Lead to Unite: Visions of Value on a Business School Trip

By Tony Cates

What is the relationship between trust and empathy?

That was it: the question. My metaphorical red pill. My ticket into Wonderland. The doorway to freedom. An essay prompt that would help clarify my understanding of everything. Intentional or not, my professor gave me both the confidence to be my most authentic self and the cha

• Language: English
• Publisher: 7 Trips Productions
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798989118014

Book preview

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LEAD TO UNITE. Copyright © 2023 by Tony Cates. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

First Edition

Book Cover by Aleksandar Milosavljevic.

ISBN: 979-8-9891180-1-4

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For my parents,

who believed in the vision from day one.

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When a person decides to be themselves they offer something no one else can be.

—Curtis 50 Cent Jackson

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.APPLICATIONS AND DISORIENTATIONS

2.THE DARK SIDE OF LEADERSHIP

3.OUR BIGGEST PROBLEM

4.THE DIVERSITY PARADOX

5.THE DIVERSITY PARADOX PT 2

6.LEONIDAS AT THE PARK

7.MUSIC THAT MAKES THEM DANCE

8.THE POSTER

9.THE LAST ESSAY

GRADUATION

OPENING

Inhale. Exhale. I close my eyes and sink deeper into my chair.

Did I tell you I’ve started doing a deep breathing exercise? I guess you already know though. All of it, right? I mean, how couldn’t you? You were there for the whole thing. I guess I’m still just getting used to all of this. I’d like to explain it though—all of it—if that’s alright with you. It helps me process everything that happened. It helps me focus my mind and organize my thoughts. It keeps me grounded, and on track. It helps me appreciate where I am.

Anyway, I start with a number of deep inhales and easy exhales to elevate both my oxygen and carbon dioxide levels. That’s how you get the highest oxygen saturation. Depleting CO2 while raising O2 doesn’t work—at least not for what I’m going for. Did you know your body releases stem cells when your oxygen level drops low enough? One of the benefits of intermittent hypoxia. And the only way to reach a low enough oxygen level without risking brain damage is to first saturate your cells with as much as you can. And to do that, you need to elevate both oxygen and carbon dioxide levels simultaneously.

Inhale. Exhale. I take another.

My mind tends to wander whenever I do this. Not that it’s a bad thing. I get a lot of new ideas during this wandering. Sometimes I think that’s the whole point. Something about the relaxation opens you to unconventional thoughts and ideas. Something about being in the moment helps bring these thoughts to mind. Something about not thinking fosters new thinking. Something about alpha waves, or stillness, or giving up control, or . . . something.

In order to stumble upon a new idea or connection, you must let your mind go to places it hasn’t gone yet. Relax and let your subconscious drive your thinking for a while. Follow a line of thought your conscious mind is unaccustomed to. Follow it long enough, and you end up at the point your subconscious was guiding you toward the whole time. At least that’s my theory. Is any of this scientifically validated? To be honest, I have no idea. But does it really matter? It’s all just part of the story, giving context to the act.

Anyway, after enough deep breaths I start to feel light-headed. My body starts to tingle. Hands first, and then into my arms and face. This means I’m close to the breath hold. I take one final inhale, hold for a second, let it go, and then hold my breath with my lungs empty as I float off into Neverland. No thoughts. No mind. Just the state said to free your mind from its usual patterns of thought—allowing the thought files to reassemble. New connections. New ideas. Organized and accessible. Or at least that’s the goal. I guess we’ll see how well it actually works. Either way, I like the feeling.

Inhale. Exhale.

What I think about most is my work. I’ve been working on a project, a writing project, a book. A collection of essays reflecting on what happened in grad school—and the repercussions—trying to make sense of it all.

That’s what I’ve been spending this time in isolation doing. Going into my thoughts—into my inner world. Like I’m doing now: thinking. Or . . . unthinking is more like it. My mind sleeps and the words flow. No control. No purpose. Thoughts come out as they want to come out: unfiltered. If they are awkward, or don’t make sense, I don’t care. At least not at first, anyway. The practice is about capturing thoughts fresh, as I think them, rather than trying to reconnect with the ideas after the fact. Remembering something you thought about isn’t the same as thinking it. It never comes out right the second time, don’t you think?

That’s what I’m doing with the book. I am working on getting my thoughts down on paper. Not articulating ideas, but capturing thoughts, unfiltered, as they are being thought. Subjective and raw. From my perspective. Imperfect. Incomplete. Always changing. Always growing and developing. Like snapshots of a river. Lined up and smoothed over in hopes that no one will notice it wasn’t all one long take. Filtered with a hue of grace and confidence to distract from how thoroughly it’s been polluted by the omnipresent fears and anxieties underlying my experience as a human. Looking as if seeing it all for the first time. Opening up and letting it out . . . finally.

On days when I’m really grooving, there is a fluid flow from my mind into my hands, onto the keyboard, and appearing on the screen. The circuit is complete. I lose the separation between my hands and the keyboard. Then, I lose the separation between my mind and my hands. It’s just one continuous flow. My thought becomes words on the screen. There is no resistance differentiating the two. There’s no separation. One continuous, uninhibited process—as if the computer is reading my mind. This is always the best way to write, isn’t it? Nothing beyond the present moment. Pure flow. Sometimes I think it’s the whole point of writing. Is there any better feeling? Flow: the most addictive state. Flow: my drug of choice. I can see it now.

Inhale. Exhale.

I’ve been doing this more and more lately, but with quarantine it’s been inconvenient to do much else. A lot of time spent in isolation. Too much time in isolation and you begin to lose touch with reality. You become disconnected from everyone and everything around you. You become ungrounded. Trapped in your head. Nothing to hold your fantasies in check. They become wilder and more bizarre and surreal and fantastic. There’s no reason to stay where you’re at, so you might as well go further—deeper into your imagination. The world in which you exist. At least that’s what I tell myself. And that’s okay sometimes, isn’t it? To experience things that aren’t really there? To not have it all together the way other people appear to have it all together?

Like when I realized the rules governing my existence were all just shared beliefs inked into our conscious experience. The most foundational truths I believed in were really collective fantasies—social constructs—agreements on what reality is so that we can trust each other enough to cooperate and get things done. Stop believing in these foundational rules of existence and you are considered insane. And no one really trusts an insane person, do they? I mean, how can you empathize with someone whose paradigm of reality falls that far outside of your own?

Like the project. The project is my interpretation of reality. My inner world externalized. My subjective truth shaped through the countless cognitive biases distorting my worldview so convincingly it never even registers in my conscious awareness. I can’t help but know—with absolute certainty—that the way I see and experience reality is, in fact, how reality is. But does that mean we’re all somehow incorrectly interpreting an objective world? Or that any idea of subjects and objects are merely overlays clouding direct experience? I don’t know. It freaks me out if I think about it too much. So, yes, they are my thoughts, but can we really trust our own thoughts? That’s why I need to capture them as they are happening. Memories are never perfect. They’re all embellished into whatever we’d like them to be.

Inhale. Exhale.

Perhaps that’s why we can’t all get along. This difference in worldviews. This gap. This incomprehensibility of the self-serving nature of our own belief systems. Isn’t that what causes all of our problems anyway? Losing sight of the degree to which we manipulate any idea of objective reality into whatever we are subjectively experiencing. Believing we are right about an issue because it is our opinion and we are the one who formed it. Which means it’s this certainty of our own subjective experience that leads to the ideological conflict so rampant in the world today. These conflicts represent the deepest crevices in the certainty of how humans experience the world.

We craft our worldviews based on the information we receive, and the information we receive comes from the information we look for—the information we value. That whole buy-a-new-car-and-start-seeing-it-everywhere type of thing. Which, isn’t that why social media has taken so much heat lately? Something about deliberately shaping consumers’ reality by showing them only certain types of information in order to manipulate their behavior. Only we’ve all been doing this all the time anyway. We just can’t see the extent to which we do it to ourselves. In which case, wouldn’t that make social media just a longer lever to the fulcrum of the human psyche—magnifying our innate human nature, including the parts of ourselves that we don’t like, the parts we hide from conscious awareness so we can go on living in our own fictional interpretation of reality?

And if everything is just an interpretation of reality, is there any way to conclude what reality actually is? Science is attempting to figure that out but is limited to only that which can be measured and reproduced. Measurements are inherently limited, existing only as a description of reality, never reality itself. All we really know to be true is what we are experiencing here and now, this moment. The direct experience, free from the confines of the story we impose on it. Like when you take a breath and your focus is on the breath . . . Oh yeah . . .

Inhale. Exhale.

But wouldn’t that mean language is a symbolic representation of this direct experience as well? An attempt at capturing the dynamic flow of life with static analogies? Like trying to hold water in a net. Words depicting a conceptual understanding of something, representative of that something yet never quite the same as what they are intended to represent. Always disconnected. Always somewhere else. A simulation of reality, never reality itself.

Books represent this simulation of the author’s reality. The reader experiences reality the way I experienced it while I wrote. Or at least as close to that as I can get. That’s why it’s important to capture these thoughts as they come out. That’s why it’s important not to think too much when I’m writing and not to edit too much when I’m done. Here are little snippets of my experience. My past experiences being captured as I am experiencing them. As I am remembering them. As I am interpreting them for you. Allowing our realities to merge. Making reading an altered state of consciousness. Your