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Borrowed Fire: Cultural Appropriation in Pagan Practice

https://pagangrove.wordpress.com/2026/05/14/borrowed-fire-cultural-appropriation-in-pagan-practice/

The Maranatha Empire

There is a prayer so holy that it should burn the tongue of every empire that tries to speak it.

Maranatha.

Come, Lord.

It is the cry of the small church under pressure. The cry of the persecuted and the patient. The cry of those who have no armies to summon, no throne to defend, no voting bloc sufficient to save them, no market share large enough to secure their future. It is the cry of those who wait because they know they are not God.

But in every age, there are those who take this prayer of waiting and turn it into a banner of possession.

They say, “Come, Lord,” but what they mean is, “Give us control.”

They say, “Thy kingdom come,” but what they mean is, “Let our faction rule.”

They say, “Prepare the way of the Lord,” but what they build are prisons, borders, propaganda machines, religious celebrity platforms, and monuments to their own fear.

This is the Maranatha Empire.

It is not one nation only, though nations may become its servants. It is not one denomination only, though denominations may become its chapels. It is not merely Rome, nor Geneva, nor Washington, nor Moscow, nor any other city that has mistaken power for providence. The Maranatha Empire is the recurring temptation of the religious heart: to stop waiting for Christ and begin replacing him.

It begins quietly.

It begins with concern.

The world is dangerous. The children are vulnerable. The church is shrinking. The enemies are multiplying. The culture is changing. The old certainties are crumbling. The people are afraid.

Fear, when baptized, often calls itself faithfulness.

So the frightened church begins to reach for tools Jesus refused.

A throne.

A sword.

A spectacle.

A scapegoat.

A strongman.

A law that can accomplish what love has not yet persuaded.

A state that can enforce what the Spirit has not yet formed.

A leader who promises to defend Christ, as though Christ ever asked Peter to keep swinging after Gethsemane.

This is how the prayer becomes an empire.

The early church cried, “Come, Lord Jesus,” because it knew that Caesar was not Lord. The Maranatha Empire cries, “Come, Lord Jesus,” because it wants Caesar to become useful.

The early church broke bread in homes. The Maranatha Empire builds platforms and calls them altars.

The early church welcomed the stranger. The Maranatha Empire sees the stranger as a threat.

The early church died rather than kill. The Maranatha Empire kills and calls the dead collateral damage in the defense of righteousness.

The early church believed the Lamb had conquered. The Maranatha Empire keeps looking for a beast strong enough to protect the Lamb.

And there is the blasphemy.

Not that empire rejects Christ outright. That would be too honest. The Maranatha Empire does something more dangerous. It uses Christ as decoration for a power that is fundamentally afraid of the cross.

It sings of the Lamb while trusting the dragon.

It preaches resurrection while organizing itself around survival.

It displays the cross while despising weakness.

It quotes Jesus while ignoring the people Jesus told us to notice: the poor, the imprisoned, the hungry, the foreigner, the enemy, the child, the wounded man beside the road.

The Maranatha Empire is not built by atheists. It is built by believers who have lost patience with the way of Jesus.

For the way of Jesus is slow.

It is seed, yeast, salt, light.

It is foot-washing.

It is forgiveness seventy times seven.

It is refusing the shortcut of domination even when domination appears efficient.

It is telling Peter to put away the sword when everything in Peter’s body screams that this is the moment for holy violence.

It is standing before Pilate and saying, “My kingdom is not from this world,” not because the kingdom has nothing to do with the world, but because it does not come by the world’s methods.

The Maranatha Empire cannot tolerate this.

It cannot tolerate a Messiah who will not seize power.

It cannot tolerate a church that would rather be faithful than influential.

It cannot tolerate a people whose politics begin at the basin and towel.

It cannot tolerate enemy-love, because enemy-love ruins the machinery. Empire requires enemies. It needs them. It feeds on them. Without enemies, the crowd might look too closely at the throne.

So, the Maranatha Empire manufactures urgency.

There is no time to love.

No time to listen.

No time to discern.

No time for reconciliation.

No time for peacemaking.

No time to ask whether the means resemble the Christ we claim to serve.

The hour is late, they say. The danger is great. The stakes are too high. We must act now. We must take control now. We must win now.

And somewhere beneath all that urgency is a terrible confession:

They do not actually believe the Lord is coming.

Or, if he is coming, they do not trust him to arrive in the right way.

So they build him an empire to inherit.

But Christ does not inherit empires.

He judges them.

He walks in alleyways, not palaces. He asks whether the churches have kept their first love. He warns those who are rich and comfortable and self-satisfied that they may be poor, blind, and naked. He stands at the door and knocks, not because he has been defeated by secularism, but because religious people have locked him outside while holding meetings in his name.

The Maranatha Empire is always shocked when Jesus is found outside the gate.

Outside the camp.

Outside respectability.

Outside the approved narrative.

Outside the walls with the crucified, the excluded, the unclean, the inconvenient, and the condemned.

The empire expected him in the capital.

But he is with the refugees.

The empire expected him in the cathedral of victory.

But he is with the mother of the disappeared.

The empire expected him on the reviewing stand.

But he is washing feet in the basement.

The empire expected him to bless the troops.

But he is asking why his followers are still carrying swords.

This is why Maranatha must remain a dangerous prayer.

It must never be allowed to become a slogan for conquest. It must never be printed on the banners of those who are unwilling to be converted by the One they summon. To pray “Come, Lord” is not to invite divine endorsement of our projects. It is to invite judgment upon them.

Come, Lord, and judge our churches.

Come, Lord, and judge our flags.

Come, Lord, and judge our markets.

Come, Lord, and judge our weapons.

Come, Lord, and judge our sermons.

Come, Lord, and judge our secret hatreds.

Come, Lord, and judge the ways we have used your name to avoid your way.

This is the prayer empire cannot honestly pray.

Because if the Lord comes, the first thing to fall may not be our enemies.

It may be our idols.

The algorithm.

The nation.

The party.

The brand.

The gun.

The strongman.

The myth of innocence.

The lie that we can harm others for a righteous cause and remain untouched by the harm.

The Maranatha Empire teaches us to fear the collapse of Christian influence.

Jesus teaches us to fear gaining the world and losing our soul.

The Maranatha Empire asks, “How do we take back the culture?”

Jesus asks, “Can you drink the cup that I drink?”

The Maranatha Empire says, “Blessed are the winners.”

Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek.”

The Maranatha Empire says, “Blessed are the forceful, for they shall secure the future.”

Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”

And perhaps this is the word for us now:

The church does not need to become more powerful.

The church needs to become more faithful.

Not passive. Not silent. Not withdrawn into pious irrelevance. But faithful in the particular, cruciform, stubborn way of Jesus. Faithful enough to resist evil without becoming its mirror. Faithful enough to tell the truth without hatred. Faithful enough to protect the vulnerable without worshiping violence. Faithful enough to build communities of economic sharing, hospitality, forgiveness, courage, and joy. Faithful enough to be a people who can live without controlling the outcome.

That is the hard part.

Empire is attractive because it promises control.

Jesus offers communion.

Empire promises security.

Jesus offers peace.

Empire promises victory over enemies.

Jesus offers reconciliation that may begin with our repentance.

Empire promises to make us great.

Jesus invites us to become small enough to enter the kingdom.

So, let the Maranatha Empire fall.

Let it fall first in us.

Let it fall in every place where we have confused anxiety with zeal. Let it fall where we have preferred dominance to witness. Let it fall where we have wanted laws to do what discipleship would not. Let it fall where we have used the suffering of others as fuel for our own righteousness. Let it fall where we have asked Jesus to come only after we have arranged the throne to our liking.

And when it falls, may something older and more beautiful remain.

A table.

A basin.

A towel.

A loaf.

A cup.

A people gathered without illusion, without empire, without the need to be impressive, whispering the ancient prayer not as conquerors but as witnesses:

Maranatha.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Come not to crown our domination, but to free us from it.

Come not to baptize our fear, but to cast it out.

Come not to make our empire holy, but to teach us again that your kingdom comes like a seed, like yeast, like mercy, like a Lamb who was slain and yet lives.

And until you come, make us faithful.

Not imperial.

Not triumphant.

Not afraid.

Faithful.

The Maranatha Empire

There is a prayer so holy that it should burn the tongue of every empire that tries to speak it.

Maranatha.

Come, Lord.

It is the cry of the small church under pressure. The cry of the persecuted and the patient. The cry of those who have no armies to summon, no throne to defend, no voting bloc sufficient to save them, no market share large enough to secure their future. It is the cry of those who wait because they know they are not God.

But in every age, there are those who take this prayer of waiting and turn it into a banner of possession.

They say, “Come, Lord,” but what they mean is, “Give us control.”

They say, “Thy kingdom come,” but what they mean is, “Let our faction rule.”

They say, “Prepare the way of the Lord,” but what they build are prisons, borders, propaganda machines, religious celebrity platforms, and monuments to their own fear.

This is the Maranatha Empire.

It is not one nation only, though nations may become its servants. It is not one denomination only, though denominations may become its chapels. It is not merely Rome, nor Geneva, nor Washington, nor Moscow, nor any other city that has mistaken power for providence. The Maranatha Empire is the recurring temptation of the religious heart: to stop waiting for Christ and begin replacing him.

It begins quietly.

It begins with concern.

The world is dangerous. The children are vulnerable. The church is shrinking. The enemies are multiplying. The culture is changing. The old certainties are crumbling. The people are afraid.

Fear, when baptized, often calls itself faithfulness.

So the frightened church begins to reach for tools Jesus refused.

A throne.

A sword.

A spectacle.

A scapegoat.

A strongman.

A law that can accomplish what love has not yet persuaded.

A state that can enforce what the Spirit has not yet formed.

A leader who promises to defend Christ, as though Christ ever asked Peter to keep swinging after Gethsemane.

This is how the prayer becomes an empire.

The early church cried, “Come, Lord Jesus,” because it knew that Caesar was not Lord. The Maranatha Empire cries, “Come, Lord Jesus,” because it wants Caesar to become useful.

The early church broke bread in homes. The Maranatha Empire builds platforms and calls them altars.

The early church welcomed the stranger. The Maranatha Empire sees the stranger as a threat.

The early church died rather than kill. The Maranatha Empire kills and calls the dead collateral damage in the defense of righteousness.

The early church believed the Lamb had conquered. The Maranatha Empire keeps looking for a beast strong enough to protect the Lamb.

And there is the blasphemy.

Not that empire rejects Christ outright. That would be too honest. The Maranatha Empire does something more dangerous. It uses Christ as decoration for a power that is fundamentally afraid of the cross.

It sings of the Lamb while trusting the dragon.

It preaches resurrection while organizing itself around survival.

It displays the cross while despising weakness.

It quotes Jesus while ignoring the people Jesus told us to notice: the poor, the imprisoned, the hungry, the foreigner, the enemy, the child, the wounded man beside the road.

The Maranatha Empire is not built by atheists. It is built by believers who have lost patience with the way of Jesus.

For the way of Jesus is slow.

It is seed, yeast, salt, light.

It is foot-washing.

It is forgiveness seventy times seven.

It is refusing the shortcut of domination even when domination appears efficient.

It is telling Peter to put away the sword when everything in Peter’s body screams that this is the moment for holy violence.

It is standing before Pilate and saying, “My kingdom is not from this world,” not because the kingdom has nothing to do with the world, but because it does not come by the world’s methods.

The Maranatha Empire cannot tolerate this.

It cannot tolerate a Messiah who will not seize power.

It cannot tolerate a church that would rather be faithful than influential.

It cannot tolerate a people whose politics begin at the basin and towel.

It cannot tolerate enemy-love, because enemy-love ruins the machinery. Empire requires enemies. It needs them. It feeds on them. Without enemies, the crowd might look too closely at the throne.

So, the Maranatha Empire manufactures urgency.

There is no time to love.

No time to listen.

No time to discern.

No time for reconciliation.

No time for peacemaking.

No time to ask whether the means resemble the Christ we claim to serve.

The hour is late, they say. The danger is great. The stakes are too high. We must act now. We must take control now. We must win now.

And somewhere beneath all that urgency is a terrible confession:

They do not actually believe the Lord is coming.

Or, if he is coming, they do not trust him to arrive in the right way.

So they build him an empire to inherit.

But Christ does not inherit empires.

He judges them.

He walks in alleyways, not palaces. He asks whether the churches have kept their first love. He warns those who are rich and comfortable and self-satisfied that they may be poor, blind, and naked. He stands at the door and knocks, not because he has been defeated by secularism, but because religious people have locked him outside while holding meetings in his name.

The Maranatha Empire is always shocked when Jesus is found outside the gate.

Outside the camp.

Outside respectability.

Outside the approved narrative.

Outside the walls with the crucified, the excluded, the unclean, the inconvenient, and the condemned.

The empire expected him in the capital.

But he is with the refugees.

The empire expected him in the cathedral of victory.

But he is with the mother of the disappeared.

The empire expected him on the reviewing stand.

But he is washing feet in the basement.

The empire expected him to bless the troops.

But he is asking why his followers are still carrying swords.

This is why Maranatha must remain a dangerous prayer.

It must never be allowed to become a slogan for conquest. It must never be printed on the banners of those who are unwilling to be converted by the One they summon. To pray “Come, Lord” is not to invite divine endorsement of our projects. It is to invite judgment upon them.

Come, Lord, and judge our churches.

Come, Lord, and judge our flags.

Come, Lord, and judge our markets.

Come, Lord, and judge our weapons.

Come, Lord, and judge our sermons.

Come, Lord, and judge our secret hatreds.

Come, Lord, and judge the ways we have used your name to avoid your way.

This is the prayer empire cannot honestly pray.

Because if the Lord comes, the first thing to fall may not be our enemies.

It may be our idols.

The algorithm.

The nation.

The party.

The brand.

The gun.

The strongman.

The myth of innocence.

The lie that we can harm others for a righteous cause and remain untouched by the harm.

The Maranatha Empire teaches us to fear the collapse of Christian influence.

Jesus teaches us to fear gaining the world and losing our soul.

The Maranatha Empire asks, “How do we take back the culture?”

Jesus asks, “Can you drink the cup that I drink?”

The Maranatha Empire says, “Blessed are the winners.”

Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek.”

The Maranatha Empire says, “Blessed are the forceful, for they shall secure the future.”

Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”

And perhaps this is the word for us now:

The church does not need to become more powerful.

The church needs to become more faithful.

Not passive. Not silent. Not withdrawn into pious irrelevance. But faithful in the particular, cruciform, stubborn way of Jesus. Faithful enough to resist evil without becoming its mirror. Faithful enough to tell the truth without hatred. Faithful enough to protect the vulnerable without worshiping violence. Faithful enough to build communities of economic sharing, hospitality, forgiveness, courage, and joy. Faithful enough to be a people who can live without controlling the outcome.

That is the hard part.

Empire is attractive because it promises control.

Jesus offers communion.

Empire promises security.

Jesus offers peace.

Empire promises victory over enemies.

Jesus offers reconciliation that may begin with our repentance.

Empire promises to make us great.

Jesus invites us to become small enough to enter the kingdom.

So, let the Maranatha Empire fall.

Let it fall first in us.

Let it fall in every place where we have confused anxiety with zeal. Let it fall where we have preferred dominance to witness. Let it fall where we have wanted laws to do what discipleship would not. Let it fall where we have used the suffering of others as fuel for our own righteousness. Let it fall where we have asked Jesus to come only after we have arranged the throne to our liking.

And when it falls, may something older and more beautiful remain.

A table.

A basin.

A towel.

A loaf.

A cup.

A people gathered without illusion, without empire, without the need to be impressive, whispering the ancient prayer not as conquerors but as witnesses:

Maranatha.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Come not to crown our domination, but to free us from it.

Come not to baptize our fear, but to cast it out.

Come not to make our empire holy, but to teach us again that your kingdom comes like a seed, like yeast, like mercy, like a Lamb who was slain and yet lives.

And until you come, make us faithful.

Not imperial.

Not triumphant.

Not afraid.

Faithful.

The Maranatha Empire

There is a prayer so holy that it should burn the tongue of every empire that tries to speak it.

Maranatha.

Come, Lord.

It is the cry of the small church under pressure. The cry of the persecuted and the patient. The cry of those who have no armies to summon, no throne to defend, no voting bloc sufficient to save them, no market share large enough to secure their future. It is the cry of those who wait because they know they are not God.

But in every age, there are those who take this prayer of waiting and turn it into a banner of possession.

They say, “Come, Lord,” but what they mean is, “Give us control.”

They say, “Thy kingdom come,” but what they mean is, “Let our faction rule.”

They say, “Prepare the way of the Lord,” but what they build are prisons, borders, propaganda machines, religious celebrity platforms, and monuments to their own fear.

This is the Maranatha Empire.

It is not one nation only, though nations may become its servants. It is not one denomination only, though denominations may become its chapels. It is not merely Rome, nor Geneva, nor Washington, nor Moscow, nor any other city that has mistaken power for providence. The Maranatha Empire is the recurring temptation of the religious heart: to stop waiting for Christ and begin replacing him.

It begins quietly.

It begins with concern.

The world is dangerous. The children are vulnerable. The church is shrinking. The enemies are multiplying. The culture is changing. The old certainties are crumbling. The people are afraid.

Fear, when baptized, often calls itself faithfulness.

So the frightened church begins to reach for tools Jesus refused.

A throne.

A sword.

A spectacle.

A scapegoat.

A strongman.

A law that can accomplish what love has not yet persuaded.

A state that can enforce what the Spirit has not yet formed.

A leader who promises to defend Christ, as though Christ ever asked Peter to keep swinging after Gethsemane.

This is how the prayer becomes an empire.

The early church cried, “Come, Lord Jesus,” because it knew that Caesar was not Lord. The Maranatha Empire cries, “Come, Lord Jesus,” because it wants Caesar to become useful.

The early church broke bread in homes. The Maranatha Empire builds platforms and calls them altars.

The early church welcomed the stranger. The Maranatha Empire sees the stranger as a threat.

The early church died rather than kill. The Maranatha Empire kills and calls the dead collateral damage in the defense of righteousness.

The early church believed the Lamb had conquered. The Maranatha Empire keeps looking for a beast strong enough to protect the Lamb.

And there is the blasphemy.

Not that empire rejects Christ outright. That would be too honest. The Maranatha Empire does something more dangerous. It uses Christ as decoration for a power that is fundamentally afraid of the cross.

It sings of the Lamb while trusting the dragon.

It preaches resurrection while organizing itself around survival.

It displays the cross while despising weakness.

It quotes Jesus while ignoring the people Jesus told us to notice: the poor, the imprisoned, the hungry, the foreigner, the enemy, the child, the wounded man beside the road.

The Maranatha Empire is not built by atheists. It is built by believers who have lost patience with the way of Jesus.

For the way of Jesus is slow.

It is seed, yeast, salt, light.

It is foot-washing.

It is forgiveness seventy times seven.

It is refusing the shortcut of domination even when domination appears efficient.

It is telling Peter to put away the sword when everything in Peter’s body screams that this is the moment for holy violence.

It is standing before Pilate and saying, “My kingdom is not from this world,” not because the kingdom has nothing to do with the world, but because it does not come by the world’s methods.

The Maranatha Empire cannot tolerate this.

It cannot tolerate a Messiah who will not seize power.

It cannot tolerate a church that would rather be faithful than influential.

It cannot tolerate a people whose politics begin at the basin and towel.

It cannot tolerate enemy-love, because enemy-love ruins the machinery. Empire requires enemies. It needs them. It feeds on them. Without enemies, the crowd might look too closely at the throne.

So, the Maranatha Empire manufactures urgency.

There is no time to love.

No time to listen.

No time to discern.

No time for reconciliation.

No time for peacemaking.

No time to ask whether the means resemble the Christ we claim to serve.

The hour is late, they say. The danger is great. The stakes are too high. We must act now. We must take control now. We must win now.

And somewhere beneath all that urgency is a terrible confession:

They do not actually believe the Lord is coming.

Or, if he is coming, they do not trust him to arrive in the right way.

So they build him an empire to inherit.

But Christ does not inherit empires.

He judges them.

He walks in alleyways, not palaces. He asks whether the churches have kept their first love. He warns those who are rich and comfortable and self-satisfied that they may be poor, blind, and naked. He stands at the door and knocks, not because he has been defeated by secularism, but because religious people have locked him outside while holding meetings in his name.

The Maranatha Empire is always shocked when Jesus is found outside the gate.

Outside the camp.

Outside respectability.

Outside the approved narrative.

Outside the walls with the crucified, the excluded, the unclean, the inconvenient, and the condemned.

The empire expected him in the capital.

But he is with the refugees.

The empire expected him in the cathedral of victory.

But he is with the mother of the disappeared.

The empire expected him on the reviewing stand.

But he is washing feet in the basement.

The empire expected him to bless the troops.

But he is asking why his followers are still carrying swords.

This is why Maranatha must remain a dangerous prayer.

It must never be allowed to become a slogan for conquest. It must never be printed on the banners of those who are unwilling to be converted by the One they summon. To pray “Come, Lord” is not to invite divine endorsement of our projects. It is to invite judgment upon them.

Come, Lord, and judge our churches.

Come, Lord, and judge our flags.

Come, Lord, and judge our markets.

Come, Lord, and judge our weapons.

Come, Lord, and judge our sermons.

Come, Lord, and judge our secret hatreds.

Come, Lord, and judge the ways we have used your name to avoid your way.

This is the prayer empire cannot honestly pray.

Because if the Lord comes, the first thing to fall may not be our enemies.

It may be our idols.

The algorithm.

The nation.

The party.

The brand.

The gun.

The strongman.

The myth of innocence.

The lie that we can harm others for a righteous cause and remain untouched by the harm.

The Maranatha Empire teaches us to fear the collapse of Christian influence.

Jesus teaches us to fear gaining the world and losing our soul.

The Maranatha Empire asks, “How do we take back the culture?”

Jesus asks, “Can you drink the cup that I drink?”

The Maranatha Empire says, “Blessed are the winners.”

Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek.”

The Maranatha Empire says, “Blessed are the forceful, for they shall secure the future.”

Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”

And perhaps this is the word for us now:

The church does not need to become more powerful.

The church needs to become more faithful.

Not passive. Not silent. Not withdrawn into pious irrelevance. But faithful in the particular, cruciform, stubborn way of Jesus. Faithful enough to resist evil without becoming its mirror. Faithful enough to tell the truth without hatred. Faithful enough to protect the vulnerable without worshiping violence. Faithful enough to build communities of economic sharing, hospitality, forgiveness, courage, and joy. Faithful enough to be a people who can live without controlling the outcome.

That is the hard part.

Empire is attractive because it promises control.

Jesus offers communion.

Empire promises security.

Jesus offers peace.

Empire promises victory over enemies.

Jesus offers reconciliation that may begin with our repentance.

Empire promises to make us great.

Jesus invites us to become small enough to enter the kingdom.

So, let the Maranatha Empire fall.

Let it fall first in us.

Let it fall in every place where we have confused anxiety with zeal. Let it fall where we have preferred dominance to witness. Let it fall where we have wanted laws to do what discipleship would not. Let it fall where we have used the suffering of others as fuel for our own righteousness. Let it fall where we have asked Jesus to come only after we have arranged the throne to our liking.

And when it falls, may something older and more beautiful remain.

A table.

A basin.

A towel.

A loaf.

A cup.

A people gathered without illusion, without empire, without the need to be impressive, whispering the ancient prayer not as conquerors but as witnesses:

Maranatha.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Come not to crown our domination, but to free us from it.

Come not to baptize our fear, but to cast it out.

Come not to make our empire holy, but to teach us again that your kingdom comes like a seed, like yeast, like mercy, like a Lamb who was slain and yet lives.

And until you come, make us faithful.

Not imperial.

Not triumphant.

Not afraid.

Faithful.

The Maranatha Empire

There is a prayer so holy that it should burn the tongue of every empire that tries to speak it.

Maranatha.

Come, Lord.

It is the cry of the small church under pressure. The cry of the persecuted and the patient. The cry of those who have no armies to summon, no throne to defend, no voting bloc sufficient to save them, no market share large enough to secure their future. It is the cry of those who wait because they know they are not God.

But in every age, there are those who take this prayer of waiting and turn it into a banner of possession.

They say, “Come, Lord,” but what they mean is, “Give us control.”

They say, “Thy kingdom come,” but what they mean is, “Let our faction rule.”

They say, “Prepare the way of the Lord,” but what they build are prisons, borders, propaganda machines, religious celebrity platforms, and monuments to their own fear.

This is the Maranatha Empire.

It is not one nation only, though nations may become its servants. It is not one denomination only, though denominations may become its chapels. It is not merely Rome, nor Geneva, nor Washington, nor Moscow, nor any other city that has mistaken power for providence. The Maranatha Empire is the recurring temptation of the religious heart: to stop waiting for Christ and begin replacing him.

It begins quietly.

It begins with concern.

The world is dangerous. The children are vulnerable. The church is shrinking. The enemies are multiplying. The culture is changing. The old certainties are crumbling. The people are afraid.

Fear, when baptized, often calls itself faithfulness.

So the frightened church begins to reach for tools Jesus refused.

A throne.

A sword.

A spectacle.

A scapegoat.

A strongman.

A law that can accomplish what love has not yet persuaded.

A state that can enforce what the Spirit has not yet formed.

A leader who promises to defend Christ, as though Christ ever asked Peter to keep swinging after Gethsemane.

This is how the prayer becomes an empire.

The early church cried, “Come, Lord Jesus,” because it knew that Caesar was not Lord. The Maranatha Empire cries, “Come, Lord Jesus,” because it wants Caesar to become useful.

The early church broke bread in homes. The Maranatha Empire builds platforms and calls them altars.

The early church welcomed the stranger. The Maranatha Empire sees the stranger as a threat.

The early church died rather than kill. The Maranatha Empire kills and calls the dead collateral damage in the defense of righteousness.

The early church believed the Lamb had conquered. The Maranatha Empire keeps looking for a beast strong enough to protect the Lamb.

And there is the blasphemy.

Not that empire rejects Christ outright. That would be too honest. The Maranatha Empire does something more dangerous. It uses Christ as decoration for a power that is fundamentally afraid of the cross.

It sings of the Lamb while trusting the dragon.

It preaches resurrection while organizing itself around survival.

It displays the cross while despising weakness.

It quotes Jesus while ignoring the people Jesus told us to notice: the poor, the imprisoned, the hungry, the foreigner, the enemy, the child, the wounded man beside the road.

The Maranatha Empire is not built by atheists. It is built by believers who have lost patience with the way of Jesus.

For the way of Jesus is slow.

It is seed, yeast, salt, light.

It is foot-washing.

It is forgiveness seventy times seven.

It is refusing the shortcut of domination even when domination appears efficient.

It is telling Peter to put away the sword when everything in Peter’s body screams that this is the moment for holy violence.

It is standing before Pilate and saying, “My kingdom is not from this world,” not because the kingdom has nothing to do with the world, but because it does not come by the world’s methods.

The Maranatha Empire cannot tolerate this.

It cannot tolerate a Messiah who will not seize power.

It cannot tolerate a church that would rather be faithful than influential.

It cannot tolerate a people whose politics begin at the basin and towel.

It cannot tolerate enemy-love, because enemy-love ruins the machinery. Empire requires enemies. It needs them. It feeds on them. Without enemies, the crowd might look too closely at the throne.

So, the Maranatha Empire manufactures urgency.

There is no time to love.

No time to listen.

No time to discern.

No time for reconciliation.

No time for peacemaking.

No time to ask whether the means resemble the Christ we claim to serve.

The hour is late, they say. The danger is great. The stakes are too high. We must act now. We must take control now. We must win now.

And somewhere beneath all that urgency is a terrible confession:

They do not actually believe the Lord is coming.

Or, if he is coming, they do not trust him to arrive in the right way.

So they build him an empire to inherit.

But Christ does not inherit empires.

He judges them.

He walks in alleyways, not palaces. He asks whether the churches have kept their first love. He warns those who are rich and comfortable and self-satisfied that they may be poor, blind, and naked. He stands at the door and knocks, not because he has been defeated by secularism, but because religious people have locked him outside while holding meetings in his name.

The Maranatha Empire is always shocked when Jesus is found outside the gate.

Outside the camp.

Outside respectability.

Outside the approved narrative.

Outside the walls with the crucified, the excluded, the unclean, the inconvenient, and the condemned.

The empire expected him in the capital.

But he is with the refugees.

The empire expected him in the cathedral of victory.

But he is with the mother of the disappeared.

The empire expected him on the reviewing stand.

But he is washing feet in the basement.

The empire expected him to bless the troops.

But he is asking why his followers are still carrying swords.

This is why Maranatha must remain a dangerous prayer.

It must never be allowed to become a slogan for conquest. It must never be printed on the banners of those who are unwilling to be converted by the One they summon. To pray “Come, Lord” is not to invite divine endorsement of our projects. It is to invite judgment upon them.

Come, Lord, and judge our churches.

Come, Lord, and judge our flags.

Come, Lord, and judge our markets.

Come, Lord, and judge our weapons.

Come, Lord, and judge our sermons.

Come, Lord, and judge our secret hatreds.

Come, Lord, and judge the ways we have used your name to avoid your way.

This is the prayer empire cannot honestly pray.

Because if the Lord comes, the first thing to fall may not be our enemies.

It may be our idols.

The algorithm.

The nation.

The party.

The brand.

The gun.

The strongman.

The myth of innocence.

The lie that we can harm others for a righteous cause and remain untouched by the harm.

The Maranatha Empire teaches us to fear the collapse of Christian influence.

Jesus teaches us to fear gaining the world and losing our soul.

The Maranatha Empire asks, “How do we take back the culture?”

Jesus asks, “Can you drink the cup that I drink?”

The Maranatha Empire says, “Blessed are the winners.”

Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek.”

The Maranatha Empire says, “Blessed are the forceful, for they shall secure the future.”

Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”

And perhaps this is the word for us now:

The church does not need to become more powerful.

The church needs to become more faithful.

Not passive. Not silent. Not withdrawn into pious irrelevance. But faithful in the particular, cruciform, stubborn way of Jesus. Faithful enough to resist evil without becoming its mirror. Faithful enough to tell the truth without hatred. Faithful enough to protect the vulnerable without worshiping violence. Faithful enough to build communities of economic sharing, hospitality, forgiveness, courage, and joy. Faithful enough to be a people who can live without controlling the outcome.

That is the hard part.

Empire is attractive because it promises control.

Jesus offers communion.

Empire promises security.

Jesus offers peace.

Empire promises victory over enemies.

Jesus offers reconciliation that may begin with our repentance.

Empire promises to make us great.

Jesus invites us to become small enough to enter the kingdom.

So, let the Maranatha Empire fall.

Let it fall first in us.

Let it fall in every place where we have confused anxiety with zeal. Let it fall where we have preferred dominance to witness. Let it fall where we have wanted laws to do what discipleship would not. Let it fall where we have used the suffering of others as fuel for our own righteousness. Let it fall where we have asked Jesus to come only after we have arranged the throne to our liking.

And when it falls, may something older and more beautiful remain.

A table.

A basin.

A towel.

A loaf.

A cup.

A people gathered without illusion, without empire, without the need to be impressive, whispering the ancient prayer not as conquerors but as witnesses:

Maranatha.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Come not to crown our domination, but to free us from it.

Come not to baptize our fear, but to cast it out.

Come not to make our empire holy, but to teach us again that your kingdom comes like a seed, like yeast, like mercy, like a Lamb who was slain and yet lives.

And until you come, make us faithful.

Not imperial.

Not triumphant.

Not afraid.

Faithful.

The Maranatha Empire

There is a prayer so holy that it should burn the tongue of every empire that tries to speak it.

Maranatha.

Come, Lord.

It is the cry of the small church under pressure. The cry of the persecuted and the patient. The cry of those who have no armies to summon, no throne to defend, no voting bloc sufficient to save them, no market share large enough to secure their future. It is the cry of those who wait because they know they are not God.

But in every age, there are those who take this prayer of waiting and turn it into a banner of possession.

They say, “Come, Lord,” but what they mean is, “Give us control.”

They say, “Thy kingdom come,” but what they mean is, “Let our faction rule.”

They say, “Prepare the way of the Lord,” but what they build are prisons, borders, propaganda machines, religious celebrity platforms, and monuments to their own fear.

This is the Maranatha Empire.

It is not one nation only, though nations may become its servants. It is not one denomination only, though denominations may become its chapels. It is not merely Rome, nor Geneva, nor Washington, nor Moscow, nor any other city that has mistaken power for providence. The Maranatha Empire is the recurring temptation of the religious heart: to stop waiting for Christ and begin replacing him.

It begins quietly.

It begins with concern.

The world is dangerous. The children are vulnerable. The church is shrinking. The enemies are multiplying. The culture is changing. The old certainties are crumbling. The people are afraid.

Fear, when baptized, often calls itself faithfulness.

So the frightened church begins to reach for tools Jesus refused.

A throne.

A sword.

A spectacle.

A scapegoat.

A strongman.

A law that can accomplish what love has not yet persuaded.

A state that can enforce what the Spirit has not yet formed.

A leader who promises to defend Christ, as though Christ ever asked Peter to keep swinging after Gethsemane.

This is how the prayer becomes an empire.

The early church cried, “Come, Lord Jesus,” because it knew that Caesar was not Lord. The Maranatha Empire cries, “Come, Lord Jesus,” because it wants Caesar to become useful.

The early church broke bread in homes. The Maranatha Empire builds platforms and calls them altars.

The early church welcomed the stranger. The Maranatha Empire sees the stranger as a threat.

The early church died rather than kill. The Maranatha Empire kills and calls the dead collateral damage in the defense of righteousness.

The early church believed the Lamb had conquered. The Maranatha Empire keeps looking for a beast strong enough to protect the Lamb.

And there is the blasphemy.

Not that empire rejects Christ outright. That would be too honest. The Maranatha Empire does something more dangerous. It uses Christ as decoration for a power that is fundamentally afraid of the cross.

It sings of the Lamb while trusting the dragon.

It preaches resurrection while organizing itself around survival.

It displays the cross while despising weakness.

It quotes Jesus while ignoring the people Jesus told us to notice: the poor, the imprisoned, the hungry, the foreigner, the enemy, the child, the wounded man beside the road.

The Maranatha Empire is not built by atheists. It is built by believers who have lost patience with the way of Jesus.

For the way of Jesus is slow.

It is seed, yeast, salt, light.

It is foot-washing.

It is forgiveness seventy times seven.

It is refusing the shortcut of domination even when domination appears efficient.

It is telling Peter to put away the sword when everything in Peter’s body screams that this is the moment for holy violence.

It is standing before Pilate and saying, “My kingdom is not from this world,” not because the kingdom has nothing to do with the world, but because it does not come by the world’s methods.

The Maranatha Empire cannot tolerate this.

It cannot tolerate a Messiah who will not seize power.

It cannot tolerate a church that would rather be faithful than influential.

It cannot tolerate a people whose politics begin at the basin and towel.

It cannot tolerate enemy-love, because enemy-love ruins the machinery. Empire requires enemies. It needs them. It feeds on them. Without enemies, the crowd might look too closely at the throne.

So, the Maranatha Empire manufactures urgency.

There is no time to love.

No time to listen.

No time to discern.

No time for reconciliation.

No time for peacemaking.

No time to ask whether the means resemble the Christ we claim to serve.

The hour is late, they say. The danger is great. The stakes are too high. We must act now. We must take control now. We must win now.

And somewhere beneath all that urgency is a terrible confession:

They do not actually believe the Lord is coming.

Or, if he is coming, they do not trust him to arrive in the right way.

So they build him an empire to inherit.

But Christ does not inherit empires.

He judges them.

He walks in alleyways, not palaces. He asks whether the churches have kept their first love. He warns those who are rich and comfortable and self-satisfied that they may be poor, blind, and naked. He stands at the door and knocks, not because he has been defeated by secularism, but because religious people have locked him outside while holding meetings in his name.

The Maranatha Empire is always shocked when Jesus is found outside the gate.

Outside the camp.

Outside respectability.

Outside the approved narrative.

Outside the walls with the crucified, the excluded, the unclean, the inconvenient, and the condemned.

The empire expected him in the capital.

But he is with the refugees.

The empire expected him in the cathedral of victory.

But he is with the mother of the disappeared.

The empire expected him on the reviewing stand.

But he is washing feet in the basement.

The empire expected him to bless the troops.

But he is asking why his followers are still carrying swords.

This is why Maranatha must remain a dangerous prayer.

It must never be allowed to become a slogan for conquest. It must never be printed on the banners of those who are unwilling to be converted by the One they summon. To pray “Come, Lord” is not to invite divine endorsement of our projects. It is to invite judgment upon them.

Come, Lord, and judge our churches.

Come, Lord, and judge our flags.

Come, Lord, and judge our markets.

Come, Lord, and judge our weapons.

Come, Lord, and judge our sermons.

Come, Lord, and judge our secret hatreds.

Come, Lord, and judge the ways we have used your name to avoid your way.

This is the prayer empire cannot honestly pray.

Because if the Lord comes, the first thing to fall may not be our enemies.

It may be our idols.

The algorithm.

The nation.

The party.

The brand.

The gun.

The strongman.

The myth of innocence.

The lie that we can harm others for a righteous cause and remain untouched by the harm.

The Maranatha Empire teaches us to fear the collapse of Christian influence.

Jesus teaches us to fear gaining the world and losing our soul.

The Maranatha Empire asks, “How do we take back the culture?”

Jesus asks, “Can you drink the cup that I drink?”

The Maranatha Empire says, “Blessed are the winners.”

Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek.”

The Maranatha Empire says, “Blessed are the forceful, for they shall secure the future.”

Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”

And perhaps this is the word for us now:

The church does not need to become more powerful.

The church needs to become more faithful.

Not passive. Not silent. Not withdrawn into pious irrelevance. But faithful in the particular, cruciform, stubborn way of Jesus. Faithful enough to resist evil without becoming its mirror. Faithful enough to tell the truth without hatred. Faithful enough to protect the vulnerable without worshiping violence. Faithful enough to build communities of economic sharing, hospitality, forgiveness, courage, and joy. Faithful enough to be a people who can live without controlling the outcome.

That is the hard part.

Empire is attractive because it promises control.

Jesus offers communion.

Empire promises security.

Jesus offers peace.

Empire promises victory over enemies.

Jesus offers reconciliation that may begin with our repentance.

Empire promises to make us great.

Jesus invites us to become small enough to enter the kingdom.

So, let the Maranatha Empire fall.

Let it fall first in us.

Let it fall in every place where we have confused anxiety with zeal. Let it fall where we have preferred dominance to witness. Let it fall where we have wanted laws to do what discipleship would not. Let it fall where we have used the suffering of others as fuel for our own righteousness. Let it fall where we have asked Jesus to come only after we have arranged the throne to our liking.

And when it falls, may something older and more beautiful remain.

A table.

A basin.

A towel.

A loaf.

A cup.

A people gathered without illusion, without empire, without the need to be impressive, whispering the ancient prayer not as conquerors but as witnesses:

Maranatha.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Come not to crown our domination, but to free us from it.

Come not to baptize our fear, but to cast it out.

Come not to make our empire holy, but to teach us again that your kingdom comes like a seed, like yeast, like mercy, like a Lamb who was slain and yet lives.

And until you come, make us faithful.

Not imperial.

Not triumphant.

Not afraid.

Faithful.

This week's article is "The Power Of The Stupid Question", one of my favourite techniques for breaking down assumptions in teams.

If you lead with your own humility, you can inspire it in others.

https://dougpennant.substack.com/p/the-power-of-the-stupid-question

#gamedev #production #leadership #humility

https://www.europesays.com/africa/228569/ COKA confident of victory in NPP Ashanti regional chair race #AshantiRegion #COKA #galamsey #Ghana #GhanaPolitics #GrassrootsPolitics #HeavenSeekersMinistry #humility #IllegalMining #InternalElections #kumasi #NPP #OdenehoKwakuAppiah #PartyLeadership #PoliticalCampaign #Unity

#341: How Radical Should You Be In Your Belief?

https://youtu.be/mOoLMJQRrQY

How radical should you be in your belief? If you believe in something, shouldn’t you aim to believe in it more? So, let’s discuss.

All of us have our ideas that we prefer over others. All of us may have our political, religious, cultural preferences. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what we do. That’s what makes us human.

If we believe deeply that something is correct, that something is good, should we not think also that more of that is better? It’s a seductive idea and it seems logical initially. If you are X, if you believe in X, shouldn’t you believe in it more so? That seems to be the case because otherwise why would you believe in it? Is your belief really that weak that you can’t strengthen it?

So that’s the idea. And if you for some reason don’t want to fully commit, maybe you really never believed it completely. Maybe you’re not really a true believer. That’s the other part of the idea.

However, I would say this ignores certain facts about ideas, because every idea — whether it’s a religion, a philosophy, a cultural preference — typically has safeguards. When you look at all the big religions, they have some sort of clause, some sort of warning against taking it too far. Because that’s what the very idea of divinity is. That’s what the very idea of God is: that which we as human beings cannot completely understand. God is that which we cannot even approach so much that we can be certain of what God is. Because if we could, wouldn’t that mean in some way that we could become God? And that’s the very warning that most religions promote.

Believe, but don’t assume for a moment that you have all the answers.

There’s this joke that camels always look at humans in a specific way. The joke is that God has 100 names. We know 99 of them. But the camel knows all 100. And that’s why the camel looks so superior.

But that is the idea of religion. The idea of religion is a combination — as strange as this may sound — of belief and humility. We are not God. We are not everything in the universe. We are not all-knowing. We are not omnipotent. And we will never get there. So whatever you think of as God — whether you think that’s a religious idea, whether you think that’s nature, whether you think that’s the universe, whether you think that’s just the ultimate good — this idea is clear: do not pretend to be all-knowing yourself. Have some sense of humility.

Now that also goes for philosophy. You may say, I follow philosopher so-and-so. But philosophy is an ongoing conversation about wisdom — the love of wisdom; that’s what philosophia means. Each idea in philosophy lives in interaction with other ideas. Philosophy is more than just footnotes to Plato. Plato can be footnotes to Plato — if you look at the Laws and the Republic, there are two very different ideas there, and more than two.

Philosophers are typically smarter than those who follow a specific philosophy. Because every philosopher knows that in order to put out the strongest version of their idea, they have to leave some of the complications out. But there are always complications. And philosophy X always lives in some form of exchange with philosophy Y or Z or however many there are. Every idea lives in an ecosystem of ideas. It lives in relation with others.

Philosophy X may be good or better in certain respects than philosophy Y. Maybe philosophy Y is good in other aspects. But the truth emerges in the interaction between the two.

So you may believe that the individual is the source of all morality. But how far do you want to take this? Do you believe this to the complete abdication of responsibility for others? Do you believe this to the complete rejection of the state? Similarly, if you believe the state is the authority over everything else, at which point does this have to stop? At which point does the state have to even question itself as to how far it should go?

Everything costs money. Does this mean that everything should be judged by its price tag? Even though price is not a static thing — it depends on a lot of factors. Is the price tag always the value of something, or is it just our momentary expression of our social and cultural priorities? Of course there’s supply and demand which regulate that. But is that still everything? Aren’t there things where we should find some difficulty putting a price on? Aren’t there some things that we can’t really measure very well? So isn’t there a limit to this kind of positivist, materialist way of looking at things?

Equally, if we say the materialistic world doesn’t matter and we need to live in a more spiritual, contemplative state of mind — that may be true to a point, but eventually bills will have to be paid. You do live in some form of reality, and that reality means that resources typically are limited and there needs to be a prioritizing. How do you organize that?

The material and the spiritual belong together. They will always have friction between each other, but they will always complement each other. If you’re too materialistic — if you believe that only that which can be measured, only that which can be owned, only that which can have a price tag matters — you should maybe think about some more spiritual components of life. If you’re too spiritual, maybe you need to be rooted more in the fact that there’s also a materialist component of life.

If X drowns out Y, sides of X may appear that make it wrong, because you need that balance. And there are more than just two — X and Y is easier, but you could say XYZ or whatever.

So in fact the saying may be true that too much of a good thing is indeed not good. It distorts what it is.

This is why you see me frequently call for moderation. You could argue that too much moderation is also wrong — you need some passion and some intensity and some belief. Well, yes. But moderation can also be just a middle ground between these different poles. All these different ideas around us lead us to negotiate our space within them. Moderation does not mean you don’t have convictions. It means that you question at which point your convictions turn into such a radicality, into such an extreme version, that they become wrong — that they are undermined by their own conviction.

Is radicality the truest expression of an idea? No. It may be the most flamboyant, the most interesting. But it can’t survive well. If you turn too radical, too extremist, your idea may be more attractive to people who really think like you. But then look at history. Every time an idea became too radical, it fails. It has failed. No matter what the idea — because in its radicality, in its extremism, it loses its power of conviction towards those who don’t agree with you. And the number of people in the world who agree with you is always going to be punctuated by the number of people who disagree with you.

If you want to build a successful movement, if you want to build a successful approach to politics, to religion, to whatever your cultural or social idea may be, you need to convince others. You need to find ways of integrating aspects of the other into your own.

Which is why this very familiar symbol of yin and yang — masculine, feminine, black, white, dark, light — shows you these two parts, but there’s always something of the other in the bigger part. You know the symbol.

If we don’t find a way to integrate that with which we disagree — as some sense of doubt, as some sense of humility within our convictions — then our convictions will be nothing but arrogance, nothing but self-congratulatory pose, and turn out to be nothing else than solipsism: centering on yourself and that which you think defines you as the only thing that matters.

[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]

#341: How Radical Should You Be In Your Belief?

https://youtu.be/mOoLMJQRrQY

How radical should you be in your belief? If you believe in something, shouldn’t you aim to believe in it more? So, let’s discuss.

All of us have our ideas that we prefer over others. All of us may have our political, religious, cultural preferences. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what we do. That’s what makes us human.

If we believe deeply that something is correct, that something is good, should we not think also that more of that is better? It’s a seductive idea and it seems logical initially. If you are X, if you believe in X, shouldn’t you believe in it more so? That seems to be the case because otherwise why would you believe in it? Is your belief really that weak that you can’t strengthen it?

So that’s the idea. And if you for some reason don’t want to fully commit, maybe you really never believed it completely. Maybe you’re not really a true believer. That’s the other part of the idea.

However, I would say this ignores certain facts about ideas, because every idea — whether it’s a religion, a philosophy, a cultural preference — typically has safeguards. When you look at all the big religions, they have some sort of clause, some sort of warning against taking it too far. Because that’s what the very idea of divinity is. That’s what the very idea of God is: that which we as human beings cannot completely understand. God is that which we cannot even approach so much that we can be certain of what God is. Because if we could, wouldn’t that mean in some way that we could become God? And that’s the very warning that most religions promote.

Believe, but don’t assume for a moment that you have all the answers.

There’s this joke that camels always look at humans in a specific way. The joke is that God has 100 names. We know 99 of them. But the camel knows all 100. And that’s why the camel looks so superior.

But that is the idea of religion. The idea of religion is a combination — as strange as this may sound — of belief and humility. We are not God. We are not everything in the universe. We are not all-knowing. We are not omnipotent. And we will never get there. So whatever you think of as God — whether you think that’s a religious idea, whether you think that’s nature, whether you think that’s the universe, whether you think that’s just the ultimate good — this idea is clear: do not pretend to be all-knowing yourself. Have some sense of humility.

Now that also goes for philosophy. You may say, I follow philosopher so-and-so. But philosophy is an ongoing conversation about wisdom — the love of wisdom; that’s what philosophia means. Each idea in philosophy lives in interaction with other ideas. Philosophy is more than just footnotes to Plato. Plato can be footnotes to Plato — if you look at the Laws and the Republic, there are two very different ideas there, and more than two.

Philosophers are typically smarter than those who follow a specific philosophy. Because every philosopher knows that in order to put out the strongest version of their idea, they have to leave some of the complications out. But there are always complications. And philosophy X always lives in some form of exchange with philosophy Y or Z or however many there are. Every idea lives in an ecosystem of ideas. It lives in relation with others.

Philosophy X may be good or better in certain respects than philosophy Y. Maybe philosophy Y is good in other aspects. But the truth emerges in the interaction between the two.

So you may believe that the individual is the source of all morality. But how far do you want to take this? Do you believe this to the complete abdication of responsibility for others? Do you believe this to the complete rejection of the state? Similarly, if you believe the state is the authority over everything else, at which point does this have to stop? At which point does the state have to even question itself as to how far it should go?

Everything costs money. Does this mean that everything should be judged by its price tag? Even though price is not a static thing — it depends on a lot of factors. Is the price tag always the value of something, or is it just our momentary expression of our social and cultural priorities? Of course there’s supply and demand which regulate that. But is that still everything? Aren’t there things where we should find some difficulty putting a price on? Aren’t there some things that we can’t really measure very well? So isn’t there a limit to this kind of positivist, materialist way of looking at things?

Equally, if we say the materialistic world doesn’t matter and we need to live in a more spiritual, contemplative state of mind — that may be true to a point, but eventually bills will have to be paid. You do live in some form of reality, and that reality means that resources typically are limited and there needs to be a prioritizing. How do you organize that?

The material and the spiritual belong together. They will always have friction between each other, but they will always complement each other. If you’re too materialistic — if you believe that only that which can be measured, only that which can be owned, only that which can have a price tag matters — you should maybe think about some more spiritual components of life. If you’re too spiritual, maybe you need to be rooted more in the fact that there’s also a materialist component of life.

If X drowns out Y, sides of X may appear that make it wrong, because you need that balance. And there are more than just two — X and Y is easier, but you could say XYZ or whatever.

So in fact the saying may be true that too much of a good thing is indeed not good. It distorts what it is.

This is why you see me frequently call for moderation. You could argue that too much moderation is also wrong — you need some passion and some intensity and some belief. Well, yes. But moderation can also be just a middle ground between these different poles. All these different ideas around us lead us to negotiate our space within them. Moderation does not mean you don’t have convictions. It means that you question at which point your convictions turn into such a radicality, into such an extreme version, that they become wrong — that they are undermined by their own conviction.

Is radicality the truest expression of an idea? No. It may be the most flamboyant, the most interesting. But it can’t survive well. If you turn too radical, too extremist, your idea may be more attractive to people who really think like you. But then look at history. Every time an idea became too radical, it fails. It has failed. No matter what the idea — because in its radicality, in its extremism, it loses its power of conviction towards those who don’t agree with you. And the number of people in the world who agree with you is always going to be punctuated by the number of people who disagree with you.

If you want to build a successful movement, if you want to build a successful approach to politics, to religion, to whatever your cultural or social idea may be, you need to convince others. You need to find ways of integrating aspects of the other into your own.

Which is why this very familiar symbol of yin and yang — masculine, feminine, black, white, dark, light — shows you these two parts, but there’s always something of the other in the bigger part. You know the symbol.

If we don’t find a way to integrate that with which we disagree — as some sense of doubt, as some sense of humility within our convictions — then our convictions will be nothing but arrogance, nothing but self-congratulatory pose, and turn out to be nothing else than solipsism: centering on yourself and that which you think defines you as the only thing that matters.

[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]

#341: How Radical Should You Be In Your Belief?

https://youtu.be/mOoLMJQRrQY

How radical should you be in your belief? If you believe in something, shouldn’t you aim to believe in it more? So, let’s discuss.

All of us have our ideas that we prefer over others. All of us may have our political, religious, cultural preferences. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what we do. That’s what makes us human.

If we believe deeply that something is correct, that something is good, should we not think also that more of that is better? It’s a seductive idea and it seems logical initially. If you are X, if you believe in X, shouldn’t you believe in it more so? That seems to be the case because otherwise why would you believe in it? Is your belief really that weak that you can’t strengthen it?

So that’s the idea. And if you for some reason don’t want to fully commit, maybe you really never believed it completely. Maybe you’re not really a true believer. That’s the other part of the idea.

However, I would say this ignores certain facts about ideas, because every idea — whether it’s a religion, a philosophy, a cultural preference — typically has safeguards. When you look at all the big religions, they have some sort of clause, some sort of warning against taking it too far. Because that’s what the very idea of divinity is. That’s what the very idea of God is: that which we as human beings cannot completely understand. God is that which we cannot even approach so much that we can be certain of what God is. Because if we could, wouldn’t that mean in some way that we could become God? And that’s the very warning that most religions promote.

Believe, but don’t assume for a moment that you have all the answers.

There’s this joke that camels always look at humans in a specific way. The joke is that God has 100 names. We know 99 of them. But the camel knows all 100. And that’s why the camel looks so superior.

But that is the idea of religion. The idea of religion is a combination — as strange as this may sound — of belief and humility. We are not God. We are not everything in the universe. We are not all-knowing. We are not omnipotent. And we will never get there. So whatever you think of as God — whether you think that’s a religious idea, whether you think that’s nature, whether you think that’s the universe, whether you think that’s just the ultimate good — this idea is clear: do not pretend to be all-knowing yourself. Have some sense of humility.

Now that also goes for philosophy. You may say, I follow philosopher so-and-so. But philosophy is an ongoing conversation about wisdom — the love of wisdom; that’s what philosophia means. Each idea in philosophy lives in interaction with other ideas. Philosophy is more than just footnotes to Plato. Plato can be footnotes to Plato — if you look at the Laws and the Republic, there are two very different ideas there, and more than two.

Philosophers are typically smarter than those who follow a specific philosophy. Because every philosopher knows that in order to put out the strongest version of their idea, they have to leave some of the complications out. But there are always complications. And philosophy X always lives in some form of exchange with philosophy Y or Z or however many there are. Every idea lives in an ecosystem of ideas. It lives in relation with others.

Philosophy X may be good or better in certain respects than philosophy Y. Maybe philosophy Y is good in other aspects. But the truth emerges in the interaction between the two.

So you may believe that the individual is the source of all morality. But how far do you want to take this? Do you believe this to the complete abdication of responsibility for others? Do you believe this to the complete rejection of the state? Similarly, if you believe the state is the authority over everything else, at which point does this have to stop? At which point does the state have to even question itself as to how far it should go?

Everything costs money. Does this mean that everything should be judged by its price tag? Even though price is not a static thing — it depends on a lot of factors. Is the price tag always the value of something, or is it just our momentary expression of our social and cultural priorities? Of course there’s supply and demand which regulate that. But is that still everything? Aren’t there things where we should find some difficulty putting a price on? Aren’t there some things that we can’t really measure very well? So isn’t there a limit to this kind of positivist, materialist way of looking at things?

Equally, if we say the materialistic world doesn’t matter and we need to live in a more spiritual, contemplative state of mind — that may be true to a point, but eventually bills will have to be paid. You do live in some form of reality, and that reality means that resources typically are limited and there needs to be a prioritizing. How do you organize that?

The material and the spiritual belong together. They will always have friction between each other, but they will always complement each other. If you’re too materialistic — if you believe that only that which can be measured, only that which can be owned, only that which can have a price tag matters — you should maybe think about some more spiritual components of life. If you’re too spiritual, maybe you need to be rooted more in the fact that there’s also a materialist component of life.

If X drowns out Y, sides of X may appear that make it wrong, because you need that balance. And there are more than just two — X and Y is easier, but you could say XYZ or whatever.

So in fact the saying may be true that too much of a good thing is indeed not good. It distorts what it is.

This is why you see me frequently call for moderation. You could argue that too much moderation is also wrong — you need some passion and some intensity and some belief. Well, yes. But moderation can also be just a middle ground between these different poles. All these different ideas around us lead us to negotiate our space within them. Moderation does not mean you don’t have convictions. It means that you question at which point your convictions turn into such a radicality, into such an extreme version, that they become wrong — that they are undermined by their own conviction.

Is radicality the truest expression of an idea? No. It may be the most flamboyant, the most interesting. But it can’t survive well. If you turn too radical, too extremist, your idea may be more attractive to people who really think like you. But then look at history. Every time an idea became too radical, it fails. It has failed. No matter what the idea — because in its radicality, in its extremism, it loses its power of conviction towards those who don’t agree with you. And the number of people in the world who agree with you is always going to be punctuated by the number of people who disagree with you.

If you want to build a successful movement, if you want to build a successful approach to politics, to religion, to whatever your cultural or social idea may be, you need to convince others. You need to find ways of integrating aspects of the other into your own.

Which is why this very familiar symbol of yin and yang — masculine, feminine, black, white, dark, light — shows you these two parts, but there’s always something of the other in the bigger part. You know the symbol.

If we don’t find a way to integrate that with which we disagree — as some sense of doubt, as some sense of humility within our convictions — then our convictions will be nothing but arrogance, nothing but self-congratulatory pose, and turn out to be nothing else than solipsism: centering on yourself and that which you think defines you as the only thing that matters.

[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]

#341: How Radical Should You Be In Your Belief?

https://youtu.be/mOoLMJQRrQY

How radical should you be in your belief? If you believe in something, shouldn’t you aim to believe in it more? So, let’s discuss.

All of us have our ideas that we prefer over others. All of us may have our political, religious, cultural preferences. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what we do. That’s what makes us human.

If we believe deeply that something is correct, that something is good, should we not think also that more of that is better? It’s a seductive idea and it seems logical initially. If you are X, if you believe in X, shouldn’t you believe in it more so? That seems to be the case because otherwise why would you believe in it? Is your belief really that weak that you can’t strengthen it?

So that’s the idea. And if you for some reason don’t want to fully commit, maybe you really never believed it completely. Maybe you’re not really a true believer. That’s the other part of the idea.

However, I would say this ignores certain facts about ideas, because every idea — whether it’s a religion, a philosophy, a cultural preference — typically has safeguards. When you look at all the big religions, they have some sort of clause, some sort of warning against taking it too far. Because that’s what the very idea of divinity is. That’s what the very idea of God is: that which we as human beings cannot completely understand. God is that which we cannot even approach so much that we can be certain of what God is. Because if we could, wouldn’t that mean in some way that we could become God? And that’s the very warning that most religions promote.

Believe, but don’t assume for a moment that you have all the answers.

There’s this joke that camels always look at humans in a specific way. The joke is that God has 100 names. We know 99 of them. But the camel knows all 100. And that’s why the camel looks so superior.

But that is the idea of religion. The idea of religion is a combination — as strange as this may sound — of belief and humility. We are not God. We are not everything in the universe. We are not all-knowing. We are not omnipotent. And we will never get there. So whatever you think of as God — whether you think that’s a religious idea, whether you think that’s nature, whether you think that’s the universe, whether you think that’s just the ultimate good — this idea is clear: do not pretend to be all-knowing yourself. Have some sense of humility.

Now that also goes for philosophy. You may say, I follow philosopher so-and-so. But philosophy is an ongoing conversation about wisdom — the love of wisdom; that’s what philosophia means. Each idea in philosophy lives in interaction with other ideas. Philosophy is more than just footnotes to Plato. Plato can be footnotes to Plato — if you look at the Laws and the Republic, there are two very different ideas there, and more than two.

Philosophers are typically smarter than those who follow a specific philosophy. Because every philosopher knows that in order to put out the strongest version of their idea, they have to leave some of the complications out. But there are always complications. And philosophy X always lives in some form of exchange with philosophy Y or Z or however many there are. Every idea lives in an ecosystem of ideas. It lives in relation with others.

Philosophy X may be good or better in certain respects than philosophy Y. Maybe philosophy Y is good in other aspects. But the truth emerges in the interaction between the two.

So you may believe that the individual is the source of all morality. But how far do you want to take this? Do you believe this to the complete abdication of responsibility for others? Do you believe this to the complete rejection of the state? Similarly, if you believe the state is the authority over everything else, at which point does this have to stop? At which point does the state have to even question itself as to how far it should go?

Everything costs money. Does this mean that everything should be judged by its price tag? Even though price is not a static thing — it depends on a lot of factors. Is the price tag always the value of something, or is it just our momentary expression of our social and cultural priorities? Of course there’s supply and demand which regulate that. But is that still everything? Aren’t there things where we should find some difficulty putting a price on? Aren’t there some things that we can’t really measure very well? So isn’t there a limit to this kind of positivist, materialist way of looking at things?

Equally, if we say the materialistic world doesn’t matter and we need to live in a more spiritual, contemplative state of mind — that may be true to a point, but eventually bills will have to be paid. You do live in some form of reality, and that reality means that resources typically are limited and there needs to be a prioritizing. How do you organize that?

The material and the spiritual belong together. They will always have friction between each other, but they will always complement each other. If you’re too materialistic — if you believe that only that which can be measured, only that which can be owned, only that which can have a price tag matters — you should maybe think about some more spiritual components of life. If you’re too spiritual, maybe you need to be rooted more in the fact that there’s also a materialist component of life.

If X drowns out Y, sides of X may appear that make it wrong, because you need that balance. And there are more than just two — X and Y is easier, but you could say XYZ or whatever.

So in fact the saying may be true that too much of a good thing is indeed not good. It distorts what it is.

This is why you see me frequently call for moderation. You could argue that too much moderation is also wrong — you need some passion and some intensity and some belief. Well, yes. But moderation can also be just a middle ground between these different poles. All these different ideas around us lead us to negotiate our space within them. Moderation does not mean you don’t have convictions. It means that you question at which point your convictions turn into such a radicality, into such an extreme version, that they become wrong — that they are undermined by their own conviction.

Is radicality the truest expression of an idea? No. It may be the most flamboyant, the most interesting. But it can’t survive well. If you turn too radical, too extremist, your idea may be more attractive to people who really think like you. But then look at history. Every time an idea became too radical, it fails. It has failed. No matter what the idea — because in its radicality, in its extremism, it loses its power of conviction towards those who don’t agree with you. And the number of people in the world who agree with you is always going to be punctuated by the number of people who disagree with you.

If you want to build a successful movement, if you want to build a successful approach to politics, to religion, to whatever your cultural or social idea may be, you need to convince others. You need to find ways of integrating aspects of the other into your own.

Which is why this very familiar symbol of yin and yang — masculine, feminine, black, white, dark, light — shows you these two parts, but there’s always something of the other in the bigger part. You know the symbol.

If we don’t find a way to integrate that with which we disagree — as some sense of doubt, as some sense of humility within our convictions — then our convictions will be nothing but arrogance, nothing but self-congratulatory pose, and turn out to be nothing else than solipsism: centering on yourself and that which you think defines you as the only thing that matters.

[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]

#341: How Radical Should You Be In Your Belief?

https://youtu.be/mOoLMJQRrQY

How radical should you be in your belief? If you believe in something, shouldn’t you aim to believe in it more? So, let’s discuss.

All of us have our ideas that we prefer over others. All of us may have our political, religious, cultural preferences. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what we do. That’s what makes us human.

If we believe deeply that something is correct, that something is good, should we not think also that more of that is better? It’s a seductive idea and it seems logical initially. If you are X, if you believe in X, shouldn’t you believe in it more so? That seems to be the case because otherwise why would you believe in it? Is your belief really that weak that you can’t strengthen it?

So that’s the idea. And if you for some reason don’t want to fully commit, maybe you really never believed it completely. Maybe you’re not really a true believer. That’s the other part of the idea.

However, I would say this ignores certain facts about ideas, because every idea — whether it’s a religion, a philosophy, a cultural preference — typically has safeguards. When you look at all the big religions, they have some sort of clause, some sort of warning against taking it too far. Because that’s what the very idea of divinity is. That’s what the very idea of God is: that which we as human beings cannot completely understand. God is that which we cannot even approach so much that we can be certain of what God is. Because if we could, wouldn’t that mean in some way that we could become God? And that’s the very warning that most religions promote.

Believe, but don’t assume for a moment that you have all the answers.

There’s this joke that camels always look at humans in a specific way. The joke is that God has 100 names. We know 99 of them. But the camel knows all 100. And that’s why the camel looks so superior.

But that is the idea of religion. The idea of religion is a combination — as strange as this may sound — of belief and humility. We are not God. We are not everything in the universe. We are not all-knowing. We are not omnipotent. And we will never get there. So whatever you think of as God — whether you think that’s a religious idea, whether you think that’s nature, whether you think that’s the universe, whether you think that’s just the ultimate good — this idea is clear: do not pretend to be all-knowing yourself. Have some sense of humility.

Now that also goes for philosophy. You may say, I follow philosopher so-and-so. But philosophy is an ongoing conversation about wisdom — the love of wisdom; that’s what philosophia means. Each idea in philosophy lives in interaction with other ideas. Philosophy is more than just footnotes to Plato. Plato can be footnotes to Plato — if you look at the Laws and the Republic, there are two very different ideas there, and more than two.

Philosophers are typically smarter than those who follow a specific philosophy. Because every philosopher knows that in order to put out the strongest version of their idea, they have to leave some of the complications out. But there are always complications. And philosophy X always lives in some form of exchange with philosophy Y or Z or however many there are. Every idea lives in an ecosystem of ideas. It lives in relation with others.

Philosophy X may be good or better in certain respects than philosophy Y. Maybe philosophy Y is good in other aspects. But the truth emerges in the interaction between the two.

So you may believe that the individual is the source of all morality. But how far do you want to take this? Do you believe this to the complete abdication of responsibility for others? Do you believe this to the complete rejection of the state? Similarly, if you believe the state is the authority over everything else, at which point does this have to stop? At which point does the state have to even question itself as to how far it should go?

Everything costs money. Does this mean that everything should be judged by its price tag? Even though price is not a static thing — it depends on a lot of factors. Is the price tag always the value of something, or is it just our momentary expression of our social and cultural priorities? Of course there’s supply and demand which regulate that. But is that still everything? Aren’t there things where we should find some difficulty putting a price on? Aren’t there some things that we can’t really measure very well? So isn’t there a limit to this kind of positivist, materialist way of looking at things?

Equally, if we say the materialistic world doesn’t matter and we need to live in a more spiritual, contemplative state of mind — that may be true to a point, but eventually bills will have to be paid. You do live in some form of reality, and that reality means that resources typically are limited and there needs to be a prioritizing. How do you organize that?

The material and the spiritual belong together. They will always have friction between each other, but they will always complement each other. If you’re too materialistic — if you believe that only that which can be measured, only that which can be owned, only that which can have a price tag matters — you should maybe think about some more spiritual components of life. If you’re too spiritual, maybe you need to be rooted more in the fact that there’s also a materialist component of life.

If X drowns out Y, sides of X may appear that make it wrong, because you need that balance. And there are more than just two — X and Y is easier, but you could say XYZ or whatever.

So in fact the saying may be true that too much of a good thing is indeed not good. It distorts what it is.

This is why you see me frequently call for moderation. You could argue that too much moderation is also wrong — you need some passion and some intensity and some belief. Well, yes. But moderation can also be just a middle ground between these different poles. All these different ideas around us lead us to negotiate our space within them. Moderation does not mean you don’t have convictions. It means that you question at which point your convictions turn into such a radicality, into such an extreme version, that they become wrong — that they are undermined by their own conviction.

Is radicality the truest expression of an idea? No. It may be the most flamboyant, the most interesting. But it can’t survive well. If you turn too radical, too extremist, your idea may be more attractive to people who really think like you. But then look at history. Every time an idea became too radical, it fails. It has failed. No matter what the idea — because in its radicality, in its extremism, it loses its power of conviction towards those who don’t agree with you. And the number of people in the world who agree with you is always going to be punctuated by the number of people who disagree with you.

If you want to build a successful movement, if you want to build a successful approach to politics, to religion, to whatever your cultural or social idea may be, you need to convince others. You need to find ways of integrating aspects of the other into your own.

Which is why this very familiar symbol of yin and yang — masculine, feminine, black, white, dark, light — shows you these two parts, but there’s always something of the other in the bigger part. You know the symbol.

If we don’t find a way to integrate that with which we disagree — as some sense of doubt, as some sense of humility within our convictions — then our convictions will be nothing but arrogance, nothing but self-congratulatory pose, and turn out to be nothing else than solipsism: centering on yourself and that which you think defines you as the only thing that matters.

[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]

Wet Feet

There is something almost comical about it at first. I took the dog to the park because I knew I would be away for pastors’ Bible study. The grass was wet. My sneakers got soaked. I went home, changed my socks, and thought I had solved the problem. Then on the hour drive I realized my feet were getting wet again, because of course the shoes themselves were still wet. So now, during Bible study, my feet have been wet. Damp. Cool. Probably getting more shriveled by the hour.

Yet somehow it feels fitting.

Not dramatic. Not grand. Just fitting.

I think of the phrase “getting my feet wet,” as though ministry, faith, and discipleship are things I ease into gradually, carefully, at a manageable depth. But some days it doesn’t feel like that. Some days it feels more like simply having wet feet and carrying on. Not preparation for service, not a metaphor about a faithful beginning, but the thing itself. Wet feet. A small discomfort that stays with me. A quiet bodily reminder that I am not moving through the day untouched.

And sitting here, I cannot help but think of Jesus washing feet.

Not the polished image of it. Not the sentimental church painting version. But the actual strangeness of it. Wet feet. Dirty feet. Vulnerable feet. Tired feet. The feet that carried dust, ache, story, and status. The Lord kneeling with basin and towel. The Most High God attending to what is lowest. Not avoiding the human mess, but stooping into it.

Maybe there is something right about reflecting on servant life while sitting in damp shoes.

Because service is rarely abstract. It is seldom dry and comfortable. It does not usually happen in pristine conditions, after everything has been neatly changed and arranged. Often it is inconvenient. Often it lingers. Often I think I have addressed the problem, only to discover the wetness has seeped through again. I change the socks, but the shoes are still soaked. I try to reset myself, but the deeper discomfort remains.

That, too, may be part of ministry.

I carry wetness with me. The sorrows of others. The unfinished conversations. The burdens that seep through. The humble tasks nobody notices. The little irritations that become, strangely, occasions of grace. And maybe part of following Jesus is not always finding a way to stay dry, but learning how to keep loving with wet feet.

Jesus washed feet not because feet are noble, but because they are ordinary. Necessary. Exposed. Human. He met his friends there, at ground level. And then he told them to do likewise.

So perhaps wet feet are not the worst thing.

Perhaps they are a reminder.

A reminder that I am not above the ground.
A reminder that discipleship is tactile.
A reminder that love kneels.
A reminder that service is not clean.
A reminder that holiness may sometimes smell like damp shoes and feel like wrinkled skin.

In some ways, it seems fitting to go through this day with wet feet.
Maybe, in some ways, it seems right to go through life that way too.

Not just getting my feet wet,
but having them wet—
as one who follows the Christ
who washed feet,
and who still seems to meet me there,
down low,
with basin,
with towel,
with love.

@Bfordham @TheGreatLlama I didn't realize telling abused women to stop bitching about how awful their partners were & to just leave their relationships was quite cruel, it was judgemental/ignorant, especially when I wasn't providing them with safe places to go. My karma for being that way was experiencing 2 abusive relationships after. I've never judged any person being abused again & ceased tone policing of people suffering from abuses that I was ignorant about, when I was younger & not as life experienced. I try to do better, when I have learned better.

#Humility #PersonalGrowth #Decolonization

Quote of the day, 23 April: Blessed Bettina

J.M.J.T.

27 September 1889

Dear Sister Michelina,

When I left you, I felt deep sorrow in leaving you in that distress, which revealed your great interior unrest. My dear one, if you would often reflect on the many graces the Lord has given you—having chosen you among the number of His intimate brides—I believe that those eyes, now so often filled with tears, would instead be filled with joy for the many blessings He has granted you and continues to grant you. What do you think? Does this seem like an exaggeration?

I hope you understand how much I love you in speaking to you so plainly: I have no other desire than to see you become a saint!

If the Lord is pleased to give you some gift reserved for souls dear to Him, I fear He may be saddened to see it received with such reluctance—or at least with so little gratitude. Come now, take courage, be generous, and you will see all the fog lift away. Let humility guide you in all your actions; be convinced that this holy virtue will open the way to a deep serenity—not only that, but to countless graces for you and for others.

How good Jesus is to us! What sorrow it will be on the last day if we have not responded with full generosity to our duties! Let us then strive to do everything possible to return love for love to Him who desires us to be eternally happy. May the holy Archangel obtain for you all the graces necessary to make you a great saint. With my blessing, this is the prayer of

Your most affectionate Mother,
Sister Teresa Mary of the Cross

Blessed Teresa Mary of the Cross “Bettina”

Letter 4 to Suor Michelina del Cuore di Maria

Suore Carmelitane di Firenze (n.d.) Scritti. Available at: https://www.suorecarmelitanedifirenze.it/scritti/ (Accessed: 21 April 2026).

Featured image: In December 2010, the State of Israel featured this photo of Stella Maris Monastery in their Flickr photo album, calling the image, “A Bit of Haifa.”  Blessed Teresa Maria’s religious congregation, the Carmelite Sisters of Saint Teresa of Florence, manage the pilgrims’ hostel in this location. Wikimedia Commons has several historic images in the Stella Maris Monastery collection.

"If you are the expert in the room, you are in the wrong room!" - Futurist Jim Carroll

--
Futurist Jim Carroll is writing a series, The Art of the Infinite Pivot, based on 36 lessons from his 36 years as a solo entrepreneur, working as a nomadic worker in the global freelance economy. The series is unfolding here, and at pivot.jimcarroll.com.
--

I had a variation of this idea in my 26 Principles for 2026 series: “If you are the fastest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.”

So too it is with expertise!

In the early stages of a career, we strive to be the "expert." We want to be the ones with the answers, the ones people look to for guidance. But in my 36-year voyage, I’ve discovered that the most dangerous place to be is to have a mindset of overconfidence, a belief that you have all the answers, and that you know enough. To maintain the Infinite Pivot - to be able to change at the speed of change - you must have the humility to constantly seek out people who make you feel like a beginner.

That's why you should always try to surround yourself with the smartest people you can find.

When you surround yourself with the smartest minds - the coders who know more than you about Linux, the scientists who understand the genome deeper than you ever will, the young disruptors who see "toys" you haven't even noticed - you are forced to expand your own mind. You are encouraged to explore more, discover bigger ideas, and chase things you don't know about that you should know about!

Throughout my 36 years, some of my most profound breakthroughs and opportunities didn't come from my own isolated "big thinking." They came from conversations with people who fundamentally challenged my assumptions, changed my beliefs, or pointed me in different directions. I remember being the "dumbest" person in a room full of NASA engineers at one point, and an audience literally full of nuclear scientists at another. Both situations taught me some things I ight not have otherwise learned about change, the future, trends, and disruptive opportunity, because I saw those things through a new and fresh set of eyes. That was an invaluable experience - I've had many, many more.

Think of it this way - if you are the smartest person in your inner circle, you are putting yourself in a situation where your progress might stall. But if you expand your circle, you have a bigger opportunity for new knowledge, and in that way, your intelligence is a reflection of your proximity.

So seek out the minds that intimidate you.

Ask the questions that reveal your ignorance.

Surround yourself with brilliance, and let it pull you toward the next opportunity in your pivot!
--

One of the most important things that Futurist Jim Carroll knows is that he knows there is a lot he doesn't know!

**#Expert** **#Humility** **#Learning**

Original post: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/04/decoding-tomorrow-the-infinite-pivot-series-19-if-you-are-the-expert-in-the-room-you-are-in-the-wrong-room/

"Never let a win get to your head, or a loss to go to your heart." - Futurist Jim Carroll

--
Futurist Jim Carroll is writing a series, The Art of the Infinite Pivot, based on 36 lessons from his 36 years as a solo entrepreneur, working as a nomadic worker in the global freelance economy. The series is unfolding here, and at pivot.jimcarroll.com.
--

When you decide to pivot your career or your business, you are making an implicit agreement with your emotions that you will ride an emotional roller coaster.

That being the case, I've learned, often the hard way, that it's critical not to become overconfident with every win. But it seems even more important that we shouldn't internalize every loss.

In a 36-year voyage, I've learned this truth through experience: the world will try to convince you that you are a genius when you win and a failure when you lose. You need to know that both are lies and are just a part of the ongoing process of building your future. To survive, you must develop a profound sense of emotional detachment from both. You cannot afford to become overconfident with every victory, nor can you allow yourself to internalize every defeat.

Why is that? If you internalize the win, you become arrogant and stop "putting in the work" (Lesson **#16**). You start believing your own press releases. If you internalize the loss, you become paralyzed by fear and stop "wasting time on frivolous things" (Lesson **#15**).

Both extremes are wrong. A "win" is just a signal to you that your current strategy worked for this specific moment. It is not a guarantee of future success, because it's not always the case that what worked in the past is what will work in the future. A loss? Often it's just a signal that your strategy was a bit off, your delivery a little out of alignment, or your actions a bit stifled.

It is not a reflection of your worth.

The highs and lows can be exhilarating or crushing. Throughout my career, I’ve had standing ovations in front of thousands, and I've had audiences that have stared at me with misunderstanding. The secret to longevity is treating both with the same degree of curiosity. When you win, ask: "What went right?" When you lose, ask: "What was the lesson?"

When you stop letting the scoreboard of wins and losses define your identity, you gain the ultimate freedom: the freedom to pivot without stress. You aren't your last keynote, and you aren't your last failed experiment.

You are the architect of your future.

Keep your head level.

The future is too volatile for anything else.

---

Futurist Jim Carroll used to obsess over audience reviews until he realized he was focusing too much on the extremes of the bell curve and not enough on the middle.

**#Balance** **#Wins** **#Losses** **#Emotions** **#Perspective** **#Resilience** **#Detachment** **#Pivot** **#Lessons** **#Freelance** **#Humility**

Original post: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/04/decoding-tomorrow-the-infinite-pivot-series-18-never-let-a-win-get-to-your-head-or-a-loss-to-go-to-your-heart/

"Never let a win get to your head, or a loss to go to your heart." - Futurist Jim Carroll

--
Futurist Jim Carroll is writing a series, The Art of the Infinite Pivot, based on 36 lessons from his 36 years as a solo entrepreneur, working as a nomadic worker in the global freelance economy. The series is unfolding here, and at pivot.jimcarroll.com.
--

When you decide to pivot your career or your business, you are making an implicit agreement with your emotions that you will ride an emotional roller coaster.

That being the case, I've learned, often the hard way, that it's critical not to become overconfident with every win. But it seems even more important that we shouldn't internalize every loss.

In a 36-year voyage, I've learned this truth through experience: the world will try to convince you that you are a genius when you win and a failure when you lose. You need to know that both are lies and are just a part of the ongoing process of building your future. To survive, you must develop a profound sense of emotional detachment from both. You cannot afford to become overconfident with every victory, nor can you allow yourself to internalize every defeat.

Why is that? If you internalize the win, you become arrogant and stop "putting in the work" (Lesson **#16**). You start believing your own press releases. If you internalize the loss, you become paralyzed by fear and stop "wasting time on frivolous things" (Lesson **#15**).

Both extremes are wrong. A "win" is just a signal to you that your current strategy worked for this specific moment. It is not a guarantee of future success, because it's not always the case that what worked in the past is what will work in the future. A loss? Often it's just a signal that your strategy was a bit off, your delivery a little out of alignment, or your actions a bit stifled.

It is not a reflection of your worth.

The highs and lows can be exhilarating or crushing. Throughout my career, I’ve had standing ovations in front of thousands, and I've had audiences that have stared at me with misunderstanding. The secret to longevity is treating both with the same degree of curiosity. When you win, ask: "What went right?" When you lose, ask: "What was the lesson?"

When you stop letting the scoreboard of wins and losses define your identity, you gain the ultimate freedom: the freedom to pivot without stress. You aren't your last keynote, and you aren't your last failed experiment.

You are the architect of your future.

Keep your head level.

The future is too volatile for anything else.

---

Futurist Jim Carroll used to obsess over audience reviews until he realized he was focusing too much on the extremes of the bell curve and not enough on the middle.

**#Balance** **#Wins** **#Losses** **#Emotions** **#Perspective** **#Resilience** **#Detachment** **#Pivot** **#Lessons** **#Freelance** **#Humility**

Original post: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/04/decoding-tomorrow-the-infinite-pivot-series-18-never-let-a-win-get-to-your-head-or-a-loss-to-go-to-your-heart/

"Never let a win get to your head, or a loss to go to your heart." - Futurist Jim Carroll

--
Futurist Jim Carroll is writing a series, The Art of the Infinite Pivot, based on 36 lessons from his 36 years as a solo entrepreneur, working as a nomadic worker in the global freelance economy. The series is unfolding here, and at pivot.jimcarroll.com.
--

When you decide to pivot your career or your business, you are making an implicit agreement with your emotions that you will ride an emotional roller coaster.

That being the case, I've learned, often the hard way, that it's critical not to become overconfident with every win. But it seems even more important that we shouldn't internalize every loss.

In a 36-year voyage, I've learned this truth through experience: the world will try to convince you that you are a genius when you win and a failure when you lose. You need to know that both are lies and are just a part of the ongoing process of building your future. To survive, you must develop a profound sense of emotional detachment from both. You cannot afford to become overconfident with every victory, nor can you allow yourself to internalize every defeat.

Why is that? If you internalize the win, you become arrogant and stop "putting in the work" (Lesson **#16**). You start believing your own press releases. If you internalize the loss, you become paralyzed by fear and stop "wasting time on frivolous things" (Lesson **#15**).

Both extremes are wrong. A "win" is just a signal to you that your current strategy worked for this specific moment. It is not a guarantee of future success, because it's not always the case that what worked in the past is what will work in the future. A loss? Often it's just a signal that your strategy was a bit off, your delivery a little out of alignment, or your actions a bit stifled.

It is not a reflection of your worth.

The highs and lows can be exhilarating or crushing. Throughout my career, I’ve had standing ovations in front of thousands, and I've had audiences that have stared at me with misunderstanding. The secret to longevity is treating both with the same degree of curiosity. When you win, ask: "What went right?" When you lose, ask: "What was the lesson?"

When you stop letting the scoreboard of wins and losses define your identity, you gain the ultimate freedom: the freedom to pivot without stress. You aren't your last keynote, and you aren't your last failed experiment.

You are the architect of your future.

Keep your head level.

The future is too volatile for anything else.

---

Futurist Jim Carroll used to obsess over audience reviews until he realized he was focusing too much on the extremes of the bell curve and not enough on the middle.

**#Balance** **#Wins** **#Losses** **#Emotions** **#Perspective** **#Resilience** **#Detachment** **#Pivot** **#Lessons** **#Freelance** **#Humility**

Original post: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/04/decoding-tomorrow-the-infinite-pivot-series-18-never-let-a-win-get-to-your-head-or-a-loss-to-go-to-your-heart/

"Never let a win get to your head, or a loss to go to your heart." - Futurist Jim Carroll

--
Futurist Jim Carroll is writing a series, The Art of the Infinite Pivot, based on 36 lessons from his 36 years as a solo entrepreneur, working as a nomadic worker in the global freelance economy. The series is unfolding here, and at pivot.jimcarroll.com.
--

When you decide to pivot your career or your business, you are making an implicit agreement with your emotions that you will ride an emotional roller coaster.

That being the case, I've learned, often the hard way, that it's critical not to become overconfident with every win. But it seems even more important that we shouldn't internalize every loss.

In a 36-year voyage, I've learned this truth through experience: the world will try to convince you that you are a genius when you win and a failure when you lose. You need to know that both are lies and are just a part of the ongoing process of building your future. To survive, you must develop a profound sense of emotional detachment from both. You cannot afford to become overconfident with every victory, nor can you allow yourself to internalize every defeat.

Why is that? If you internalize the win, you become arrogant and stop "putting in the work" (Lesson **#16**). You start believing your own press releases. If you internalize the loss, you become paralyzed by fear and stop "wasting time on frivolous things" (Lesson **#15**).

Both extremes are wrong. A "win" is just a signal to you that your current strategy worked for this specific moment. It is not a guarantee of future success, because it's not always the case that what worked in the past is what will work in the future. A loss? Often it's just a signal that your strategy was a bit off, your delivery a little out of alignment, or your actions a bit stifled.

It is not a reflection of your worth.

The highs and lows can be exhilarating or crushing. Throughout my career, I’ve had standing ovations in front of thousands, and I've had audiences that have stared at me with misunderstanding. The secret to longevity is treating both with the same degree of curiosity. When you win, ask: "What went right?" When you lose, ask: "What was the lesson?"

When you stop letting the scoreboard of wins and losses define your identity, you gain the ultimate freedom: the freedom to pivot without stress. You aren't your last keynote, and you aren't your last failed experiment.

You are the architect of your future.

Keep your head level.

The future is too volatile for anything else.

---

Futurist Jim Carroll used to obsess over audience reviews until he realized he was focusing too much on the extremes of the bell curve and not enough on the middle.

**#Balance** **#Wins** **#Losses** **#Emotions** **#Perspective** **#Resilience** **#Detachment** **#Pivot** **#Lessons** **#Freelance** **#Humility**

Original post: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/04/decoding-tomorrow-the-infinite-pivot-series-18-never-let-a-win-get-to-your-head-or-a-loss-to-go-to-your-heart/

"Never let a win get to your head, or a loss to go to your heart." - Futurist Jim Carroll

--
Futurist Jim Carroll is writing a series, The Art of the Infinite Pivot, based on 36 lessons from his 36 years as a solo entrepreneur, working as a nomadic worker in the global freelance economy. The series is unfolding here, and at pivot.jimcarroll.com.
--

When you decide to pivot your career or your business, you are making an implicit agreement with your emotions that you will ride an emotional roller coaster.

That being the case, I've learned, often the hard way, that it's critical not to become overconfident with every win. But it seems even more important that we shouldn't internalize every loss.

In a 36-year voyage, I've learned this truth through experience: the world will try to convince you that you are a genius when you win and a failure when you lose. You need to know that both are lies and are just a part of the ongoing process of building your future. To survive, you must develop a profound sense of emotional detachment from both. You cannot afford to become overconfident with every victory, nor can you allow yourself to internalize every defeat.

Why is that? If you internalize the win, you become arrogant and stop "putting in the work" (Lesson **#16**). You start believing your own press releases. If you internalize the loss, you become paralyzed by fear and stop "wasting time on frivolous things" (Lesson **#15**).

Both extremes are wrong. A "win" is just a signal to you that your current strategy worked for this specific moment. It is not a guarantee of future success, because it's not always the case that what worked in the past is what will work in the future. A loss? Often it's just a signal that your strategy was a bit off, your delivery a little out of alignment, or your actions a bit stifled.

It is not a reflection of your worth.

The highs and lows can be exhilarating or crushing. Throughout my career, I’ve had standing ovations in front of thousands, and I've had audiences that have stared at me with misunderstanding. The secret to longevity is treating both with the same degree of curiosity. When you win, ask: "What went right?" When you lose, ask: "What was the lesson?"

When you stop letting the scoreboard of wins and losses define your identity, you gain the ultimate freedom: the freedom to pivot without stress. You aren't your last keynote, and you aren't your last failed experiment.

You are the architect of your future.

Keep your head level.

The future is too volatile for anything else.

---

Futurist Jim Carroll used to obsess over audience reviews until he realized he was focusing too much on the extremes of the bell curve and not enough on the middle.

**#Balance** **#Wins** **#Losses** **#Emotions** **#Perspective** **#Resilience** **#Detachment** **#Pivot** **#Lessons** **#Freelance** **#Humility**

Original post: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/04/decoding-tomorrow-the-infinite-pivot-series-18-never-let-a-win-get-to-your-head-or-a-loss-to-go-to-your-heart/

The Genius of Getting It Wrong: What Hawking Teaches Us About Knowing

In 2004, at a physics conference in Dublin, Stephen Hawking stood before his peers and announced he had been wrong for nearly thirty years. The specific error concerned whether black holes permanently destroy the information they consume, a claim Hawking had championed since 1976 against some of the sharpest minds in theoretical physics. He paid off a bet with Caltech physicist John Preskill, handing over a baseball encyclopedia, a gift selected because, unlike a black hole (or so Hawking had argued), an encyclopedia allows its information to be recovered. The audience laughed. The moment was graceful and self-aware. It was also one of the most important intellectual acts of the twenty-first century, though most people missed the real lesson.

The lesson was never about black holes.

The Weight of Certainty

We live in a culture that punishes the admission of error. Politicians who change positions are called flip-floppers. Scientists who revise findings are treated as though their credibility has been permanently contaminated. Public intellectuals who say “I was wrong” are consumed by a media apparatus that treats consistency as the only acceptable proxy for intelligence. The reward structure is clear: stake your claim, defend it until you die, and never let anyone see you recalculate. Certainty, in this environment, becomes a performance rather than a conclusion.

Hawking’s career demolishes this framework. Here was an intellect of astonishing range, the author of singularity theorems that reshaped general relativity, the discoverer of Hawking radiation, the physicist whose popular writing brought cosmology into millions of households. When he claimed in 1976 that information falling into a black hole was lost forever, he was making a serious argument grounded in his own mathematical work on black hole thermodynamics. The claim violated a central principle of quantum mechanics, unitarity, which demands that information is always conserved even when it appears to vanish. Leonard Susskind and Gerard ‘t Hooft pushed back hard, insisting that quantum mechanics could not be overruled by gravitational physics. The debate raged for decades, generating entire subfields of research, and Hawking held his ground for most of that time.

Then he changed his mind. He looked at the accumulating theoretical evidence, including work on holographic principles and the AdS/CFT correspondence developed by Juan Maldacena, and concluded that his opponents had been closer to the truth. Information is preserved. The mechanism by which it escapes a black hole remains an open question, one that Hawking himself continued working on until his death in 2018, contributing ideas about “soft hair” on event horizons as a possible encoding method. He did not slink away from the problem he had gotten wrong. He kept working on it, from a new starting position.

The Anatomy of Productive Error

Hawking’s information paradox was a rigorous, mathematically supported position that happened to collide with an equally rigorous principle from a different branch of physics. This is worth understanding because it reveals something about the nature of difficult problems: being wrong about them is often the only way to generate the friction that produces eventual understanding.

Before Hawking’s 1976 claim, nobody had seriously confronted the question of what happens to quantum information at the event horizon of a black hole. The problem did not exist in its modern form until Hawking created it by insisting, with formal arguments, that information was destroyed. Susskind has written openly about how Hawking’s “wrong” answer forced an entire generation of physicists to develop new tools, including holographic encoding, black hole complementarity, and the firewall paradox, tools that would never have existed without the provocation of Hawking’s error. The wrong answer was generative. It built a field.

This pattern repeats across the history of science. Lord Kelvin’s calculation that the Earth was fewer than 100 million years old, based on cooling rates, was wrong because he did not know about radioactive decay as a heat source. His error forced geologists and physicists into a productive confrontation that refined understanding of both thermodynamics and nuclear physics. Linus Pauling proposed a triple-helix structure for DNA in 1953, an error that spurred Watson and Crick to accelerate their own work on the double helix. The wrong model clarified what the right model needed to explain.

Productive error requires two conditions that our current intellectual culture actively discourages. The first is the willingness to commit fully to a position, knowing it might be destroyed by future evidence. The second is the willingness to abandon that position when the evidence arrives. Hawking met both conditions. Most of us fail at one or both.

Why “Not Knowing” Is the Higher State

There is a seductive comfort in certainty. Once you have decided what is true, the cognitive labor stops. You no longer need to read new research, entertain opposing arguments, or sit with the discomfort of ambiguity. Certainty is a resting state, and the human brain gravitates toward rest whenever possible. This is why conspiracy theories are so durable: they offer total explanatory frameworks that eliminate the need to keep thinking. Everything is accounted for. Every loose end is tied. The appeal operates at the neurological level, where pattern completion feels safer than open questions.

Hawking’s willingness to move from certainty back into uncertainty represents a reversal of this cognitive gravity. He had a settled position, one that bore his name and defined a major strand of his legacy. Walking away from it meant re-entering a state of not knowing, of having to ask again what happens at the boundary of a black hole, of being a student of a problem he had once claimed to have answered. The act demands the most rigorous form of intellectual discipline, and it requires more courage than defending a fixed position ever could.

The philosopher of science Karl Popper built his entire epistemology around this insight. Science progresses through falsification, through the systematic destruction of claims that fail to survive testing. A theory that cannot be wrong is not a scientific theory at all; it is a dogma wearing empirical clothing. Hawking’s concession was Popperian science at its finest: a hypothesis tested against accumulating evidence, found wanting, and revised. The system worked exactly as it should. The fact that we treat such moments as embarrassing rather than triumphant says more about our cultural dysfunction than about the scientist involved.

The Personal Cost and the Public Reward

We should be honest about what admitting error costs. Hawking’s 2004 concession was covered by international media, and much of the coverage carried a subtle tone of diminishment, as though catching a genius in a mistake reduced his stature. This is the tax that public error extracts, and it is steep enough to deter most people from ever paying it. Academics protect wrong positions for entire careers rather than face the professional and social consequences of reversal. Politicians would rather lose elections on a failing platform than admit the platform needs revision. Parents would rather enforce arbitrary rules than tell their children, “I was wrong about that, and here is what I have learned since.”

The reward, though, is that Hawking’s legacy is larger because of his concession than it would have been without it. His willingness to be wrong, publicly and specifically, transformed him from a brilliant physicist into something rarer: an example of how a mind should work. The information paradox, in its current partially resolved state, carries his name twice, once for posing the problem and once for acknowledging the direction of its solution. He owns both sides of the equation. That is a richer intellectual inheritance than any fixed certainty could provide.

The Lesson That Applies to All of Us

Most of us will never confront the quantum mechanics of black holes. The specific physics are irrelevant to the principle. Every person alive holds positions, about politics, about relationships, about how the world works, that are based on incomplete information, outdated evidence, or reasoning that felt sound at the time but has since been undermined by experience. The question is never whether we are wrong about something. We are. All of us, right now, about something we feel certain about. The question is whether we have the intellectual infrastructure to detect our own errors and the emotional resilience to act on that detection.

Hawking did not wake up one morning and decide to be humble. He followed the evidence through decades of argument and counterargument, watched his position weaken under sustained theoretical pressure, and responded to that pressure by updating his beliefs. Humility, in this context, functions as a practice, a repeated act of choosing discomfort over complacency, inquiry over defense, revision over reputation. The skill can be cultivated and taught. Hawking modeled it with grace, humor, and an encyclopedia handed across a stage in Dublin.

The genius of getting it wrong is that it keeps you moving. Certainty arrives and sits down; inquiry walks forward. Hawking understood the difference, and his greatest contribution to public intellectual life may have been demonstrating, in front of the entire world, that the walking matters more than the sitting.

The Genius of Getting It Wrong: What Hawking Teaches Us About Knowing

In 2004, at a physics conference in Dublin, Stephen Hawking stood before his peers and announced he had been wrong for nearly thirty years. The specific error concerned whether black holes permanently destroy the information they consume, a claim Hawking had championed since 1976 against some of the sharpest minds in theoretical physics. He paid off a bet with Caltech physicist John Preskill, handing over a baseball encyclopedia, a gift selected because, unlike a black hole (or so Hawking had argued), an encyclopedia allows its information to be recovered. The audience laughed. The moment was graceful and self-aware. It was also one of the most important intellectual acts of the twenty-first century, though most people missed the real lesson.

The lesson was never about black holes.

The Weight of Certainty

We live in a culture that punishes the admission of error. Politicians who change positions are called flip-floppers. Scientists who revise findings are treated as though their credibility has been permanently contaminated. Public intellectuals who say “I was wrong” are consumed by a media apparatus that treats consistency as the only acceptable proxy for intelligence. The reward structure is clear: stake your claim, defend it until you die, and never let anyone see you recalculate. Certainty, in this environment, becomes a performance rather than a conclusion.

Hawking’s career demolishes this framework. Here was an intellect of astonishing range, the author of singularity theorems that reshaped general relativity, the discoverer of Hawking radiation, the physicist whose popular writing brought cosmology into millions of households. When he claimed in 1976 that information falling into a black hole was lost forever, he was making a serious argument grounded in his own mathematical work on black hole thermodynamics. The claim violated a central principle of quantum mechanics, unitarity, which demands that information is always conserved even when it appears to vanish. Leonard Susskind and Gerard ‘t Hooft pushed back hard, insisting that quantum mechanics could not be overruled by gravitational physics. The debate raged for decades, generating entire subfields of research, and Hawking held his ground for most of that time.

Then he changed his mind. He looked at the accumulating theoretical evidence, including work on holographic principles and the AdS/CFT correspondence developed by Juan Maldacena, and concluded that his opponents had been closer to the truth. Information is preserved. The mechanism by which it escapes a black hole remains an open question, one that Hawking himself continued working on until his death in 2018, contributing ideas about “soft hair” on event horizons as a possible encoding method. He did not slink away from the problem he had gotten wrong. He kept working on it, from a new starting position.

The Anatomy of Productive Error

Hawking’s information paradox was a rigorous, mathematically supported position that happened to collide with an equally rigorous principle from a different branch of physics. This is worth understanding because it reveals something about the nature of difficult problems: being wrong about them is often the only way to generate the friction that produces eventual understanding.

Before Hawking’s 1976 claim, nobody had seriously confronted the question of what happens to quantum information at the event horizon of a black hole. The problem did not exist in its modern form until Hawking created it by insisting, with formal arguments, that information was destroyed. Susskind has written openly about how Hawking’s “wrong” answer forced an entire generation of physicists to develop new tools, including holographic encoding, black hole complementarity, and the firewall paradox, tools that would never have existed without the provocation of Hawking’s error. The wrong answer was generative. It built a field.

This pattern repeats across the history of science. Lord Kelvin’s calculation that the Earth was fewer than 100 million years old, based on cooling rates, was wrong because he did not know about radioactive decay as a heat source. His error forced geologists and physicists into a productive confrontation that refined understanding of both thermodynamics and nuclear physics. Linus Pauling proposed a triple-helix structure for DNA in 1953, an error that spurred Watson and Crick to accelerate their own work on the double helix. The wrong model clarified what the right model needed to explain.

Productive error requires two conditions that our current intellectual culture actively discourages. The first is the willingness to commit fully to a position, knowing it might be destroyed by future evidence. The second is the willingness to abandon that position when the evidence arrives. Hawking met both conditions. Most of us fail at one or both.

Why “Not Knowing” Is the Higher State

There is a seductive comfort in certainty. Once you have decided what is true, the cognitive labor stops. You no longer need to read new research, entertain opposing arguments, or sit with the discomfort of ambiguity. Certainty is a resting state, and the human brain gravitates toward rest whenever possible. This is why conspiracy theories are so durable: they offer total explanatory frameworks that eliminate the need to keep thinking. Everything is accounted for. Every loose end is tied. The appeal operates at the neurological level, where pattern completion feels safer than open questions.

Hawking’s willingness to move from certainty back into uncertainty represents a reversal of this cognitive gravity. He had a settled position, one that bore his name and defined a major strand of his legacy. Walking away from it meant re-entering a state of not knowing, of having to ask again what happens at the boundary of a black hole, of being a student of a problem he had once claimed to have answered. The act demands the most rigorous form of intellectual discipline, and it requires more courage than defending a fixed position ever could.

The philosopher of science Karl Popper built his entire epistemology around this insight. Science progresses through falsification, through the systematic destruction of claims that fail to survive testing. A theory that cannot be wrong is not a scientific theory at all; it is a dogma wearing empirical clothing. Hawking’s concession was Popperian science at its finest: a hypothesis tested against accumulating evidence, found wanting, and revised. The system worked exactly as it should. The fact that we treat such moments as embarrassing rather than triumphant says more about our cultural dysfunction than about the scientist involved.

The Personal Cost and the Public Reward

We should be honest about what admitting error costs. Hawking’s 2004 concession was covered by international media, and much of the coverage carried a subtle tone of diminishment, as though catching a genius in a mistake reduced his stature. This is the tax that public error extracts, and it is steep enough to deter most people from ever paying it. Academics protect wrong positions for entire careers rather than face the professional and social consequences of reversal. Politicians would rather lose elections on a failing platform than admit the platform needs revision. Parents would rather enforce arbitrary rules than tell their children, “I was wrong about that, and here is what I have learned since.”

The reward, though, is that Hawking’s legacy is larger because of his concession than it would have been without it. His willingness to be wrong, publicly and specifically, transformed him from a brilliant physicist into something rarer: an example of how a mind should work. The information paradox, in its current partially resolved state, carries his name twice, once for posing the problem and once for acknowledging the direction of its solution. He owns both sides of the equation. That is a richer intellectual inheritance than any fixed certainty could provide.

The Lesson That Applies to All of Us

Most of us will never confront the quantum mechanics of black holes. The specific physics are irrelevant to the principle. Every person alive holds positions, about politics, about relationships, about how the world works, that are based on incomplete information, outdated evidence, or reasoning that felt sound at the time but has since been undermined by experience. The question is never whether we are wrong about something. We are. All of us, right now, about something we feel certain about. The question is whether we have the intellectual infrastructure to detect our own errors and the emotional resilience to act on that detection.

Hawking did not wake up one morning and decide to be humble. He followed the evidence through decades of argument and counterargument, watched his position weaken under sustained theoretical pressure, and responded to that pressure by updating his beliefs. Humility, in this context, functions as a practice, a repeated act of choosing discomfort over complacency, inquiry over defense, revision over reputation. The skill can be cultivated and taught. Hawking modeled it with grace, humor, and an encyclopedia handed across a stage in Dublin.

The genius of getting it wrong is that it keeps you moving. Certainty arrives and sits down; inquiry walks forward. Hawking understood the difference, and his greatest contribution to public intellectual life may have been demonstrating, in front of the entire world, that the walking matters more than the sitting.

The Genius of Getting It Wrong: What Hawking Teaches Us About Knowing

In 2004, at a physics conference in Dublin, Stephen Hawking stood before his peers and announced he had been wrong for nearly thirty years. The specific error concerned whether black holes permanently destroy the information they consume, a claim Hawking had championed since 1976 against some of the sharpest minds in theoretical physics. He paid off a bet with Caltech physicist John Preskill, handing over a baseball encyclopedia, a gift selected because, unlike a black hole (or so Hawking had argued), an encyclopedia allows its information to be recovered. The audience laughed. The moment was graceful and self-aware. It was also one of the most important intellectual acts of the twenty-first century, though most people missed the real lesson.

The lesson was never about black holes.

The Weight of Certainty

We live in a culture that punishes the admission of error. Politicians who change positions are called flip-floppers. Scientists who revise findings are treated as though their credibility has been permanently contaminated. Public intellectuals who say “I was wrong” are consumed by a media apparatus that treats consistency as the only acceptable proxy for intelligence. The reward structure is clear: stake your claim, defend it until you die, and never let anyone see you recalculate. Certainty, in this environment, becomes a performance rather than a conclusion.

Hawking’s career demolishes this framework. Here was an intellect of astonishing range, the author of singularity theorems that reshaped general relativity, the discoverer of Hawking radiation, the physicist whose popular writing brought cosmology into millions of households. When he claimed in 1976 that information falling into a black hole was lost forever, he was making a serious argument grounded in his own mathematical work on black hole thermodynamics. The claim violated a central principle of quantum mechanics, unitarity, which demands that information is always conserved even when it appears to vanish. Leonard Susskind and Gerard ‘t Hooft pushed back hard, insisting that quantum mechanics could not be overruled by gravitational physics. The debate raged for decades, generating entire subfields of research, and Hawking held his ground for most of that time.

Then he changed his mind. He looked at the accumulating theoretical evidence, including work on holographic principles and the AdS/CFT correspondence developed by Juan Maldacena, and concluded that his opponents had been closer to the truth. Information is preserved. The mechanism by which it escapes a black hole remains an open question, one that Hawking himself continued working on until his death in 2018, contributing ideas about “soft hair” on event horizons as a possible encoding method. He did not slink away from the problem he had gotten wrong. He kept working on it, from a new starting position.

The Anatomy of Productive Error

Hawking’s information paradox was a rigorous, mathematically supported position that happened to collide with an equally rigorous principle from a different branch of physics. This is worth understanding because it reveals something about the nature of difficult problems: being wrong about them is often the only way to generate the friction that produces eventual understanding.

Before Hawking’s 1976 claim, nobody had seriously confronted the question of what happens to quantum information at the event horizon of a black hole. The problem did not exist in its modern form until Hawking created it by insisting, with formal arguments, that information was destroyed. Susskind has written openly about how Hawking’s “wrong” answer forced an entire generation of physicists to develop new tools, including holographic encoding, black hole complementarity, and the firewall paradox, tools that would never have existed without the provocation of Hawking’s error. The wrong answer was generative. It built a field.

This pattern repeats across the history of science. Lord Kelvin’s calculation that the Earth was fewer than 100 million years old, based on cooling rates, was wrong because he did not know about radioactive decay as a heat source. His error forced geologists and physicists into a productive confrontation that refined understanding of both thermodynamics and nuclear physics. Linus Pauling proposed a triple-helix structure for DNA in 1953, an error that spurred Watson and Crick to accelerate their own work on the double helix. The wrong model clarified what the right model needed to explain.

Productive error requires two conditions that our current intellectual culture actively discourages. The first is the willingness to commit fully to a position, knowing it might be destroyed by future evidence. The second is the willingness to abandon that position when the evidence arrives. Hawking met both conditions. Most of us fail at one or both.

Why “Not Knowing” Is the Higher State

There is a seductive comfort in certainty. Once you have decided what is true, the cognitive labor stops. You no longer need to read new research, entertain opposing arguments, or sit with the discomfort of ambiguity. Certainty is a resting state, and the human brain gravitates toward rest whenever possible. This is why conspiracy theories are so durable: they offer total explanatory frameworks that eliminate the need to keep thinking. Everything is accounted for. Every loose end is tied. The appeal operates at the neurological level, where pattern completion feels safer than open questions.

Hawking’s willingness to move from certainty back into uncertainty represents a reversal of this cognitive gravity. He had a settled position, one that bore his name and defined a major strand of his legacy. Walking away from it meant re-entering a state of not knowing, of having to ask again what happens at the boundary of a black hole, of being a student of a problem he had once claimed to have answered. The act demands the most rigorous form of intellectual discipline, and it requires more courage than defending a fixed position ever could.

The philosopher of science Karl Popper built his entire epistemology around this insight. Science progresses through falsification, through the systematic destruction of claims that fail to survive testing. A theory that cannot be wrong is not a scientific theory at all; it is a dogma wearing empirical clothing. Hawking’s concession was Popperian science at its finest: a hypothesis tested against accumulating evidence, found wanting, and revised. The system worked exactly as it should. The fact that we treat such moments as embarrassing rather than triumphant says more about our cultural dysfunction than about the scientist involved.

The Personal Cost and the Public Reward

We should be honest about what admitting error costs. Hawking’s 2004 concession was covered by international media, and much of the coverage carried a subtle tone of diminishment, as though catching a genius in a mistake reduced his stature. This is the tax that public error extracts, and it is steep enough to deter most people from ever paying it. Academics protect wrong positions for entire careers rather than face the professional and social consequences of reversal. Politicians would rather lose elections on a failing platform than admit the platform needs revision. Parents would rather enforce arbitrary rules than tell their children, “I was wrong about that, and here is what I have learned since.”

The reward, though, is that Hawking’s legacy is larger because of his concession than it would have been without it. His willingness to be wrong, publicly and specifically, transformed him from a brilliant physicist into something rarer: an example of how a mind should work. The information paradox, in its current partially resolved state, carries his name twice, once for posing the problem and once for acknowledging the direction of its solution. He owns both sides of the equation. That is a richer intellectual inheritance than any fixed certainty could provide.

The Lesson That Applies to All of Us

Most of us will never confront the quantum mechanics of black holes. The specific physics are irrelevant to the principle. Every person alive holds positions, about politics, about relationships, about how the world works, that are based on incomplete information, outdated evidence, or reasoning that felt sound at the time but has since been undermined by experience. The question is never whether we are wrong about something. We are. All of us, right now, about something we feel certain about. The question is whether we have the intellectual infrastructure to detect our own errors and the emotional resilience to act on that detection.

Hawking did not wake up one morning and decide to be humble. He followed the evidence through decades of argument and counterargument, watched his position weaken under sustained theoretical pressure, and responded to that pressure by updating his beliefs. Humility, in this context, functions as a practice, a repeated act of choosing discomfort over complacency, inquiry over defense, revision over reputation. The skill can be cultivated and taught. Hawking modeled it with grace, humor, and an encyclopedia handed across a stage in Dublin.

The genius of getting it wrong is that it keeps you moving. Certainty arrives and sits down; inquiry walks forward. Hawking understood the difference, and his greatest contribution to public intellectual life may have been demonstrating, in front of the entire world, that the walking matters more than the sitting.

The Genius of Getting It Wrong: What Hawking Teaches Us About Knowing

In 2004, at a physics conference in Dublin, Stephen Hawking stood before his peers and announced he had been wrong for nearly thirty years. The specific error concerned whether black holes permanently destroy the information they consume, a claim Hawking had championed since 1976 against some of the sharpest minds in theoretical physics. He paid off a bet with Caltech physicist John Preskill, handing over a baseball encyclopedia, a gift selected because, unlike a black hole (or so Hawking had argued), an encyclopedia allows its information to be recovered. The audience laughed. The moment was graceful and self-aware. It was also one of the most important intellectual acts of the twenty-first century, though most people missed the real lesson.

The lesson was never about black holes.

The Weight of Certainty

We live in a culture that punishes the admission of error. Politicians who change positions are called flip-floppers. Scientists who revise findings are treated as though their credibility has been permanently contaminated. Public intellectuals who say “I was wrong” are consumed by a media apparatus that treats consistency as the only acceptable proxy for intelligence. The reward structure is clear: stake your claim, defend it until you die, and never let anyone see you recalculate. Certainty, in this environment, becomes a performance rather than a conclusion.

Hawking’s career demolishes this framework. Here was an intellect of astonishing range, the author of singularity theorems that reshaped general relativity, the discoverer of Hawking radiation, the physicist whose popular writing brought cosmology into millions of households. When he claimed in 1976 that information falling into a black hole was lost forever, he was making a serious argument grounded in his own mathematical work on black hole thermodynamics. The claim violated a central principle of quantum mechanics, unitarity, which demands that information is always conserved even when it appears to vanish. Leonard Susskind and Gerard ‘t Hooft pushed back hard, insisting that quantum mechanics could not be overruled by gravitational physics. The debate raged for decades, generating entire subfields of research, and Hawking held his ground for most of that time.

Then he changed his mind. He looked at the accumulating theoretical evidence, including work on holographic principles and the AdS/CFT correspondence developed by Juan Maldacena, and concluded that his opponents had been closer to the truth. Information is preserved. The mechanism by which it escapes a black hole remains an open question, one that Hawking himself continued working on until his death in 2018, contributing ideas about “soft hair” on event horizons as a possible encoding method. He did not slink away from the problem he had gotten wrong. He kept working on it, from a new starting position.

The Anatomy of Productive Error

Hawking’s information paradox was a rigorous, mathematically supported position that happened to collide with an equally rigorous principle from a different branch of physics. This is worth understanding because it reveals something about the nature of difficult problems: being wrong about them is often the only way to generate the friction that produces eventual understanding.

Before Hawking’s 1976 claim, nobody had seriously confronted the question of what happens to quantum information at the event horizon of a black hole. The problem did not exist in its modern form until Hawking created it by insisting, with formal arguments, that information was destroyed. Susskind has written openly about how Hawking’s “wrong” answer forced an entire generation of physicists to develop new tools, including holographic encoding, black hole complementarity, and the firewall paradox, tools that would never have existed without the provocation of Hawking’s error. The wrong answer was generative. It built a field.

This pattern repeats across the history of science. Lord Kelvin’s calculation that the Earth was fewer than 100 million years old, based on cooling rates, was wrong because he did not know about radioactive decay as a heat source. His error forced geologists and physicists into a productive confrontation that refined understanding of both thermodynamics and nuclear physics. Linus Pauling proposed a triple-helix structure for DNA in 1953, an error that spurred Watson and Crick to accelerate their own work on the double helix. The wrong model clarified what the right model needed to explain.

Productive error requires two conditions that our current intellectual culture actively discourages. The first is the willingness to commit fully to a position, knowing it might be destroyed by future evidence. The second is the willingness to abandon that position when the evidence arrives. Hawking met both conditions. Most of us fail at one or both.

Why “Not Knowing” Is the Higher State

There is a seductive comfort in certainty. Once you have decided what is true, the cognitive labor stops. You no longer need to read new research, entertain opposing arguments, or sit with the discomfort of ambiguity. Certainty is a resting state, and the human brain gravitates toward rest whenever possible. This is why conspiracy theories are so durable: they offer total explanatory frameworks that eliminate the need to keep thinking. Everything is accounted for. Every loose end is tied. The appeal operates at the neurological level, where pattern completion feels safer than open questions.

Hawking’s willingness to move from certainty back into uncertainty represents a reversal of this cognitive gravity. He had a settled position, one that bore his name and defined a major strand of his legacy. Walking away from it meant re-entering a state of not knowing, of having to ask again what happens at the boundary of a black hole, of being a student of a problem he had once claimed to have answered. The act demands the most rigorous form of intellectual discipline, and it requires more courage than defending a fixed position ever could.

The philosopher of science Karl Popper built his entire epistemology around this insight. Science progresses through falsification, through the systematic destruction of claims that fail to survive testing. A theory that cannot be wrong is not a scientific theory at all; it is a dogma wearing empirical clothing. Hawking’s concession was Popperian science at its finest: a hypothesis tested against accumulating evidence, found wanting, and revised. The system worked exactly as it should. The fact that we treat such moments as embarrassing rather than triumphant says more about our cultural dysfunction than about the scientist involved.

The Personal Cost and the Public Reward

We should be honest about what admitting error costs. Hawking’s 2004 concession was covered by international media, and much of the coverage carried a subtle tone of diminishment, as though catching a genius in a mistake reduced his stature. This is the tax that public error extracts, and it is steep enough to deter most people from ever paying it. Academics protect wrong positions for entire careers rather than face the professional and social consequences of reversal. Politicians would rather lose elections on a failing platform than admit the platform needs revision. Parents would rather enforce arbitrary rules than tell their children, “I was wrong about that, and here is what I have learned since.”

The reward, though, is that Hawking’s legacy is larger because of his concession than it would have been without it. His willingness to be wrong, publicly and specifically, transformed him from a brilliant physicist into something rarer: an example of how a mind should work. The information paradox, in its current partially resolved state, carries his name twice, once for posing the problem and once for acknowledging the direction of its solution. He owns both sides of the equation. That is a richer intellectual inheritance than any fixed certainty could provide.

The Lesson That Applies to All of Us

Most of us will never confront the quantum mechanics of black holes. The specific physics are irrelevant to the principle. Every person alive holds positions, about politics, about relationships, about how the world works, that are based on incomplete information, outdated evidence, or reasoning that felt sound at the time but has since been undermined by experience. The question is never whether we are wrong about something. We are. All of us, right now, about something we feel certain about. The question is whether we have the intellectual infrastructure to detect our own errors and the emotional resilience to act on that detection.

Hawking did not wake up one morning and decide to be humble. He followed the evidence through decades of argument and counterargument, watched his position weaken under sustained theoretical pressure, and responded to that pressure by updating his beliefs. Humility, in this context, functions as a practice, a repeated act of choosing discomfort over complacency, inquiry over defense, revision over reputation. The skill can be cultivated and taught. Hawking modeled it with grace, humor, and an encyclopedia handed across a stage in Dublin.

The genius of getting it wrong is that it keeps you moving. Certainty arrives and sits down; inquiry walks forward. Hawking understood the difference, and his greatest contribution to public intellectual life may have been demonstrating, in front of the entire world, that the walking matters more than the sitting.

The Genius of Getting It Wrong: What Hawking Teaches Us About Knowing

In 2004, at a physics conference in Dublin, Stephen Hawking stood before his peers and announced he had been wrong for nearly thirty years. The specific error concerned whether black holes permanently destroy the information they consume, a claim Hawking had championed since 1976 against some of the sharpest minds in theoretical physics. He paid off a bet with Caltech physicist John Preskill, handing over a baseball encyclopedia, a gift selected because, unlike a black hole (or so Hawking had argued), an encyclopedia allows its information to be recovered. The audience laughed. The moment was graceful and self-aware. It was also one of the most important intellectual acts of the twenty-first century, though most people missed the real lesson.

The lesson was never about black holes.

The Weight of Certainty

We live in a culture that punishes the admission of error. Politicians who change positions are called flip-floppers. Scientists who revise findings are treated as though their credibility has been permanently contaminated. Public intellectuals who say “I was wrong” are consumed by a media apparatus that treats consistency as the only acceptable proxy for intelligence. The reward structure is clear: stake your claim, defend it until you die, and never let anyone see you recalculate. Certainty, in this environment, becomes a performance rather than a conclusion.

Hawking’s career demolishes this framework. Here was an intellect of astonishing range, the author of singularity theorems that reshaped general relativity, the discoverer of Hawking radiation, the physicist whose popular writing brought cosmology into millions of households. When he claimed in 1976 that information falling into a black hole was lost forever, he was making a serious argument grounded in his own mathematical work on black hole thermodynamics. The claim violated a central principle of quantum mechanics, unitarity, which demands that information is always conserved even when it appears to vanish. Leonard Susskind and Gerard ‘t Hooft pushed back hard, insisting that quantum mechanics could not be overruled by gravitational physics. The debate raged for decades, generating entire subfields of research, and Hawking held his ground for most of that time.

Then he changed his mind. He looked at the accumulating theoretical evidence, including work on holographic principles and the AdS/CFT correspondence developed by Juan Maldacena, and concluded that his opponents had been closer to the truth. Information is preserved. The mechanism by which it escapes a black hole remains an open question, one that Hawking himself continued working on until his death in 2018, contributing ideas about “soft hair” on event horizons as a possible encoding method. He did not slink away from the problem he had gotten wrong. He kept working on it, from a new starting position.

The Anatomy of Productive Error

Hawking’s information paradox was a rigorous, mathematically supported position that happened to collide with an equally rigorous principle from a different branch of physics. This is worth understanding because it reveals something about the nature of difficult problems: being wrong about them is often the only way to generate the friction that produces eventual understanding.

Before Hawking’s 1976 claim, nobody had seriously confronted the question of what happens to quantum information at the event horizon of a black hole. The problem did not exist in its modern form until Hawking created it by insisting, with formal arguments, that information was destroyed. Susskind has written openly about how Hawking’s “wrong” answer forced an entire generation of physicists to develop new tools, including holographic encoding, black hole complementarity, and the firewall paradox, tools that would never have existed without the provocation of Hawking’s error. The wrong answer was generative. It built a field.

This pattern repeats across the history of science. Lord Kelvin’s calculation that the Earth was fewer than 100 million years old, based on cooling rates, was wrong because he did not know about radioactive decay as a heat source. His error forced geologists and physicists into a productive confrontation that refined understanding of both thermodynamics and nuclear physics. Linus Pauling proposed a triple-helix structure for DNA in 1953, an error that spurred Watson and Crick to accelerate their own work on the double helix. The wrong model clarified what the right model needed to explain.

Productive error requires two conditions that our current intellectual culture actively discourages. The first is the willingness to commit fully to a position, knowing it might be destroyed by future evidence. The second is the willingness to abandon that position when the evidence arrives. Hawking met both conditions. Most of us fail at one or both.

Why “Not Knowing” Is the Higher State

There is a seductive comfort in certainty. Once you have decided what is true, the cognitive labor stops. You no longer need to read new research, entertain opposing arguments, or sit with the discomfort of ambiguity. Certainty is a resting state, and the human brain gravitates toward rest whenever possible. This is why conspiracy theories are so durable: they offer total explanatory frameworks that eliminate the need to keep thinking. Everything is accounted for. Every loose end is tied. The appeal operates at the neurological level, where pattern completion feels safer than open questions.

Hawking’s willingness to move from certainty back into uncertainty represents a reversal of this cognitive gravity. He had a settled position, one that bore his name and defined a major strand of his legacy. Walking away from it meant re-entering a state of not knowing, of having to ask again what happens at the boundary of a black hole, of being a student of a problem he had once claimed to have answered. The act demands the most rigorous form of intellectual discipline, and it requires more courage than defending a fixed position ever could.

The philosopher of science Karl Popper built his entire epistemology around this insight. Science progresses through falsification, through the systematic destruction of claims that fail to survive testing. A theory that cannot be wrong is not a scientific theory at all; it is a dogma wearing empirical clothing. Hawking’s concession was Popperian science at its finest: a hypothesis tested against accumulating evidence, found wanting, and revised. The system worked exactly as it should. The fact that we treat such moments as embarrassing rather than triumphant says more about our cultural dysfunction than about the scientist involved.

The Personal Cost and the Public Reward

We should be honest about what admitting error costs. Hawking’s 2004 concession was covered by international media, and much of the coverage carried a subtle tone of diminishment, as though catching a genius in a mistake reduced his stature. This is the tax that public error extracts, and it is steep enough to deter most people from ever paying it. Academics protect wrong positions for entire careers rather than face the professional and social consequences of reversal. Politicians would rather lose elections on a failing platform than admit the platform needs revision. Parents would rather enforce arbitrary rules than tell their children, “I was wrong about that, and here is what I have learned since.”

The reward, though, is that Hawking’s legacy is larger because of his concession than it would have been without it. His willingness to be wrong, publicly and specifically, transformed him from a brilliant physicist into something rarer: an example of how a mind should work. The information paradox, in its current partially resolved state, carries his name twice, once for posing the problem and once for acknowledging the direction of its solution. He owns both sides of the equation. That is a richer intellectual inheritance than any fixed certainty could provide.

The Lesson That Applies to All of Us

Most of us will never confront the quantum mechanics of black holes. The specific physics are irrelevant to the principle. Every person alive holds positions, about politics, about relationships, about how the world works, that are based on incomplete information, outdated evidence, or reasoning that felt sound at the time but has since been undermined by experience. The question is never whether we are wrong about something. We are. All of us, right now, about something we feel certain about. The question is whether we have the intellectual infrastructure to detect our own errors and the emotional resilience to act on that detection.

Hawking did not wake up one morning and decide to be humble. He followed the evidence through decades of argument and counterargument, watched his position weaken under sustained theoretical pressure, and responded to that pressure by updating his beliefs. Humility, in this context, functions as a practice, a repeated act of choosing discomfort over complacency, inquiry over defense, revision over reputation. The skill can be cultivated and taught. Hawking modeled it with grace, humor, and an encyclopedia handed across a stage in Dublin.

The genius of getting it wrong is that it keeps you moving. Certainty arrives and sits down; inquiry walks forward. Hawking understood the difference, and his greatest contribution to public intellectual life may have been demonstrating, in front of the entire world, that the walking matters more than the sitting.

"Never forget that adaptability outranks experience." - Futurist Jim Carroll

--
Futurist Jim Carroll is writing a series, The Art of the Infinite Pivot, based on 36 lessons from his 36 years as a solo entrepreneur, working as a nomadic worker in the global freelance economy. The series is unfolding here, and at pivot.jimcarroll.com.
--

The future doesn't care about your resume.

It only cares about your ability to adapt.

Don't let your experience become the baggage that holds you back.

If you think about our world of rapid change, you can easily appreciate that experience is a double-edged sword. It gives you the confidence to go forward, but it can also hold you back by encouraging you to be complacent, trying the 'same old things' instead of trying new things. In my 36-year voyage, I’ve come to realize that the more you "know" about how something works, the harder it is to see how it is about to change.

Think about it this way: the experience that you have in adapting to change has become more important than experience itself.

What does this mean? To master the art of the infinite pivot, you have to be willing to fire yourself as an expert every few years and reinvent yourself. You need to be willing to trade your "Expert" badge for a "Beginner" badge, admitting that the knowledge that made you successful yesterday might be the very thing that makes you obsolete tomorrow.

This is not only a personal skill but also the ultimate test for any leader in an era of disruptive change. Most organizations are run by experts who are conditioned to protect their "proven" success. When disruption occurs, these experts are often the first to dismiss it, discount it, and label it as unimportant because it threatens their identity, status, and power. They aren't just protecting the business; they are protecting their status.

To master the Infinite Pivot, you must be willing to unlearn and relearn. You have to be comfortable being the student in a room full of people who have less "experience" but more "adaptability" than you do.

The future rewards your ability to learn, not your ability to remember.

Don’t let your years of experience become years of baggage!

--

Futurist Jim Carroll is always trying to learn new stuff, knowing that it is better to know what you don't know than to try to rely on what you do know.

**#Adaptability** **#Experience** **#Learning** **#Unlearn** **#Relearn** **#Pivot** **#Beginner** **#Change** **#Disruption** **#Growth** **#Reinvention** **#Flexibility** **#Future** **#Leadership** **#Baggage** **#Expert** **#Student** **#Humility** **#Evolution** **#Freelance** **#Lessons** **#Resume** **#Courage** **#Transformation** **#Onwards**

Original post: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/04/decoding-tomorrow-the-infinite-pivot-series-10-never-forget-that-adaptability-outranks-experience/

"Never forget that adaptability outranks experience." - Futurist Jim Carroll

--
Futurist Jim Carroll is writing a series, The Art of the Infinite Pivot, based on 36 lessons from his 36 years as a solo entrepreneur, working as a nomadic worker in the global freelance economy. The series is unfolding here, and at pivot.jimcarroll.com.
--

The future doesn't care about your resume.

It only cares about your ability to adapt.

Don't let your experience become the baggage that holds you back.

If you think about our world of rapid change, you can easily appreciate that experience is a double-edged sword. It gives you the confidence to go forward, but it can also hold you back by encouraging you to be complacent, trying the 'same old things' instead of trying new things. In my 36-year voyage, I’ve come to realize that the more you "know" about how something works, the harder it is to see how it is about to change.

Think about it this way: the experience that you have in adapting to change has become more important than experience itself.

What does this mean? To master the art of the infinite pivot, you have to be willing to fire yourself as an expert every few years and reinvent yourself. You need to be willing to trade your "Expert" badge for a "Beginner" badge, admitting that the knowledge that made you successful yesterday might be the very thing that makes you obsolete tomorrow.

This is not only a personal skill but also the ultimate test for any leader in an era of disruptive change. Most organizations are run by experts who are conditioned to protect their "proven" success. When disruption occurs, these experts are often the first to dismiss it, discount it, and label it as unimportant because it threatens their identity, status, and power. They aren't just protecting the business; they are protecting their status.

To master the Infinite Pivot, you must be willing to unlearn and relearn. You have to be comfortable being the student in a room full of people who have less "experience" but more "adaptability" than you do.

The future rewards your ability to learn, not your ability to remember.

Don’t let your years of experience become years of baggage!

--

Futurist Jim Carroll is always trying to learn new stuff, knowing that it is better to know what you don't know than to try to rely on what you do know.

**#Adaptability** **#Experience** **#Learning** **#Unlearn** **#Relearn** **#Pivot** **#Beginner** **#Change** **#Disruption** **#Growth** **#Reinvention** **#Flexibility** **#Future** **#Leadership** **#Baggage** **#Expert** **#Student** **#Humility** **#Evolution** **#Freelance** **#Lessons** **#Resume** **#Courage** **#Transformation** **#Onwards**

Original post: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/04/decoding-tomorrow-the-infinite-pivot-series-10-never-forget-that-adaptability-outranks-experience/

"Never forget that adaptability outranks experience." - Futurist Jim Carroll

--
Futurist Jim Carroll is writing a series, The Art of the Infinite Pivot, based on 36 lessons from his 36 years as a solo entrepreneur, working as a nomadic worker in the global freelance economy. The series is unfolding here, and at pivot.jimcarroll.com.
--

The future doesn't care about your resume.

It only cares about your ability to adapt.

Don't let your experience become the baggage that holds you back.

If you think about our world of rapid change, you can easily appreciate that experience is a double-edged sword. It gives you the confidence to go forward, but it can also hold you back by encouraging you to be complacent, trying the 'same old things' instead of trying new things. In my 36-year voyage, I’ve come to realize that the more you "know" about how something works, the harder it is to see how it is about to change.

Think about it this way: the experience that you have in adapting to change has become more important than experience itself.

What does this mean? To master the art of the infinite pivot, you have to be willing to fire yourself as an expert every few years and reinvent yourself. You need to be willing to trade your "Expert" badge for a "Beginner" badge, admitting that the knowledge that made you successful yesterday might be the very thing that makes you obsolete tomorrow.

This is not only a personal skill but also the ultimate test for any leader in an era of disruptive change. Most organizations are run by experts who are conditioned to protect their "proven" success. When disruption occurs, these experts are often the first to dismiss it, discount it, and label it as unimportant because it threatens their identity, status, and power. They aren't just protecting the business; they are protecting their status.

To master the Infinite Pivot, you must be willing to unlearn and relearn. You have to be comfortable being the student in a room full of people who have less "experience" but more "adaptability" than you do.

The future rewards your ability to learn, not your ability to remember.

Don’t let your years of experience become years of baggage!

--

Futurist Jim Carroll is always trying to learn new stuff, knowing that it is better to know what you don't know than to try to rely on what you do know.

**#Adaptability** **#Experience** **#Learning** **#Unlearn** **#Relearn** **#Pivot** **#Beginner** **#Change** **#Disruption** **#Growth** **#Reinvention** **#Flexibility** **#Future** **#Leadership** **#Baggage** **#Expert** **#Student** **#Humility** **#Evolution** **#Freelance** **#Lessons** **#Resume** **#Courage** **#Transformation** **#Onwards**

Original post: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/04/decoding-tomorrow-the-infinite-pivot-series-10-never-forget-that-adaptability-outranks-experience/

"Never forget that adaptability outranks experience." - Futurist Jim Carroll

--
Futurist Jim Carroll is writing a series, The Art of the Infinite Pivot, based on 36 lessons from his 36 years as a solo entrepreneur, working as a nomadic worker in the global freelance economy. The series is unfolding here, and at pivot.jimcarroll.com.
--

The future doesn't care about your resume.

It only cares about your ability to adapt.

Don't let your experience become the baggage that holds you back.

If you think about our world of rapid change, you can easily appreciate that experience is a double-edged sword. It gives you the confidence to go forward, but it can also hold you back by encouraging you to be complacent, trying the 'same old things' instead of trying new things. In my 36-year voyage, I’ve come to realize that the more you "know" about how something works, the harder it is to see how it is about to change.

Think about it this way: the experience that you have in adapting to change has become more important than experience itself.

What does this mean? To master the art of the infinite pivot, you have to be willing to fire yourself as an expert every few years and reinvent yourself. You need to be willing to trade your "Expert" badge for a "Beginner" badge, admitting that the knowledge that made you successful yesterday might be the very thing that makes you obsolete tomorrow.

This is not only a personal skill but also the ultimate test for any leader in an era of disruptive change. Most organizations are run by experts who are conditioned to protect their "proven" success. When disruption occurs, these experts are often the first to dismiss it, discount it, and label it as unimportant because it threatens their identity, status, and power. They aren't just protecting the business; they are protecting their status.

To master the Infinite Pivot, you must be willing to unlearn and relearn. You have to be comfortable being the student in a room full of people who have less "experience" but more "adaptability" than you do.

The future rewards your ability to learn, not your ability to remember.

Don’t let your years of experience become years of baggage!

--

Futurist Jim Carroll is always trying to learn new stuff, knowing that it is better to know what you don't know than to try to rely on what you do know.

**#Adaptability** **#Experience** **#Learning** **#Unlearn** **#Relearn** **#Pivot** **#Beginner** **#Change** **#Disruption** **#Growth** **#Reinvention** **#Flexibility** **#Future** **#Leadership** **#Baggage** **#Expert** **#Student** **#Humility** **#Evolution** **#Freelance** **#Lessons** **#Resume** **#Courage** **#Transformation** **#Onwards**

Original post: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/04/decoding-tomorrow-the-infinite-pivot-series-10-never-forget-that-adaptability-outranks-experience/

"Never forget that adaptability outranks experience." - Futurist Jim Carroll

--
Futurist Jim Carroll is writing a series, The Art of the Infinite Pivot, based on 36 lessons from his 36 years as a solo entrepreneur, working as a nomadic worker in the global freelance economy. The series is unfolding here, and at pivot.jimcarroll.com.
--

The future doesn't care about your resume.

It only cares about your ability to adapt.

Don't let your experience become the baggage that holds you back.

If you think about our world of rapid change, you can easily appreciate that experience is a double-edged sword. It gives you the confidence to go forward, but it can also hold you back by encouraging you to be complacent, trying the 'same old things' instead of trying new things. In my 36-year voyage, I’ve come to realize that the more you "know" about how something works, the harder it is to see how it is about to change.

Think about it this way: the experience that you have in adapting to change has become more important than experience itself.

What does this mean? To master the art of the infinite pivot, you have to be willing to fire yourself as an expert every few years and reinvent yourself. You need to be willing to trade your "Expert" badge for a "Beginner" badge, admitting that the knowledge that made you successful yesterday might be the very thing that makes you obsolete tomorrow.

This is not only a personal skill but also the ultimate test for any leader in an era of disruptive change. Most organizations are run by experts who are conditioned to protect their "proven" success. When disruption occurs, these experts are often the first to dismiss it, discount it, and label it as unimportant because it threatens their identity, status, and power. They aren't just protecting the business; they are protecting their status.

To master the Infinite Pivot, you must be willing to unlearn and relearn. You have to be comfortable being the student in a room full of people who have less "experience" but more "adaptability" than you do.

The future rewards your ability to learn, not your ability to remember.

Don’t let your years of experience become years of baggage!

--

Futurist Jim Carroll is always trying to learn new stuff, knowing that it is better to know what you don't know than to try to rely on what you do know.

**#Adaptability** **#Experience** **#Learning** **#Unlearn** **#Relearn** **#Pivot** **#Beginner** **#Change** **#Disruption** **#Growth** **#Reinvention** **#Flexibility** **#Future** **#Leadership** **#Baggage** **#Expert** **#Student** **#Humility** **#Evolution** **#Freelance** **#Lessons** **#Resume** **#Courage** **#Transformation** **#Onwards**

Original post: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/04/decoding-tomorrow-the-infinite-pivot-series-10-never-forget-that-adaptability-outranks-experience/

Sharing a bit of perspective, fitting for these (and all) times. From “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius:

“Look back, and consider both how quickly all things that are, are forgotten, and what an immense chaos of eternity was before, and will follow after all things.”

#MarcusAurelius #Meditations #Perspective #Impermanence #Humility #Clarity #Philosophy #Spirituality #SpiritualBNR

A quotation from Emerson

   A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.
   In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, poet
Essay (1841), “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series, No. 2

More about this quote: wist.info/emerson-ralph-waldo/…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #emerson #ralphwaldoemerson #belief #believeinyourself #confidence #creativity #ego #genius #humility #idea #opinion #originality #pride #selfappreciation #selfapproval #selfbetrayal #selfcensorship #selfconfidence #selfconsciousness #selfcriticism #selfdefeating #selfdeprecating #selfeffacing #selfesteem #selfjudgment #selfquestioning #selfreproach #selfsabotage #selftrust #spontaneity #trustyourself

A quotation from Emerson

   A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.
   In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, poet
Essay (1841), “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series, No. 2

More about this quote: wist.info/emerson-ralph-waldo/…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #emerson #ralphwaldoemerson #belief #believeinyourself #confidence #creativity #ego #genius #humility #idea #opinion #originality #pride #selfappreciation #selfapproval #selfbetrayal #selfcensorship #selfconfidence #selfconsciousness #selfcriticism #selfdefeating #selfdeprecating #selfeffacing #selfesteem #selfjudgment #selfquestioning #selfreproach #selfsabotage #selftrust #spontaneity #trustyourself

A quotation from Emerson

   A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.
   In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, poet
Essay (1841), “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series, No. 2

More about this quote: wist.info/emerson-ralph-waldo/…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #emerson #ralphwaldoemerson #belief #believeinyourself #confidence #creativity #ego #genius #humility #idea #opinion #originality #pride #selfappreciation #selfapproval #selfbetrayal #selfcensorship #selfconfidence #selfconsciousness #selfcriticism #selfdefeating #selfdeprecating #selfeffacing #selfesteem #selfjudgment #selfquestioning #selfreproach #selfsabotage #selftrust #spontaneity #trustyourself

A quotation from Emerson

   A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.
   In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, poet
Essay (1841), “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series, No. 2

More about this quote: wist.info/emerson-ralph-waldo/…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #emerson #ralphwaldoemerson #belief #believeinyourself #confidence #creativity #ego #genius #humility #idea #opinion #originality #pride #selfappreciation #selfapproval #selfbetrayal #selfcensorship #selfconfidence #selfconsciousness #selfcriticism #selfdefeating #selfdeprecating #selfeffacing #selfesteem #selfjudgment #selfquestioning #selfreproach #selfsabotage #selftrust #spontaneity #trustyourself

A quotation from Emerson

   A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.
   In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, poet
Essay (1841), “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series, No. 2

More about this quote: wist.info/emerson-ralph-waldo/…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #emerson #ralphwaldoemerson #belief #believeinyourself #confidence #creativity #ego #genius #humility #idea #opinion #originality #pride #selfappreciation #selfapproval #selfbetrayal #selfcensorship #selfconfidence #selfconsciousness #selfcriticism #selfdefeating #selfdeprecating #selfeffacing #selfesteem #selfjudgment #selfquestioning #selfreproach #selfsabotage #selftrust #spontaneity #trustyourself

Re: #ArtemisII & #Carroll - Once we've reassembled our humans back on #Earth, let's resume our meeting discussing who gets to "#discover" and "name" places that are "#uncharted #territory".

What we do, in #broadcasts heard for decades, gets repeated by folks inspired to go "beyond" in their version of #humanity's #future.

Just as our #perspective on life & home changes w/ #Earthrise image, we need to maintain #awe & #humility for days ahead.

#NASA #Moon #spacesettlements #marscolonization

Re: #ArtemisII & #Carroll - Once we've reassembled our humans back on #Earth, let's resume our meeting discussing who gets to "#discover" and "name" places that are "#uncharted #territory".

What we do, in #broadcasts heard for decades, gets repeated by folks inspired to go "beyond" in their version of #humanity's #future.

Just as our #perspective on life & home changes w/ #Earthrise image, we need to maintain #awe & #humility for days ahead.

#NASA #Moon #spacesettlements #marscolonization

Re: #ArtemisII & #Carroll - Once we've reassembled our humans back on #Earth, let's resume our meeting discussing who gets to "#discover" and "name" places that are "#uncharted #territory".

What we do, in #broadcasts heard for decades, gets repeated by folks inspired to go "beyond" in their version of #humanity's #future.

Just as our #perspective on life & home changes w/ #Earthrise image, we need to maintain #awe & #humility for days ahead.

#NASA #Moon #spacesettlements #marscolonization

Re: #ArtemisII & #Carroll - Once we've reassembled our humans back on #Earth, let's resume our meeting discussing who gets to "#discover" and "name" places that are "#uncharted #territory".

What we do, in #broadcasts heard for decades, gets repeated by folks inspired to go "beyond" in their version of #humanity's #future.

Just as our #perspective on life & home changes w/ #Earthrise image, we need to maintain #awe & #humility for days ahead.

#NASA #Moon #spacesettlements #marscolonization

Re: #ArtemisII & #Carroll - Once we've reassembled our humans back on #Earth, let's resume our meeting discussing who gets to "#discover" and "name" places that are "#uncharted #territory".

What we do, in #broadcasts heard for decades, gets repeated by folks inspired to go "beyond" in their version of #humanity's #future.

Just as our #perspective on life & home changes w/ #Earthrise image, we need to maintain #awe & #humility for days ahead.

#NASA #Moon #spacesettlements #marscolonization

A quotation from Marcus Aurelius

Accept modestly; surrender gracefully.
 
[Ἄτύφως μὲν λαβεῖν, εὐλύτως δὲ ἀφεῖναι.]

Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) Roman emperor (161-180), Stoic philosopher
Meditations [To Himself; Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν], Book 6, ch. 33 (8.33) (AD 161-180) [tr. Staniforth (1964)]

More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/marcus-aureleus/8313…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #marcusaurelius #marcusaureliusmeditations #acceptance #arrogance #badfortune #badluck #deserving #fortune #goodfortune #goodluck #grace #gracefulness #grudge #humbleness #humility #letitgo #modesty #pride #receive #reception #resignation #stoicism #surrender

A quotation from Marcus Aurelius

Accept modestly; surrender gracefully.
 
[Ἄτύφως μὲν λαβεῖν, εὐλύτως δὲ ἀφεῖναι.]

Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) Roman emperor (161-180), Stoic philosopher
Meditations [To Himself; Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν], Book 6, ch. 33 (8.33) (AD 161-180) [tr. Staniforth (1964)]

More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/marcus-aureleus/8313…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #marcusaurelius #marcusaureliusmeditations #acceptance #arrogance #badfortune #badluck #deserving #fortune #goodfortune #goodluck #grace #gracefulness #grudge #humbleness #humility #letitgo #modesty #pride #receive #reception #resignation #stoicism #surrender

A quotation from Marcus Aurelius

Accept modestly; surrender gracefully.
 
[Ἄτύφως μὲν λαβεῖν, εὐλύτως δὲ ἀφεῖναι.]

Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) Roman emperor (161-180), Stoic philosopher
Meditations [To Himself; Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν], Book 6, ch. 33 (8.33) (AD 161-180) [tr. Staniforth (1964)]

More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/marcus-aureleus/8313…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #marcusaurelius #marcusaureliusmeditations #acceptance #arrogance #badfortune #badluck #deserving #fortune #goodfortune #goodluck #grace #gracefulness #grudge #humbleness #humility #letitgo #modesty #pride #receive #reception #resignation #stoicism #surrender

A quotation from Marcus Aurelius

Accept modestly; surrender gracefully.
 
[Ἄτύφως μὲν λαβεῖν, εὐλύτως δὲ ἀφεῖναι.]

Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) Roman emperor (161-180), Stoic philosopher
Meditations [To Himself; Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν], Book 6, ch. 33 (8.33) (AD 161-180) [tr. Staniforth (1964)]

More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/marcus-aureleus/8313…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #marcusaurelius #marcusaureliusmeditations #acceptance #arrogance #badfortune #badluck #deserving #fortune #goodfortune #goodluck #grace #gracefulness #grudge #humbleness #humility #letitgo #modesty #pride #receive #reception #resignation #stoicism #surrender

A quotation from Marcus Aurelius

Accept modestly; surrender gracefully.
 
[Ἄτύφως μὲν λαβεῖν, εὐλύτως δὲ ἀφεῖναι.]

Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) Roman emperor (161-180), Stoic philosopher
Meditations [To Himself; Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν], Book 6, ch. 33 (8.33) (AD 161-180) [tr. Staniforth (1964)]

More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/marcus-aureleus/8313…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #marcusaurelius #marcusaureliusmeditations #acceptance #arrogance #badfortune #badluck #deserving #fortune #goodfortune #goodluck #grace #gracefulness #grudge #humbleness #humility #letitgo #modesty #pride #receive #reception #resignation #stoicism #surrender

MISA, Death, and the Humility of Entrepreneurship

It was in 2022. I was on the road to Abeokuta for one of Governor Dapo Abiodun’s campaigns…
#NewsBeep #News #Entrepreneurship #Business #BusinessLessons #businessrivalry #entrepreneurshiplessons #GraceinBusiness #humility #Leadership #Leadershiplessons #lifeanddeath #mentorship #MISA #MuritalaAdegboyegaIbraheem #NigerianRealEstate #SijibomiOgundele #Sujimoto #tribute #UK #UnitedKingdom
https://www.newsbeep.com/uk/502655/