What IF, you were a potato?

I'm bored with writing about leadership, so I wanted to talk about potatoes.I see the eye roll. I double dog dare you to stay with me for a bit.

You live underground. Cool. Dark. Quiet. The earth around you is steady — soil, rocks, the weight of everything above pressing in gently, constantly. As you grow, that pressure grows too. It becomes tighter. Not suffocating. Holding. You expand into it and it expands around you and you don’t understand what’s happening.

And then something moves.

A worm. You feel it before you could ever see it — you can’t see anything down here. It slides past you, moving in its own direction with its own purpose. It’s alive in a way the rocks aren’t. It’s agency in your small dark world, and you have no idea if it’s danger or gift or something you don’t have a word for yet. It’s just other, passing through your space, and everything you thought you knew about what was solid and still just got more complicated.

The pressure keeps building. Something keeps changing. You still don’t know what any of this is.

And then — green.

Not a feeling on your skin. Something entirely new: leaves. Parts of yourself you didn’t know existed push up through the dirt and into air. You didn’t plan this. You didn’t know you were capable of it. One moment you are fully a potato, contained and held in the cool dark, and the next you are also — somehow — a leaf.

And the leaf has never felt pressure in its life.

Wind moves it. Rain hits it. It sways in ways it cannot control and doesn’t need to. There is no weight here, no rock pressing in, no soil holding shape around it. The leaf is free in a way the potato underground cannot imagine — not because the potato was trapped, but because the potato had no idea freedom was even a category.

You are still the potato. You are also now the leaf. You are rooted in the cool and the pressure below, moving freely in the air above, and you have eyes — eleven of them — pointing in every direction at once.

This is what curiosity actually creates within a leader.

Not in a philosophical, sit-quietly-and-reflect way. In a what-just-happened-to-my-leaves way.

Graceful Leadership isn’t about arriving. It’s about evolving. Staying in relentless pursuit of understanding, keeping the lens of curiosity alive, especially when things feel like nothing but pressure and worms in the dark. Curiosity is what gets you to the breakthrough. And the breakthrough isn’t always what you expected. Sometimes it’s a whole new part of yourself you didn’t know was possible.

So let’s try a few more.

You are a petal on a flower. You are one of many — identical and distinct at the same time. You don’t hold the whole bloom together, the center does that. But without you, something essential is missing. From here, what does your role look like? Are you trying to be the center when you’re actually designed to be a petal? Is your whole team trying to out-center each other while the bloom goes unbuilt?

You are a carrot. Half underground, half reaching into the light. You exist in two worlds simultaneously, and the part people see — the bright orange top — is only half the story. The real work is happening where nobody’s looking. From here, that decision you’ve been wrestling with — are you honoring both halves? Or are you only leading from what’s visible?

You are a very confident snail. You carry your home on your back. You move slowly and deliberately, and you are not apologizing for it. From here, what would it look like to move at your actual pace instead of everyone else’s?

Here’s what these little thought experiments actually do: they interrupt the story your brain has been telling on repeat.

Leaders are pattern-recognition machines. That’s mostly a superpower. But it means we can get locked into seeing our organizations, our teams, our challenges through the same lens over and over again — thinking we’re evaluating a situation fresh when really we’re running it through a filter we built years ago.

You cannot be a potato discovering it has leaves and also be clenching your jaw about the Q3 budget at the same time. Something has to give. And when it does, even for thirty seconds, your brain gets a crack of light it didn’t have before. That’s not woo. That’s just how perspective works.

Try this before your next hard meeting.

Pick something absurd. A potato. A thundercloud. A very confident snail. Ask yourself: What does this situation look like from there? Don’t force an answer. Just let the image sit for a moment and see what surfaces.

Then notice — what shifted? Even slightly? What did you see that you weren’t seeing before?

That flicker is the thing. That’s Evolving in real time. That’s the lens of curiosity doing exactly what it’s designed to do: keeping you moving, keeping you open, keeping you from leading only from what you already know.

The potato had eleven eyes all along. They were sensing in the dark, doing their work underground where nobody could see. The leaves are the recognition of what was always functioning — the unseen gifts, the capacities that were always there, the clairvoyance you’ve been using without language for it.

We’re not discovering new powers. We’re waking up to the ones we’ve been using all along.

The magic isn’t in having the right eyes in the right places. It’s about being willing to discover you have leaves.

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