On Leadership and Leadership-Adjacent Things, April 2026

Leadership sucks. It is not strategy, not vision, not charisma. At its most basic it is sacrifice: whoever leads absorbs costs that would otherwise land on the people around them. That sacrifice is the job but the trap is stopping there — if absorbing cost is all you do, you become a single point of failure, the center of “everything,” and the moment you step back, the whole thing around you collapses. “Real” leadership is still that same willingness to carry weight, but pointed at a further goal: you develop the people around you until they can lead on their own, carry weight themselves, step up without waiting for permission, and keep what you started building standing after you are gone.

This harsher, fuller definition explains why so many people avoid it. Why would you sign up to carry cost AND invest in others when you could just carry cost and be the hero? Or better yet, not carry anything at all? The hours can be long and thankless. The decisions are constant and the emotional weight does not clock out when you do. If things go right, you are okay, if things go wrong, you might get to be a villain in someone’s perspective. And the return of leadership, when there is one, is almost never proportional to what it cost you to produce it. You can pour yourself into something for years and the outcome might be invisible, or delayed, or credited to someone else, or just enough to keep things from falling apart, which nobody notices because the whole point was that it did not fall apart. Leadership is so hard and can be so shitty for the person who does it, that just running away from it makes sense. I get it. I’ve run away from leadership my fair share of times. At home, at work, out in the public, sometimes I just literally run away, I get it.

I also understand when some people take the title and seem to be leading but redirect the costs back onto others. They think they are sleek: I am going to be a “leader” but I am going to exploit and profit off of it. I do challenge the notion that those types are leaders. They are called that, but there has to be a better word for them. So yeah, this loaded essay is about the type of leadership that absorbs cost and effort so others do not have to, and that builds others up so they can lead alongside you. This essay is not about the leadership that extracts anything and everything else so they never have to. Both types call themselves leaders, but only one is.

Leadership is on all of us, always. You are responsible for it in your environments, just as I am in mine. Or we step down and follow someone willing to lead. Following someone’s lead is also part of leadership. But there is a third dimension that neither absorbing cost nor following captures: empowering. Teaching. Modeling. Supporting someone else’s growth until they can lead on their own. A household where only one person can lead is fragile. A team where only one person absorbs ambiguity is a single point of failure. The goal is not one leader surrounded by followers. The goal is a room full of people who can hold it, leadership, when it needs holding.

Leadership is not only an individual thing. It layers outward from the self unto our families, our communities, our systems. I see a failure of leadership or failures of leadership at every single layer of these systems. I think it is so costly to be a leader that it breaks people, and this is not something individuals are architecting, I think it’s systemic. The systems we live inside were built in ways that make real leadership harder and that fake leadership we talked about earlier easier. This leadership crisis I’m calling out today has been mounting for hundreds of years, and it is from the top, endemic, and everywhere I have been able to look. This essay is my attempt to map all of these concepts on leadership, starting with myself, my flaws and wins. We will go outwards, by layers, from the micro and the self, into the macro and unto bigger and broader scales because this leadership crisis operates at the scale of a household and at the scale of a nation. It is in the classroom, the boardroom, the algorithm, the legislature, the family dinner table. I believe the absence of real leadership is so pervasive that we stopped recognizing it as an absence and started accepting it as normal but there’s nothing normal about it. It is an epidemic that nobody named because the people who benefit from the vacuum are the same people who would have to name it.

Turn on the news. Any news. Even the most optimistic broadcast still sits inside a world where wars are launched and the consequences are externalized onto people who never chose them, where politicians make promises that dissolve the moment the election is over, where violence between people is so normalized we debate its frequency instead of its existence.

Our leaders tell us to bear children but where are the laws telling families we have got them covered? Where is the parental leave, the affordable childcare, the housing that does not require two incomes and a miracle? That is one string of an example. There are thousands. The trickle-down never trickles. The safety nets have holes the size of families. And the people who designed the systems are never the ones who fall through them. The leadership crisis is the gap itself: the distance between what leaders are supposed to do and what they actually do. That gap is not a flaw. It is an abysm. And it is so wide that most people have stopped expecting it to close. That gap in leadership looks like a world that postures at sometimes, but generally moves towards the opposite, it’s stunning, baffling and even, disrespectful, I would argue.

The education I received and watched others receive was not designed to build leaders. Let’s be honest. I sat in those classrooms. When I was catalogued a good student, it really meant I was good at following instructions and not asking why. Whenever I stopped following instructions and applied an iota of critical thinking or simply pushed back, I became a “bad student”, sounds familiar? Nobody pulled me aside and said, “Antonio, here is how you think for yourself.” Nobody had to suppress that in me because it was never being cultivated in the first place. These curriculums are designed to produce people who comply and consume. It wasn’t until my first sociology professor in college who popped upon my critical thinking and epistemology for me that I was able to lead the charge and redefine many concepts, such as why education and learning was so important for me to develop as a leader within’ myself and my household, my home. John Taylor Gatto, a thirty-year public school teacher in New York City who won the state’s Teacher of the Year award and then quit on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, spent his career arriving at exactly that conclusion. His book Dumbing Us Down (1992) lays out the argument that compulsory schooling does not accidentally fail to produce independent thinkers because it was built to produce the opposite: people who follow instructions and buy things and do not ask too many questions about who designed the instructions or why. He did not think it was accidental. And if you do not set the environment for something to grow, if you actively design the environment to prevent it, why would you expect it to grow? The system does not just fail to build leaders. It fails to build people who can build leaders. The transmission is broken at nearly every level because people are generally not learning to lead, and only a few are learning to teach and leading others to lead.

And if the system was not designed to build leaders, it is worth asking what it was designed to build. The answer is consumers, it will always be consumers. People who obey, and absorb content instead of producing direction, people who follow feeds instead of setting them. The infrastructure for manufacturing that passivity has been evolving for over a century (much more?), and it has never been more sophisticated than it is right now. Look at what it produces at every scale. At home it could look like a baby watching a screen because daddy wants to doomscroll. That is, and might be surprising to some of you reading this, a leadership decision — not to actively father in that moment, but to passively consume, and to hand the child the same passivity so the consumption can continue undisturbed. At the community level, it is a neighborhood where nobody knows each other’s names because everyone is inside, oriented toward a feed or some binge media consumption, or whatever it is modern humans do nowadays, Tik Toks?, instead of energy and effort toward the people next door, your neighbors. At the corporate level, it is an entire workforce trained to consume directives instead of producing direction, to absorb messaging instead of questioning it, we have seen how this ends over and over throughout history, now more importantly than ever. At the national level, it is a citizenry that consumes political performance — the debate, the headline, the outrage cycle, the fear, the numbness, the hyperindividualism — without ever producing political participation beyond the consumption itself. Passivity manufactured and agency eroded, by design.

The outsourcing of thinking is not new but it has never been this efficient. I can feel it in myself. The pull to let something else do the processing. To open a feed instead of opening a thought. To ask a machine instead of sitting with the question long enough to find my own answer. To endless sit in front of a boxed screen and consume until I’m spent, it’s avoidance, it’s less work, less cost, less energy, less effort. It is a gravitational thing, and fighting it takes actual effort, discipline, and willpower every single time. Culture, clubs, celebrity, algorithm, feed — each one a layer built on top of the last, each one offering you a ready-made identity in exchange for your attention, each one making it a little easier to skip the work of building one yourself. Zygmunt Bauman, the sociologist who spent his career studying what happens to identity when everything becomes liquid and temporary, documented how selfhood became a consumer product long before smartphones existed — a through-line of Consuming Life (2007). People constructing who they are through what they buy rather than through what they build internally or within their communities. Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard professor who spent years mapping the economics of digital platforms, showed in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) how those platforms then industrialized that process — engineering behavior at scale through prediction and behavioral modification, turning Bauman’s consumer identity into a product they could manufacture and sell. And Eli Pariser, the activist who coined the term ‘filter bubble,’ mapped the end result in The Filter Bubble (2011): a personalized feed so narrow that it is effectively thinking for you, confirming what you already believe, closing off what might challenge it.

And now we have “AI,” the quotation marks intentional because what is being marketed as artificial intelligence is pattern-matching at scale, not thinking! Large language models (LLMs) do not reason. They predict language strings and we are outsourcing our thinking to them with the same enthusiasm we outsourced it to the feed, except faster and with more confidence in the output. This is another point of failure of leadership. The irony is that I am using an LLM right now to help me finish off this essay. That is not lost on me because the tool is definitely useful. The danger is the same danger it has always been: that the tool does or leads the work and you never develop the capacity the work was supposed to build. Every paragraph I let a machine draft without wrestling with it myself is a paragraph where I practiced convenience instead of leadership. At home, it is letting the machine write the thank-you note you should have wrestled with yourself, because the wrestling is where the sincerity lives. At work, it is letting the model draft the strategy document and then presenting it as your thinking, when the thinking was the whole point of the exercise. At the institutional level, it is entire organizations replacing human judgment with algorithmic output and calling it efficiency, when what they actually eliminated was the costly, slow, irreplaceable process of a person deciding what matters.

The algorithms generally do not model sacrifice. They model optimization and possibly bias. It will surface Epictetus quotes in your feed — “some things are in your control and some are not” — because the algorithm learned that you engage with that kind of content. But it surfaces it as consumption and not as instruction. You scroll past it and you feel something but you keep scrolling. The Stoic who taught you to act becomes another piece of content that teaches you to sit still and that is the irony at the center of every feed: even the material that should wake you up is delivered in a format designed to keep you asleep. Sacrifice is inherently anti-algorithmic because it reduces personal optimization in service of something external. The feed rewards engagement, confirmation, aspiration, consumption. So the very systems most people are immersed in filter out the one quality that makes leadership possible.

The problem was never leading versus following. It was passive versus intentional. The signal is not missing — David Goggins screams it in Can’t Hurt Me (2018), the Stoics wrote it down two thousand years ago, every contemplative tradition has a version of it. The signal exists but the system you and I are inside does not amplify it. It amplifies the opposite. The feed is “free” but intention is not. Every deliberate act — stepping up, stepping behind someone who is stepping up, even just choosing to be present when you could be scrolling — is a cost you absorbed that the passive version of you would not have. That is leadership at its most basic. Not the grand gesture but the choice to be awake because attention is the raw material we are meant to mold.

I’m stating today that the “leadership” stack is against us from the start and you have to build leadership yourself, against the current, with very little in the default path designed to help you get there. The resources exist — the books, the mentors, the traditions, the materials, and ultimately the hard lessons we go through life — but nobody tells you to look for them, what to look for, and the system certainly does not point you toward them. Robert Bly, the poet whose book Iron John (1990) launched the modern men’s movement, argued that the Industrial Revolution severed the transmission of mature masculinity between fathers and sons long before algorithms or curricula could be blamed for it. When fathers left the home for the factory, sons lost access to the daily modeling of how a man navigates difficulty, holds his ground, and serves the people around him. The same severance happened during wartime — twice in the twentieth century where millions of fathers disappeared into conflict and millions of mothers absorbed the full weight of leading households with no structural support and no blueprint. And if you have spent any time listening, you already know how that story ends for the women as they get blamed. In a lot of circles, they are still being blamed for raising soft sons and the absence of masculine role models, or for not doing a good enough job filling a role that was never supposed to be theirs alone to fill. Maybe you have heard this. Maybe you have not, and whether that makes you lucky or just further removed from a problem that exists whether you see it or not is itself an answer to the question this essay keeps asking. Terry Real, a family therapist and author of I Don’t Want to Talk About It (1997), documented what the severance produced in men specifically: covert depression expressed as rage, workaholism, emotional distance, and relational failure. Men who were never taught to access their interior lives and who built elaborate systems to avoid discovering that absence. In some cases, the men never left their homes but they are so severed from healthy masculinity and leadership that they seem checked out beyond themselves, this severance is so costly downwards and externalizes so much.

I know what that severance looks like from the inside. But I want to be honest about what I did receive, because the truth is not clean. My father taught me work ethic. I watched it in him before I had any language for what I was watching. And I picked up pieces from leaders I encountered along the way — men and women both — a way of handling pressure here, a way of showing up there. But it was scattered and spare. Never a full transmission, never a system, never someone sitting me down and saying this is how you carry weight for other people. So I went looking. I read everything I could find, across philosophy, psychology, leadership, parenting, trauma recovery, fiction — anything that looked like it might contain a piece of what I was missing. Epictetus, in the Discourses (recorded c. 108 CE), gave me the line between what I control and what I do not, and that one distinction restructured how I moved through the world. Brené Brown, especially in Atlas of the Heart (2021), gave me the vocabulary to name emotions I had been feeling my entire life without a single word for many of them. And then there were the fictional characters who filled spaces the real people left open. Guts carrying a sword that was never meant to be held by a human because the weight was there and someone had to carry it — that is what sacrifice looks like when nobody is watching and nobody is clapping. Tanjiro showing me what it looks like to protect your people with fierce, unapologetic love — that is service without condition, the purest form of leading for someone else’s benefit. Garou refusing to stay down no matter what hit him, treating every obstacle like a level he was going to clear whether it liked it or not — that is the refusal to accept an external locus of control, the insistence that you are the agent, not the object. Goku getting stronger every time the universe found something bigger to throw at him — that is orientation toward difficulty as raw material, the foundational act of self-leadership. Before I had any vocabulary for any of this, those characters were installing the patterns. When the real transmission of leadership is scarce, whatever you find becomes your curriculum. I assembled mine because the alternative was staying empty and that was not working at all.

What breaks the cycle of passivity and lets us step into leadership? Well, a lot of work. A lot of inner work, many hours, many mistakes, many decisions. Many actions then. Doing the work. It’s a ton of effort and self-leadership is the foundation because without it, everything that follows might as well just be performance (for others? for our egos?).

Julian Rotter, the psychologist who gave us the concept of locus of control in the 1960s, spent decades documenting the degree to which people attribute outcomes to forces outside themselves rather than to their own choices and actions. External orientation, the tendency to see yourself as acted upon rather than acting, is not rare. It is the default for people who were never given conditions to develop otherwise. The shift from external to internal, from passenger to agent, is the first act of leadership. It happens before anyone else is involved. I remember what it felt like before that shift. Everything was happening to me. The job, the relationship, the city, the circumstances. I was narrating my own life like I was watching it from outside and had no say, or very little say boo-hoo, in the script. Yet the moment I started treating my own choices as the variable, not the situation, everything reorganized. Not because the external conditions changed but because I stopped waiting for them to and that is the prerequisite for everything that scales beyond the self.

I have to be honest about something I only recently saw. The internal locus of control has a shadow. When I shifted from “everything happens to me” to “I am the agent,” I did not stop at agency and kept going inadvertently into control. I became the person who carries everything, manages everything, absorbs everything, and somewhere in that process, I started needing to be that person. The internal locus of control, unchecked, became an internal locus of everything, some sort of hyper-something, hyper-independence? I don’t carry a word for this but my own view of leadership was infected by my own unhealthy or unbalanced patterns. I was defining leadership as “I absorb the cost” because that kept me at the center. That is not service but control wearing a sacrifice costume. It’s funny that it only took a short conversation with my mother to be called out on the pattern, identifying and further more see it, seeing it plainly in what was my flawed perception of leadership, which I assume was tainting many things leadership-adjacent. She said leadership is also empowering and enabling others to lead. By example. By teaching and support. And the moment she said it, I read my own essay (which I had at this point been working for almost 5 months) back and saw the shadow running through the whole thing. A leader who only absorbs cost is still a single point of failure and a leader who builds other leaders is building something that survives. The shift from external to internal locus of control is the first act. The shift from internal control to shared capacity is the second act and I had been stuck at the first one, calling it the whole thing. Thanks for the leadership lessons mother!

In any household, leadership is always happening. It does not pause because someone is not paying attention to it. The weight of running a home, from grocery shopping, from cooking and serving lunch up to raising children, organization, maintaining a relationship, maintaining a clean and healthy home, planning a future, and the stuff we can’t possibly even think about or be aware of, all that weight is always being carried by someone. If you are not carrying it, identify and look at who is. The weight does not disappear but transfers. I speak about this as a man and for men mostly because that is what I know from the inside because that is what I have lived and failed at and am still learning.

When a man stops carrying his share he does not become neutral either. Most of the time this passivity makes us become dependents. The household still runs because someone makes it run, but we are no longer the one making it run. We are possibly being managed too. Fed, scheduled, reminded, accommodated. We become, functionally, another variable our partner has to account for. This is what women mean when they say they are raising another child. It is not simply “an insult invented online” but a description of a real dynamic. Eve Rodsky, a Harvard-trained organizational management specialist who spent years interviewing couples about how domestic labor actually gets divided, documented exactly this in her book Fair Play (2019). Darcy Lockman, a clinical psychologist who studied the division of labor in dual-income households, documented in All the Rage (2019) the resentment that accumulates in women carrying disproportionate domestic load. It is not occasional frustration and it builds over time and changes the relationship permanently.

The research on cognitive household labor shows that mothers carry roughly seventy-three percent of all cognitive work in the home: the planning, the anticipating, the noticing, the tracking, the delegating, the monitoring of outcomes. Not seventy-three percent of the dishes. Seventy-three percent of the thinking that makes the household function. Who remembers the pediatrician appointment. Who notices the sponge needs replacing. Who is already planning next week while everyone else is still living in today. That is not housework. That is leadership. And women have been performing it so consistently, for so long, that we stopped calling it leadership and started calling it motherhood, as if it were biological rather than operational. Huge red flag!

The research is clear: this cognitive labor costs women their mental health, their career trajectories, and their capacity to be anything other than the infrastructure everyone else runs on. They arrive at work already depleted from leading at home, which reinforces the glass ceiling, which reinforces the assumption that they were not leadership material to begin with. It is one loop. And it started because someone was not carrying their share. Forget about genders for a second, I imagine this affects any household where the flaw is found, but as a man, I can be honest and identify that hey, we are failing our homes plenty!

So when I say leadership sucks, part of what I mean is this: women, and others, have been subsidizing men’s leadership failure for generations, absorbing the cost that men refused to carry, and paying for it with their health, their ambition, and their freedom. And that is not partnership. That is an unacknowledged transfer of cost from the people who should be leading to the people who had no choice but to lead in their absence. It is the same systemic failure from the opening of this essay, just wearing a different face, it’s a mode of failure for leadership. The system did not build men to lead, women filled the vacuum, and the system rewarded no one for it. We are yet to see and feel and live through the effects of these causalities, the cost of abdicating leadership.

The cost of abdicating leadership is not only paid by our partners too. A bystander in his own home is not at peace. He either does not see what it costs everyone around him, or he sees it and cannot look at it directly. Neither is a good place to live.

I know this from the inside because I have caught patterns in myself that I am actively working to dismantle. A tendency to go passive and let the weight land on Zuleyka, my current partner and love of my life, mother of our baby boy, or even on my ex-wife before her, which kinda tells you why we aren’t together anymore. I’ve also noticed a tendency to overcorrect into control: running a scorekeeper, cataloging actions, assigning moral weight, reducing complex people to snapshot judgments while giving myself full credit for my own trajectory and complexity. The scorekeeper felt like leadership because it required attention and produced conclusions but it was not leadership more than it was surveillance dressed as accountability because it created distance by design. I have been moving away from both of those patterns toward something more balanced: a real share of the work, grounded in radical acceptance and experiencing the people in my life without default evaluation unless evaluation is actually required. This is not a completed transformation because leadership is fucking hard but the required work is slowly getting me into a more integrated and healthy version of who I as a leader need to be. And that is the whole point, all the work and the effort, and the integration, that final state I might or might never arrive to as a man who leads our home and nurtures leadership through support and modelling healthy behaviors, a contributor in every sense of the word.

Carrying my share of responsibilities is only half the work and the other half is the part I missed until my mother named it. Am I building a household where everyone leads? Am I teaching my daughter and son to plan, or just planning for her? Am I building my stepson’s capacity to anticipate and step up, or just modeling it in front of him and calling that enough? Am I creating conditions where Zuleyka does not just get relief from the load but gets space to lead in domains she chooses rather than domains she is stuck with? There is a difference between alleviating weight and distributing power: the first one keeps you at the center and the second one builds something that holds without you.

The work is also not abstract, mostly. It is taking out the garbage before she has to ask. It is knowing the school drop-off schedule without being told. It is sitting with the budget on a Tuesday night when you are already exhausted. It is anticipating what the weekend needs before Friday arrives. When I let Zuleyka plan a vacation, or when I let my ex-wife plan the holidays (deep sigh), they put in all the effort, all the sacrifice, and I just followed. The moment I step up and lead I alleviate that work. When you take the kids to the park, who is leading that outing? Who packed the snacks? Who checked the weather? Who planned the route? Is it mom or is it dad? The answer tells you everything about who is carrying what in that household. But the deeper question is: are you also teaching your kids to pack their own snacks? To check the weather themselves? To plan the route? Because the park outing where dad did everything is better than the one where mom did everything by default, sure. But the park outing where the twelve-year-old planned the route because someone taught them how, that is leadership producing leadership.

As a brief sidenote, I want to mention that sometimes kids end up regulating their parents before they can even name what they are doing. Psychologists call it parentification: a child absorbing the emotional cost that should have been carried by the adult. That is the cost-absorption test failing at leadership in the most intimate scale imaginable, inside a family, inside a child.

And that black hole of effort or leadership is not abstract as with the parentification example. The black hole can tangibly look like the twenty hours in a video game while the household runs on someone else’s labor. It is the evening on the couch while partner plans the week, tracks the appointments, anticipates what the kids will need on Monday. I am not here to villainize gaming or entertainment or rest. Rest is necessary. But leadership sometimes means you will not have time to play or for leisure. Sometimes you will have to put the controller down, not because the game is wrong, but because something real needs you and you are the one who is supposed to show up for it. The question is not whether you deserve leisure. You do. The question is whether you are choosing leisure while someone else absorbs the cost of your absence. That is not rest but abdication with a screen in front of it.

Here is what passivity looks like in hours: a working parent with a standard job, a commute, and the basic requirements of being alive — sleeping, eating, showering, getting out the door — has maybe 57 hours a week of time that is not already claimed. Maybe, that is the generous number. That is the number where nobody got sick, no appointment ran long, nothing needed a repair, and nobody had to stay late, nothing went sideways. Life does not usually hand you the generous number. So the question becomes: what do you do with whatever is left? Because every hour you spend on yourself is an hour someone else is either covering for you or going without. That is not guilt either, it is simple arithmetic. 10 hours at the gym — 2 hours, 5 days — is 17% of those 57 hours. Nearly a fifth of every hour you have available for your family, your home, your relationship, your children, your own rest. I am not here to say exercise is wrong. Just like the gaming, these are not wrong or “bad”. Exercise is leadership of the self, and it matters. But we are not bodybuilders. We are not training for the Olympics! And when research shows your partner is likely carrying roughly seventy-three percent of all cognitive labor at home — the planning, the anticipating, the tracking, the invisible architecture that keeps everything from collapsing — those 10 hours look different from the inside of her week than they do from the inside of yours. Cut 1 hour per session. That is 5 hours back. 5 hours of bedtime routines, of homework, of being present when she is planning next week and you are actually there to carry half of it. Leadership is not eliminating what you need but adjusting what you take so the people around you are not subsidizing your optimization of yourself. A hard lesson for me as I do enjoy, most than anything, my alone time to develop my skills and projects, such as this lengthy essay. Who covered for me while I wrote this monster?! Hah!

Going back to children, and parentification, and emotional turmoil and work, there is a layer underneath the logistics that took me a while to see. Before I can teach my daughter to regulate her emotions, I must first regulate mine. Before I can teach her to find her center, I must first find mine. When I come home stressed, she knows before I say a word. She reads my shoulders, my breath, my speed. If my energy is scattered, hers becomes scattered. Our 3 month old son is following a similar trend where my energy seems to be the seed or pie forzao’ he grabs on to and follows. If my energy is calm, theirs becomes calm. Calm is contagious and so is chaos or distortions. This is not mystical thinking. I think it is simply nervous system regulation basics and mirror neuron, or “the biology of connection”. Every time I choose calm over reaction, I am not managing a moment but I am installing a pattern. It’s a leadership call after all!

Installing calm is not the same as teaching someone to generate their own calm. Modeling is a first layer. The second layer is empowerment: giving them the tools, the language, the practice so that they can regulate themselves when I am not in the room. If my calm only works when I am present, I have not led. I have made myself indispensable. And indispensable is just another word for single point of failure. The goal is a daughter who can find her own center, a son who can regulate himself in conflict, a stepson who can orient himself when everything is uncertain. Not because I am there radiating steadiness but because someone taught them how. They become leaders themselves, and it’s glorious!

That pattern — calm installing calm, chaos installing chaos — does not stop at the family. A manager who walks into a room regulated sets the temperature for the entire team. A politician who communicates from fear installs fear in millions of nervous systems simultaneously. The pattern scales and the biology does not change fundamentally. Only the amount of people absorbing the signal changes. Leadership installs patterns because leadership is a pattern of action and the highest form of that pattern is one that replicates: a leader who installs the capacity to lead, not just the experience of being led.

That pattern is or can be legacy. Not sneakers or a bank account. Not a car collection or whatever materials possessions we might think about. I saw a thread the other day, women asking men “what is your legacy? your sneaker collection?” Very dismissive, but they are pointing at something real. The work, the legacy, is not only the bank account. Financial provision is one lane of leadership, sure. But legacy is what you install in the people closest to you. The default response my daughter reaches for when her world is spinning at fifteen, at twenty-five, at thirty-five. The way my son regulates himself in conflict because he absorbed a pattern from our nervous system before he could even speak. The steadiness my stepson can orient toward when everything else is uncertain. That is legacy operating at a level no external accumulation can touch. It is invisible and internal. And it is exactly what I mean when I say leadership is sacrifice in service of building others: the most important work produces no visible evidence. Nobody posts it or applauds it but everybody in range absorbs it and the deepest version of that legacy is not what you installed in them but what they can now install in others. A daughter who leads her own household. A son who teaches his own children to find their center. Leadership that outlives you by generations is the end goal ultimately. What you install in the people around you — whether that is a household of four or an organization of four thousand — is the only thing that outlasts you, that’s legacy for me.

You do get something back from “real” leadership but I have to be honest about how this hits me. My first instinct is to say “mostly from the children, adults suck.” That might be my trauma talking because when I sit down with a cool and centered head, the actual return of leadership is freudenfreude: watching everyone else enjoy the fruit of your planning, your labor, your anticipation. You organized the vacation and tracked the logistics. Then you anticipated the needs while everyone else is present in the moment. You are running the system and the return is in their experience and freudenfreude and not in their gratitude or in applause. The fact that it worked and they got to live inside something you built is also sweet. And there is a deeper return I am only beginning to see: the moment when someone you invested in steps up and leads on their own (I see you, Gino André!!!). When the planning you modeled becomes planning they initiate and the care you practiced becomes care they extend without being asked, even if it excludes you, ironically. That return is not only freudenfreude but proof that the sacrifice was not just absorbed and it was transformed and is now alive and in motion, breathing its own life.

The cost of leadership is also very real. You are often too depleted to enjoy the thing alongside them. And I should name what cost actually means here, because the word is clean enough to hide behind. Cost can look like many things, it is the hour of sleep you did not get because you were mapping out tomorrow or the meal you skipped or ate standing up because you were solving something for someone else. Cost is the game you did not play, the show you did not watch, the run you did not take, because the capacity went somewhere else and there was nothing left. Cost is the mental bandwidth that is never fully off, the part of your brain that is always tracking what needs to happen next even when your body is sitting still. It needs not to be dramatic or cinematic because it’s real, it’s the slow, quiet erosion of the space you used to have for yourself before you became the person everyone else’s stability depends on. It can also be financial.

I’ve witnessed that cost-absorption and sacrifice gets tricky for many people because this is where sacrifice can curdle into martyrdom if you are not careful. Sacrifice is chosen, conscious, structural. The group needed someone to carry this and you carried it. But martyrdom is a corrosive identity. The martyr needs the suffering to prove something about who they are. The scorekeeper (my old pattern) was the mechanism that turned my sacrifice into martyrdom. “I did all this and nobody noticed. Leadership does suck!” But that is not leadership for me anymore, my own definition of leadership was tarnished. That kind of thinking pattern is really accounting for resentment. How many times have you heard the story of a parent pulling rank and wanting more gratitude from their children because of all the sacrifice, all the money and time spent, oh, the disgrace. I’ve realized that the internet is full of people on both sides of this line, the martyrs and the victims, masked as leaders, I believe some people call this virtue signaling (?). Partners exhausted from carrying “everything” or paying for “everything”. Partners furious that their carrying went unrecognized. Both are describing the same failure: one never led and the other led but crossed the line from sacrifice into victimhood but leadership covers both: carrying the weight AND not becoming a victim to your own role and responsibilities. Martyrdom is for victims, and leadership is for everyone else. Leadership is inherently a healthy endeavor in whichever way or frame you want to look at it, if your framing of leadership does not sound healthy, or looks slightly toxic, your frame and possibly definition, and evidence of leadership needs some reassessment and evaluation.

There is a third failure mode I did not see until recently, and it might be the most dangerous one because it looks the most like leadership. It is the person who carries everything and never teaches anyone else to carry anything. They absorb all the cost, plan everything, and “anticipate every need”. The thing is that the people around them never develop the capacity to do any of it, or if they do, you never get to experience that individual’s leadership because there’s no space for them to execute. That is not sacrifice, I argue it’s some type of hoarding. Hoarding control under the cover of service. “I will carry it all” sounds noble until you ask: for the sake of what? So everyone depends on you? So you get to be the indispensable one? So you can look like a “hero” instead of building other heroes? I had to ask myself that question honestly, and the answer was not clean. Some of my carrying was genuine service. Some of it was control I had dressed up as love. More work for me!

This same line runs through organizations and nations and it does not get prettier at scale. A company that brands itself as mission-driven while burning out the people who carry the mission is performing martyrdom at the institutional level, “look how much we sacrifice,” while the actual cost lands on the lowest-paid employees who never chose that sacrifice and never benefited from the branding. A government that invokes sacrifice during wartime while exempting the families of the people who declared the war is doing the same thing at the national scale. The martyrdom is always loudest at the top and the cost is always quietest at the bottom. Always.

Let’s talk about the opposite of leading: following. Following is natural. Anybody can and should be a follower if that is what they want and nobody should be ashamed or shamed for it, that is honest and it needs to be said plainly. The problem is not followers. The problem is posturing. When someone who is following pretends to lead, the system cannot orient itself. Children in a home cannot find their footing when the person who should be setting direction is performing leadership without practicing it. Posturing is not just dishonest but disorienting for everyone who depends on knowing who is actually carrying the weight, who made the call, who planned the thing, who will be there when it falls apart, who is absorbing the costs, etcetera. This posturing is a subject for another essay itself, I won’t get too much into this. For now, categorize this as another failure mode of leadership, or one of those fake leaders I was referring to at the beginning of the essay, very disorienting!

Nobody escapes home life. We all have one, or we all came from one. The billionaire heir in every movie and novel you have ever consumed eventually says the same line to a lover: “my father was never there, he was always working, I couldn’t tell you a thing about him.” That line is not about wealth but about leadership exercised in one domain and abdicated in another. Leadership at work, absence at home. And the child who grew up inside that absence carries it forward because the pattern was never corrected, the cost was never absorbed where it needed to be absorbed. This is my main problem with fake leadership. There is another version of that billionaire’s father that nobody talks about: the one who was home every night, who carried everything, who absorbed every cost, and who never once said “here, let me show you how.” The son of that father does not say “he was never there” but instead says “I never learned how to do any of this myself.” Both are failures of leadership. One is absence and the other is presence without transmission. Everything I have described so far operates at the scale of a household but it does not stop at the front door. It follows you to work, into institutions, into the structures that govern nations.

What the cost-absorption test reveals at work is often worse. Let me show you some ideas around this.

I have spent over twenty years building software across agencies, startups, and enterprise environments. I have been on both sides of the test and I have watched it fail in every professional environment I have ever been in, every single one. The patterns repeat, the titles are different but the dynamic does not. That’s not to say that at work, leadership failures are constant, I’m not saying that, let’s just identify some of these patterns. Leadership does show up at work, and I’m extremely grateful for these teachings and moments.

What does leadership actually look like at work when nobody is performing it for an audience? It is absorbing ambiguity so the people around you can execute clearly. It is writing the document nobody asked for because you realized the team was building on assumptions that had never been validated. It is sitting in a meeting where someone proposes a major change right before a deadline and recognizing that the proposal is not about the outcome but about the proposer’s need to demonstrate vision, and then not saying that, instead redirecting toward what actually needs to ship. That is cost absorption and it is invisible and it burns calories nobody counts.

The professional version of posturing is what I call competence theater. Senior people propose initiatives that sound strategic but serve their positioning more than the mission. The slides are polished, the vocabulary is sharp, and the team exchanges glances because everyone in the room knows this is not about the initiative but about the presenter being seen as the person who proposed it. The work will land on someone else and the credit will not meanwhile the people actually shipping are operating two or three levels below the title that gets credit and often the proposal is an excuse being constructed in advance because “we did not have the right infrastructure” is a much more comfortable narrative than “we did not execute.” I have sat in those rooms more times than I want to count.

There is a version of this that is gendered and it needs to be named. Women in technical organizations learn early that excellence attracts the wrong kind of attention: more labor, more scrutiny, repeated proving so they optimize for execution over recognition and they stay below what I think of as the “leadership altitude”, not because they lack capability but because they calculated, correctly, that visibility costs more than it pays. That is not a failure of ambition but competence operating under constraint and I have watched this happen to brilliant women I worked alongside and it is infuriating every time.

There is also a failure mode that disguises itself as leadership so effectively that most people cannot tell the difference until the damage is already done which is the person who coordinates through authority instead of through trust or partnership. These leaders default to hierarchy as a tool and when someone pushes back the response is not engagement with the substance but escalation. That is not leadership, I’m very sorry but that is leverage disguised as process and the person and persons absorbing the cost of that behavior, managing the fallout, choosing their words carefully, are the ones doing the actual leadership work but they just do not have the title that matches.

Tone policing is a specific form of this and I have been on both sides of it. The instruction to “calm down” during a substantive disagreement is not about calm, it is a reframing move. It takes a professional disagreement and recategorizes it as an emotional problem which shifts the burden from “address this person’s actual point” to “manage this person’s feelings.” The person doing it avoids absorbing the intellectual cost of the disagreement and the person receiving it now has to manage their own emotional state AND the other person’s perception of their emotional state AND the original substantive problem, all simultaneously. Three jobs for the price of zero recognition.

And then there is the vacuum problem when leadership above does not articulate a clear direction the person or persons with the most context become living documentation. These people carry the understanding and answer every clarifying question, write the insight nobody requested, connect the dots between teams that should have been connected by someone above them and the understanding dies when they leave the room because it was never committed to a structure, never formalized, never owned by the people whose job it was to own it, and the pattern was never installed because they were never allowed to lead and shine through. These “hidden leaders” become the human bridge between organizational gaps that should have been closed by design and the reward for holding it is that they get to keep holding it. There is generally no promotion for being the person who quietly ensured the building did not collapse, there is only the continued expectation that they will keep ensuring it. And what the empowerment lens reveals about this is that the understanding dying when they leave the room is not proof of their value but proof they were never given the support or the mandate to transfer the capability. Real leadership above them would have formalized that knowledge, built it into the team, made it survivable, acknowledged the costs and supports.

There is a calculation that every competent professional makes, usually silently, and if you have been in the workforce for any amount of time you know exactly what I am about to say. The gap between what you are paid and what you produce. The gap between your title and your actual operating altitude. The gap between the scope you are trusted with informally and the scope you are recognized for formally. You can deliver work that belongs three levels above (and below) your compensation and do it for years and the organization will let you because it benefits from the arrangement. The moment you name the gap there’s a possibility, depending on the types of leaderships in your organization, that you are no longer convenient, and you become a problem. So I’ve seen many people, many leaders, cower and dare to not name it as they optimize for execution, and stay below the radar, and let leadership own the performance. This is rational and it is also corrosive because over time it teaches you that your best work is worth exactly what they decided to pay for it, which is always less than what it actually cost you.

If you want to know who is leading, do not look at the org chart. Look at who absorbs the ambiguity, who translates between teams that cannot communicate directly, who documents clearly and helpfully the thing that would otherwise be lost, who sits with the risk assessment on a Tuesday night when they are already exhausted. That person is leading. If you want to know who is leading well, ask one more question: are they building others’ capacity to do what they do? Because the person who absorbs everything and transfers nothing is not leading, they are becoming a bottleneck with a martyr narrative, the “hero” type. I know because I have been that bottleneck.

The hardest professional leadership lesson I have learned, and I think this applies well beyond work, is that you have to regulate yourself in rooms where nobody else is regulating themselves. The proportionate response to bad faith is fury but the leadership response is to document what happened, propose something better, and not hand over more of yourself than the situation requires. Every piece of unnecessary context you volunteer under pressure is leverage you give to someone who has already shown you what they do with leverage. The impulse behind transparency is good faith but transparency aimed at people acting in bad faith is just self-harm with a noble story attached. The calendar is the argument and the work is the evidence and nothing else needs to be said. And underneath all of it you absorb the friction, you translate between people who should be talking to each other directly, you assess the risk nobody else mapped, you deliver the thing that holds everything together, and when you can you teach someone else how to do what you just did because the hero saves the day but the leader builds a room that does not need saving.

Robert Greenleaf, who spent most of his career inside AT&T before Servant Leadership (1977) became the usual touchstone for servant leadership, proposed a simple test: do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? That last clause is the one I missed for years. More likely themselves to become servants. Greenleaf was not asking whether the leader absorbs cost, he was asking whether the leader’s sacrifice produces other leaders. Not just who carries the weight but whether the carrying built something in the people who witnessed it. James MacGregor Burns, the political scientist who studied presidential leadership for decades, spent a career distinguishing transformational leadership from transactional leadership in Leadership (1978). Burns showed that the dominant form in institutions is transactional: compliance exchanged for reward, not growth, not service, exchange. They did not invent the test but documented what anyone who has worked inside an organization already senses: most leadership is not leadership, it is management of compliance and compliance does not build leaders, it builds dependents.

The Edelman Trust Barometer has tracked public trust in institutions annually for over two decades across dozens of countries and the trend is consistent and it has not reversed: government, media, business, and NGOs have all seen trust decline to historic lows and people are not being cynical, IMHO, they are being accurate. The evidence that institutional leaders absorb cost on behalf of those they serve is simply not there and the evidence that they are building the next generation of leaders is even thinner. Look around, where are the leaders?

The same test applies at the territorial scale and this one is personal. I grew up in a place where fiscal policy, monetary policy, and trade routes were controlled by a larger power that would never live under the results of that policy. The debt got restructured and the creditors got paid but the electricity bill doubled and the grid collapsed, killing thousands of people, and ultimately got privatized. Young professionals left (and are still leaving) because the math no longer works. I left. I packed what I could carry and I left the island I loved because the people who made the decisions, the “leaders”, never had to live with them and I did and I could not afford to anymore. The decisions were made somewhere else and the consequences landed on our streets, in our homes, on our families. Who are these people leading? Themselves into profit? Who?! That is the cost-absorption test failed at the scale of a people and it looks exactly like it looks at every other scale. The entity with leverage does not absorb cost and the people without it do, always. And the empowerment test fails even harder: did that larger power build the island’s capacity to govern itself, to lead itself, to sustain itself? Or did it build dependence by design? I am being deliberately indirect here and I know it. Naming names would turn this paragraph into a political argument and I am making a leadership decision for the sake of this essay: the pattern matters more than the geography.

We are on track for our first trillionaire. Not someday but this year, 2026. Is that the result of leadership? Apply the test. Who absorbed the cost? It wasn’t the person who accumulated the wealth, that is for sure. The warehouse workers racing AI-optimized quotas until their bodies gave out absorbed cost. The teenagers in their bedrooms talking to chatbots that affirmed their suicidal ideation absorbed cost. The content moderators cleaning up AI-generated sludge for a few dollars an hour absorbed cost. The same math shows up across the portfolio: products shipped before they are safe and the crash lands on someone else’s body, infrastructure sold to cities and the cost of failure lands on the inspectors and riders and local politicians, expansion pushed into communities that never chose the noise or the risk. The pattern is always the same and the geography changes but the direction of cost does not. It flows down. The governments left holding the regulatory and infrastructure consequences absorbed cost. The public absorbed cost. A trillion dollars is not the result of leadership but the result of cost externalization operating at a scale that has never existed before. The wealth accumulated precisely because cost flowed downward while profit flowed upward and that is not leadership but extraction, and the algorithms and possibilities that built it will never model sacrifice because sacrifice would reduce the accumulation!

There is a micro and a macro to all of this and when the macro fails it pushes cost downward onto people who were already under-equipped to carry it.

Leadership is buildable. It is not a personality trait or something you are born with, it is not charisma. Leadership is practice across specific domains, accumulated over time, refined through failure and honest feedback. I know this because I built some of it and I am still building it and can name the domains.

The first domain is awareness. You cannot lead what you cannot see. Honesty with yourself, critical thinking, reflection, active listening. This is “the Epictetus layer” for me: what is in my control and what is not. Marcus Aurelius practiced this daily in his private journal, governing an empire by governing himself first — the collection we know as Meditations (written c. 170–180 CE). Ryan Holiday translated those principles for a modern audience in The Obstacle Is the Way (2014). Wayne Dyer dismantled the erroneous zones, the cognitive distortions that keep you externally oriented, blaming circumstances instead of examining your own contribution, in Your Erroneous Zones (1976). This cluster is about seeing clearly before acting and I spent years leading with confidence and zero self-awareness which is just a polished way of being wrong at high speed. I could make decisions all day but I could not tell you why half of them made me angry or anxious or whatever. The awareness domain is what finally slowed me down enough to see that the discomfort or activation was not about the meeting or the deadline but about something I had not looked at yet. Without it every other leadership skill is built on a distorted foundation and you will lead confidently in the wrong direction and not know it until the cost has already landed on everyone around you.

The second domain is relational. Communication is probably the most important leadership skill that exists, not rhetoric or persuasion but the ability to transmit what you actually mean and receive what someone else is actually saying. Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (1999) (a precious life-changing gift from a dear close friend and coworker) gave me the language for expressing needs without aggression and hearing needs without defensiveness. Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart (2021) (another life-altering gift from another great friend) gave me the vocabulary for over sixty emotions I had no words for. You cannot regulate what you cannot name and you cannot lead through an emotional landscape you do not have a map for. Gary Chapman, in The Five Love Languages (1992), showed me that people receive care in different languages and if you are transmitting on the wrong frequency nobody hears you no matter how loud you broadcast. Daniel Siegel, in The Whole-Brain Child (2011) and No-Drama Discipline (2014), showed me how children’s brains develop and how to parent through connection rather than control. Humility, trust in others, involvement, freudenfreude. Not performing presence but actually reaching the people you are trying to lead. I remember the first time I told Zuleyka what I was actually feeling instead of what I thought I was supposed to feel and the difference in how she received it was so immediate it embarrassed me. I had been broadcasting on the wrong frequency for years wondering why nobody could hear me.

The third domain is structural. Service, consistency, proactivity, regulation, willpower, ethics, transparency. These are the values that make leadership reliable rather than episodic. Stephen R. Covey mapped the path from dependence to independence to interdependence in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) and that is literally the scaling path of leadership: from governing yourself, to leading alongside others, to building systems that serve the group. Andrew Grove’s High Output Management (1983) taught me that the measure of a leader is output not activity, not how many meetings you attended or how many emails you sent but what actually got built, shipped, resolved. This is the garbage-before-she-asks layer, the showing-up-every-time layer. Not once and not when you feel like it but every time until it becomes the way you move and people can depend on you without having to check. I am not there yet entirely. I still have days where I want to coast, where I convince myself that showing up yesterday earns me a pass today, it does not. The structure only works if it is consistent and consistency is the part of leadership that nobody romanticizes because there is nothing romantic about it, it is just showing up, again.

The fourth domain is generative and this is the one I was notably missing from this essay and from my earlier foundations in leadership. Everything in the first three domains can be practiced alone. Awareness, communication, structure: you can build all of that and still be the only person in the room who can lead. The generative domain is where leadership becomes contagious. It is teaching and mentoring and creating the conditions for someone else to develop their own awareness, their own relational skills, their own structure. It is the mother who does not just cook for her children but teaches them to cook. It is the manager who does not just absorb ambiguity but walks a junior through how she assessed the situation so they can assess the next one themselves. It is the partner who does not just carry cognitive load but builds shared systems so the load distributes naturally. My mother saw this before I did. She watched me define leadership as carrying, absorbing, sacrificing, and she said: that is real, but it is incomplete. Leadership is also empowering and enabling others to lead, by example, by teaching, by support, by creating the space for someone to try and fail and try again with you standing close enough to catch them but far enough away that they are actually doing it themselves. Without this domain the other three produce a “hero” but with these they produce a leader.

Every failure of leadership maps to a failure in one of these domains. Aggression is not strength but a failure of regulation masquerading as decisiveness. Micromanagement is not involvement but a failure of trust masquerading as diligence and the person micromanaging is not absorbing cost, they are distributing anxiety. Hostility is not honesty. Poor communication is not directness. Lack of reflection is not confidence. Disrespect is not authority. The person who mistakes aggression for leadership builds a structure that requires their constant pressure to function and that is not a structure, it’s kind of a hostage situation due to the employer-employee dynamics. And the person who carries everything without teaching anyone else to carry anything builds a structure that requires their constant presence to function and that is not leadership either, it is a different kind of hostage situation, one where the hostage taker thinks they are the “hero”.

There is a single diagnostic that surprisingly cuts through everything: schadenfreude or freudenfreude. Does the leader feel satisfaction when the group succeeds or when someone in the group fails? One question, and if you need more than a second to answer it honestly, you already have your answer. And there is a second diagnostic that cuts even deeper: when someone you invested in outgrows you, do you feel pride or threat? The leader who feels pride has completed the generative work and the leader who feels threat was never building leaders, they were building followers who confirmed their indispensability.

Not all input builds leadership and part of the work is developing discernment. Lived experience is part of that ledger too: some stretches build you, some scar you, some install patterns that hold under pressure — how you ask for help, how you come back after a mistake, how you stay honest when you could perform — and some install shortcuts, hypervigilance, cynicism, or compliance you mistake for maturity until life forces a reckoning. None of it is neutral; it is training whether you picked the curriculum or not. Which experiences built you and which ones only armored you. Which books rewired you and which ones you put down halfway through. Which feedback changed your trajectory and which was noise. Which relationships taught you something and which just confirmed what you already believed. I have read many books across philosophy, psychology, leadership, parenting, trauma recovery, and fiction and not all of them hit. The same filter applies to people, to therapy, to criticism, to praise. Not everything that arrives is signal and part of building leadership is learning to tell the difference and having the discipline to act on the right things in the right order.

The same discernment applies at work. Not every initiative deserves your energy and not every meeting deserves your preparation and not every proposal deserves your engagement. One of the hardest things to learn as a professional leader is that saying “no” to noise is itself an act of leadership because it protects your capacity and the capacity of the people who depend on you and it models for others that not all activity is progress. Some of the most important leadership moments in any career are the things you choose not to react to: the proposal you let die on its own because engaging would have given it oxygen, the escalation you did not match because the record already spoke, the frustration you kept private because letting it leak would have flattened your read on someone who was more complex than your anger was willing to admit.

Without this foundation you can still lead. But where are you leading to?

Here is the thing I keep coming back to though: something can be done about this. You can lead in how you communicate, choosing your own words instead of generated ones, saying what you actually mean instead of what sounds optimized. You can lead in how you consume, asking whether the content you are absorbing is building your capacity or replacing it. You can lead in how you show up, choosing intention over convenience in any room you walk into, digital or physical. And you can lead in how you build others, not just doing the work in front of them but teaching them to do the work, not just absorbing cost but sharing the tools so they can absorb it too, not just leading but multiplying leadership in every environment you touch.

• Where are you absorbing cost so others do not have to?
• Where are you redirecting it?
• Where are you letting a system do your thinking because the thinking was hard and the system was easy?
• Where are you carrying everything yourself because letting go feels like losing control?

Start with yourself and then look outward.

• Who is absorbing costs right now so that you do not have to?
• Whose labor, whose patience, whose planning is subsidizing your comfort?
• Who around you has the capacity to lead if you would just make room for them?

Those questions cut both ways and they are supposed to! These answers should give us our foundations and path to become better leaders.

I am writing this from inside that process of understanding and becoming a leader, from that gap between who I am today and who I am becoming. This essay is not advice from someone who figured it out but a mirror I built to see myself clearly, to map the distance between what I understand about leadership and how I actually move in my life. Not from the other side of some completed transformation but just from the middle where the gap is still visible and still worth crossing. I thought leadership was sacrifice, and it is. Then my mother told me leadership is also empowering others to lead and I realized my definition had been shaped by the same control pattern I was trying to dismantle. The essay you just read is the version that includes what she taught me. It is more honest than the one before it and I am more honest for having written it.

Sources

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• Julian B. Rotter — “Generalized Expectancies for Internal vs. External Control of Reinforcement” (1966) · Locus of control (concept)
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