The Wisdom We Resist (Introducing LANTERN)

A few weeks ago I wrote about ADEPT, my favorite tool for learning technical concepts. Today I want to share its sibling. LANTERN. It’s for a different kind of learning problem: wisdom that transcends any single person or circumstance. Broadly applicable truth. The stuff of philosophy, religion, and psychology.

ADEPT comes from my dear friend Kalid Azad of BetterExplained, who has spent two decades explaining things the way they should’ve been explained to us the first time: intuitively. Analogy, Diagram, Example, Plain English, Technical. It builds intuition first and saves the formal rigor for last, when it can finally land. I’ve used it with delight on everything from cryptography to tax code.

But I read more than technical material. I’ve been a voracious reader of the humanities my whole life: scripture, philosophy, poetry, psychology. I wanted a framework like ADEPT, but more suited to the concepts I was exploring. These concepts aren’t esoteric; to the contrary, these are universal concepts. Most fit in a sentence. But given the meta-ness of these concepts, they tend to be layered, the kind of ideas that expose something true about being human. Scholars file this under the perennial philosophy. I just think of it as a deep forest that has to be explored.

Here’s a recent example. I was traveling through ancient archaeological sites in Jordan with a guide named Osama, a new friend and a university-educated archaeologist with working experience on some of the sites we were visiting. As we got to know each other, he shared his favorite book with me: The Forty Rules of Love, Elif Shafak’s novel about Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, and the wandering teacher who transformed him. The forty rules in the title are the novelist’s invention. But when I dug into the primary sources behind them, nine Sufi concepts emerge. Three of them, compressed: Love is the instrument of knowing, not the reward for it. Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. The prayer is graded on the ache, not the grammar.

Read those again. Nothing esoteric. You could explain any of them to a ten-year-old. And yet.

Why ADEPT can’t carry this

ADEPT assumes the learner is on your side. For technical concepts, that’s true. The enemy is complexity, and the framework builds a model piece by piece until the reader intuitively understands the concept. Philosophical wisdom is different. The idea is simple. The resistance is the reader. Tell me directly that I judge people to feel superior and my defenses are up before you finish the sentence. The ego is both the student and the subject matter. That changes everything about how this kind of teaching has to work. It’s like casually inspecting the nature of consciousness and expecting results. Meta wisdom requires sneaking up on it. Approaching it from a variety of angles. Again, to truly experience a forest you have to wander in it. Forage. Hunt. Climb. Dig. Get lost on the animal trails.

So I went looking at how the great teachers handled teaching wisdom, the ones whose lessons survived twenty-five centuries of retelling. The pattern is remarkably consistent.

The prophet Nathan needed to confront King David over a murder. He didn’t accuse. He told a story about a rich man who stole a poor man’s one beloved lamb, let David condemn the thief in a fury, and then said: you are the man. David convicted himself, the only conviction that changes anyone. Jesus taught almost entirely in parables with a twist, then handed the verdict back to the listener. The Buddha ended his teachings with an experiment: don’t believe this, try it and watch what happens. Socrates asked questions until certainty dissolved into productive bewilderment. Jung named the invisible patterns so people could finally track them, and warned that every virtue casts a shadow. Different centuries. Unconnected traditions. Same small toolkit. That convergence is the tell.

The seven moves

LANTERN is a framework for processing difficult truths and converting them into wisdom: a mental model intuitively understood.

Line. One compressed, slightly paradoxical aphorism. The way Jung named patterns. Something memorable and loaded with compressed meaning.
Anchor. A physical image from daily life that provides an effective mnemonic of sorts, since the best recall tools are visual.
Narrative. A story with a reversal. The concept sneaks past your ego rather than confronting it.
Turn. The story pointed at you. Specific, recent, slightly uncomfortable.
Enact. At least one experiment under five minutes.
Ripples. What changes around you in weeks, and in your systems over years. The benefit.
Nemesis. The counterfeit: how the ego fakes this exact virtue, and how to tell the difference.

The order is the technology. The story gets past the guard. The turn springs the recognition. The experiment converts it into first-person evidence while it’s still warm. And the Nemesis keeps the whole thing honest, because every one of these virtues has a knockoff the ego prefers. A teaching that doesn’t name its counterfeit trains the counterfeit.

LANTERN at work

I could show you this framework applied in a personal context, but that feels too vulnerable :-). Instead I’ll run it in a professional context, on the second of those nine ideas, which I co-wrote with Exo (my personal agent powered by Claude) using the LANTERN skill I built for it. It’s worth noting that this Sufi wisdom is also a Zen Buddhist truth I hold dearly: Shoshin, beginner’s mind.

LANTERN: “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”

Line. Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. That’s Rumi’s coin (Masnavi IV:1407, in R. A. Nicholson’s translation: “Sell intelligence and buy bewilderment: intelligence is opinion, while bewilderment is immediate vision”).

Anchor. The pros-and-cons list you build after your gut has already decided. Every executive writes one a week: the spreadsheet whose conclusion was known before the first row, the deck assembled to dress a verdict as an analysis. Rumi has a name for this prosthetic in the Masnavi, his six-volume poem built almost entirely of teaching stories: “The leg of the syllogisers is of wood: a wooden leg is very infirm” (Masnavi I:2128). A real leg doesn’t need a crutch. Next time you catch yourself decorating a decision, flag this as a weakness and explore it more deeply. It’s confirmation bias.

Narrative. A grammarian steps into a boat. Underway, he asks the boatman, “Have you studied grammar?” “No,” says the boatman. “Then half your life has been wasted.” The boatman says nothing. A storm rises, and the boat begins to founder. The boatman calls back: “Have you learned to swim?” “No,” says the grammarian. “Then all your life has been wasted.” And Rumi lands the pun the whole story was built to carry: here we need mahw, self-effacement, not nahw, grammar. The reversal: the credential is the thing that doesn’t float. The examiner drowns holding his answer key. (The story is from Book I of the Masnavi.)

I’ve watched sales teams drown themselves far more times than I could count. Here’s one of the most common dysfunctions I’ve observed in sales: a deal dies, and the post-mortem convicts the customer. They moved too slow. They didn’t get it. They picked inferior technology because they’re cheap. They don’t know what they want. The truth is usually less flattering. The team never did the labor of understanding the customer’s business. They were fluent in their own product and illiterate in the buyer’s outcomes, and their cleverness about the first excused their incuriosity about the second. The deal didn’t die because the customer failed to understand the pitch. It died because no one selling ever tried to understand the customer.

Turn. When did you last say “I don’t understand this, walk me through it” in a room where you were the highest-paid person in it? If you can’t remember, the crutch has become the leg. Your ego is running the show.

Enact. In your next meeting, the moment you notice your rebuttal loading while the other person is still talking, set it down and ask one question you genuinely cannot predict the answer to. One meeting, one question. Afterward, check: did the question surface anything the rebuttal would have buried? That delta is the “immediate vision” Rumi is selling.

Ripples. Second order, in weeks: people stop pre-packaging information to survive your cleverness. Problems arrive earlier and rawer. Meetings shift from verdict-delivery to actual discovery. Decisions get slightly slower and reverse far less. Third order, in years: an organization that watches its leader buy bewilderment learns that “I don’t know yet” is safe to say upward, and the information asymmetry that kills companies (bad news traveling slower than good) starts to shrink. The inverse compounds too: an organization that rewards cleverness selects for confident wrongness at every level below you. You are a band of confident idiots.

Nemesis. Two counterfeits, and both are ways to avoid being seen not-knowing.

The Socratic pose: You ask a series of questions leading the audience to your pre-determined answer. Your questions are a maze with one exit. The tell, observable from the outside: people answer while watching your face, not the whiteboard. The test: name the last decision where someone’s answer to your question reversed your position. A specific decision, with a date. If nothing comes, the questions aren’t inquiry. They’re staging.

Gut-worship: laziness wearing the heart’s coat. The scene: the candidate “felt right in the room,” so the reference calls become a formality. The pricing analysis dies with “I’ve seen this movie before,” and the movie turns out to be one bad quarter in 2019 wearing a trench coat. This counterfeit quotes the wisdom itself (“a labor of the heart, not of the head”) to skip the labor part. Bewilderment is only worth teaching to someone whose cleverness is worth selling. Bewilderment after mastery is vision; bewilderment instead of mastery is fog. The test: ask the gut, “what exactly am I pattern-matching on?” Real intuition is compressed experience. It can name its pattern. If what comes back is a feeling plus an anecdote, the heart isn’t speaking. You’re just being lazy. And the positive sign, so you know the real thing when you feel it: genuine intuition welcomes the audit. It names its pattern, then asks for the reference calls anyway. If your gut gets sharper under questioning instead of defensive, the heart and the head are finally working the same shift.

The two counterfeits share one root: both protect you from ever being exposed as not knowing. Real bewilderment isn’t dressed up as wisdom. It’s honest about your ignorance. If your version of this virtue has never made you look foolish, then you’re not practicing this virtue.

I didn’t invent this framework. Nathan, the Buddha, Jesus, Socrates, Rumi, and Jung used every one of these moves to carry wisdom and virtue past their students’ defenses. All I did was label the parts so I could practice them on purpose in an effort to process philosophical, religious, or psychological truths about being human. Oh, and I built a Claude Skill I could use with my personal agent to help me delight in the exploration of deep dark forests that make me a better person. The skill is on GitHub, free for the stealing. I hope LANTERN helps you sneak a truth past the belligerence of your ego.

Anchors and Sails

I have to credit John Cena for this one. I heard him on Amy Poehler’s podcast this week talking about anchors and sails, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it, because it describes every team I’ve ever worked with. I love John Cena, by the way. He was a neighbor of mine for many years, and he’s exactly what you would expect. Funny, sincere, friendly, and kind.

So, yes…anchors and sails. Every team has both.

Sails catch wind. They propel the team toward the mission. Anchors hold the team right where it is.

And the anchors? Almost never the people who don’t care. Usually it’s the opposite. They care so much about the mission, and about their own piece of it, that they get stuck. I’ve watched brilliant people sit on work that was ready weeks ago. Stall on a decision because getting it wrong felt unforgivable. That was never apathy. It was fear. Fear of letting the team down. Fear that the work isn’t good enough.

Anyway…sails don’t have to be perfect. A patched sail with a few holes still catches wind. The boat doesn’t need your work to be flawless. It needs your work to move it.

Perfectionism paralysis is one common anchor behavior. Another is paralyzing the team with endless questions before executing. Analysis paralysis. Usually these are good and valid questions. But in technology, you very rarely have all the answers. We’re often inventing something new. You have to make your best guess with the information you have, and you execute. Challenge your thinking regularly, absolutely. But move forward. Waiting for all the answers ensures you’re not creating anything new. You find the answers on the journey.

Anyway, I love this simple concept, anchors and sails, but don’t use this as a label to bludgeon team members. Use this as a question. When someone’s ruminating on everything that can go wrong: okay, great points. Solid red teaming. Now how do we turn this into forward movement? Or when someone is desperately seeking to exhaust all unknowns from the domain space — often impossible — thank them for their thoughtful questions and challenge them to turn this into forward movement, even if it means inferring answers. How do we turn this into a sail and not an anchor? When someone’s been polishing the same deliverable for weeks, ask them, no accusation in it: are you being a sail or an anchor right now? No reason to get defensive; we’ve all been an anchor at times. The question assumes they care. It just asks where that care is pointed.

Caring about the mission means moving it. Ship the patched sail.

Thanks, John. I’d say it to your face, but I moved out of the old neighborhood, and it was always hard to see you anyway.

When Your Integrity Crashes Into Your Ego: A Lesson in Revolutionary Positivity

I’m going to share something embarrassing because the lesson is worth the cringe.

Several years back, I was leading a business unit that was absolutely crushing it. It was growing sixteen times faster than any previous unit in company history. It improved Net Promoter Score (NPS) and helped other divisions hit their numbers by increasing their Net Retention Rates. The math was irrefutable.

Yet somehow, we became a political piñata. Some executives questioned the data. Peers cherry-picked our results to make them seem less impressive. People who didn’t know my technical background attacked my technical competence. They criticized my vision. At the same time, they tried to absorb parts of our product into their portfolios.

Here’s where it gets ugly: I got swept up in the negativity. Started talking shit in backchannels. Being snarky. Acting like the very people I was frustrated with. Then, through my own stupidity, one of those backchannel conversations went public. The worst part? My snark was aimed at someone who hadn’t even done anything wrong. I was venting sideways.

The hypocrisy hit me like a stink I couldn’t wash off. There I was, compromising my integrity while complaining about others’ lack of integrity.

I wasn’t maintaining my form. I was fracturing under pressure, becoming someone I didn’t recognize. I was already feeling terrible, and then my leader delayed a promotion I’d been promised. But it wasn’t losing the promotion that hurt. To be honest, that actually made me feel a little better since it was establishing a cultural boundary. It was the realization that I’d violated my core values, and my actions hurt others. That pain hit deeper than any career setback. Still does when I think about it.

During this transformation—while rebuilding my integrity—I found this Epictetus quote that became something I would refer to often:

“If you are ever tempted to look for outside approval, realize that you have compromised your integrity. If you need a witness, be your own.”

Most people think integrity means obeying a moral code. But the word comes from the Latin integer—whole, complete, untouched. It’s about maintaining your form under stress, much like we discuss structural integrity in engineering. Yes, it’s also about behaving morally as we know it today. However, there’s this lovely aspect of the word that is about authenticity and honoring your values. Being your whole self. I had allowed the disapproval and behaviors of others to compromise my integrity. To be clear, this is not an excuse for my behavior. That was entirely on me. But it helped me understand the absurdity of my behavior and get to the root cause.

Another helpful phrase came from my leader at that time. He said, “What people say about you behind your back is none of your business.” This guy has an incredible ability to elevate himself above the nonsense. I learned a lot from him.

I started coaching myself and my team on what I called ‘polite, positive, persistent pressure.’ When someone questioned third-party data in a meeting—objective numbers from an independent source—we didn’t get defensive. We’d say ‘Let’s dig into those numbers together.’ When denigration reached our ears: ‘That’s none of my business.’ Present solutions, not problems. Share credit, own failures. Show up prepared, stay relentlessly positive.

Here’s the thing about cynicism—it metastasizes like cancer. It’s toxic and justifies mediocrity and inaction. Sometimes, you’re not in a position to affect change. You must not allow this to drag you into the morass of negativity. And in these situations: Remaining positive in the face of overwhelming negativity isn’t weakness. It’s rebellion.

It’s punk rock in a polo shirt.

Growing up on a farm taught me this: When operating heavy machinery, you have three options. You can run it, you can trust the operator, or you can get the hell out of the way. Standing around complaining achieves nothing useful, but it could well get you maimed.

Business is the same. You can’t control the cynics. You can only model something better. And when that fails? Avoid their machinery. They’ll crash it on their own schedule, and you don’t want to be nearby when they do.

Our unit kept growing. The cynics kept talking. But here’s what I noticed: Positive teams ship. Cynical teams bitch.

I’m not naturally someone who seeks praise—it actually makes me uncomfortable. But I care deeply about the mission. When negativity threatens the mission, that’s when integrity demands we do something different.

And sometimes, the most revolutionary act is simply refusing to join the mob or trying to fight the mob.

Choosing positivity isn’t about being soft. It’s about being effective. It’s about maintaining your structural integrity when others are fracturing. It’s about being your own witness when the gallery is full of critics.

In our current climate—whether in business, politics, or culture—cynicism feels like the smart play. But cynicism is just fear dressed up as intelligence.

The real punk move? Building something extraordinary while others are busy tearing things down.

Be your own witness. Maintain your integrity. And when the negativity comes—because it always does—remember that your polite, positive persistence isn’t just personal development.

It’s revolution.