No single decision a leader makes today will ever be provably, definitively, the one that moved the needle. That is not resignation, pessimism, or cynicism speaking. That’s simply how I’ve learned to live with the Sorites paradox. An ancient and deeply annoying observation that you cannot identify the precise grain of sand that turns a pile into a pile. An observation the Greeks get sole credit for today largely because they wrote it in a neater and pithier manner.
Way before that, Buddhist philosophy had already arrived at Pratītyasamutpāda, dependent origination, which says something quieter and more unsettling: that no outcome has a single cause, ever, and that looking for one is a category error dressed up as accountability. You add grains. The pile grows. No grain is the grain.
In nonprofit leadership, those grains are every meeting you ran well, every coalition you held together through sheer force of professionalism, every funder relationship you cultivated across three years before it paid out. Each one is real. None of them registers as the moment. The needle moves and the evidence dissolves.
From my own professional experience and lived personal experience, any individual grain can become an irritant or nuisance. But collectively, those grains add up to something more productive, more pleasant, with greater permanence beyond any leadership role.
You are simultaneously told, and have probably internalized, that not wanting credit for those undetectable decisions is the mark of a great leader. Humility. Servant leadership.
The team gets the win. So you are working in a system where your individual contribution is structurally invisible, and your response to that invisibility is supposed to be virtue. The absence of recognition becomes proof of your character.
The exhaustion gets reframed as devotion. You see how this goes. The Andean concept of ayni — reciprocal labor that is witnessed, tracked, and returned — makes this dynamic almost unbearable by contrast, because it describes a world built on the explicit premise that contribution deserves to be seen. Your sector built the opposite world and called it leadership development.
The result is something I have watched play out in boardrooms and back offices across two continents for three-plus decades. Leaders get trapped between imposter and martyr with very little room to breathe in between.
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The systemic problems founders and leaders and managers and boards are working on never visibly shrink. Systemic problems do not work that way. So the absence of definitive milestones starts to feel like personal failure, even when the work is solid, even when the grains are accumulating.
Externally, they manage coalition competition, program innovation, and the grinding quarterly ritual of funder negotiation. Internally, they are quietly deciding whether to credit the program officer who saved a deliverable, how honestly to engage with a board that wants reassurance, and what to do with the small decisions nobody is watching.
Too often, we who are active in social change and social impact and social anything ignore the understanding that personhood itself is constituted through relationship and mutual recognition.
If you decide to embrace ubuntu in practice and in spirit, not merely as lingo — then you accept that internal ledger is not just where character lives. It is where the community either holds or fractures. Yet, sadly, we in the sector don’t talk about such things in these terms. At least not aloud.
The annual board retreat functions as liturgy. A roomful of exhausted directors and community voices reaffirming collective faith in a heap that may or may not be accumulating into something. A five-year strategic plan operates like an idol that may never show its true form. Did we ever satisfy what the plan demanded of us? Did we maintain our vows to our org and board? You never know. Yet you maintain the steps towards devotion anyway.
You revise the theory of change. You run the all-staff. This sustained moral effort practiced without guarantee of return — rèn, some folks call it— gets received as benevolence.
But maybe, it’s better understood as a discipline of remaining human under pressure that rewards neither. That attention, that focus, that commitment is real. And it costs something real too. I wonder if it’s not time to laugh at the format of what we’re devoted to— and start treating our devotion itself as something worth taking care of.
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The flip side is quieter than everything else I am saying, and I want to leave it that way.
The Taoist concept of wu-wei does not mean doing nothing. It means acting in alignment with what is actually true rather than performing effort for an audience that isn’t watching anyway.
There is an internal audit available to every leader that nobody can conduct on your behalf. It involves privately tracking and naming your own grains to yourself, with honesty and without performance.
Not for a performance review. Not for a board narrative. For the simple reason that the absence of external recognition cannot erase what you actually know happened. The work either occurred or it did not. You know which one it is.
There is also a right you carry that rarely gets named in the professional literature. You are allowed to assess an engagement and decide it is not right for you.
You are allowed to look at an organization and conclude it is not the right fit. You can decline a coalition. You can withdraw when a situation becomes genuinely untenable rather than just uncomfortable.
Whether you can actually afford to exercise that right is a different and much more honest conversation, one the sector is not yet having at full volume. But the right exists. Start there.
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The social impact sphere and nonprofit/NGO sectors have spent decades telling you that getting buried alive is a form of spiritual evolution. It isn't. Grains add up over time, yes, but let's be honest about the topography of what we are building: piles are created, but they are also meticulously, exhaustively made. And just as easily as we construct a pile to stand on, we dig the very pits we end up trapped in.
The moment you reframe your personal erasure as a organizational virtue, you’ve handed the system the shovel. The internal audit isn't about escaping the work; it's about realizing you are the one who engineered the depth of the hole.
Lay off the false humility of the servant leadership trap if you truly can’t embody those principles. Forgo the rituals of transformational leadership if you know you won’t change a thing.
Don’t aim for participatory leadership if you fundamentally can’t share the burdens or the joys of a democratic culture alongside a common vision of sucess. Embrace charismatic leadership if you change you seek is— or must be— truly all about you.
And absolutely, by all means, do lean into transactional leadership if you only view the communities that need your work and the resources that make your efforts possible as line items in a ledger.
Forget the flashy moves; they fade anyway. The grains are all that ever mattered.
If you happen to make it to the beach at all this summer—and I deeply hope you can and will— notice something shifting under your feet. Out there, away from the boardroom liturgy, you won’t focus so much on the frantic tally of the grains. You might actually find yourself awed by them. You play with them. You engage with them. You allow them to sit atop your skin without needing to log them into a metric report.
The ultimate liberation of the epistemectomy is simple: you learn how to exist among the grains without getting lost in them, without being buried under them, and without becoming so obsessed with accumulating the heap that you lose the exact utility, presence, and joy required to put them to good use when they are actually needed. Drop the ledger. Look at the water. Walk away.
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