THE GOVERNANCE CIRCLE

  There's a version of gratitude I've come to find genuinely strange, and a little perverse. You tell someone you're struggling — broke, behind on everything, or you've just lost your home — and almost on reflex, the person says, " Well, at least you're not bedridden in the hospital " or " At least you're not in prison. " or " At least you still have your legs ."  Said kindly, usually. Meant as comfort. But sit with it for a second and it starts to feel off about this relative gratitude. Why does my gratitude need a person worse off than me? Why can't I just be grateful without reaching for someone else's (seemingly) harder life as the measuring stick? What this kind of gratitude actually is Strip away the kind intention behind it, and what's left is a quiet ranking system. Somewhere in the back of the mind, there's a ladder, and gratitude becomes the relief of not being on a lower rung. It's not really gratitude...

"...So cling to nothing too tightly, even yourself, / and when it’s time to let go, let go with grace, / for nothing is owned, only borrowed..." — James McCrae. James McCrae’s poem titled “ Instructions Before Visiting Earth ” seems to be having another viral moment these days. The man has unwittingly created a masterpiece on the art of living gracefully, one that is worth revisiting from to time.   The extract above inspired some thoughts which I would like to share in this piece to help anyone dealing with invasive dark thoughts. When we are in the depths of depression, our thoughts feel like heavy, permanent fixtures of our identity. We treat them as if they are solid truths—as if they are us . But what if we started treating them as guests? What if we acknowledged that our thoughts, our moods, and even our current mental states (even the happiest of them) are not possessions we own, but experiences we are simply borrowing for a time? Western education has us co...

  In 2001, Enron collapsed almost overnight. One of the most admired companies in America — six years running as Fortune 's "Most Innovative Company" — turned out to be a shell built on numbers that didn't exist. $74 billion in shareholder value gone. Thousands of employees lost their jobs and their retirement savings in one afternoon. The outline of the story is familiar: fraud, greed, a few executives who deserved prison. But the part that gets skipped is the part that actually matters to the rest of us — Enron didn't fail because a handful of villains lied to the public. It failed because an entire organization got extremely good at lying to itself . That's the uncomfortable, useful part. Because the mechanisms Enron used to deceive itself aren't exotic corporate-fraud techniques. They're the same mechanisms you and I use at a much smaller scale, when we don't want to look at something. Here are some of them — and what they look like whe...

There's a strange kind of respect I've come to have for depression — not for what it does to a person, but for what it reveals about the mind experiencing it. What if the very capacity to experience deep, all-consuming depression is proof of an immense, untapped power? Think about what depression actually requires of the mind: with terrifying singular focus it generates thoughts so convincing that they override hunger, ambition, curiosity, and self-preservation; it builds a narrative so airtight that a person who once had dreams, plans, and momentum can wake up and abandon them all. That's not a small feat.   That's not a "weak mind." That is an extraordinarily powerful cognitive engine. We don't usually talk about depression this way. We talk about it as an absence — a lack of motivation, a lack of energy, a lack of joy. But absence isn't the only thing that’s happening. Something is very much present and very much active: a relentless i...