This is the science of human gravity (gravitas).The deepest power in hypercompetitive, hyperwired, hypercreative work. The origin of breakthrough, the root of your relevance, the building block of confidence and competence. Identity that isn’t a demographic, influence that supersedes visibility and volume. It’s elemental. Learn more about our work and new book at https://schoolofgravity.com/. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com. This episode was presented by the author, Steven Titus Smith. This material is copyrighted.We live in a hypercompetitive world of two, inescapable realities: inequality and potential. Maybe we started life with a window overlooking Harvard’s halls or peeking through the hole of a boarded shack on the unsympathetic poverty of Haiti. For some, birth itself is a lucky ticket into a circle of opportunity. Some arrive miles behind. We are not equally free, safe, smart, gifted, connected or skilled. The terrain is never flat or fair. No two lives mirror each other, no two circles are identical. Neither is what we do with them.And as we fight our way out of a brutal circle, test the edge of one too tight for us or we’re free to fly as we please, everyone is trained to live on a steady diet of confidence, competence and competitive drive. Not surprising, very pragmatic. No one really questions it. Sixty-seven percent of executives put “competence” at the top of the career capital list.The diet is devoured as the elixir of action, the focal point of job interviews and reviews, itemized on your résumé to separate the fittest from the rest. Corporate memos kick the diet into overdrive: lean and mean, more with less, go harder, work longer, skill up, play big, be bold. Deviate from the doctrine, it’s religiously believed, and business spins into a semi-profitable love-in. Maybe you’re a believer. It’s a large congregation. One fintech CEO sitting restlessly in the pews and nearing an IPO told us, “I can’t shake the feeling we’re missing the intensity to take the next step.”So, what if the intensity execs and emails keep pushing is essential, just misdirected? What if “good” is all the diet can do? And in the hardest circles—competitive, unjust or uncharted circles—what if it can’t feed us what we need? This is a book to rewrite the memos and modernize the diet. It begins by rethinking “qualifications.” Not your résumé. Not your diet and deliverables. Deeper. The origin of power that creatively underpins and socially feeds it all. A stabilizing yet adaptive power that has the longevity to sustain, even propel you into greater relevance and influence.See Jane run.On July 14, 1960, twenty-six-year-old Valerie Jane Goodall entered the jungles of Tanzania to make one of the most historic scientific discoveries of the century. And she was, in nearly every way, the least qualified person to make it. Just how she arrived began six months earlier.After decades in the dust digging for fossils to better explain the origin of human beings, archeologists and paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey knew there was a limit to how much they could learn below ground on the outskirts of what is now Tanzania’s Gombe National Park. So, Louis applied for a grant to study chimpanzees in the wild. After several rejections by skeptics, the money finally came—with a six-month expiration date. If his study of living primates didn’t uncover something remarkable, it was back to bones. So, it would have been logical in Dr. Leakey’s search for a project lead to put experienced anthropologists or primatologists at the top of the candidate list. At that point of his legendary career Louis had authored eleven books in his field. Mary made a historic archeological find in hers. So, if you were applying for the job, aren’t experience and expertise exactly what you’d highlight (even exaggerate a little) on your résumé and in the interview? Instead, Leakey handed the controls to Goodall, a new assistant from London with no college degree. Jane’s résumé listed Oxford University secretary, waitressing, and choosing music for documentaries. Experts questioned her age and qualifications. Officials were convinced that entering a jungle alone was no job for a young “girl.” Especially one who described her credentials as, “an open mind, a passion for knowledge, a love for animals, and monumental [remember that word] patience.” Why Goodall was Leakey’s first choice is a central point of this book: the nature of who she was mattered more in what awaited her than the qualifications of what she had or hadn’t done. That nature began in Jane’s childhood twenty-two years earlier. And it made her impossible to ignore.Qualifying.When Jane visited her grandmother’s farm as a young girl, one of her chores was collecting the hens’ eggs. As the days passed, a four-year-old Dr. Goodall grew puzzled at how such a small creature laid such a big egg. So, ...
