SPIRIT OF THANKS

I recently spent time with a group of industry CEOs who have actually done the work. Builders. Operators. Survivors. Each came with a story forged through pain, luck, grit, and unreasonable effort. And as we talked, I realized why I found it so enjoyable: every single one of them possessed brutal awareness.

• Awareness of who they are.

• Awareness of how life works.

• Awareness of the costs they’ve paid.

• Awareness of what success truly extracts.

Because of that, the conversations were honest, sharp, and often hilarious. There’s something liberating about sitting with people who understand the absurdity of leadership, how running a company can be both devastating and ridiculous in the same breath. And in those moments, a simple truth stood out:

You have to learn how to laugh at the darkness.

Not out of cynicism, and not because you lack empathy. But because leadership demands the ability to hold contradictory emotions at once, to remain human in situations that feel, at times, hopeless or unfair. That release valve has saved me more times than I can count.

The way you build that capability is deceptively simple:

Accept reality. All of it.

As long as it’s not life or death, the sun will rise. You will face the consequences. And no amount of blame or deflection changes that. When you internalize this, nothing feels fatal. Nothing feels permanent. And the absurdity becomes manageable.

The metaphor I use is packaging.

A problem is only overwhelming when you refuse to pick it up. But once you name it, size it, and box it, you can move it. You can give it a place.

Brutal awareness is the upgrade to this.

It says everything can be packaged, even your emotions.

It ends self-deception because it frees you to see things as they are, not as you wish they were. That clarity creates a recursive feedback loop: the world sharpens, your responses strengthen, and what was once crippling becomes routine. What used to break you becomes fuel.

This is the trait I’ve seen in the leaders who endure. Not just the successful ones, the ones who outlast.

I’m thankful I learned this early. Thankful for the founders and operators who never hid the truth. Thankful for two and a half decades of leading people from every background imaginable. Those years gave me a life that is often chaotic, occasionally absurd, but never dull.

And when I look back at those conversations with other CEOs, it always circles to the same place:

a desire to see more, become more, and find out what “possible” actually looks like.

Photos by the author. Skies of Europe 2019.