Outliers & Flight

If you’ve read the previous pages, you already know the theme: serious people don’t usually need more information. They need a place to tell the truth, see the pattern, and move toward suitability without doing it alone.

This page is the same idea, told through a story many outliers never quite forget.

Some people read Jonathan Livingston Seagull in high school and moved on.

If you are here, you probably did not.

Something in that slim book stayed with you: the bird who cared less about scavenging and more about precise flight; the sense of being quietly exiled for wanting more than the flock wanted; the teacher who appears not with fireworks, but with patient, repeated practice; the moment when the student realizes the real lesson was never to become “special,” only to become fully himself.

You may not think of yourself as that bird. You have degrees, credentials, a mortgage, colleagues, perhaps a family. You go to meetings, answer emails, sign documents, navigate politics. Yet beneath all of that, the familiar tension remains: you did not come this far only to coast. You also did not come this far to sell your conscience to a series of quarterly updates and performance reviews.

You are, in your own way, an outlier with a tidy LinkedIn profile.

The flock you never quite joined

Most of the people who find this practice look, from the outside, like solid members of the professional flock: serious university, hard discipline, professional qualification, respectable firm, demanding city. They did everything the grown-ups recommended.

The inner story feels different.

You sit in rooms where everyone is clever and busy, and you still feel slightly mis-placed. The conversations skim across the surface. The work is competent. The jokes are fine. The lunches are fine. You are not in crisis.

You are just not fully there.

The part of you that loves precision, depth, moral weight, and real craft feels half-engaged, like a strong bird flying with one wing folded.

Many people try to fix that feeling by doing what they’ve always done: more courses, more designations, more responsibility. It helps for a while. Each new level gives a temporary rush. Then the noise of the flock returns and the circle closes again.

No one calls this problem by name at work. The word for it, here, is mis-suitability: a respectable, externally approved life that quietly does not fit the person living it.

The other race: learning how you actually fly

In Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the race is not about collecting badges. The race is to notice the limits you’ve quietly accepted, then practise beyond them with care.

That is the race many of my clients find themselves in, often around mid-career.

You already know how to work ridiculous hours. You already know how to grind through lonely study. You already know how to carry pressure and scrutiny.

The missing piece is not stamina or intelligence. The missing piece is learning how you actually fly, in your own sky, with your conscience intact, and with anchors strong enough to hold when conditions change.

This work is rarely dramatic. It looks like questions you’ve learned to ignore:

• When do I feel most awake in my current work, even for an hour?

• Where does my intensity actually help, and where does it scorch the field?

• Which expectations belong to me, and which belong to the flock that raised me?

• If I stopped trying to impress people I do not respect, what would change first?

You don’t answer questions like these in a weekend. You circle them. You try small experiments. You pull back when fear spikes. You lean in when something feels quietly right.

Suitable lives are usually built in millimetres, not grand declarations.

Teachers, not saviours

Every outlier in that book finds, at some point, a teacher: someone who can already do what the outlier longs to do, and who refuses to treat him as broken or special. The teacher does not rescue the student. The teacher points, corrects, encourages, and eventually steps aside.

That is roughly how I see my role in this practice.

I am not here to blow up your career or to drag you into mine. I am not here to tell you that you were “meant” to be an entrepreneur, or a board member, or a partner.

I am here to sit with you while you notice what the flock trained you to ignore, and to stay alongside you while you test small, suitable changes in the real world.

Sometimes those changes are almost invisible from the outside: one conversation held sooner, one boundary drawn, one role declined, one evening used for sleep rather than more screen time. Sometimes they are large: leaving a firm, moving cities, renegotiating a marriage, walking away from work that pays extremely well and quietly harms you.

My contribution is not a blueprint. My contribution is a mix of experience, pattern recognition, and stubborn respect for your agency. You decide. You act. You live with the consequences. I help you see more clearly, think more slowly, and trust the part of you that already knows when something is right or wrong for you, even when logic and fear argue otherwise.

Outliers still need a sky

One lie highly educated outliers often swallow is that because they are “different,” they should be able to navigate alone. The reality is harsher and kinder at the same time.

Yes, you are responsible for your own flying. No one else can do the practice for you.

But you still need big skies.

You need at least one place where you can speak without performing. One relationship where the listener knows your world well enough that you do not have to translate every acronym, every code word, every stakes-loaded decision. One conversation where your doubts and your conscience carry as much weight as your résumé.

That is the purpose of this practice.

Not to turn you into a different kind of bird. Not to drag you away from serious work.

To give you a quiet, rigorous space where you can be fully seen, tell the truth, and move toward a more suitable life without doing it alone.

If any part of you read Jonathan Livingston Seagull and thought, “I recognize myself and I do not know what to do about that,” then this page is simply a way of saying: you are not imagining things. You are not alone. And you are allowed, even now, to learn a different way to fly.

I’m obsessed with leadership because the world is under-led and the baton is already being passed. Many of the most suitable people hesitate, not from laziness, but from conscience, exhaustion, or a refusal to play politics. I help reluctant leaders step forward without borrowing a persona, without chasing volume, and without turning into perfectionist micromanagers. Leadership is learnable. The people I work with excel at learning. My role is to be a steady, private confidant so you can lead in your own style and move toward roles that fit, without doing it alone.