In 1752, Benjamin Franklin figured out something strange about lightning. You couldn’t fight it, and for centuries people tried anyway: building higher, building thicker, hoping mass would win. It never did. Churches burned. The tallest building in town was usually the first one struck.
Franklin’s fix was almost insulting in its simplicity: a thin rod that doesn’t resist the strike at all. It just gives the charge a path to the ground, and the house underneath gets to stay intact.
He never patented it. He said it belonged to everyone.
I think about that rod a lot, usually when a client starts telling me about the big personality in their life. The person who fills every room. Standing near them feels like standing next to the tallest steeple in town. You brace. You absorb. You leave depleted.
The usual advice is to fight back or get small. Both are steeple strategies, and steeples lose.
There’s a Carnegie Mellon study, led by Anita Woolley, on what actually makes a group smart. It wasn’t raw intelligence. It was how evenly the conversation moved around the table.
When one voice took over, the whole group got dumber, including the person doing the talking. The storm doesn’t just wear everyone else out. It doesn’t know it’s making itself stupider too.
I once worked with an executive who spent two years bracing against a genuinely volcanic CFO. She’d rehearse her defenses before every meeting and leave every meeting drained anyway.
At some point she stopped trying to hold her ground and started trying to give his energy somewhere to go instead. The next time he erupted, she just asked, “Say more about the part that worries you most.” No pushback, no absorbing the blast. Just a place for it to land.
Six months later he told her she was the only person in the building he could actually think next to.
Nobody tells you this about big personalities, but most of them aren’t looking for an audience. They’re looking for ground. They’re usually exhausted by their own charge, surrounded by people who either spark back at them or throw up walls.
The rare one is the person who can take the full strike and still be standing there afterward, unremarkable, still asking a grounded question.
None of this makes the storm wrong, by the way. Lightning often builds energy and momentum. It filled the seats. It said the thing nobody else would say out loud. The world runs on people who play big. The problem is never the voltage. It’s a lack of anywhere for the voltage to go.
I spent years being the loudest thing in the room myself. Keynote stages train you for exactly that. Nobody warns you that thunder can’t hear anything, including itself.
The people who actually changed me weren’t the ones who out-talked me. They were the quieter ones who asked the grounded question and let my noise find somewhere to land.
Most days now, I try to be the rod.
Not every day. Most.
Stay human,
–Bryan
P.S. Are you the rod or the lightning? One word. Tap comment.
I’m Bryan, and if you’re a leader or executive, pull up a chair. Fancy stuff: Built companies in Silicon Valley. Gave a TED Talk. Keynoted 200+ times.
Crashed hard. Found my way back. Lost 85 lbs. Ditched diabetes. Moved to Lisbon. And as it turns out, you can operate differently at any age.
Now I work with leaders and teams who’ve proven themselves but know something needs to shift.
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