Before the Wave Had a Name

Long before language, the body is already learning.

Before titles, achievements, résumés, social identities, relationship histories, or the strange modern ritual of compressing an entire human life into a confident biography written for strangers on the internet, we are absorbing the world around us. Tone. Touch. Attention. Absence. Warmth. Tension. Predictability. Surprise. What seems to bring people closer and what appears to make connection disappear.

Childhood is more than memory. It is also an atmosphere in which we begin constructing meaning about ourselves and other people.

As children, we are gradually given identifiers, beginning with something as simple as our names. I sometimes imagine these as dog tags. Then, over time, the sticky notes start accumulating around them: who we are, what we are good at, what we should or should not become, what receives praise, what creates conflict, what makes adults proud, and which parts of ourselves seem easier or harder for the people around us to receive.

Parents and caregivers usually participate in this process with far more love than conscious intention. They also arrive carrying their own histories, adaptations, fears, hopes, cultural expectations, family patterns, and everything they themselves learned about what it takes to belong. None of us begins with a blank page.

Gradually, those experiences help shape an identity. Not a false identity exactly, but an incomplete one: the version of ourselves we learned was useful for navigating the world in which we grew up.

At a retreat in Siem Reap, Cambodia, Chris Tracy and Ariel Lee offered language that stayed with me: identity becomes the foundation of our stories, and those stories help construct the avatar through which we experience our lives.

I loved the word avatar because it captured something immediately. The avatar is the version of us that walks into rooms trying to be loved, respected, safe, admired, useful, invisible, impressive, indispensable, or impossible to reject. One avatar overachieves. Another rescues everyone. Another avoids conflict. Another controls every variable in sight. Another quietly carries the emotional furniture for the entire room while insisting, “No, no, I’m totally fine,” even when everybody nearby can clearly tell otherwise.

None of these strategies necessarily means something is wrong with us. Many began as intelligent responses to the environments in which we developed. The difficulty comes when an old adaptation becomes so familiar that we mistake it for the whole of who we are.

The avatar then becomes the main character in its own movie, interpreting each new scene through everything that came before. Rejection becomes proof of an old belief. Uncertainty activates an old defense. Praise temporarily confirms an identity. A relationship becomes populated not only by the two people actually standing there, but by all the stories each one has carried into the room.

Then, if we become fortunate or curious enough to notice what is happening, another character appears: the Witness. The Director of the Movie.

The Witness does not destroy the avatar. It creates enough distance to see it. We begin noticing, There I go again. I am trying to earn belonging. I am preparing for rejection before anybody has rejected me. I am carrying responsibility nobody asked me to carry. I am treating an old story as if it were happening right now.

That moment can be profoundly liberating. What was learned can change. What became defended can soften. What once operated automatically can become a choice. Most importantly, we can begin relating to our patterns with curiosity rather than shame.

Much of this book grew from that realization, slowly, through decades of leadership work, relationships, wilderness experiences, founder communities, organizations, retreats, mistakes, friendships, moments of grace, and thousands of conversations with human beings beneath the identities they carried professionally.

Again and again, I encountered accomplished people who had learned extraordinary ways to function while carrying patterns they had never really examined. They were not simply CEOs, founders, parents, investors, artists, teachers, healers, or leaders. Beneath those roles were human beings improvising their way through love, fear, ambition, loss, belonging, responsibility, and change just like everyone else.

That changed the way I understood leadership and transformation. Many of the struggles I witnessed were not evidence that people were defective. They were the predictable consequences of human beings trying to navigate increasingly complex lives with patterns developed under very different circumstances.

And modern life keeps adding complexity. Work follows us home. Information never stops. Relationships stretch across continents and screens. Technology accelerates. Expectations multiply. The identities we perform can become visible to thousands of people at once, while the quieter person underneath them may have very little room to breathe.

Somewhere inside all of this, a question began forming for me long before I understood that it would become a book:

What helps human beings remain deeply alive while everything around them accelerates?

Not merely optimized. Alive. Not performatively spiritual while privately exhausted, endlessly productive while relationally depleted, or extraordinarily informed while increasingly disconnected from direct experience.

Something more embodied. More relational. More human.

I did not yet know what I would eventually call the Joy Protocol or Tsunami OS. I only knew that some kind of wave was building, and

that many of the most capable people I knew were already feeling the pressure of a world they could no longer manage through greater effort alone.

Then, one morning in Taipei, the pieces began coming together.