Transcript · How Leaders Think
The Act of Living
The full conversation with Kenny Lange, edited for reading.
This is the recorded conversation, edited for reading. Filler, repetition and false starts have been removed, broken sentences closed, and speaker attribution corrected throughout. Nothing has been added, and no answer has been rewritten to say something it did not say. The show’s closing sign-off is branding rather than conversation, and is not reproduced here.
The episode page is here.
If you want the substance without the conversation, the ideas raised are summarised at the end.
Kenny Lange
Welcome to the How Leaders Think podcast, the show that transforms you by renewing your mind and giving you new ways to think. I’m your host, Kenny Lange, and with me today is the Federico Malatesta. There, I added some sizzle on that, so hopefully that goes well. You just record that, and that’ll be your text message notification from now on.
Federico is an author and an executive coach. He’s also a fellow Texan, at least for the time being. He founded FM Transformational Coaching and The Artha Ranch in Texas after a career in global energy that included serving as Chief Investment Officer of a major oil and gas company, overseeing a 40 billion dollar capital portfolio. That’s billion with a B, people. He writes on leadership, identity and the second half of life. Welcome to the show, Federico.
Federico Malatesta
Hey, Kenny. Lovely to be here with a fellow Texan, even if temporarily.
Kenny Lange
Even if temporarily, I know. People told me the old saying is, “I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could,” because I was born in Japan, which usually strikes people as odd. But I am odd, so maybe that goes along with my personality.
Federico Malatesta
It’s a cool spot to be born.
Kenny Lange
Not everybody gets to claim that. Well, tell me, Federico, what is on your mind today?
Federico Malatesta
A couple of different things. The first one is very practical. I’m thinking of launching a series of videos that accompany my book, some kind of lectures on YouTube that mirror the different chapters of my new book. That’s the practical side.
More intellectually, if you want, I recently have a new client. I’ll call her Claire; it’s not her real name. She’s a really successful young CEO, one of those people who were always the best: the best in her class, the best university, a super fast career, really smart, really sharp. She came to me because recently she started to wake up in the middle of the night with a complete anxiety attack. And the anxiety is not specific. She just wakes up, she cannot go back to sleep, and she doesn’t really understand why.
The reason it’s on my mind is that in this situation it’s very easy to reach for quick solutions. What self-development, self-improvement tells you to do is to find a technique to tackle a particular issue. But often that is the worst answer you can give to a client, and the worst answer you can give to yourself. When you don’t know why something is concerning you, why something bothers you, why something keeps you awake, it means there’s a reason you cannot access. And finding a technical solution to a problem about life is the worst thing you can do. It’s a bit like when your faucet is leaking and you put your thumb on it. Yes, maybe for a second you stop the water, but you’re just going to build up pressure, and the moment you release it, everything is going to burst out. It’s the same thing.
Kenny Lange
It’s not really going to do anything to help. So what do you mean by a technical solution?
Federico Malatesta
I go back to something that Aristotle distinguished 2,500 years ago. Aristotle categorized the different aspects of life in a number of ways. What concerns us is that he described one activity, which he called poiesis: a craft, the making of something. Today we also talk about an instrumental activity. Making a chair, making a table, or a doctor with a patient. There is an end goal. The end goal is to make a beautiful table; the end goal is to heal the patient. So you have to be very good at it, and Aristotle even spoke about excellence in doing that.
But it only applies to certain categories. It does not apply to life itself. Life itself is what he called praxis, which can be translated as action, and it’s something that you do that has no final goal. The activity is the doing. And you cannot find technical solutions when something doesn’t have an end goal. You’re a fellow Texan. You like barbecue, I assume?
Kenny Lange
Yes, very much so.
Federico Malatesta
So when you go and get that moist piece of brisket, the pleasure is eating the brisket. The goal is not to say at the end of the meal, “I have achieved the meal.” The pleasure is the action of eating. Life is the same thing. So when you apply a protocol or a routine or a three-step solution to something like a general anxiety about the trouble of living, that cannot work. It’s a categorical error, and this is what self-help does all the time.
Kenny Lange
That makes me think a lot of what Simon Sinek says with the infinite game: the purpose of the game is to continue the game. Or when we talk about life, there’s the quote, and I don’t know who gets credit for it, that it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. The point is not that I arrive somewhere; the point is, did I journey well?
Federico Malatesta
Yes. The infinite game is not a metaphor I particularly like, because it gives you the idea of sport, of an activity which does have an end. This is why sport is such a bad metaphor for life. In sport you can say who won, you can say by how much; you can objectively measure a performance. In life you can’t. And the idea of boxing life into a set of rules and constraints is most often what causes the problem.
There is another aspect which is as important: most of our life is unconscious. We do not understand why we are driven to do certain things, why we like some things and not others. So the idea that you can sit down and analyze a life as you analyze a game just misses the point.
Kenny Lange
What’s interesting, though, is that so many of us who are driven high achievers and performers latch on to that way of thinking, and it serves us until it doesn’t.
Federico Malatesta
Right.
Kenny Lange
It’s probably true of your client Claire. Thinking in terms of the rules of the game and abiding by them has probably helped her a lot to be the winner in the room, to be a young female executive in this world. It’s working, it’s working, it’s working, until you’re waking up at three in the morning, full of panic, full of anxiety about things you know and things you don’t know, and you call in someone like yourself. I think that’s the hard part of life, and of leadership in particular.
And it’s why I like that your bio talks about the second half of life. Richard Rohr also writes about having a first half and a second half of life: we adopt these masks that work for us until they don’t, and then we almost have to completely unlearn, or relearn, how to engage and even how to measure what success might mean. At least in my own personal experience, that’s produced quite a lot of disorientation. I thought I knew how this place worked, but maybe I was wrong altogether. Can you speak into that?
Federico Malatesta
Yes. You’re absolutely right. I’ll go back to Aristotle for a moment, and then we’ll go back to the second half of life. What Aristotle said about life is that what you need is phronesis, which can be translated as practical wisdom, judgment. He was saying you have to understand what matters to you at this moment in time, in this particular situation, which is why routines don’t apply, why protocols don’t apply. And to make that judgment is exactly to say: this has served me well so far, and it doesn’t serve me well now.
We make up stories. We are a collection of stories in our head. There is some truth to it: there are some events, some real things that have happened. But mostly we are a collection of stories, and some stories serve us for a certain period of time, and then we find a new story that serves us better, and so on.
Some of the stories end more abruptly than others, and this is where it’s more difficult. This anxiety attack can be one of these examples, and it is more difficult because it’s sudden. In Italian we have a nice verb, tramontare, which translated would be something like to sunset: when something slowly ends. It’s a beautiful show. You see the sun going down, and you know that tomorrow the sun is going to set again. There is a nice conclusion to something that has to end. It’s like a boxer who leaves the ring at the peak of his career.
Unfortunately, that hardly ever happens, because people want one more fight. And then the end is abrupt, and suddenly it’s like: my identity was so caught up in this person, living with these stories in this environment, that now I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what is next. And that can be really disconcerting.
Kenny Lange
Absolutely. I hadn’t thought about the suddenness and how those things work. I think about Dr. Henry Cloud’s work on necessary endings, and how some things do need to come to an end. Intellectually a lot of us know that. A lot of leaders understand that. But I don’t think we really take it to heart, and that’s the part that screws us up. I wasn’t ready for this job to end. I wasn’t ready for this level of mastery to no longer be sufficient. I wasn’t ready to let go of a team member I loved dearly but who could no longer perform at this level.
And what’s tricky is when it doesn’t happen in a negative way, like an athlete who hangs on too long, suffers an injury and goes down in a blaze of glory. Sometimes it comes in the form of great opportunities that you thought were going to be a little further off. You’re preparing, you’re preparing, but then the window opens earlier than anyone was expecting, and you’re like, “Well, this is the moment. I thought I had more time. Let’s go for it.” That can be jarring, especially when you’re used to performing, being a top performer, getting your gold star, and it can feel like starting over. That beginner’s mindset is really tough.
I’ve got four teenagers, so whoever’s listening, pray for me. One turns 17 soon and the other turns 16 next week. They’re Irish twins, and they bicker like it too. One has started driving, the other is about to start, and she’s like, “I’m going to be fine. I’m going to be great.” And the older one’s like, “No, you’re going to be terrible, but everybody is.” That’s what I try to tell them: you’re going to suck at this at first. That’s one thing when you’re a teenager starting to drive. It’s another thing when you’re a career professional with a résumé of accolades and suddenly you have to step into something you don’t feel fully prepared for. That really does mess with your identity.
That’s one part of it. The other is that life can happen to you, it feels like sometimes. You and I talked a little bit about that in our pre-show call a couple of weeks ago. For myself, as I was telling a new friend of mine, this whole year has been about recalibration.
Federico Malatesta
Right.
Kenny Lange
What worked for me leading up to this year was no longer sufficient. I couldn’t continue it. I couldn’t hold up that identity any longer. Some of this has been a rediscovery of myself: things I put to the side because I thought, this is not how a professional acts, this is not what an entrepreneur does, this is not what a coach should say or be like. I took on a whole bunch of other identities and ignored my own. I think that’s the part so many of us start butting up against, to the point where I almost feel like if somebody were to re-engage with me, I’d have to say, “You’re about to meet a new Kenny. The Kenny you met before, and maybe hired, is no longer here.”
It’s been hard for me, because I’m in the middle of it, trying to figure it out. And sometimes it feels compounded by interacting with people I’ve known and developed relationships with as what I might consider the old me, a previous version of me, and now I’ve got to interact with them here, and that can feel jarring. I don’t want to upset them. I don’t want to be rude or aloof.
How do you help leaders navigate through that? I know you have your book, They Are Lying to You, about the self-help phenomenon we live in, which you and I both try to rail against in one way, shape or form. But how do leaders transition, like your client Claire, to where they say, something new has to emerge, or maybe something old that I had stuffed down needs to bubble back up? And how can you do that in a way that’s helpful for you, knowing you can’t stop the whole world just to process it?
Federico Malatesta
A few things. First, what you were saying about how other people react to you. The first thing is to consider that this is a very natural phenomenon, because our brains are predictive. We always create a prediction of what is about to happen, because it’s much more efficient in terms of the brain’s use of energy. So people have put you in boxes based on certain categories, and they’re going to keep using these boxes, not because they’re bad people, not because they have strange ideas about the relationship, but simply because it’s more efficient for their brain at that point in time. Soon they will realize there is a mismatch between what they’re predicting and what they’re seeing, and it takes time to recalibrate. So the first thing I would say is that it’s helpful to tell yourself: people are doing what people do. It’s not personal. We often say, “Oh, they are this way with me,” but it’s a general trait of how our brains operate.
The second is that we are always changing. There are elements which are pretty constant, but there are elements that change all the time, whether we recognize it or not. Sometimes we recognize changes only when something particular happens, and then we realize how long this process has been going on. It’s not something where you say, “Oh, today I’m different.” There is something lingering, and it comes up, and this is our unconscious telling us, “Watch out here. Be careful about this. Think about that.” It takes time to understand what our unconscious tells us.
And finally, what you were saying about making a decision. You author the decision, taking into account what you are feeling, what you are experiencing, and that is a very important process. Not everyone can do it by themselves. Sometimes we need contact and contrast to make these things come to life more fully. But we still have to author it. When you’re saying, “Look, I am something different now, something is changing,” you are helping yourself, bringing this to light and making sure that it is at the forefront. And that is critical.
Kenny Lange
So, by communicating that with someone: “I know in the past I may have done things this way or sounded this way, but I don’t think that serves me any longer, and I’m trying to change that about myself, or set it aside and no longer show up that way.” You are also helping yourself with that very change. Is that what you’re saying?
Federico Malatesta
That’s exactly right. You often hear, again from self-help and self-development: surround yourself with people who think like you; you’re the sum of the five people closest to you. Nonsense. There’s no science behind this. What matters is finding someone who has your interest at heart, but who also has the possibility to challenge you. So if you say something outlandish, they can say, “I think that’s BS, honestly,” and they give you a perspective that you cannot have by yourself, because we only have one perspective: ours.
Kenny Lange
Right.
Federico Malatesta
We can enlarge our perspective. One of my biggest recommendations to people, when they ask what they can do for self-improvement, is to read good fiction, because by reading good fiction we look at the world through somebody else’s eyes. We feel like them. It’s the same with having somebody who tells you, “I don’t see it that way.” You don’t have to agree with them, but you take their perspective into account, and that matters.
All of these exercises, like journaling and so forth, might have their place sometimes, but they’re solipsistic exercises. It’s you and yourself, telling stories to yourself about yourself. There is no contrast with reality, no impact of reality on your thoughts. Only when you have somebody who challenges you can you say, “Okay, I hadn’t thought of it this way.”
Kenny Lange
I like that. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but none of us exist in a vacuum, right? Anything I might change about myself, good or bad, is going to impact the relationships closest to me, the strangers I’m going to meet today. We’re all so interconnected, and we desperately need to get closer to reality. There’s a scripture in the New Testament that says we see through a glass dimly, speaking about the fact that we don’t see reality as it is. We see reality through the lens of our own solo perspective, and it’s only through interactions with others that we can start to get a clearer picture of what actually is, not just what we perceive it to be. And that’s complicated, because people are messy. Relationships are messy. Leadership would be easy if it weren’t for all these people.
Federico Malatesta
Yes. The most difficult team is always the team.
Kenny Lange
Yeah.
Federico Malatesta
You’re absolutely spot on. If you think about the definition of identity, identity is something that grows with others and through others. We don’t develop our identity by ourselves. If you grow up in a family and everybody tells you, “Oh my God, you’re so intelligent, you’re so good,” and you go to school and people say, “Oh, he’s so intelligent,” you develop the identity of somebody who is intelligent because of what other people recognize you as. You might do something by yourself and say, “I was pretty good,” but that’s a small part. If you go out and everybody says, “Oh, he’s ugly, he’s not good-looking,” that matters to you. That’s how you see yourself. We always see ourselves through others. Not exclusively, but mostly.
So to think that we can change by ourselves, alone, with a five-second rule, is absurd. We can only change with other people, together with other people. Which is why this idea of Let Them is, let me try to find a euphemism here, moronic. It looks at a relationship as two separate parts sending information, but that’s not a relationship. A relationship is something that impacts you as you are in it, and impacts the other person, which then impacts you, and so forth. Then there’s the famous Harvard study that looked at happiness and the good life over 70 years and said, “We found out that the most important thing is relationships.” And you’re like, “No shit.”
Kenny Lange
Right.
Federico Malatesta
Taking a few pointers from 3,000 years ago would have helped.
Kenny Lange
What then, though? I’m with you on this: we change with others and through others. Is there a place, and if so where, for clarifying your own thoughts and how you would like to see yourself? Let’s say you tell me, “Kenny, you look like you fell off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down,” but my wife tells me, “You’re okay looking.” Where is the ownership of my own identity, where I say, “I don’t think everybody is right”? Somewhere in the middle there’s probably some reality, but I can’t just take everything everyone says to me and say, “They’re on the outside looking in, that’s the marketplace, that’s reality.”
How do you balance what you let affect you, or shape your perception of reality, against wanting to sit, maybe meditate, reflect on the conversations I’ve had, see where the truth is, and hold to that even in the face of somebody telling me I’m never going to be anything, that I’m lazy and a loser? You’ve got to have some resilience about yourself to go make something of yourself. Where is there a place for that?
Federico Malatesta
Two things here. The first one is to go back to this idea of phronesis, which is the judgment of the moment, of the situation and of the people in the situation. That judgment changes over time and in different situations. If your best friend tells you something, you cannot equate it with a comment on Facebook. You have to have the judgment to say these are not the same things, and therefore I should not absorb this information in the same way.
The other thing is that the complexity of life is that you don’t have an answer. The act of living is moving forward under uncertainty and assuming responsibility, which is what I also call leadership. In life you don’t know exactly how much introspection you need, how much you need other people, how much reflection alone, with the family, with your friends. And the same is true for leaders. Should I buy the new company? Should I expand the market? Only very seldom are there obvious answers. Most of the time you don’t know, but you still make the decision. And if it doesn’t work, you regroup and you take another decision. You think about something and you say, “Maybe I haven’t thought about this enough. That’s okay, I made a mistake. I’ll go back and think about it more.” Maybe next time you think about it too much.
Kenny Lange
Right.
Federico Malatesta
It’s a question of adjusting. I think of it like driving on ice. You’re always adjusting a little bit. You cannot do too much on one side or the other, otherwise you go off the road. You have to make these micro-adjustments. I see life in the same way.
Kenny Lange
Gotcha. I really like that. Can you say that definition of leadership again? Moving forward under uncertainty…
Federico Malatesta
Moving forward under uncertainty, assuming responsibility. And all three elements matter.
Kenny Lange
Can you break down those elements? I feel like I’ve heard and read each of them in books and podcasts, but not in relationship to one another. That part sounds unique to me.
Federico Malatesta
Okay. Moving forward, because leaders move forward. The etymology of “to lead” is to take a step forward. So if you don’t move forward, you’re not a leader. You might be the most charming team member. You might make everyone happy about what you do. But if you don’t move forward, you’re not a leader. It’s not a judgment, it’s not an accusation, but leaders move forward.
We went from the Jack Welch type of leadership, “I am the best, I know everything, I do everything myself, you’re just an idiot,” to what I sometimes call LinkedIn leadership, where we all love each other, we all have to listen to everything everyone says, and we’re all in this together. That’s a commune. That’s not leadership.
Kenny Lange
Right.
Federico Malatesta
So that’s the first element. There has to be the movement forward, the decision.
Kenny Lange
Yeah.
Federico Malatesta
The second is under uncertainty, because you never have perfect information, by definition. It’s like Anthropic now: is this the right time to do an IPO? You just don’t know. You can make a lot of arguments for and a lot of arguments against. You just don’t know. Should I release the new model? Again, the same. And it applies to our personal life: should I marry that person? You don’t know.
Kenny Lange
That flies in the face of the certainty that we as people crave, and wrongfully demand of others, and it leads to frustration. That makes a lot of sense.
Federico Malatesta
Exactly. And the third thing is assuming responsibility, which is as important as the other two. Why? Because if I make a decision and you pay but I don’t, it’s very easy for me to take a lot of risk. We can take a number of examples in business, in politics, in various areas of life. Taking bold decisions when nothing happens to you and the price is paid by somebody else is not leadership. You have to be accountable for the decisions you take. It has to fall on you, which is what happens in real life. If you marry someone and it doesn’t work out, you’re accountable for it; both parties are equally accountable.
Kenny Lange
That’s so good. That is going to sit with me after we close up: the intersection of those three. I end up hearing a lot more about the middle one, the face of uncertainty, and I end up challenging that with a lot of my clients. They say, “Yeah, but I have to know that this is going to work.” And I say, “Who told you you were supposed to know that? Who entitled you to that level of certainty? None of us have it.” I’m not saying it’s not natural or understandable to want it, but who told you you get it? And some people say, “Fine, I don’t want uncertainty, but if this doesn’t work out, my hands are clean.” There’s a tension in that which I think is really unique.
I think top leaders probably start to understand it. I find a lot of people who’ve never held a position of leadership really struggle with it, which is why they say, “If I was so-and-so, if I was the CEO, if I was the president…” And I’m like, look, you can barely manage your own life. You think you can manage a country? Good luck. That doesn’t mean I’m giving a glowing endorsement to any president we’ve ever had, but I know enough to know I’ve never had to manage something that oversaw 330 to 400 million people.
Federico Malatesta
And if you think also about business, about the way business has evolved, especially in the US and Western Europe over the last 30 or 40 years, assuming responsibility has gone, because CEOs usually get such sweet packages that no matter what, if they make huge mistakes, if the stock price tanks, they’re still fine. If you look at the compensation of some major CEOs against their stock price performance, it’s an absolutely inverse correlation. So what incentive do you have to be careful with your decisions if you’re well off anyway? If things go bad, you get your 20 million package and you’re gone. Think of Neumann, the guy from WeWork. It was an absolute financial disaster, and he walked away with half a billion dollars.
Kenny Lange
Which is probably why founders, early on, are different: every decision impacts whether or not I’m keeping the lights on, paying the rent. I believe the word entrepreneur comes from a French word, entreprendre, which means something like to assume risk. And some of these CEOs in publicly traded companies, or even very large private corporations, have divorced the risk from leadership. But I think risk is inherent in leadership.
Federico Malatesta
And it’s the same thing in our personal life. Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher of the 1930s, had an incredibly sharp picture of life as something that is becoming. What he was saying is that what matters is not where you are now. You are where you are, and there are constraints to where you are. But there is the possibility of life, and the fact that you can fail gives meaning to those possibilities, because if they were written already, they would not be as meaningful.
Kenny Lange
That’s so good. If you couldn’t fail, then success would be meaningless. That goes back to what you were saying about being a collection of stories, story-driven creatures. So much in marketing, like Donald Miller and StoryBrand, and the hero’s journey with Joseph Campbell, is based on this: if there are no stakes, the adventure means nothing. Like you said about fiction: if you’re not facing certain death, if we don’t defuse the bomb, or the president dies, or if we don’t get this ring back, all hell is going to break loose and evil will rule the land. If there are no stakes, there’s really no incentive for us to keep going, to try, to risk. And ultimately, because of this show and the work you and I are in, there’s no incentive to really lead.
Federico Malatesta
Exactly. In the same way, people often misunderstand when they read, especially philosophy. For example, what Nietzsche said about authenticity. What he meant is that finding yourself is finding what you can become, but you don’t know what you can become. It’s in the actual finding. It’s not excavating inside to find a perfect nucleus that was there all along. And that is the key difference between self-help and a real understanding of how life operates: going out, authoring our own life, taking risks in doing that, to find what is there, what can be there. Not trying to find, “Oh, I am only here, in this box, and I’m going to stay in this box for the rest of my life.”
Kenny Lange
Right. It’s taking hold of the agency that we have to see something, know something, make a decision. It’s not deterministic, it’s not fatalistic. There could be tendencies, there are statistics, there are all sorts of things, but there are outliers to everything and branches within everything. You are not bound to some future state. You have a say in it. Other people do as well, right? Getting back to what you were saying about relationships and connections: someone could fire you, someone could hire you, someone could give you a million dollars, someone could take your last cent. But you’re not helpless. It’s not just happening to you; it’s happening with you and through you, and you can influence those things as well. We could go off on a whole other rabbit trail about quantum physics and entanglement. I’ve been on a kick this year reading books on that and what it means for us practically, not just staring out into the stars or watching Interstellar, one of the finest movies ever, with a great soundtrack.
But Federico, if a listener has made it this far and they’re hooked in, saying, “Wow, this has challenged some of my thinking,” or, “This has spoken to something I’ve already been sensing inside, and I think this is the direction I need to go in,” and they want to take a baby step towards, I almost want to say towards reality, which feels like a big question, but towards this agency in their identity, in their becoming, in the next 24 hours, spending little to no money, what would you tell them to do?
Federico Malatesta
First, there’s no reason to spend money on it. Whatever you can buy is not going to help you at this stage. So that’s the first thing: keep the money. Second, think about what is troubling you. Try to express in real language what you’re thinking, and then find someone and tell them. Find someone who, as you were saying before, can push back if necessary, or can give you a different perspective, or can say, “Well, yeah, I think it’s a great idea,” if they actually mean it. Find somebody who means it. Don’t ask ChatGPT, because ChatGPT will tell you you’re a genius. Find a real person who likes you, loves you, and can say, “I don’t know. I don’t think you’re going to make it against Mike Tyson at Madison Square Garden.”
Kenny Lange
Right. I like that. If you want to ask me, I’ll tell you you’re a genius, but I’m going to say it sarcastically.
Federico Malatesta
And the other part is that, having said all of this, you also have to apply judgment. If I were to tell this person, “I’m going to run the 100 meters in 9.3 seconds,” being a very slow person, I have to be realistic. There’s no chance I can do that, no matter how much I alter my life. This is why you need some perspective.
Kenny Lange
That’s so good. If somebody says, “That sounds great, I’d love to do that, I’m going to follow up on it,” but maybe they have some follow-up questions, things we didn’t cover today, or they want to know more about your book or your work, where do they find you? How do they connect? What are all the places and links we should know about?
Federico Malatesta
They can find me at my first name and last name, federicomalatesta.com. All the information about my work is there. I write on Substack and LinkedIn; they can find me there too. The book is titled They Are Lying to You: The Self-Help Delusion, and it’s probably the widest-ranging analysis of self-help and of all the problems that come from listening to a world made of routines, protocols, and people who misunderstand Eastern philosophy and reduce it to a cookie cutter.
Kenny Lange
Absolutely, and we are going to link all of that up. Go follow Federico in all those places, LinkedIn, Substack. Go check out the book, and be prepared to have a lot of your own beliefs, understandings and conceptions challenged, and let that be okay. And then reach out if you have further questions. Federico, this was a phenomenal conversation. I feel like we could talk for hours about so many different things, and not just good Texas barbecue. Maybe we should do that next time. We’re going to do it over barbecue.
Federico Malatesta
That’s going to be interesting. We’ll have to edit lots of bits: “Get your fingers out of your mouth, Kenny.” Thank you so much, Kenny. It was a wonderful conversation. We have to do this again.
Kenny Lange
Absolutely, I would love to do that.
The ideas in this conversation
A summary of the concepts raised, in the order they came up.
- 01A problem about life is not a technical problemWhen you cannot say why something keeps you awake, there is a reason you cannot access. A technique applied to it is a thumb on a leaking faucet: the water stops for a second while the pressure builds.
- 02Poiesis and praxisAristotle separated poiesis, making something toward an end goal, from praxis, action done for its own sake. Life is praxis, so a protocol, a routine or a three-step solution applied to the trouble of living is a categorical error.
- 03Sport is a bad metaphor for lifeIn sport you can say who won and by how much. In life you cannot, and most of what drives us is unconscious, so a life cannot be analyzed like a game.
- 04PhronesisPractical wisdom: judgment of what matters at this moment, in this situation, with these people. It includes the judgment that something has served you well so far and no longer does.
- 05Stories that sunsetWe are collections of stories that serve us for a period and are then replaced. Tramontare is an ending that comes slowly, like a sunset. Most endings come abruptly instead, because people want one more fight.
- 06People keep you in the old boxesOthers go on predicting the person you were. It is not personal, and it takes time for them to notice the mismatch and recalibrate.
- 07You author the changeChange is noticed late and comes partly from the unconscious, but the decision is still authored by you, often with someone else’s contact and contrast.
- 08Someone who can challenge youNot five people who think like you, but someone who has your interest at heart and can tell you when you are wrong. Good fiction widens perspective; journaling on its own stays solipsistic.
- 09Identity grows through othersWe see ourselves mostly through what others recognize in us. Changing alone, with a five-second rule or by letting others be, misunderstands what a relationship is.
- 10Leadership in three elementsMoving forward under uncertainty, assuming responsibility. Leaders move forward; information is never perfect; and the decision has to fall on the person who takes it.
- 11Risk divorced from leadershipWhere executives are protected whatever the outcome, the third element disappears, and with it the incentive to decide carefully.
- 12Possibility and failureFollowing Heidegger, the fact that you can fail is what gives possibilities their meaning. Finding yourself is finding what you can become, not excavating a core that was there all along.
- 13A first step in the next 24 hoursSpend nothing. Put what is troubling you into plain words and tell a real person who can push back. Not ChatGPT, which will tell you you are a genius. Then apply judgment about what is realistic.
Key terms
- Poiesis
- Aristotle’s term for making: an activity aimed at an end outside itself, such as a table or a healed patient.
- Praxis
- Aristotle’s term for action done for its own sake, where the activity is the doing. Life belongs here.
- Phronesis
- Practical wisdom: judgment of the moment, the situation and the people in it. It cannot be replaced by a routine.
- Tramontare
- Italian, to set, as the sun sets. Change as completion: allowing a phase to end rather than holding on for one more fight.
What you find here is a very summarized version of a longer argument, not an exhaustive explanation. If you want to find out more, contact me at info@federicomalatesta.com.
Where this comes from
Out Now
They Are Lying to You
The Self-Help Delusion
Learn more about the book