The Desert and What Holds Weight Part Three of a Three-Part Conversation with Eric Pennington There is a particular kind of man who can tell you, without flinching, exactly what a decade cost him — and then tell you, in the same breath, that he wouldn’t trade it. Eric Pennington is that man. I have […]
Part Two of a Three-Part Conversation with Eric Pennington Eric Pennington was bored out of his mind in a conference room. He’ll tell you that himself, with no embarrassment about it. He was sitting with a room full of division presidents, listening to the same conversation he’d already sat through three years earlier — the […]
Part One of a Three-Part Conversation with Eric Pennington There’s a particular kind of loneliness in watching your own life happen to you. Eric Pennington knows it from the inside. As a boy, he remembers feeling almost outside himself — like he could watch young Eric move through his days, present in his own body […]
There’s a particular kind of confusion that comes up almost every time spiritual direction is mentioned. People hear “spiritual” and think church. They hear “direction” and think someone’s about to tell them what to do. Neither is quite right, and the confusion is understandable — it’s an old practice with a name that doesn’t […]
In 1206, a young cloth merchant’s heir stood in the public square of his hometown, took off every piece of clothing he owned, and handed it back to his father along with his inheritance. By any reasonable business measure, Francis di Bernardone had everything: a thriving trade business waiting for him, the kind of security […]
Hope Takes Practice The meeting room was quiet in a way that didn’t feel like reverence. It felt like dread. We’d borrowed the space from the church, a place to meet, nothing more, but everyone was there, all of us together in one room, and that fact alone told people something was coming before I […]
She could name what she was feeling before most people in the room even knew they had feelings. She could read a tense conversation like a map, tracking the undercurrents, sensing what was unspoken. By every measure the research celebrates, her emotional intelligence was high. And yet, somewhere beneath all of that competence, something was […]
There were two easels in our house growing up, set at angles in the same room so neither parent blocked the other’s light. My mother worked in oils, slow and layered, sometimes returning to the same canvas for weeks until a shadow finally sat right. My father moved faster, looser, more willing to ruin a […]
On the three lies we’re sold about work, and what’s true instead. A woman sat across from me on a video call a few months ago, holding a coffee mug with her company’s logo on it up near her kitchen counter, turning it slowly between her palms the way you turn something you’re not sure […]
What Is Ours to Do: Six Years Inside the World’s EQ Family We were sitting at Josh Freedman’s table in California, there to do actual work on an idea that had started with us and Josh after a night in Italy when everything was stolen. That loss wasn’t metaphorical — it was the kind that […]
