THE GODS OF
(x)
We don’t believe in the gods.
We believe in what made them worth remembering.
Not Olympus or thunderbolts.
The forces of who they were.
Curiosity. illumination. Gravity.
Discernment. Presence. Truth. Chaos.
Our work took us deep inside those powers.
Not the myths. The science. The traits.
What made the gods godlike.
The labs we run—what the gods
would call crucibles—are the
science and soul of those traits.
Moved from myth to method into
Monday’s big meeting.
Legend into language. Symbolism into strategy.
What the gods called power.
What we call practice.
The gods of ego..
When mortals or gods have egos, bad things happen.
Nearly half of 8,000 people said ego wrecks something good at work at least weekly.
And steals about 10% of revenue.
The gods of capitalism are not happy.


1. Play big, stay small.
What breaks.
Most people think confidence comes from experience, talent, belief. It doesn’t—at least not under pressure.
In the moment, our nervous system skips the résumé. It runs the wiring. And if that wiring is wrong—if it’s fed by ego or built on past success—you don’t rise. You lock up.
And power? It rewires relevance. Titles, IQ, and status quiet the empathy circuits. You don’t even notice you’re off. Everyone else—markets, clients, teams—does.
What we build.
We tested it. In a high-pressure task, people primed with humility outperformed those primed with confidence by 17%. Why? Because humility doesn’t fake certainty. It stays responsive. Ego gets rigid. Insecurity fades.
Old confidence models say competence feeds confidence—get good, get confident.
If that were true, the most experienced people would be the most unshakable. They’re not.
Confidence built on past success collapses when the future stops matching it.
Watch the competitive power of play big, stay small.
Let’s see if it fits in 15 mins. No pitch.
Powers v.
Counterfeits.
Is this bulletproof logic—
or burying ingenuity under a flood of “facts?”
Building something brilliant—
or just something different? Again.
Moving at speed and scale—
or just hustling to feed a metric machine?
Aligned—or just alike?
Is killing this project smart—
or just appeasing the cautious?
Grinding through resistance—
or just ignoring the brutal facts?
Are you trusted or just obeyed?
Law one gets inside the moment powers go
rogue and no one notices.
One belief at a time. Once behavior at a time.
PRESSURE
on the trip from point a to z
Bends powers.
Sometimes it twists them into opposites—
speaking up switches to silence.
But the real threat is counterfeits.
They look like a power, feel like power.
But they don’t land like a power.


2. Wake the incurious, See the invisible.
What breaks.
Most leaders think they’re reading the room. They’re actually projecting onto it.
They don’t notice the shift. They just feel certain—and certainty sells. Especially under pressure.
But pressure distorts input. In one study, something as small as the texture of a chair changed how people judged power and trust—without realizing it.
The brain doesn’t report distortion. It reports clarity.
And the worse news? Familiarity makes it worse. The more you “know” someone, the less you check. The more confident your read, the more wrong you tend to be.
In our data set—8,000+ participants—most organizations reward answers, not questions. And when expertise outranks curiosity, the smartest people in the room go blind first.
What we build.
Law Two builds pattern interrupters—people who notice the drop, the dodge, the word that was almost said or no one questions.
People who don’t get unnerved by ambiguity—they hold it. And when they speak, they don’t clean it up. They expose the fault line.
This isn’t just curiosity-as-virtue. It’s undivided attention that holds under pressure.
The skill isn’t asking more questions. It’s asking the one question that breaks the script.
The intensity of curiosity in our culture is: *From our 8,374 person, 477 team culture and chemistry survey.


3. Seed hurricanes, hunt for truth.
What breaks.
Most rooms are built to avoid storms.
People showcase. Agree too fast. Protect. Friction gets labeled dysfunction. Curiosity gets filtered for tone. Approval becomes the goal. And when everyone’s nodding, no one’s leading.
Smart people shut down the truth by accident—because the more intelligent we are, the more polished our spin.
We don’t even know we’re resisting. We just say things like: “Let’s take that offline.” “It’s not the right forum.” “Can we reframe this later?”
Creative friction dies. Real insight never enters the room.
What we build.
Law Three builds truth-seekers under tension.
The ones who don’t just tolerate conflict—they know how to use it. They provoke. Not for ego. For a signal.
They listen past the surface. They ask the question no one else will touch. They don’t spin. They pull.
And when the room gets tight they don’t back off because they know the truth isn’t discovered gently.
You have to jolt it in.
If someone goes a little against the grain to get to the “truth,” they get: *From our 8,374 person, 477 team culture and chemistry survey.

The elements of HUMAN
gravity.
Watch how we built it. And how to build yours.
WE RUN
CRUCIBLES.
Not L&D-sanitized workshops.
We’re not skill stackers or module makers.
Live experiments and films
you feel in your bones.
Rewiring instincts built for
speed, scale, ambiguity, chaos.
Real-time dialogue and debate
for high-intensity work that
breathes and bites back.
This is not leadership content from a museum.
This is built for the work of
X.
We don’t just teach laws of gravity.
We forge them.
Crucible (n.): a place where concentrated forces interact to cause or influence change.
Deeper gravity, faster
impact.
Modern work is a sprint from one job or project to the next. Chemistry needs speed.
Clients improve the way they work at twice the speed of typical training. That’s because we start at the root of behavior: mentality.
How much better everyone gets at dialogue and debate, creative thinking, climbing steep learning curves, opening minds, solving wicked problems, etc.
effective
immediately.
37%>
Culture growth clients report.
120
Months in research, writing and building labs.
4.78/5
Rating of hard raters and smart skeptics.
14&50
Languages and countries published.
231K
People taught across the world, ballpark.
8,000/200
People surveyed/interviewed in our study.
microsoft lockheed sekisui house accor hotels boston scientific kla baptist healthcare bny mellon halliburton adobe logitech
microsoft lockheed sekisui house accor hotels boston scientific kla baptist healthcare bny mellon halliburton adobe logitech
Power in your bones to CHANGE THE ATMOSPHERE.
These moments feel singular. They’re not.
Breakdowns have a shape.
So do breakthroughs.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Tap the X to see what most people miss
and what reverses it.
Spaced out.
Space Project | Silicon Valley| Q3
A $1.2B satellite on the line. Jon was 25. First job. He broke the silence, questioned the model, didn’t back down. His fix saved $200 million. What he really changed? The way the rocket scientists think about science.
Big five, big table, big pitch.
CTO War Room | Q4
A Big Five firm brought a tech stack, three platforms, and an 80-slide deck. Someone on the client side finally said, “This solves for scale. It doesn’t solve for us.” Silence. The deck cleared. Then clarity. The room rebuilt itself in real time—whiteboard only.
Unfounded.
Founder Offsite | Brooklyn | Q1
One founder walked in with a corporate identity crisis disguised as a roadmap. She walked out having dismantled her pitch, realigned her board, and rewritten the story her team was afraid to say out loud.