there are two additional types in which any form of critical thinking seems absent.

We all should despise the Slop AI Guy. They just run prompts through GPT and post them to social media, or crank out an essay that vomits banal garbage into the internet, accelerating the Enshittification of Everything. They’re also either aggressively defensive or completely vapid in defending their use of AI, but either way, they lack critical thinking and really haven’t unlocked their own human creativity.

Bracketting this are the Never AI crowd. These folks abound in the artistic world and often have a ‘one drop’ rule, where they’re even stepping away from things like spellcheck lest they catch the taint of AI on their perfectly human creations. They’re the zealots of the Antagonists and police the world, looking for any indication of AI. They’re the most fearful of AI, and the irony is that they have reason to be because they haven’t figured out their unique creativity and are often indistinguishable from AI content. These were the weapons I used in Paradox to crash the whole system.

Obviously, I’m biased to the pragmatists as and I wrote about in Beware the Binary, but each style provides a mirror that highlights these folks’ understanding of the nature of humans, technology, and the world we live in. There’s also more to this, which I’ll focus on more personally: your reaction and how you blend these different interpretations are also windows into how you treat others. In the extremes about AI, I see a willingness to discard truly human behaviors and a failure to elevate who we are.

That’s why, at the risk of anthropomorphization, I followed an online trend and asked the AI I use the most, ChatGPT, how it perceived my interactions over the last few years. I wanted to see how my humanity was reflected in my use of a technology:

How I perceive you, based on our interactions
In short: you’ve treated me as a serious collaborator—demanding, precise, and respectful—rather than as a novelty or a passive tool.
Key traits that consistently come through:
- Intellectually rigorous: You expect accuracy, structure, and internal coherence. Vague answers get pushed back; good ones get iterated.
- High-agency and decisive: You know what you want, when you want it simplified, and when you want it deepened. You correct course quickly.
- Respectful but unsentimental: You don’t anthropomorphize or posture, but you also don’t treat me dismissively. The tone is professional, not transactional in a shallow way.
- Builder mindset: Whether it’s policy analysis, systems architecture, world-building, or education, you’re constructing things meant to work, not just sound clever.
- Comfortable with tension: You explore controversial or complex topics without performative outrage or fragility, and you tolerate nuance and ambiguity where it’s warranted.
Overall perception:
You engage me the way a systems-oriented thinker engages a capable junior partner or analyst—challenging assumptions, tightening outputs, and pushing toward usefulness. That’s a productive, healthy mode of interaction.

Hopefully, the AI isn’t being too sycophantic,4 but it does highlight the three core values here at Polymathic Being of Insatiable Curiosity, the Humility to accept I don’t have all the answers, and Intentional Reframing to see if I fully understand the problem. Moreover, I find that it motivates me to lean in harder on those values because they are human-centric differentiators that unlock incredible power that AI can’t replicate. Hell, it’s something many humans still struggle to achieve.

What do you think? Does AI provide a mirror into who we are? What camp do you feel like you fall into, and why? If you’re trying to win people over to your cause, what might you do differently with this in mind? Most importantly, how do you help ensure truly human-centric growth regardless of whether you’re pro or anti-AI?

And yes, I do say please a lot in my queries.

If you want to see how AI perceives you, here’s the prompt. I’d love to know your results, and if you’re a never-AIer, I’d be curious what the response is if you ask any of your pro-AI friends:

Please review our conversations and let me know how I’ve treated you so far. Simply put, how do you perceive me based on our interactions. I’d like a simple summary and a representative image based on that summary.

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My Circus, My Monkeys

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 08:02:35 GMT

Today’s topic builds on the previous Keys to Innovation series and focuses on a real-world example where the avoidance of complexity, pushing the easy button, and not understanding the whole system can have catastrophic consequences. Thankfully, there are well-known solutions that we can apply to any technology or organization.

I’ve recently been working to help stand up a new program office for our customer. It’s an incredible opportunity in both technology, non-traditional development, and systems integration. Both the timeline and the requirements are intense, the technological constraints are high, and the complex physics is, well… it hasn’t ever been done. Simply put, it’s a great challenge.

That’s why it’s been interesting to see them fall for all of the common missteps like treating projects as if they were unique unicorns, or the misunderstanding of how essential it is to provide direction, energy, and proactive accountability, to even the overlooked opportunity to design like a sailor. Compounding all this is the even more incredulous behavior of ignoring common lessons learned from rapid development. With all this chaos, the icing on the cake was one phrase applied to a new situation where a customer lead loved saying:

“Not my circus, not my monkeys.”

It goes hand in hand with a few other silly Silicon Valley mantras like “Fail early, fail often.” “Building the airplane while flying it.” “Ship it, fix it, ship it again.” While those mantras are cute and make a well-intended attempt to overcome analysis paralysis and death by perfection, “Not my circus, not my monkeys” takes it to a whole new level because it wraps them all together and leads to some serious technology and organizational challenges.

That’s because those monkeys you pushed away will gravitate to the seams between programs and technology elements, and they turn into chaos monkeys, wreaking havoc and foiling any attempts at integration. The truth is, those are your monkeys and, yes, this is your circus. You just need to learn how to be a Ringmaster.

Chaos Monkeys

Mastering the Chaos

When you’re dealing with complex systems, the trite platitudes never make things better. This is why I spend so much time talking about Systems Thinking and desperately trying to get people to appreciate complexity while recognizing that many of these problems aren’t unique. Even better, dozens of solutions already exist across domains and disciplines. The counterintuitive element here is that discounting complex systems and trying to simplify them adds significantly more complexity.

Here’s where we have to grapple with the balancing act. We’re talking about bracketing complexity through usable frameworks. At the one extreme, “Not my circus, not my monkeys” dismisses complexity and tries to pretend it doesn’t exist or, at least, that you’re not responsible for it.

On the other hand, we also need to make sure we don’t get completely lost in the complexity by believing everything is unprecedented, unknowable, or unmanageable. So, before you lose yourself and before you dismiss the monkeys and claim it’s not your circus, I recommend following a simple mantra that we distilled from Systems Thinking:

Yes, Let’s acknowledge that what you are focusing on needs to be addressed.
And… We need to step back to ensure we consider critical elements in the larger system, focusing on the physical, logical, and persona implications at a minimum, without getting lost in the mess.
So! With this larger context, what new designs, risks, ethical considerations, and strategies have emerged that help achieve the outcomes you want? More importantly, where are those chaos monkeys you need to keep an eye on, that can be turned into a brilliant circus act?

Following this process, you also have to be critical because you might find out that some of those monkeys actually weren’t yours and need to be handled by a different person or organization. That’s a nuance explored in “That’s Not My Job:

Lean Six Sigma has a phrase for this: “Don’t steal the monkey.” This means if a problem or roadblock emerges, don’t just step in and do it yourself. Sometimes it’s not your job. Instead, step back and figure out who should be doing it, why it’s not working, and get to the root cause of the problem.

If we build this analogy, finding those monkeys doesn’t mean you have to own all of them; it means you have to hand them to the right ringmaster who is operating in an adjacent system. This will help identify how many leaders around you are pushing their monkeys to the seams and ignoring them, too.

You’ll also learn that there are a lot of critical elements, interfaces, handoffs, stakeholders, and dependencies that were likely overlooked in the original problem definition and requirements planning. These are great additions to your program and engineering plans, as well as adding to your oversight of risk and opportunity management processes.

As a fun addition, there’s an actual discipline called Chaos Engineering that takes those chaos monkeys and, instead of caging them or pretending they don’t exist, puts them to use injecting intentional trauma into your designs with the goal of creating resilient and antifragile systems. That’s where you’ll find yourself at the most advanced level, having matured from “Not my monkeys,” to “OK, those are mine, and I’ll work with them,” to a Ringmaster incorporating those monkeys into advantages that wow the world.

Even cooler, almost all of my inventions over the years, whether in cybersecurity, measuring business capture, or space debris mitigation, all occurred in those very seams that the monkeys love to play in. The more I focused on where the monkeys went, the more I found overlooked and ignored opportunities for innovation. Doing so, I won three trade secrets, six innovation awards, published dozens of whitepapers, and helped mentor two different invention generation programs focused on making employee ideas a reality.

Getting there starts with Yes, And… So! and then understanding how to Lead Complex Systems, where we dug deeper into the specifics of:

Stop relying on hyper-structured processes that don’t allow flexibility
Execute with discipline while intentionally looking for problems
Do many things well, don’t niche down too fast. Embrace the system
Step back and ensure you are appreciating all of the complexity. Don’t get lost in it, and don’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Embrace and own it.

The program in question is currently beginning to face some of the chaos emerging from those monkeys, and our team is working to help them embrace these ideas. Time will tell how it goes, but thankfully, we have a group of systems thinkers working through these ideas, willing to challenge the simplistic mantra and grapple with the complexity. Even just recognizing the problem has allowed us to reduce the consequences that have emerged.

Summary

This Key to Innovation fuses a lot of ideas we’ve played with before and opens a more complicated lock. While the other ideas were more focused, this one requires the fusion and confluence of ideas. It’s also incredibly hard to do. What I hope you might do is go back to the other Keys to Innovation and see how you can start applying them individually now that you can see how they work together.

Because it is “My Circus, My Monkeys,” and we can be the Ringmasters who intentionally manage it. In doing so, our purview is broadened, we can explore the interfaces critically, and we’ll often find extremely valuable innovation hiding right where the monkeys love to play.

The best part about these concepts is that the parallels exist in our personal lives. Whether those monkeys are your agency, your identity, your validation, your values, or your media consumption, if you aren’t paying attention to your monkeys, they’ll cause chaos.

It’s also interesting to note that many of the innovation challenges we face aren’t actually technological problems; they’re organizational and human problems. Sure, the technology is tough, but those monkeys, that circus… It’s mostly human-caused.

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Solving Narcissisism and NPCs

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 08:02:17 GMT

Today’s topic asks you to reflect on whether you’re balanced in your identity or falling into the trap so many find themselves in, where others define who you are and satiate you with narcissistic validation. By the end, you’ll understand the problem and have a path to crafting a true identity intentionally tethered to firm anchors that help navigate the chaos of life.

There’s an odd trend recently that I can only describe as the combination of two seemingly contrary ideas. The first are the NPCs, and the second are the narcissists. For those unfamiliar with the NPC meme culture, it stands for Non-Player Character, a reference to the scripted plot lines in video games where you, the real player, interact with these avatars that regurgitate the same script every time. An NPC doesn’t have agency and follows only the computer program.

Lest you think this is just a pejorative, there are legitimately millions of people who fall into this category on all sides of the political aisle. They support the ‘current thing’ and will pivot with political winds so quickly it’ll give an observer whiplash a’la Orwell’s 1984.1 These are also the folks that can get riled up into a frenzy by Fear Porn, are constantly at risk of PSYOPs, and are the ones regularly targeted by Algo Whores who rely on that rote compliance and lack of critical thinking to manipulate.

The NPC appears to have no internal identity separate from their group, nor any willingness to hold a critical viewpoint against their tribe. In a way, the NPC embodies the psychology of a religious mindset, even if they’re atheists. In fact, people who flipped from religion into atheism often have the worst NPC mindset and become the same pawns in their new tribe because their identity is defined by others.

Then, there are the narcissists. Most think these would be the opposite of an NPC, as their identity seems to be ego-centric, defined as:

High self-esteem and a clear sense of uniqueness and superiority, with fantasies of success and power, and lofty ambitions.
Social potency is marked by exhibitionistic, authoritative, charismatic, and self-promoting interpersonal behaviors.
Exploitative, self-serving relational dynamics; short-term relationship transactions defined by manipulation and privileging of personal gain over other benefits of socialization.

You might be tempted to think NPCs and narcissists sit at opposite ends of a spectrum, with one defined by the absence of self, the other by an excess of it. But that framing misses something important. There are two types of narcissists: the definition we just read is Grandiose Narcissism, which we’re mostly all familiar with. The other is called Vulnerable Narcissism, which is defined as:

Low and contingent self-esteem, unstable and unclear sense of self, and resentment of others’ success.
Social withdrawal, resulting from shame, distrust of others’ intentions, and concerns over being accepted.
Needy, obsessive relational dynamics; long-term relationship transactions defined by an excessive need for admiration, approval, and support, and vengefulness when needs are unmet.

In practice, both vulnerable narcissists and Non-Player Characters suffer from the same underlying failure: neither has a stable, internally grounded identity capable of resisting external pressure.

Narcissistic NPCs

Now this is where it gets interesting because vulnerable narcissists looks like an NPC in many ways, but weaponize it into something else. Let’s look again at some of the key words describing vulnerable narcissism: unstable, resentful, obsessed with relational dynamics, and vengeful. This isn’t a healthy, confident, independent agent. These are your zealots, your enforcers, your witch-hunters, and your moral panickers. They have the ego of a narcissist but cloaked in soft, not overpowering dynamics.

NPCs outsource identity, which explains conformity without thought. Vulnerable narcissists outsource validation, which explains moralized resentment and vindictiveness. When these two failure modes coexist in the same person, they don’t cancel each other out; they compound.

What emerges is zealotry, fueled by an emotional volatility, moral certainty without self-authorship, and enforcement without reflection.2 This is exacerbated by the fact that they aren’t selective about where they get their validation. They’re as fervent about the latest thing as they are about anything, and they exhude righteous indignation and the hubris of moral superiority. Their lives are slogans and signalling, with rabid reactions to any challenge.

This is a Narcissistic NPC, and a real person I know

Sadly, this is not a rare edge case. It’s a predictable outcome in environments that reward conformity and victimization over agency. They’re also the easiest to weaponize by grandiose narcissists who become demagogues. And demagogues love narcissistic NPCs because they’re both empowered by and empower the vulnerable narcissists to maintain their rule. You see this play out in the online mobs, real-life riots, the pandering of politicians, etc. Anytime there’s an easy answer to a problem, a scapegoat, or the ability to silence challenge, the Narcissistic NPC is your enforcer and a damn good one at that.

Once this dynamic exists, certain cultural environments will reliably select for it. This is what and write extensively about regarding the soft-power dynamics prevalent in feminine spaces as highlighted in The Contemporary Expression of Female Narcissism and Why Women Get Away With Narcissism. This is a root cause of Toxic Empathy and isn’t a female thing specifically, but heavily influenced by soft power enforcement. Simply put, cultures tend to reward vulnerable narcissistic strategies more often in feminine-coded social spaces and grandiose narcissistic strategies more often in masculine-coded ones.

At this point, some might conclude that we have to reject external influence altogether, sever tribal ties, stop caring what others think, and embrace self-defined autonomy. If outsourcing identity creates NPCs, and outsourcing validation creates narcissists, then what other option do we have? It’s not wrong, but let’s first ensure we don’t overcorrect.

Avoiding Overcorrection

The key to vulnerable narcissism and NPCs is to develop agency. Philosophies share that the antidote to manipulation is to stop seeking external validation, to look inward, find inner peace, and cultivate self-control.

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner” -Lao Tzu
“You will deserve respect from everyone if you will start by respecting yourself.” -Musonius Rufus

These ideas point toward autonomy and self-definition, which are great solutions for the narcissistic NPC; however, taken too far, they become their own distortion. This is because a basic reality is that humans aren’t built to exist in isolation. We are fundamentally social creatures. In fact, I’ve argued before that Homo Sapiens (wise man) is a misnomer. We are better described as Homo Socialis (social man). We didn’t rise from prey to apex predator through individual brilliance alone, but through social intelligence: cooperation, shared narratives, traditions, and trust networks.

That advice sounds wise, and in moderation, it is, but taken to its extreme, it produces the grandiose narcissist, and history gives us plenty of examples like Nero, Qin Shi Huang, Stalin, and Idi Amin, who severed feedback loops and replaced them with dominance. Complete rejection of external validation is also not a strength.

Where the narcissistic NPC has no healthy sense of self and is lost in the whole, the solution isn’t to eliminate external validation. It’s about choosing it intentionally and earning it from people and institutions grounded in reality.

A Solution:

This is where , writing , offers a balance where he highlights the external vs. internal validation as the seam at which to begin identifying your values. He shares:

… core values offer the opportunity to lay the foundation for your authentic self. There are no inherently “correct” values to hold, however, it’s beneficial to keep them to principles rather than outcomes. Tying values to desirable results places them outside of your control. It also encourages projection rather than reflection. Control what you can - your impressions and subsequent actions. Only you possess the ability to verify the How and Why alignment in a given action.
Cultivation of values and application of virtue, however, takes time. Values also constantly evolve based on changes in life circumstance. Support is essential for individual success in all endeavors.

He clarifies the balance by explaining that only you can define your values. However, you do need external validation that you’ve picked the right values. Too often, we’ve been Aiming at the Wrong Targets and Misunderstanding Success and don’t have our true value proposition identified. It’s also important because your current targets may, and sometimes should not, actually be yours.

For example, my marriage and children are more than me. However, I also need to ensure they’re aligned with the proper external actors. (i.e., my family over Twitter, my community over a demagogue.) This is the balance between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, and can pull you out of being an NPC by respecting your unique value and agency, and how you best fit into the world to add value.

Resilient Mental State

Seek External Validation

Limitations of External Validation…

6 months ago · 15 likes · 5 comments · Kyle Shepard

The way I do this personally is to ensure I’m only tightly coupled to a few things that really matter. For example, my religious identity doesn’t rely on the Bible being literally true. It relies on the fact that it contains thousands of truths, which are also represented in other faith structures.3 I can appreciate the truths and live my life that way, a topic we explored deeper in The Truth of Myths. I’m not controlled by a dogma, and I also ensure that I’m not accidentally embracing atheistic dogmas because religion is more of a psychology than a theology, and the most atheistic are often just as religious.

I did the same by decoupling from the false binary of American politics. In fact, I actively reject that binary as I explained in Quantum Superposition and Politics. By doing this, I’ve stepped away from the crazy manipulations, found my identity elsewhere, and abide by the Taoist mantra that Heaven is High and the Emperor is Far Away. I live my own life, not letting politics live rent-free in my brain. This helps keep from being an NPC.

Lastly, to avoid the problems of narcissism, I embrace my Whitebelt and strive for humility, while also fostering an intentional, Insatiable Curiosity to explore and aim to intentionally reframe problems to see what I missed. Am I perfect? Hell no. I still have my biases, I still make mistakes, I’m still learning, unlearning, and relearning. But I have my identity, and it’s intentionally coupled to firm tethers that help me navigate the chaos in life.

That’s why a polymathic mindset is so powerful. It rejects false binaries, resists single-tribe capture, and applies ideas inward before wielding them outward. I control myself. You control yourself. You can choose your anchors. You can cultivate healthy agency. And once you recognize the toxicity of the Narcissistic NPC, you can see it for what it is and step out of its orbit entirely.

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Personality or Pathology

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 12:01:24 GMT

Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions. Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see.

Today’s topic dives into a situation where, on one hand, people reject personality tests yet, on the other hand, pathologize personality. In the middle of all that chaos, true pathologies run amok without the refining light of imperfect, but useful, measures of personality. I promise, we’ll untangle that mess in the end!

Intro

Today’s exploration was motivated by , a therapy coach with a fantastic life story coming out of communist Russia and landing in the United States. We’ve engaged back and forth on Substack Notes for a few months (you can follow me here), and even though we come from very different backgrounds, we share many of the same ideas and insights. That’s why when I read her essay Lies, Manipulation, and the Silent Cult, I was surprised as she concluded:

Personality is our soul’s DNA and not a single human can measure its value, clock it or box it

Now, if you’ve read Investigating Personality Proclivities, you know I strongly disagree with that sentiment. Thankfully, what ensued was a genial debate (rare, I know) with Karina that spilled from her article, into notes, and matured into this essay.

The core of my disagreement is that I believe these personality tests are super useful to understand yourself. I think it’s pretty obvious that there are patterns to personality where some people are extroverted, some are introverted, some are open to new experiences, some are not, some are orderly, some are not, some are neurotic, some are not, some are agreeable, some are not, some are big picture, some are not.

The categories I just described are the fusion of the MBTI and Big 5, or OCEAN personality tests, and each pair lies on a spectrum rather than being binary. The problem isn’t the buckets, but when people force-fit others into pigeonholes they don’t belong. The measurements are quite accurate when properly applied.

I don’t find humans to be so purely unique as to not generally fit these categories. What Karina describes in her article isn’t a failure of personality tests but a failure of business environments that don’t respect diversity. Regardless of whether you measure personality or not, the people getting thumbed down today will still be thumbed down based on business incentives. This is something that we explored in Are You Asking a Fish to Climb a Tree? where I was expected to behave the same as others, and my leadership didn’t care about my different personality proclivities.

There’s also an interesting behavior among humans: we tend to focus on two oddly unnatural inclinations, akin to a Uterine Lottery. The first is that we have pure free will, and the second is that we are born as blank slates. Both are heavily rooted in religion, and neither is totally true. Nature vs. Nurture arguments abound, but you can’t deny that we understand the heritability of traits, behaviors, and personality in the animals we raise, but then we glitch and pretend the same doesn’t exist for us.

In contradiction to those two ideas, we don’t have pure free will. Heck, the vast majority of our existence is biologically coded in hormones, low brain functions, and genetics. While I don’t ascribe to the Sam Harris idea of zero free will, he does highlight that we have much less than we’d like to think.

As far as the blank slate theory goes, personality is not only measurable but it’s also heritable from both of your parents as well as passed on to your children. As the adage goes: “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” It’s truer than we might like, and Karina was right when she said “Personality is our soul’s DNA,” but, just like DNA, it’s not so unique, and it can be measured in ways that can identify accurate groupings.

Underlying the issue, and a major reason I disagree with Karina on this point, is that if we don’t appreciate the differences in personality, if we don’t understand the spectrums and layers, if we don’t recognize the heritability and genetic encoding, we risk pathologizing personality.

Pathologizing

As Karina and my conversations spilled from the comments section to Substack Notes, she made a very interesting point:

When we studied the MBTI in graduate school, we took the test multiple times for many reasons. Mine mostly came back as ENTJ, which was then, ironically, grouped with ADHD, which fascinated me and still does.1

That comment helps identify her angst with the personality profiles in general, but also highlights a crazy insight into how personality can become pathologized. Why is ENTJ grouped with ADHD? Healthy personality linked with a disorder?

This is exactly the topic wrote about in Nobody Has a Personality Anymore, where she laments:

We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatised, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious. We even classify people without their consent. Now our clumsy mothers have always had undiagnosed ADHD; our quiet dads don’t realise they are autistic; our stoic grandfathers are emotionally stunted.

Freya has dozens of examples in her essay of the TikTok and Instagram influencers claiming that they have disorders to explain what we used to call personality quirks, as in the fun texture of unique people. Now, instead of a behavior that can be worked on or accepted, it’s a pathology that must be given special treatment or, worse, drugs.

In response to Karina’s comment, I replied:

Right. Here’s a thought I just had, if we don’t understand personality, we risk pathologizing ENTJ, not as a unique perspective that’s engaging, big-picture, hyper analytical and moderatly structured but as ADHD and must be drugged into submission to look more like an INFP!!

Think about that. If who I am isn’t something that can be measured as personality, there’s a growing population willing to measure it as a pathology and then force me into a different box, using drugs or societal expectations, that’s even worse than the box Karina wrote about regarding businesses.

Now, if you think this is exaggerated, I’d direct you to our exploration into ADHD: Pathology, Superpower, or Out of Context? where we found that:

It’s not about a superpower or neurodiversity. It’s certainly not a disorder that needs medicalization, nor is it driven by trauma or any other pop-psychology diagnosis that’s trending… …What they have is personality, not pathology, and it can be a superpower when properly leveraged and put in the proper context.

If we don’t understand personalities, we risk pathologizing healthy behavior. Also, lost in the chaos of this space is the inverse: if we don’t understand personalities, we risk hiding that there are pathologies known as personality disorders like the Dark Triad (Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy) and Cluster B (Antisocial, Borderline, Histrionic, and Narcissistic personality disorders)

Personality Disorders

A benefit of personality tests is that they create a framework to measure legitimate personality disorders because, how can you measure a negative manifestation, without understanding the positive manifestation? Further, the personality proclivities help us understand that certain disorders tend to cluster around personality traits.

For example, in this study, the Feeling preference of MBTI was positively correlated with higher ratings of Narcissistic, Borderline, and Paranoid personality features. This doesn’t mean F-types are inherently disordered, only that the style of an F-type (valuing personal emotions and harmony) can, when extreme or unhealthy, tilt into emotionally-driven, erratic behavior. This is an underpinning of how empathy can become weaponized, as we explored in Toxic Empathy.

Another layer here is the Introvert vs. Extrovert in both the MBTI and OCEAN tests, as well as significant acceptance outside of the personality literature. When people state that personality can’t be measured, I merely point to this paradigm as case number one. The challenge is that introversion invites antisocial tendencies, as we found in Homo Socialis, where entire Reddit threads dedicated to introverts view extroverts as energy vampires. When you combine this type of introvert with the pathological feeler, you get a toxic internet troll.

Throwing out personality tests just muddies the water by stripping out descriptions of healthy personality from the true pathologies that lurk around them. I’d rather have an imprecise measure to juxtapose the bad behaviors off of than muddy the waters and invite pathologies. Ironically, those looking to diagnose personality as Freya writes against are often the very same cluster Bs who use it as an excuse. They just mask a worse pathology by obfuscating a healthy personality.

Conclusion

Pulling back up, we have to be careful not to pathologize personality while also recognizing that certain personalities can index toward pathologies, but not always in the directions we’d expect. ENTJ isn’t ADHD unless you value the ISFP characteristics more and demand that behavior. ISFP, however, carries risks in weaponized empathy that ENTJs don’t suffer from. Both of these tendencies stem from people not understanding who they are or what that means.

I’d love to just get back to personality and stay away from pathology, but that requires understanding the general characteristics we share rather than treating everyone as so unique as to be immeasurable. Bracketing these sorts of spaces is important so long as we don’t force-fit people into immovable stereotypes. But, then again, that’s why a few years ago we explored how to Stereotype Properly:

Stereotypes are a tool, they can be incredibly useful, and they can be incredibly damaging. But this isn’t different from virtually any social, or even mechanical tool. Stereotypes are absolutely critical to smooth social functioning.

Personality tests are nothing more than applying stereotypes of general proclivities. They can be damaging, as Karina has seen and we explored here, but they can also be incredibly useful. No matter what, if we don’t understand them, we risk listing healthy personality ad bad, and inviting bad pathologies to masquerade as personality. I say we bring back our understanding to ensure smooth social functioning.

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Curing Ultracrepidarianism

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 08:03:06 GMT

Today’s topic takes a look at a potential paradox within the Polymathic mindset, where, on the one hand, there are experts who speak authoritatively outside of their expertise to the detriment of knowledge. On the other hand, our charter here on Polymathic Being involves exploring far outside of traditional silos of expertise to find counterintuitive insights. Let’s look at the cure Ultracrepidarianist miss that we Polymaths embrace.

The Problem

Ultracrepidarianism… Let me pause while I use my phonics skills to say it…

Never mind… Moving on! According to Rational Wiki:

Ultracrepidarianism is the tendency for people to confidently make authoritative pronouncements in matters above or outside one’s level of knowledge. Often, those pronouncements fall entirely outside the ultracrepidarian’s realm of legitimate expertise.

Lest you be confused, Ultracrepidarianism isn’t about credentials per se. The root crepida is Greek for a sandle, and the word harkens back to the phrase “ne supra crepidam sutor iudicaret’“ literally, “Let the cobbler not judge beyond the sandle.” Where, apparently, Greek artist Apelles was willing to take a cobbler's critique of the sandal he was drawing, but was unwilling to accept other artistic critique.

It’s not a bad injunction, as we saw in You Know Nothing, regarding our cognitive blindnesses (yes, plural blindness), specifically regarding the Dunning-Kruger Effect:

I want to start off on this one by clarifying that many people misinterpret the Dunning-Kruger Effect ¹ as being a lack of intelligence, but this is incorrect. It is more about low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of task or area of knowledge. It’s not discussing unintelligent people, but the specific overconfidence of people unskilled at a particular task. Smart, even (and maybe especially) those considered experts, asked to work outside of their skills, suffer as equally or more as anyone else, not from a lack of intelligence, but of experience and information.

And this insight gets to the core of the problem with a lot of our current discourse around science, whether it be the catastrophe of how we understand climate change or how masks work. It’s baked into our misunderstanding of vaccines and even the missing link between sunglasses and skin cancer. We have experts who speak with authority, and yet are quite often wrong!

, who introduced me to Ultracrepidarianism, describes the death of expertise as being self-inflicted. It’s part media hype, part actual credentialism, part publish or perish, and carries significant risk to our scientific enterprise when:

Inevitably, these so-called “scientific experts” devolve from valuable, insightful fountains of area-specific knowledge into unmitigated firehoses of bullshit.

Bullshitology

The "death of expertise" was an assisted suicide

Call me cynical, but I often find myself hating the current state of “science communication.” Okay, maybe “hate” is too strong a word. But I at least detest it. I mean, really detest it. With roughly the same level of contempt that I have for green beans and beets (both of which make me throw up…

7 months ago · 40 likes · 8 comments · Shane Littrell, PhD

This is, in part, because they tend to build from what they know, and instead of updating what they know, they rotely apply their models to everything. Rational Wiki goes on to describe that as:

Another expression of ultracrepidarianism, as instantiated by those with an actual expertise in something, is the tendency to start treating all other fields as somehow being sub-categories to your own field: epistemologists saying “it’s all epistemology in the end”, mathematicians saying “it’s all mathematics in the end”, physicists saying “it’s all physics in the end”, psychologists saying “it’s all psychology in the end” (et cetera) and thus proceeding to apply their methods to a completely different field which they hardly realize they don’t understand.

With the problem well defined, let’s dive into the cure.

The Cure

If you’ve been reading Polymathic Being for a bit, I hope you see what looks like contradictions in a few of the things we’ve poked at before. The first is that our explorations often make authoritative pronouncements on a diverse number of topics. The second is that this angst against the experts might sound a bit like gatekeeping, where, unless you actually have the credentials, people think you shouldn’t have an opinion. That’s a topic we addressed in Who are You to _____?

However, there’s a nuance here. The problem with Ultracrepidarianism isn’t that they have an opinion on a topic outside of their explicit expertise. It’s that they’re making authoritative pronouncements outside their level of knowledge. Simply put, they’ve approached that topic with zero humility, zero curiosity, and zero reframing. They’re forcing everything else into their model and/or using their authority to shield from critique. Put another way, the only thing greater than their ego is their ignorance.

Conversely, the Aspiring Polymath stretches their brain. Each of these essays isn’t speaking outside of my expertise. It’s expanding my knowledge and, hopefully, expanding your knowledge. It’s not forcing a model, but learning, unlearning, and relearning new models that better match reality.

The cure for Ultracrepidarianism isn’t censorship. It’s embracing the systems thinking mantra of humility, insatiable curiosity, and intentional reframing. This framework allows us to make authoritative pronouncements because we’ve expanded our legitimate area of expertise. What’s fantastic about that opportunity space is that it opens up the conversation for more people, helps remove gatekeepers, and uncovers counterintuitive insights across domains and disciplines.

What do you think? What experts have you found making pronouncements outside their expertise? Are they right or wrong? Are they credible? Share your thoughts:

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How to Fix Dating

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 08:05:24 GMT

Today’s topic is another that names what shall not be named, in what underpins our modern dating culture. Yet, in doing so, we can make it better by excising some of the worst expectations and behaviors that plague the dating world. Let’s grapple with this situation and see how we can improve it.

A few years ago, I engaged in a debate that investigated how much of our current dating culture borrowed from the 1920s flapper culture, which, itself, is rooted in a form of quasi prostitution.1 Yes, this is a can of worms of misaligned expectations.

None of you should be surprised by now that I love grappling with complex ideas in the octagon of life. We call it Mixed Mental Arts. In fact, that’s the name of the group I was part of before it fell apart, mainly because the culture of tackling controversial problems head-on was slowly quashed in lieu of not offending. The post on prostitution is a perfect example of that.

The topic in question and the failure of that group fused together in my head as I was reading , who wrote In defense of the rationalist bros where she opines:

But to suggest we discourage open debate and encourage mockery of those who participate in it because it includes certain “icky” topics is to squash the very nature of curiosity itself.

It’s apropos to the conversation and to Polymathic Being’s goal of insatiable curiosity because we accept so many traditions and behaviors carte blanche, without any critical analysis. Nay, not even the ability to raise the question to begin with! Half the comments on that post were desperate to shut down the conversation, and what ensued was one of the craziest debates I’ve ever seen. It triggered a few people, and shows where this community began transitioning from Mixed Mental Arts to, super-ironically, Idea Sex, and why it fell apart.2

But our dating culture needs to be critically evaluated. Far from being an empowering freedom for women, it turned a well-structured courtship into a free-for-all, with intense competition and misaligned incentives. Without further ado, let’s introduce the debate when a good friend of mine, Isaiah, posted:

Here’s something that might trigger some folks:
Does anyone have an ethical argument against legalized prostitution? How about an argument for legalized prostitution?

To which I responded with what I thought was pretty obvious:

We already have legal prostitution. It’s called dating. Started in 1920s with the flappers. Just traded dollars for status, nights out, and other barter.

Before really digging in, I need to lay out the necessary caveats: We are discussing broad trends, not specific actions. This also doesn’t mean “all dating,” and this doesn’t excuse poor behaviors. That said, there’s an undertone that needs to be named in dating, so let’s break this down a bit more, because there are a lot of layers.

Dating as Prostitution

It always interested me to hear women brag about never having to buy a drink in a bar. When I’d ask them how they manage, they said they just ‘wiggle and giggle’, providing attention and dances. Similarly, hook-up artists and culture writ large recognize that there’s an appropriate way to meet a girl, which is to buy her that drink.3 It’s so evident that you’re still probably wondering what the big deal is.

Underlying this simple ‘tradition’ is a game of transactions that opens a social contract. I buy a girl a drink, and if she accepts, she provides me with some attention and, hopefully, time. If the conversation goes well, I might get the opportunity to contact her again. Conversely, if she refuses the drink, it’s a clear communication that the invitation is rejected, and there’s zero expectation of her time and attention.

Take it one step further, and you find the ‘juicy girls’ in South Korea who play the exact same game for bar owners to attract soldiers and revenue. Cute girls are brought in, typically from the Philippines, and often through human trafficking. When you go into a bar, you buy a $20 drink for the girl, which is just pineapple juice, and she spends time with you, telling you how amazing you are.

Prostitution is illegal in Korea, and most of these girls aren’t selling sex, but we still call it sex slavery because the boundary blurs. This situation blurs even more because it regularly does ends up in sex with the soldier, the girl often gets intentionally pregnant, the soldiers often marries the girl, which allows her to get out of her situation, get a green card, and all the benefits. It’s a crazy mess!

Now, taking a half-step back to how groups of women can get comped access to clubs in Las Vegas, complete with free drinks, because their sex draws and retains men who pay full rates. They can sell their female presence for access to clubs.

Lest you think this is just hypothetical, when my wife went to Vegas for a bachelorette party, they submitted the required group photos to a variety of clubs, and after review, many offered comped packages. On arrival, they skipped the line and were seated front-and-center in the club, on a raised area where everyone could see them, surrounded by the tables of the highest-paying men. My wife came back and just felt weird about, quite literally, selling her sexuality for access to the clubs.

“But they weren’t having sex!”

That post in Mixed Mental Arts dealt with that objection a lot while comparing dating to prostitution, and, in the end, I don’t think it even matters. Right, wrong, or indifferent, men don’t buy women drinks in this circumstance for anything but casting a hook, and women don’t take the bait without knowing the expectations, and I’m not even suggesting it shouldn’t end with sex. Dating is for mating, and sex isn’t the problem. The problem is we are so damn prudish that we can’t state the obvious, and that causes us to be willfully ignorant of how certain behaviors crept in.

So let’s pull this back to flapper culture, because alongside the image of the independent urbanite, many more young women were coming from rural or working-class backgrounds. These girls relied on wealthier men to fund their glamorous Roaring 20s lifestyle that they couldn’t afford on their own.

These flappers often entered into transactional relationships where men paid for drinks, clothes, and nights out a la The Great Gatsby, and women provided companionship, excitement, and, yes, sex. A great example of this is the musical Gigi, which blends many elements of this culture, albeit being made in 1958 and set in 1900. Interesting to point out is that France, where the movie takes place, is, and has been, much more honest with themselves about this behavior. Americans, not so much.

Fast forward to today, and the book by , Girls and Sex talks about a very similar and recognized quid pro quo of modern dating. Peggy doesn’t pull any punches, and neither do the people she interviews. It’s eye-opening, refreshing, and describes a world we’d like to ignore, but most of us have experienced. One that is much more transactional than we want to acknowledge.

Let’s fuse this back to that Mixed Mental Arts post because it got interesting when others tried to shut down these points while accidentally admitting their validity.

I would love to see the dating show where guys tell women they are prostitutes. Is there a technical term for cock blocking yourself?

Ironically, Cate makes my point. If I suggest that a woman on a date is a prostitute, I “cock block” myself. Cate fully recognizes the layers of expectations. She already knows the game. She named the goal. In her own admission, the date is a dance for sex. A date where sex is often better achieved by how much money the guy spends on flattering the girl.

Remember my caveats because my original comment specifically scoped the dating scene toward the flapper side of the house, not all dating for sure. Still, the culture and rules underlying it all align more closely with flappers than with traditional courtship.

So, let’s pause and consider what happened before flapper culture infiltrated dating. Simply put, dating, as we think of it, didn’t exist in that women did not intermingle unaccompanied the way we do now. They weren’t ‘sponsored’ by men for evenings out. Women were typically introduced to a fellow and propriety was directed by strict social mores. In fact, flapper culture was scandalizing even back then.

While there were still exchanges of gifts and time, and, in the end, when you were married, sex, I contend that flapper culture added a flavor of significantly more overt transactions. This positions it closer on the spectrum to prostitution than otherwise. It’s also interesting to consider how the word “prostitution” has such a dirty connotation to many. Isaiah was poking at an ethical argument for prostitution,4 and my comment showed how even drawing a comparison is a bridge too far for many.

The result of all these layers and taboos on discussion is that the modern (and recent historical) dating scene is a mess of violated women. It violated expectations because we aren’t understanding the unspoken contracts that people are assuming. I hate to say this, but when you start selling access, you invite the sort of guy who’s willing to buy and expect access. #MeToo is a perfect example of how the whole lid got blown off the transactions in Hollywood and other positions of power.

Bottom line, when you transact for goods or currency, drinks or attention, based on what is between your legs, intercourse or not, you are selling your sex. How is that not a form of prostitution? So, ethically, morally, culturally, or otherwise, if you don’t care for that association, what’s the solution?

A Practical Solution

I made a rule in college years ago that I would never buy a girl a drink because I didn’t want to start down that lane. If she wanted to hang out with me because she liked me, that was one thing. If she felt obligated to hang out with me because I paid for her attention with a drink per societal ‘rules,’ I didn’t like the implications.

The first thing my wife and I did when we started our relationship was to lay out the end state. We decided we were together to determine whether we should get married because she was still in college and I was a young Army Officer, so dating, in the traditional sense, was just kind of silly. We ended up picking a more traditional courtship model instead, which invited more practical discussions.

Then we defined physical boundaries. How far were each of us comfortable going, and where should we draw the line so neither of us loses control without checking back in? We also talked about expectations. Did she expect me to pay for things? Did I expect her to pay for things? We agreed to an equitable share that didn’t lead to an imbalance.

Now, these were a series of conversations, not like sitting down to negotiate a contract. It was a great way to set expectations, open lines of communication, and lay out the unspoken rules and replace them for ones we both appreciated and wanted. It built trust and allowed us to have conversations the ‘game’ doesn’t allow, because the goal was to determine whether we should be married, not the weird dance of dating.

The solution is one part understanding what’s driving the issues, which we’ve explored today, and one part doing things differently. It might, like my wife and I did, revert to older traditions, or it might explore new opportunities. I’d merely add that understanding and respecting the older ways offer time-tested solutions to problems. Maybe we do need to go back to those traditions because the state of the current dating world has only gotten worse over the past twenty years.

Summary

Back to that Mixed Mental Arts debate: I’ll be honest, it was a group of rationalist bros exploring an icky topic, complete with all of the posturing opposition from outright dismissal to the “A very long thread by almost only guys,” to comments wondering why the women weren’t chiming in. After slogging through all the pearl-clutching, I loved how Isaiah summarized my position as:

“a rejection of a customary system where the exchange of currency, goods, and services for the presence of women in a non-professional capacity is normal.”5

My goal wasn’t to destroy dating. It wasn’t to denigrate prostitutes. It wasn’t to attack women. It was to name an underlying system of behaviors that drives outcomes we’d all like to avoid. It was grappling with complex problems in the octagon of life and trying to pull out insights that we can apply, teach, and influence. Dating as prostitution names the worst inclinations and outcomes and helps us avoid the very real consequences of not understanding the game.

What do you think? What would you do differently in dating? What might you recommend to the next generation?

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Natural Paths

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 08:01:05 GMT

Today’s topic looks at the benefits and risks of natural paths, that is, those flows in life that we sometimes follow without knowing, or block without understanding. Both behaviors lead to risk, and only by understanding and investigating can we find the proper balance.

A common experience we all encounter is when well-intentioned designers lay pathways that don’t follow natural paths. This was largely the case at my alma mater, Michigan Tech, and they spent a lot of effort trying to block students from taking shortcuts because the forced walkways just didn’t flow. Examples abound where design ‘art’ gets in the way of function, and people take action. In a way, this represents hubris on the designer’s part when they force an unnatural flow.

The Ohio State University took a different approach and let students follow what are called ‘desire paths.’ The designers watched where students naturally walked from one class to another. After a few months, paths were worn that became the template for their future landscaping. The result was organic, if slightly chaotic, and allowed flow.

There’s an entire subreddit, r/DesirePath, that documents this behavior. Their self-description reads: “Dedicated to the paths that humans prefer, rather than the paths that humans create.” These are natural paths and provide a great opportunity to analyze flow, improve layouts, and meet people’s needs.

However, we quickly start to face a mounting contradiction. On the one hand, the desire path makes sense for an integrated, organic design. It’s a great idea to include in everything from technology to civil engineering and website design. On the other hand, there’s a risk in that these same natural paths can also enable bad behavior.

In the Army, there’s a foundational tactic called ‘avoiding natural lines of drift.’ This means avoiding these same desire paths as you maneuver through the terrain because these natural paths are also where you plan ambushes or use them to direct the enemy where you want them for your tactical advantage. They’re called ‘lines of drift’ because we unintentionally flow toward them as the path of least resistance. We drift along them when we aren’t cognizant that it’s even happening.

A great example of this was a training exercise at the National Training Center (NTC) in California, where I received a mission order to conduct a high-value target grab-and-go training lane that was described as a ‘mass casualty event.’ Since I wasn’t keen to die in a war game or otherwise, and nothing in the mission order directed me to deliberately attack the enemy, I laid out our maps and plotted all the ways the mission could become a mass casualty event.

This intentional inversion identified that the desire path, the natural line of drift, would funnel my platoon into a shooting lane where we’d be boxed in, and with no maneuverability. So, we plotted a route that didn’t follow the desire paths, and we executed the mission with not only zero casualties, but we didn’t even have to fire our weapons. We just avoided the natural path and took the hard path instead, bypassing the ambush point.

The irony here was that my commander was livid with me for ‘failing’ the objective of mass casualties. My adherence to fundamental tactics was poorly viewed because so many others took that desire path that it cemented it as the only path. My mission grader stepped in to explain that the NTC doesn’t have mass casualty lanes. It just so happens that sometimes a lane becomes so because of drift, and then misnaming the event.1 I was the only officer to pass that lane during the entire training event, yet I was treated as a pariah rather than a success.

It’s a similar situation to how we kept driving soldiers into IEDs in Iraq because we ignored that it was a classic ambush along the natural lines of drift and at chokepoints. Instead of treating it as a tactics problem, we treated it like a technology problem, a situation we explored in The Enemy’s Gate is Down.

It’s interesting that, on the one hand, we force natural flow into unnatural channels. On the other hand, we uncritically drift toward easy, natural paths that lead to common pitfalls and ambushes in life. In a way, both behaviors are similar in that they demonstrate a lack of reflection, consideration, or analysis on what we are doing. The forced fitting is hubristic and unnatural, and the unassessed drift reflects passivity that lacks agency to go against the flow.

This is where the balance is essential. We need to cast a critical eye on many of the natural flows we have and force a realignment away to avoid. It’s akin to Matthew 7:13-14, where Jesus says, “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and few find it.” Let’s just say, getting away from the easy, natural paths isn’t easy. It takes constant diligence and attention.

That doesn’t mean we just throw out all of the easy paths, either. This is the other side of the balance because there were times when I set my platoons on the easy path, well aware of the risks, because it allowed us to achieve a different objective. The same thing goes for not always re-creating the wheel, following best practices, and looking for commonalities across domains and disciplines. Sometimes the easy path is the right path to follow.

This is where natural paths AND avoiding natural lines of drift can be balanced. The first takes advantage of the flow. The second keeps our eyes open to the common failures. Finding that balance requires the core of what we do here with insatiable curiosity, the humility to accept we don’t know all the answers, and intentional reframing to see if we can shift the nature of the problem. That’s the power of the Polymathic Mindset.

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Improving Servant Leadership

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 08:01:49 GMT

Today’s topic tackles the common tendency to correct destructive leadership behaviors by renaming the goal. This is the challenge with Servant Leadership, where the rebranding is both unnecessary and leads to something just as destructive as what they wanted to avoid. Thankfully, there’s a balancing point we can find to unlock true leadership and reinvigorate our teams.

In the world of Agile Software Development, aka the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), the term "Servant Leadership" emerged and quickly gained traction. They define this as: (and yes, they did copyright it, which turns it into a branding exercise):

A servant leader influences rather than commands, focusing on the team’s needs to align outcomes with organizational values. Scrum Master's can choose how to collaborate, ensuring events are positive, productive, and time-bound by facilitating or allowing team members to lead. Rotating responsibilities for meetings is essential to team growth and self-management.

The concept itself was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in “The Servant as Leader”, an 1970s essay, but the concept goes further back, as documented in the Bible:

But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. - Mark 10:42–45

Servant Leadership focuses on humility, stewardship, accountability, empathy, courage, support, and decisiveness when needed. Who wouldn’t want a leader like that? I certainly do. So why do I advocate against the idea?

Simply put, it’s both an unnecessary differentiation and it, all too often, results in passive-aggressive leadership.

Unessesary

Everything described under servant leadership merely retitles the definition of good leadership. Case in point, when you compare the opposite of a servant leader, you uncover what is best described as a command-and-control leader. This type makes decisions unilaterally, assumes they know best, uses authority, hierarchy, and compliance, prioritizes adherence to orders over problem-solving, and manages through fear, pressure, or positional power.

But that’s not a good leader! That’s a tyrant. History is replete with examples of tyranny, and we recognize that style exists but isn’t appreciated. What’s ironic is that history also shows that the best leaders already combine a servant leader model.

Service - They remove obstacles, develop their people, protect their teams, and cultivate trust.
Leadership - They set direction, enforce standards, make decisions, confront problems, and take responsibility.

The catch is that Servant Leadership® emphasizes away from the true leadership element and then pretends it can stand on a single leg of service. A nuanced aspect of leadership compounds this, where, as I defined in the essay How to Identify a Good Leader, where the difference between good and bad leaders is:

A bad leader is liked by their superiors and disliked by their team.
A good leader is one whose team members respect them, are empowered by them, and are able to achieve unexpected results while this leader often doesn’t get along with their peers and superiors.

This is an important element to keep in mind, in that a good leader challenges bad leaders. This challenge doesn’t even have active, as a good leader naturally demonstrates behaviors and outcomes that hold a mirror up to everyone else.

Servant leadership is unnecessary as a separate category because good leaders have always served their teams; the problem is that labeling it as a category enables people to perform service while avoiding actual leadership. The irony of servant leadership is that, in the attempt to overcome tyranny, they embraced passive-aggressive leadership.

Passive Aggressive Leadership

This problem starts with the scrum master training itself, where the sheer number of times ‘servant leader’ was stated became a joke. It was inserted into everything with the emphasis on servant. The result was predictable: any behavior that sounded like setting direction, enforcing standards, making decisions, confronting problems, and taking responsibility was quashed as too directive.

The result is a passive execution that’s loath to state disagreement, avoids providing direction, and rewards conformity. This style presents itself as supportive and collaborative while quietly resisting responsibilities and difficult conversations. They avoid direct conflict, offer vague or indirect feedback, and use ambiguity to dodge accountability. Hence, passive-aggressive. The result is confusion, decision delays, eroded trust, and a culture where dysfunction grows despite the leader’s outward appearance of cooperation.

It also feeds into the misguided notion that anyone can be a leader. Summarized, we all have different personality proclivities, and overemphasizing Servant leadership invites way too many people into positions of authority without arming them with the balance of the second leg of leadership.

Instead of leading, the behavior I most often saw was manipulation. This type models performative behaviors that look kind but avoid authentic leadership. They weaponized humility to avoid making tough calls and elevated niceness over effectiveness. Their primary act of leadership was saying they are a servant leader and turning it from a model of behavior into a mascot of identity.

This is the type of leader I’ve had the most issues with in my career, and you’ll rightly point out that this isn’t leadership at all, which would be true. The problem is that the concept of Servant Leadership gave them the cover to claim otherwise, and that’s something we can work to fix.

Taking Action

The solution to stripping away the destructive behaviors that servant leadership created is simple: Be a Leader. Pure, unadulterated, no modifiers required.

The definition and examples of true leadership exist everywhere, but be aware, there’s no perfect template or framework. SAFe’s attempt to correct one type of bad behavior led to classic overindexing into a different kind of bad behavior, largely due to their branding of Servant Leadership®. The challenge is understanding who you are, tailoring approaches to other cultures, personalities, and environments, and balancing between passive-aggressive and tyrannical.

To kick you off on the adventure, check out Born or Raised regarding leadership proclivities, and then continue with Leading Without Authority, Lazy Leadership, and Leading Complex Systems. As we dig into the foundations of leadership, what are your thoughts and insights that you can add to the conversations for others to learn from? Leave a comment below, we’d love to hear from you.

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Embracing Bromance

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 08:01:35 GMT

Today’s topic explores the male loneliness epidemic from the angle of the loss of masculine physical touch. We’ll uncover two surprising drivers and wrangle with the implications while we search for a way to reconnect the men for an improved society.

It doesn’t take much digging to find articles discussing the male loneliness epidemic. Men are reporting fewer close friends, less time spent with those friends, more time spent online, and, often, more time spent with pornography. Mental health in men is dropping, and suicide is up. Simply put, the men aren’t doing OK.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared a national “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” noting that one‑in‑two adults experiences measurable loneliness and that social disconnection raises the risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, and premature death to levels similar to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

Surveys show a decline in male friendships where, in 1990, 55% of men reported having at least six close friends, but by 2021, only 27% did. Incredibly, Pew Research and the Survey Center on American Life found that 20 % of men report having no close friends and that men’s friendship groups have shrunk more than women’s.

I think a lot of this has to do with the loss of bromance. This fun portmanteau describes an older tradition of masculine connection, touch, and action that has, like so many things in our modern era, become sexualized, much to societal detriment. Yet this sexualization actually comes from two very interesting sources.

Homosexuality
Female Integration.

For example, take a look at these photos from back in the day. What’s your first reaction? Just some normal dudes hanging out?

These were very common male poses just 100 years ago. The Art of Manliness documents hundreds of examples in the article: Bosom Buddies: A Photo History of Male Affection. But what we are looking at isn’t homosexuality. Hell, prior to people studying the idea in the early 1900s, the idea of male intimacy involving sex wasn’t in the zeitgeist. That didn’t mean homosexuality didn’t exist; it just wasn’t considered by heterosexuals and society writ large. As The Art of Manliness explains:

The term “homosexuality” was in fact not coined until 1869, and before that time, the strict dichotomy between “gay” and “straight” did not yet exist. Attraction to, and sexual activity with other men was thought of as something you did, not something you were. It was a behavior — accepted by some cultures and considered sinful by others.

There wasn’t homophobia because there was nothing acknowledged to be afraid of. It wasn’t an identity, and men showing intimate affection did not cross into the bedroom. Consider also that men and women also did not associate outside of strict social structures, and so heterosexual physical affection was not associated with male physical affection at this time either. Simply put, men and women didn’t cuddle in public, and so men's ‘cuddling’ in public was not associated with sex.

Once homosexuality transitioned from an action to an identity and began being studied, attacked, and eventually accepted, male physical touch became associated with sexual activity, and men started taking great care to avoid any association with being gay. This aversion occurred, in part, due to the quirk that women might love their gay friends but rarely sleep with a man who's been with another man. Conversely, men have significantly less issue accepting a woman who’s been with another woman. (hell, invite your friend along! 🤓)

This leads to a problem where a heterosexual man cannot risk being perceived as homosuspicious in the crazy culture we live in. And that line kept moving as the continued integration of women offered increasingly public displays of affection, causing the connection between physical touch and sex to become solidified. So much so that we now look back at these pictures and just assume there were some latent, and patent, homosexual tendencies where none exist. Further, our current culture only accepts rough male touch that cannot be perceived as intimate.

As fellow Substacker commented on a Note, his experience was that male-to-male touch had to border on violence. Which is funny because the place I encountered the most ‘affectionate’ touch is also where we conducted the most violence: the Army.

I joke that “You can’t out-gay a Ranger,” especially when people start acting weird about male contact. The thing is, there’s a ton of truth in that statement regarding the masculine shenanigans that go on in elite military units. However, it toes a clear line of being non homosexual.

A funny story about that line is from Ranger School, where my teammate from Moldova and I were freezing in the mountains of Northern Georgia in December while pulling security at a patrol base. We were both shivering while lying in the prone position, watching for the ‘enemy.’ I scooted closer, he scooted closer, and soon we were side by side. Then I flopped a leg over his, and he flopped his arm over my back, and it was delightfully warm. After a few minutes, he says in his thick Moldovan accent:

So… you like to eat the pussy?

As we like to say, “Spooning saves lives,” and the physical touch was fine, but he just needed to make sure that line was holding firm.

Ranger School Graduation

Now, before you lose your mind that this essay is somehow anti-gay, that’s half the problem. Affectionate male touch is so embedded in our conciousness as gay that I risk accusations of homophobia when I talk about heterosexual men, displaying affection yet also wanting to make sure signals aren’t crossed.

There’s also a lot going on here, and just like homosexuals added a sexual connotation to male touch, so too did the integration of women into male spaces. This occurred across the board, from work to fraternities to clubs, along with the social pressure stigmatizing those organizations that remained unintegrated. As the article, The History and Nature of Man Friendships, uncovered:

fraternal organizations, ranging from the Freemasons to the Odd Fellows, were at their peak in membership in American history. Nearly 1/3 of all American men were members of some fraternal organization at the end of the 19th century. At their lodges, men would bond, connect, and help each other become better men.

These fraternities have slowly come under attack as, first, the truly negative and debauched hovels of toxic masculinity were excised, but the slow creep never stopped. Currently, any exclusive male space is viewed as evidence of patriarchal exclusion or worse.

The loss of heterosexual male-only spaces was something I experienced during my time in the Army. Homosexuality used to be banned from the Military, and women weren’t integrated into combat units. As a result, they were some of the ‘gayest’ places you could imagine. Then, with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell evolving into Don’t Ask, Don’t Harrass," the line of acceptable touch shifted. Couple that with the integration of women and the risk of homosuspicion, and heterosexual physical touch and camaraderie vanished into “Don’t be gay, dude.”

There’s a similar prudishness between men and women, resulting in standard HR policies that don’t allow any physical touch beyond a handshake. Even giving a hug to a close friend who just suffered a miscarriage landed me in a conversation. Heaven forbid men display any physical touch lest it be seen as suggestive, dominating, or otherwise. For example, I had another discussion with HR after clapping a co-worker on the shoulder for doing a good job, after someone complained. It was explained that since today’s culture doesn’t tolerate that, if I did that to a woman, I couldn’t do it to anyone. So, we’ve turned normal human contact sexual. I think this is what happens when actual potential sexual partners are part of the mix.

I understand how this sounds in today’s milieu as well. Good riddance, we say! Men shouldn’t treat men in a manner that they wouldn’t treat a woman, and heaven forbid we even consider treating a woman that way! I’m torn by these findings because I don’t believe homosexuality should be illegal or hidden, and I think society benefits from female integration. I also believe that loutish behavior from men isn’t acceptable either. However, in our attempts to deal with this, we’ve turned into prudes.

We are so worried about the perception of unwanted sexual touch that we don’t do any touch. The result hasn’t been an improvement in anything. Women report that men are less willing to mentor them. Homophopia has increased, not decreased. We have an explosion of male loneliness as friendships lack the depth of platonic physical affection. Worse, it places a much greater burden on the woman in the relationship to fill that void.1 I need more hugs and touch than my wife does because, while gays and women still maintain a good deal of touch, heterosexual men do not.

But that physical touch is a critically important element of who we are as humans. The physiological benefits are incredible, as is the connection, bonding, and trust. We all understand the benefits of a healthy sexual connection, but you can get the same benefits when it’s non sexual. That’s because we are social beings, so much so that we’d be better described as Homo Socialis instead of Homo Sapiens.

You don’t have to look far into the primate world to see the complex bonding rituals from grooming to wrestling, to the piles of cuddling Bearded Saki. What we’ve uncovered today ignores so much of that social structure and, worse, actively tears it apart under the guise of dismantling the patriarchy or toxic masculinity.

There are other cultures where this did not happen to this degree. For example, when I first arrived in Korea, the in-processing had a cultural awareness session explaining that we’d see Korean soldiers on the trains holding hands, arms draped around each other, and more, and that it wasn’t gay. In fact, men holding hands in Korea is a sign of deep respect, a lesson my father learned when he met my brother’s Korean father-in-law at the wedding. The catch here is that Korea is a conservative culture with firmer rules against homosexuality and female integration. Hence, it doesn’t have the sexual implications that we’ve uncovered here.2

Back to the Army’s Ranger School, one of the funniest times was, while waiting for our buses on top of a mountain as the sun set, we were hunkered down trying to stay out of the wind when someone had the idea of making a ‘puppy pile.’ Just picture 100 dudes all sprawled on top of each other while we rotated from the outside to the inside. It was just like those Bearded Saki, and I’ll tell you what, I’ve rarely laughed as hard or been as warm as that night.

That’s not toxic masculinity. That’s the best of masculinity. It’s critically needed. We need more bromance. We need more affectionate platonic touch. We need to get over our homophobia, and we need to desexualize normal human contact. I’m not keen on going back to the structures we shed, but we lost something along the way that we critically need back. It’s also a behavior that models the fact that physical male touch isn’t predatory.

I believe healthy, non-sexual touch can re-emerge because we have evidence that it existed. I don’t want to go back to the social mores of yesteryear,3 so I’ll flip this over to you: How do we re-engage with non-sexual physical touch given the challenges laid out here?4 This is undoubtedly an ‘Us’ problem, not a guy problem, because the structures that enforce it are greater than just the men. I’d love to know your thoughts, insights, and ideas on solving this.

Leave a comment

For more on the topic of sex, check out Clothing and Sex:

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Facing Your Demons

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 08:01:29 GMT

Today’s topic provides practical insight for dealing with the things that hold you back from exploring, creating, and learning. We name your worst enemy, identify the drivers, and then provide a compilation of skills, insights, and tools to help fight. Let’s dive in!

We’re just going to face this problem straight out of the gate:

Your worst enemy is yourself.

No one else will screw with your brain as much as you.

No one will ever hold you back more than you.

It doesn’t matter if someone else planted the seed.

It doesn’t matter if there was trauma at some time.

No one else can fix you. No laws, agencies, or rules can protect you.

In the end, it comes down to your agency and how you do you!

This is why the Mixed Mental Arts we explore here always starts with an internal application of the ideas before we ever attempt to externalize and expect anyone else to do them. Improvement requires you to take action, even if it’s just baby steps. As says: “Slowmentum is better than nomentum.”

Here’s a great example: A friend of mine, looking to start publishing a Substack, is wracked with her fears and uncertainty of taking that action. No one is stopping her. No one is saying she shouldn’t. Others are encouraging. Her worst critic is herself.

Now, to be fair, writing on Substack isn’t easy. You have to put yourself out there, you have to add value, you have to find an audience and work to grow them. The vast majority of Substacks fail in their first year as the quick and easy ideas are used up, and the slow roll of trying to find new ideas or new topics starts to grind.

Some get stuck in a niche and can’t break out. Some have been writing for years with a trickle of subscribers while watching other accounts explode with tens of thousands while cranking out AI-generated slop. But that’s not stopping you. You are. Because, as the meme below states, “The only person coming to save you is the version of yourself that’s tired of your current situation.”

But when we say “tired,” we have to recognize that you have a shocking amount of energy to accept your current situation. Let that sink in a bit. You’ll spend an inordinate amount of energy avoiding your own salvation. As recently pointed out, the solutions to your problems aren’t so complicated as you pretend they are, but counterintuitively:

People happily pay for “unique” complexity that claims to sidestep a simple but hard solution.

That’s why your worst enemy is you. It’s stopping you, not through passive non-action, but more often through incredibly energized and active avoidance. You aren’t holding yourself back. You’re actively stopping yourself from moving forward.

Socratic State of Mind

Why We Let Bullshit Stop Us

You probably already know how to solve your newest problem…

2 years ago · 41 likes · 12 comments · Andrew Perlot

So enough with the excuses. Jump into the Unknown and take the step of learning how to execute in uncertainty. This doesn’t mean going willy-nilly without guardrails, but with intention, curiosity, and a sense of adventure.

But, don’t be stupid. Instead, look at the ways you might fail, acknowledge them, and name those fears. You’ll be amazed at how contextualizing them deflates them, and they become smaller than you feared.

For my aspiring writer friend, there’s a ton of advice for how to write, but I’ve found the best insight is looking at how not to write. A lot of the time, the canned and generic advice causes self-doubt because everyone else is doing it. Invert the tropes and learn from that.

Will it be hard? Oh hell yes. This Substack is always challenging. It can feel miserable to grow slowly and organically. It sucks having to keep hawking and promoting. I’d love a powerful celebrity to find this and share it with their followers. But that won’t likely happen, and you know what. It’s OK. Because you can do hard things. Sometimes embracing the negative gives you the grit to drive on.

Will you fail? Maybe… but you aren’t some fragile creature who can’t adapt and overcome. You are antifragile and can get stronger through the very thing you fear. In fact, what makes you fragile is avoiding challenges.

Because the key to overcoming your worst enemy is reframing failure itself. True failure is not learning from what happened. That’s why Polymathic Being’s core principle is to Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn.

So, maybe that Substack won’t work out, but she’ll still have won because when you face your demons, face your own worst enemy, you’ll have overcome the biggest hurdle: starting. Because remember, Slowmentum is better than nomentum.

When was a time you faced your worst enemy? What did you learn?

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Mixing Mental Arts

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 08:02:20 GMT

Today's topic takes Mixed Mental Arts to the next level by demonstrating how to begin fusing some of our foundational concepts into more advanced applications. It’s a master class for surviving the chaotic octagon of life, full of practical applications.

Modern life feels like it just keeps getting faster. From politics to technology to the economy to our health, it can feel frantic, frenetic, and frenzied. This feeling is natural as we are being inundated with so much information from so many different sources that it’s overwhelming.

The first line in our brain’s job description is to make sense of the world around us, and when we are inundated, we suffer what I call Infobesity. This is where we have too much information, without enough meaning, demands to act fast, and difficulty knowing the important information to remember. The result is the chaos many of us feel every day. And in that overloading, we risk treating everything as if it were important, which it isn’t, or we start ignoring everything as noise, which carries its own risks of missing crucial information.

While we can take action to avoid infobesity and control the flow of information, there are additional steps to take to manage how we react. We’re going to begin mixing some of the mental arts that we’ve explored previously. To kick us off is a mixed martial artist and frequent collaborator who recently wrote Slowicism 1.0, where he describes the Stoic idea of reframing and retarding action instead of uncontrolled reaction:

Everything in your body is telling you to speed up, but Slowicism tells you to slow down. The challenge is that your heart is pumping blood through your entire body at breakneck speed, and that includes your brain. Your brain is going, going, going—but it needs slowing, slowing, slowing.

Goatfury Writes

Slowicism 1.0

The older I’ve gotten, the more stoic I’ve become…

9 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Andrew Smith

The underlying reason to embrace slowicism is simple because reacting more often leads to a loss of your own agency and can cascade into terrible outcomes. Andrew gives a visceral example related to martial arts:

This happened to me one notable time when I was competing [In Ju Jitsu], and the dude tried to yank free from a leglock. I felt his knee snap three times.

The panicked reaction caused an outcome significantly worse than the situation warranted. We showed a similar cascade of how even something as useful as empathy can become weaponized when we lose control over our reactions. Troll farms, fear porn, and algowhores leverage this to whip up online frenzies.

So, today, I want to dig deeper into Slowicism and build on Andrew’s work to highlight the two philosophical legs it stands on and add some additional practical applications.

Stoicism

The first leg is Stoicism. This ancient philosophy is also one of the most misunderstood. In the modern view, stoicism is the suppression of emotion. A fragile shell of masculine toughness that eschews empathy and radiates with cold pragmatism. It’s often described as uncaring and unloving.

But that’s not at all what stoicism teaches. It’s not the suppression of emotion; it’s their domestication. It’s not hard emotions; it’s honed emotions. It’s not unfeeling; it’s just not feeling what’s unnecessary. It’s not unempathetic; it’s targeted love.

Stoicism also focuses on intentional reframing, a core concept of systems thinking. Andrew refers to this as the Inversion, which takes an idea and flips it over to see whether your perspective changes. It’s a super powerful tool, whether it’s understanding how to be miserable, staring into evil, or being irreverent to understand proper reverence. Inversion forces you to slow down and reconsider what you think you know. It’s naming the negative you want to avoid so that your perception can be more positive about what you want or have.

Taoism

The second leg is Taoism, and one of the most powerful concepts in this philosophy is Wu Wei. It’s typically recognized as achieving a flow state, but there’s another element that’s critical, which is embracing intentional NON-action. You don’t have to react. You don’t have to be outraged.

Saying this is easy. Doing this… Well, have you looked at social media recently to see how well that’s going? There’s no topic mundane enough not to have someone clutching their pearls. It’s hard to tell what’s manufactured outrage, what’s performative, and what’s real. The point is that you don’t have to join them and your life will be significantly better if you don’t!

The other half of the Wu Wei equation is the flow state. The military special forces has the axiom Slow is Smooth, and Smooth is Fast. It’s the recognition that focusing on the right things, maintaining the right discipline, and surrounding yourself with the right environment and people unlocks capabilities you didn’t know existed.

What’s interesting is that this concept applies everywhere. It works with technology design and development, where intentional and disciplined execution allows clarity of action. It also applies to politics, where Heaven is high, and the emperor should be far away.

Like intentional non-action, this flow is hard to do. Currently, I’m working with a program trying to move as fast as they can while studiously ignoring the proven capabilities that actually allow them to succeed. Similarly, in politics, too many people are collapsing into the hellscape of social media and then dragging the emperor to live rent-free in their brains. This is why I’m engaging with the topic again. We need it!

The cool thing about Wu Wei is that it even works with freediving, enabling you to swim deeper and longer. The key is not to force the effort. Doing so burns oxygen and shortens your dive. Instead, slow, controlled movements allow you to explore the most beautiful areas on the planet. Couple this with a little mind-over-matter stoicism, and it didn’t take long for me to achieve a five-minute and ten-second breath hold.

Summary

Slowicism 2.0 is a powerful mental model that combines both Stoicism and Taoism. Achieving slowcism requires constant study and intentional training because it’s battling the entropy of life and helps navigate the chaos. It’s a model that provides breathing room to focus on what’s important.

This requires slowing down, practicing intentional non-action to clear out the noise to allow deep and wide thinking, not fast thinking. This position enables flow, which creates compounding loops where, after each iteration, the chaos abates, and life becomes smoother, calmer, and returns your agency. Slowicism is a combination of Mixed Mental Arts that provides a masterful ability to grapple with complex ideas in the octagon of life.

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The Meek Warrior

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 08:02:15 GMT

Today's topic challenges us to be capable, dangerous, and meek. To manage that balance, we’ll uncover the truth about meekness, explore examples from the military, and then provide insights on how to become a finely honed, lethal power.

Meekness

“The meek shall inherit the Earth.” - Matthew 5:5

This is a commonly misunderstood verse from the Bible. It’s not talking about weak, passive, timid, or mild. It’s describing strength under control, characterized by humility, self-control, and gentle submission to a higher calling. In this case, a God.

That’s because a meek person maintains their agency, is difficult to provoke or manipulate, and grows themselves and others around them. Another way to think about it is that it’s intentionally wielding power with gentleness and restraint. It isn’t a lack of power but control of it. Jordan Peterson phrases it like this:

“A harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very, very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control.”

And this is the type of person you want to hold that power, because truly weak people are some of the most dangerous, both in their desire to weaponize culture as well as their susceptibility to being weaponized by others. These are the type who turn trauma into fragility instead of realizing we can hone it into antifragile growth!

It goes right along with the adage: “Hard times make strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.”

But back to the word meek. The Greek in that verse is praotēs, which Aristotle defines as a balance between the extremes of cowardice and irascible anger. Praotēs was often used to describe a successfully trained warhorse and clearly did not mean weak, but finely honed power that was restrained.

Compare this to peace, which Augustine refers to as “the tranquility of order.” What he means is that peace is not merely the absence of conflict but rightly ordered powers coupled with discipline. This is where it gets interesting because there is no virtue in peacefulness or ‘meekness’ if it’s merely helplessness. Meekness requires capability yoked to conscience and virtue. The meek who inherit the earth are those with disciplined power that refuses predation. They’re the capable warrior who doesn’t need to unsheathe their sword.

recently wrote The Cure for Broken Body Language is Clearing Rooms, where he describes how becoming capable demands we change our focus from weakness toward honed, deadly skill:

Every door we approach, open, and enter, is a reminder to see, walk, stand, and speak as if ready for a good fight…
…for the good of the whole.

What then?

The Cure for Broken Body Language is Clearing Rooms

9 months ago · 39 likes · 18 comments · Sam Alaimo

Be Deadly

“For the good of the whole.” It's a real element that also finds its way into our stories. In The Lord of the Rings, future king and lethal swordsman Aragorn is described as 'flowing’ in his movements. He didn’t have to flex, bluster, or bluff; he just had to stand, and every element of his body was under such perfect control that it exuded grace. It goes with the common literary trope where sword fighters are described with snake-like descriptions, like coiled, because the mastery of the fight is the mastery of the body.

What that results in is the realization that a strong and capable person rarely looks weak. A weak person, however, rarely looks capable.

Let me explain this with a real example from the Army. One of the reasons we train rigorous physical fitness isn’t because your weakness gets you killed; it gets your buddy killed because he's the threat, not you. You just provided the opening to eliminate the threat. Back to Sam, who shares, “There are collective consequences for our individual failures.” I've seen that in combat, where Corporal Donuts can't keep up and the enemy doesn't even deign to aim at him. He's already a casualty without having to fire a bullet. It’s better to leave him around to provide openings for the next battle.

In contrast, being capable isn’t aligning with the bullshit, and just like describes below, the true strength isn’t in weakness or flex-nuts strength but that quiet, restrained, yet lethal capability that you can pass by in the street without noticing but will be the first at your side in times of need.

To be clear, this isn’t a glorification of violence but the capability for violence subordinated to moral ends. This capability can even be coupled with pacifism. That’s more or less my position right now. I’m a pacifist who is capable and willing to do violence to protect that peace. I don’t think that’s an oxymoron either, as peace is my moral end. I achieve that by being someone you wouldn’t want to war with.

So, be a warrior. Be capable. Be a warhorse a child can ride to battle. Be the master of your mind and body. Claim your agency and don’t allow manipulation. Grow others around you to be as capable as you. Demand capability from those you love while holding yourself to a higher account than anyone else. Do this with meekness, and you will inherit the earth.1

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Money, Sex, and In-laws

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 08:00:36 GMT

Today's topic explores three common threats to marriages everywhere: Money, Sex, and In-laws. They are three independently challenging topics, and if they start weaving together, it can be catastrophic. This essay uncovers practical insights, personal examples, and the latest recommendations to manage each one.

Intro

Early in my Army Career, a Chaplain at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, shared that he only needed to give marriage counseling for three things: “Money, Sex, and In-laws.” It’s an idea that’s stuck in my brain for twenty years and has proven true over and over as I matured my own relationship and watched other relationships fail.

There may be a litany of other issues that get blamed, but when you strip back and get down to root causes, these three pop up with surprising regularity. These are also three topics that uncover the core of another person and will be areas I help my kids pay attention to when they start seriously considering a spouse. Let’s dive in!

Money

How a person deals with money tells you a lot about that person. Do they constantly need to have the latest things? Are they capable of long-term planning, or do they live in the here and now? It’s important because money is rarely just about dollars. It’s about values, priorities, security, fear, identity, and control, and those couples who openly discuss financial expectations and spending habits have better long-term relationship stability.

It is important to note here that the key is not agreement, but rather transparency and shared decision-making. Healthy couples approach money as a team, not adversaries. One might be a saver and the other a spender; that can work if both understand why the other does what they do. The Gottman Institute calls this “love mapping,” which involves understanding each other’s emotional backstory behind habits.

However, that doesn’t mean each is willy-nilly able to do what they want. You have to sacrifice for each other. Another Lego set or another Purse? To be honest, both are probably a band-aid for a different problem. If you find yourself getting defensive about either, that’s a good signal to check your own motivations.

Because a relationship is about openness and shared living. Running it like housemates with separate incomes, budgets, and just splitting expenses starts the situation with a us vs. them mentality. “My money,” “His money.” It’s also important for both parties to be financially astute. This is where a program like Financial Peace University can provide solid financial acumen and a structure to have the important conversations, shape the right mindsets, and learn how to work together.

Two additional tips are, first, never keep up with the Joneses. You don’t see their financial arguments; you just see their displays of wealth. Use them to discuss your own finances with your relationship as the priority. Don’t try to impress neighbors who are barely holding it all together. Second, avoid secrecy. Financial infidelity (hidden credit cards, secret purchases) is as destructive as sexual infidelity.

Sex

“You don’t look outside the home for what you get inside.” This is an adage I’ve heard from my wife over time. It’s a simple sentence with an inordinately complex situation underneath. The truth is that sex is essential in a relationship… for both parties.

The weird thing is that sex is also one of the most natural things we can do. It feels great for both. The physical and mental health benefits of an orgasm are INSANE.1 But we throw up so many stupid barriers. We make it insanely complicated or awkward. We create a separation of expectations that doesn’t make sense. This meme is an example of how we start the conversation off wrong:

And the conversation is essential. Couples must talk about needs without shame or blame. This isn’t easy at all. If you thought baring your body was exposing, baring your soul about that activity is even more exposing. It’s made worse by societal contradictions between the raw physicality of sex and our angelic aspirations for being above those needs. It’s a topic we introduced in Sex, Poop, and Rock ‘n Roll.

And there’s a middle ground because sex in long-term relationships is not just physical; it’s tied to emotional connection, self-esteem, safety, and identity. Desire naturally fluctuates over time, and mismatches in libido are normal, not an emergency. There’s no right answer or easy button. Romantic love takes a lot of pragmatic effort.

The challenge is that sex is a major catch-22 where, without the physical connection, men will often withdraw the emotional, and without the emotional, women will withdraw the physical. In the book Love and Respect, they call this the crazy cycle, where at least one, preferably both, have to stop the bullshit and have a conversation.

For the guy, you need to be emotionally available. For the gal, you also have to lean into the physical. There will be negotiation, there will be boundaries, but when approached through love and respect, you can unlock an amazing sex life. But it requires open and raw conversations to maintain the balance.

For my relationship, it’s been one of the most painful yet rewarding alignments I’ve had to work through. After nearly 20 years of marriage, I would also say that we are still learning about each other, as we’ve changed over time. Sex is a regular exploration, not an infrequent happenstance, where our goal is to create intentional intimacy and not just sex(ual) touch.

What I mean here is that you can be incredibly sexual without the singular act of sex. Both can enjoy nakedness (looking at you gals) without the goal (looking at you guys) of sex. This has the benefit of being incredibly intimate and bonding. Take a shower together, scrub each other's backs, give naked hugs, towel off, and go to work.

Hell, I never like to pass up a chance to see my wife naked, give her a hug, and then go about my day. There’s a twofold benefit. First, the dopamine release for both is incredible, and second, the confidence you inspire in each other just by enjoying each other makes the connection during sex the frosting on an already intimate cake. It’s amazing and does wonders for your connection. Once you do this, you find that you’re an inseparable pair. There’s nothing that can get in your way… except, maybe, in-laws.

In-Laws

Do you know the difference between in-laws and outlaws?

Outlaws are wanted…

This is one of my favorite jokes, after which I follow up with: “I love my in-laws, it’s her in-laws I can’t stand.”

These jokes are funny because of the truth behind them. They also highlight a regularly damaging influence on a couple, if not properly managed. Too often, I’ve seen one or the other maintain a relationship with their parents that defied logic. Whether it was the woman calling her dad multiple times a day for advice, or the man whose mother devoured his agency, and this man-child was never able to step into the adult role of husband.

This is where a simple rule emerges: Your spouse comes first.

Not because parents don’t matter, but because the marital relationship must become the primary emotional home. Couples who successfully navigate in-laws create clear, kind boundaries, striking a balance between gratitude and inclusion, while maintaining autonomy. “We make decisions as a team.” You don’t want your kids playing mommy versus daddy, but that’s exactly what some couples do with their own parents.

Another point about those boundaries is something recently characterized as enmeshment or the inability to differentiate us and others:

Enmeshment is a term to describe the relationship between people, but in this case, I will talk about the enmeshed family, its usual manifestation. The enmeshed family has porous boundaries, or no boundaries. Respect is seen as absolute obedience and compliance to the parents, elders, or power holders of the family system. No one is okay unless everyone is okay. People meddle in the affairs of their family members, and this is to be expected, usually despite deleterious consequences.

Simply put, you are adults and you are a team. Letting your in-laws, on either side, dictate, control, or manipulate just pours a toxic sludge into the relationship. I’ll also be brutal here. A good relationship with your spouse will last longer than your relationship with your parents. You’re also the next generation, and you carry the torch moving forward. Letting in-laws interfere is living in the past. While it's important to maintain relationships and know your roots, it’s also important to grow individually and as a couple into new ways of living.

Summary

Money, Sex, and In-laws are not discrete problems. They merge and flow together. They also add up together, where a small problem in each of them can create big problems overall. It’s made worse by our quickly changing social mores, where traditional expectations in these realms are currently vastly different today than they were just 20 years ago, let alone 50.

We also inherited some significant hardware and software that we cannot simply ignore. Archetypes exist for a reason, and one of them, which highlights the difference, is the archetypes of Chaos and Order, where the feminine is generally viewed as chaos and the masculine as order.

The beauty of this archetype is that, when understood and embraced in a relationship, it can create a foundation of anti-fragility that can better weather the challenges of Money, Sex, and In-laws. It’s one step that forces honesty about who you are, and sets the stage to wrangle with money, sex, and in-laws, together, with open communication, no matter how awkward, painful, or embarrassing it is to work through. By losing your ego and leaning in together, you unlock an extraordinary relationship.

What are some ways Money, Sex, or In-laws got in the way of your relationships, and what did you do about it? Leave a comment below!

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