Transitions Are Like Being Lost In The Pacific

When you f**k up one of them, it’s like you get unmoored. You can’t go back but you aren’t going forward either. After you’ve f****d up enough of these, it’s like being in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific. There may be land somewhere, but you can be pretty sure that it’s a long ways away. You’ve got limited water, the sun is beating down, and you have to come face-to-face with the fact that you can’t get out of this alive by yourself. Even with someone else looking for you, it’s going to take a miracle. You are absolutely f****d.

Butch, a mode 9, describes what it feels like to have messed up three consecutive transitions.

When you go through a transition, you have to leave behind what had worked and move towards something new. I have talked about it before as the feeling that even though you might have a great job and a great personal life you have to move. You don’t know where you want to go but you know that you can’t stay here.

Sometimes you miss a transition and don’t navigate it properly. If you are Mode 7+, the risk of this is incredibly high. And let’s be honest here: most people who are reading this and think that they are mode 7 aren’t, and many of the people who are bewildered and why I’m now looking at them in the audience are. I run into a very large number of people mode 7 and above, but they are rarely people who want it. For good reason, because the higher modes have more chances to screw up a stratum transition (they have more of them) and are less likely to get support through them, since almost no one in power is mode 7 or above.

So what can you do?
People who miss transitions can often be found at increasingly lower paid positions. Once they cross into Str 5, regardless of navigating the transition well or not, they lose the ability to do lower level thinking work. But if they haven’t had assistance with the previous transitions (almost no one can manage them alone) they will not be capable of doing Str 5 work, either. This leaves low Str 1 work, which can be done by anyone.

And so there you will find them.

Mode 6 people are the ones who normally object here. I don’t know why it is mostly Mode 6, because you would think it would be normally distributed. But it’s mostly Mode 6. Somehow, they are threatened by this thought. Maybe because it means that they aren’t really that special. Dunno, really.

But perhaps you, gentle reader, are having problems believing that (a) I know what I’m doing and (b) that this could ever happen.

I can tell you stories of two well known transformative leaders who came up from Str 1 jobs to change the world.

How about we look at those over the next few days.