There is a tool I keep returning to. It comes from the world of leadership coaching, which means most people who encounter it treat it as a planning exercise.

Fill in the boxes.

Set the milestones.

Choose your celebrations.

I want to argue it is something older and stranger than that.

The tool is called the PHAG, the Personal Hairy Audacious Goal. A decade-level commitment. Ten annual milestones. A celebration attached to each one. The format is almost insultingly simple. A grid. Some boxes. Your name on it.

But I keep snagging on the word hairy.

Not ambitious. Not bold. Not even audacious alone, that word we’ve learned to domesticate, to put on mission statements and VC decks until it means nothing.

Hairy.

As in: not yet groomed.

As in: something that grew from a place you didn’t fully plan.

As in: wild.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard distinguished between two kinds of commitment. The first is the commitment you make once the rational case is assembled, once the risk is calculated, the path is visible, the outcome is defensible. This kind of commitment isn’t really commitment at all. It’s compliance with evidence.

The second kind is the leap. The movement you make before the ground appears underfoot. Not recklessly, Kierkegaard was not advocating chaos, but with the recognition that certain thresholds cannot be crossed by reasoning alone. They require you to go first, and let the path reveal itself in the going.

A PHAG, properly understood, is a leap with a decade attached to it.

This is why the word matters. Hairy things haven’t been made presentable yet. They haven’t been stress-tested by the internal critic who needs everything to look viable before committing. The hairy goal is the one you’re not quite sure you can achieve, the one that makes you slightly uneasy when you say it out loud, the one that, if you’re honest, frightens you a little.

That fear is not a warning sign. It is a signal of contact with something real.

The depth psychologist Bill Plotkin writes about what he calls the work of the soul, the long, often subterranean process by which a person moves from a constructed identity (the self we built to survive) toward something more native, more genuinely their own. This work, he insists, is not linear. It does not follow a project plan. It moves through descents, disorientation, and return. It takes years. Sometimes decades.

The mythologist Michael Meade puts it differently but arrives at the same territory: a life shaped only by external expectations, career ladders, social approval, the logic of productivity, is a life that has missed its own story. What interrupts that drift, what cracks the performative shell, is almost always some encounter with what you actually want at depth, the desire that doesn’t fit the approved categories.

This is what a real PHAG is pointing at. Not a stretched version of your current ambitions. Not a bigger number on the same trajectory. Something genuinely other, a direction that emerged from a level of self-knowledge most planning frameworks don’t have the patience to reach.

The ten annual milestones are where the architecture gets interesting.

Think about what they actually are. Each milestone is not just a checkpoint. It is a year of your life in which something must die and something must be born. You arrive at year three of a decade-level commitment not as the same person who set the goal in year one. You are someone who has been changed by the first two years of trying, failing, adjusting, learning, and continuing anyway.

This is what Krippendorff calls second-order change, not adjusting the strategy but being altered by the process of pursuing it. The goal doesn’t just describe what you want to achieve. Over a decade, it shapes who you become.

The celebrations are not incidental to this. They are a structural acknowledgment that arrival matters, that the movement toward something difficult deserves to be witnessed, including by yourself. Too many people are so focused on the next phase that they skip this. They arrive, note it, and move on. The celebration is the full stop. It is the moment you stand in what you have done before stepping into what is next.

Without them, the decade becomes a grind. With them, it becomes a rhythm.

I want to be direct about something.

Most goal-setting frameworks are designed to help you execute on what you already want. They take desire as given and focus on the mechanics of delivery. There is nothing wrong with this, but it misses a prior question:

Where did this desire come from? Is it really mine, or is it borrowed from the ambient culture I’ve been swimming in?

The hairy goal forces this question because it insists on ten years. A decade is long enough that you cannot fake it. Short-term motivation, external validation, performance for an imagined audience, these don’t sustain over a decade. What sustains is something more stubbornly internal.

A genuine why that doesn’t need to make sense to anyone else.

This is also why the PHAG lives in the register of the personal, not the professional. Yes, professional integration will lead to outcomes, this is a likely be involvement. But the animating core is the person, not the role. It is my goal in a way that a company target or a KPI never can be.

There is something that happens when a person’s deepest wanting finds its echo in the work they are asked to do. Not alignment in the corporate sense, not the language of strategy cascades and objective-setting, but something older and stranger. The moment when what you are burning toward and what the world needs from you are, briefly, the same fire.

This is worth a longer conversation. What I can say here is that there may be a shape to it, a rhythm of approach and departure, personal and collective, the decade of the individual and the decade of the institution, moving together like two frequencies that occasionally, remarkably, produce the same note. What gets made in those moments is different from what gets made in their absence.

Different projects.

Different organisations.

Different lives.

So here is the practical question I want to leave you with.

Not: what are your goals?

But: what do you want that you have not yet let yourself fully want, because it seems too large, too strange, too risky, or too vulnerable to say out loud?

Start there. That is where the PHAG lives.

Hans Schulte writes on the long work of becoming. This post is part of an ongoing series drawn from The Long Fire, a book about descent, return, and what it costs to stay true to something.

The Decade’s Work

Before the path, the longing.

Before the longing,

the silence where the real thing lives not yet named, not yet tame,

still wearing its original fur.

A decade is not a plan.

It is a country you agree to cross before you know the terrain,

before the language comes,

before the body learns what the soul already knew when it said yes in the dark.

Each year a door.

Each door a small dying.

Each dying, a room you didn’t know was there

lit from inside by whatever you refused to abandon.

This is the work.

Not the milestones

those are just the places you stopped

to remember who you were becoming.

The work is the long fire.

The one that doesn’t ask permission.

The one that was burning before you decided to call it a goal.

Go toward it.

The boxes will fill themselves.

Jim Collins spent years studying what separates great companies from good ones. His Hedgehog Concept distilled it to three questions.

What are you deeply passionate about?

What can you be the best in the world at?

What drives your economic engine?

Most organisations treat these as three separate problems to manage. They optimise each circle independently and call the overlap a strategy. I believe Collins was pointing at something more radical: the companies that endure are the ones where all three circles collapse into a single point. Not balanced. Not traded off against each other. Unified.

There is a word for that condition. It predates Collins by two thousand years.

The Latin root of the word integrity is integer. It means whole. Undivided. A thing that has not been split against itself. Not integrity in the moral sense we now reach for reflexively, but integrity as a description of structure. The integrity of a bridge. The integrity of a living organism. The thing that holds together because nothing in it is working against anything else.

Aristotle circled the same idea from a different direction. His concept of eudaimonia is usually translated as happiness or flourishing, but the translation loses something essential. For Aristotle, virtue and flourishing were not in tension. They were the same movement. You did not sacrifice one for the other. The person who lived well and the person who did good were the same person, operating from the same source. The split between ethics and self-interest was, for Aristotle, not a genuine dilemma but a failure of understanding.

Western business thinking missed this entirely and built the trade-off model instead. You sacrifice some profit for some principle, or some principle for some profit. The board gets uncomfortable when the numbers are tight and the values get quietly set aside.

Everyone understands the subtext.

The principles are aspirational.

The strategy is real.

I have been watching a real-time case study that breaks that model, and it is worth pausing on because the lesson reaches far beyond the industry in question.

Anthropic recently declined a significant Pentagon contract. The immediate analysis split into two camps. One said it was a principled stand, brave, possibly costly, the kind of decision that makes investors nervous. The other said it was a strategic move, a calculated repositioning designed to capture enterprise trust and separate from the competition on brand. The debate got lively.

Both camps were right. And both camps were missing the point.

The analysis that stopped me was this: when you genuinely cannot tell whether a decision is principled or strategic, because both are fully present and mutually reinforcing, you are looking at the strongest possible position anyone can hold. The principle gives the strategy its power. The strategy gives the principle its durability.

They are not two things in tension. They are one thing.

That is not balance. That is integrity in the original sense. That is integer.

Anthropic’s passion is genuine safety-first AI development. Not a positioning statement. Baked into the architecture of the product, the construction of the contracts, the culture of the organisation. The best-in-world position flows directly from that passion, because trust built from actual commitment cannot be manufactured or replicated by a competitor. And the economic engine turns out to be driven by exactly that trust: enterprise demand, developer loyalty, talent attraction, legal infrastructure that compounds over time.

The three circles are the same circle. Which is why the position is, in Collins’ language, hedgehog-simple and almost impossible to displace.

Going into the myth and archetype here for a few moments, bare with me:

This is what Moses experienced in the desert when the voice told him to remove his shoes. The ground was on fire. The simplicity of that direct contact with what was real stripped away all his complexity in an instant. David Whyte writes about this moment in his poem “Fire in the Earth,” and the line that matters here is this: he never recovered his complicated way of loving again. And from that moment, everything he said mattered. Because it came from a place that was no longer divided against itself.

That is the Hedgehog fully realised. Not a clever strategy. Not a brave sacrifice. A removal of shoes. A return to direct contact with what is actually true about you and your work. And from that contact, nothing you say is performative anymore. It carries weight because it comes from a unified source.

Here is why this demands something of every leader in every organisation.

Most companies think of ethics and strategy as a trade-off. The moment you accept that frame, both weaken. The principle becomes ornamental. The strategy becomes generic, because it is no longer powered by something that cannot be copied. You cannot manufacture genuine conviction. You cannot retroactively build a culture of real belief. You cannot fake your way to the kind of response that causes thousands of people to celebrate your decision to leave revenue on the table. That response only happens when people can feel the difference between performance and reality.

Principle without strategy is martyrdom. You stand for something, it costs you everything, and the thing you believed in dies with the organisation. Admirable. Ineffective.

Strategy without principle is mercenary. You win in the short term, attract the talent that wants to win in the short term, and build nothing that compounds. The market eventually prices in the cynicism.

The integration of both, to the point where they become non-separable, is the rarest and most durable form of competitive advantage. It is what Aristotle meant. It is what Collins was pointing at. It is what the word integrity actually means before we softened it into a virtue we put on posters.

And it is available to any organisation willing to do the harder, slower work of actually meaning what they say.

So the question this raises for every leadership team is a demanding one.

Where in your organisation do your values and your strategy genuinely reinforce each other? Not on paper. Not in the culture document. In the actual decisions you make when it is expensive to be consistent.

And where are they quietly in tension, which means one of them is not real?

Collins said the Hedgehog Concept was not a goal or a strategy. It was an understanding. An honest reckoning with what you actually are, what you can actually be, and what actually generates the energy that keeps the whole thing alive.

The leaders who find that understanding and build from it do not have to manage the tension between principle and strategy. Because there is not one.

That is not a luxury. That is the work.

Remove your shoes. The ground is already on fire.

Fire in the Earth

And we know, when Moses was told,

in the way he was told,

“Take off your shoes!” He grew pale from that simple

reminder of fire in the dusty earth.

He never recovered

his complicated way of loving again

and was free to love in the same way

he felt the fire licking at his heels loved him.

As if the lion earth could roar

and take him in one movement.

Every step he took

from there was carefully placed.

Everything he said mattered as if he knew

the constant witness of the ground

and remembered his own face in the dust

the moment before revelation.

Since then thousands have felt

the same immobile tongue with which he tried to speak.

Like the moment you too saw, for the first time,

your own house turned to ashes.

Everything consumed so the road could open again.

Your entire presence in your eyes

and the world turning slowly

into a single branch of flame.

-from River Flow: New & Selected Poems, David Whyte

Let’s start with a provocation.

The word love has been so thoroughly domesticated, stuffed into greeting cards, Valentine’s Day campaigns, and inspirational LinkedIn posts, that we’ve almost completely lost contact with what it actually is. We’ve reduced it to a sensation. Something that happens to us, rather than something we do, or more precisely, something we inhabit.

That’s the mistake. And it has a higher than anticipated cost, in your leadership, your creativity, your business, and frankly, your life.

Fromm Saw It Coming

In 1956, Erich Fromm published The Art of Loving, a book that, if the business world had taken seriously, might have saved us seventy years of fear-based management. His central argument was simple and radical: love is not a feeling that arrives unbidden. It is a practice. A discipline. An art form, in the same sense that medicine, carpentry, or music are art forms. It demands both knowledge and consistent effort.

Most people, Fromm wrote, approach love as if the problem is finding the right object to love. They don’t realise the real question is whether they’ve developed the faculty for it.

This distinction is everything.

A leader who is waiting to feel inspired, who is waiting for the right team, the right market, the right conditions, is making the object mistake. They are waiting to fall in love with their work again, rather than understanding that love is something you bring to the work, or you don’t.

Fromm called this the difference between falling in love and standing in love. One is a temporary neurochemical event. The other is a way of being in the world.

What Neuroscience Actually Says

Here’s where it gets interesting for those of you who need the science before you’ll trust the philosophy.

When we experience states of warmth, connection, trust, and genuine care (what the brain’s oxytocinergic system is running on), something quite remarkable happens to our cognitive function. Research published across multiple peer-reviewed studies, including a landmark paper by De Dreu and colleagues, has shown that oxytocin doesn’t just make us feel good. It directly enables creative cognition. It reduces analytical rigidity, increases holistic and divergent thinking, and enhances our capacity for original ideation.

In plain language: love-adjacent states make you significantly better at problem-solving, innovation, and seeing what you haven’t seen before.

There’s a parallel finding in the research on flow states, which Csikszentmihalyi spent his career mapping. What happens in flow? The prefrontal cortex partially deactivates. The inner critic goes offline. The brain slips from the fast-moving beta waves of anxious productivity into the slower, more connective alpha-theta border, where ideas combine freely and time loses its grip. McKinsey’s ten-year study of top executives found performance increases of up to 500% in flow. Harvard’s Teresa Amabile found that not only do people perform more creatively in flow, but they also remain more creative the day after.

Now consider: what reliably blocks flow? Fear. Anxiety. The experience of being unseen, unvalued, or under threat. In organisations built on fear (and most organisations still are, whether they admit it or not), you are chemically and neurologically suppressing the very capacities you’re desperately trying to hire for.

Love, as a state of being and not a sentiment, is the antidote.

The Business and Meaningful Project People Are Starting to Figure This Out

Softway, a Houston-based technology company, was on the edge of collapse in 2015. Toxic culture. Haemorrhaging talent. Leadership that managed through control and fear. In their own words, they were “running on empty.” Their turnaround, documented in Love as a Business Strategy, wasn’t built on a new product or a funding round. It was built on a decision: to create an environment where people could bring genuine care, honesty, and vulnerability to their work.

The results were measurable: retention soared, innovation returned, and the business not only survived but became something its founders were proud of.

Marcus Buckingham, who has spent decades studying the most engaged teams and loyal customers for Harvard Business Review, reached a striking conclusion: when someone says they love what they’re doing, it isn’t hyperbole. His research shows it means they are actively flourishing, at ease, absorbed, productive, and energised. That state doesn’t happen by accident. It is the product of environments and leadership that make love (in the Frommian sense) possible.

Steve Farber, who has spent years translating this into leadership development frameworks, puts it simply: love generates a culture where people are more loyal, more innovative, and more likely to do their best work. And critically, you cannot fake it. People know.

David Whyte’s Contribution: The Quality of Your Conversations

The poet David Whyte, who has spent thirty years working at the frontier of where poetry meets organisational life, offers something that the business researchers can’t quite get to on their own. He says that the quality of your life is, ultimately, the quality of your conversations, including the conversation you have with yourself.

This lands differently when you understand love as a state of being rather than a sentiment. In a fear-based state, you have fear-based conversations: defended, performative, managed, strategic in the small sense of the word. You say what will protect you rather than what is true.

In a love-based state, a state of genuine care, of what Fromm would call active concern for the growth of what you’re engaged with, you have entirely different conversations. You tell the truth. You ask the question you’ve been avoiding. You challenge the person in front of you because you actually want them to grow, not because you want to be right.

Whyte calls this “courageous conversation.” And he’s clear: courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s what happens when you love something more than you fear the consequences of honesty.

That distinction alone is worth the price of entry.

What This Actually Looks Like on a Monday Morning

Here’s where the philosophy has to pay its rent.

Love as a state of being, practically speaking, means this:

You do your work from interest, not from anxiety. Anxiety narrows. It makes you conservative, reactive, and control-obsessed. Interest, genuine curiosity and care about the problem in front of you, opens. It generates the divergent thinking that neuroscience tells us is the signature of actual creativity. The question to ask yourself is: am I approaching this project because I fear what happens if I don’t, or because I’m genuinely interested in what might happen if I do?

You treat accountability as an act of care. One of the most common misunderstandings about love-based leadership is that it means soft. It doesn’t. Fromm was clear: love without discipline is sentimentality, not love. The companies that have successfully embedded love as an operating principle (Patagonia, Warby Parker, the Softway story) are not places without accountability. They’re places where accountability is held by people who genuinely care about each other’s growth. That’s entirely different from accountability as punishment.

You notice what you’re actually trying to protect. Most of the defensiveness in organisations (the turf wars, the information hoarding, the political manoeuvring) is fear wearing a strategic mask. When you’re operating from a genuine state of care for the work and for the people doing it, you ask a different question: what do we need to be true to actually do this well? Not: how do I stay safe?

You build belonging deliberately. Belonging, the experience of genuinely mattering, is not a soft benefit. It is the precondition for people bringing their actual intelligence to work rather than a managed version of it. When people know they matter, they bring their best ideas, their real concerns, and their creative risk-taking. When they don’t, they bring compliance.

You love your own work enough to do it with full attention. This is Fromm’s self-love point, and it’s the one most likely to make executives uncomfortable. He was direct about it: you cannot genuinely love others if you haven’t developed the capacity for self-love, not narcissism, but the genuine honouring of your own life and what it’s asking of you. A leader who has long since stopped caring about their own work cannot create the conditions for others to care about theirs.

The Harder Question

All of this raises something that the business literature tends to avoid.

If love as a state of being is this productive, this generative, this measurably good for the bottom line, why isn’t every organisation operating from it?

The answer is uncomfortable. Because love requires courage. It requires honesty. It requires being willing to be seen. It requires having actual conversations about what matters, what’s broken, and what needs to change, rather than the managed performance of those conversations.

And it requires that the people at the top of the organisation go first.

Fromm’s observation still holds: most people are more afraid of loving than of not being loved. They would rather remain in the familiar contracted state, defended, strategic and performing, than take the risk of full engagement.

But here’s what sixty-plus years of research since Fromm, and the accumulated wisdom of the practitioners, the neuroscience, and the business case studies all point to:

The contracted state isn’t safe. It just feels familiar.

The companies that will matter in the next decade are the ones where people are actually in their work, curious, connected, accountable, and alive. That state has a name. We’ve just been too embarrassed to use it in a boardroom.

Love is not the opposite of professionalism. It is the precondition for the kind of professionalism that actually gets something done that matters.

After more than half a century on this beautiful earth, I have seen a fair bit of Love come and go. One of the greatest lessons of my life involves the infinite relationship between love and grief… but, as they say in the classics, that is another story.

I have included a poem from my upcoming canyon and dust publication that highlights a few of the lessons I have learnt about love along the way.

Dust Roads and the Beloved

You want to know about love?

Then you must learn the language of dust,

how it rises from the road with each step taken,

how it settles in the folds of your clothes,

in the creases of your palms,

in the lines around your eyes from squinting into distance.

The desert knows what the mountains know:

that joy begins the journey

but cannot promise its ending.

The trail winds down into valleys

where you lose sight of yourself,

where the question isn’t

will love stay or flee, but

whether you can bear not knowing.

Look, there is fruit on the branch,

summer-swollen with promise.

But the tasting requires the tearing,

the revealing of hidden flesh,

the juice running down your chin

like a confession.

Some nights, the stars conspire to make you believe

heaven has descended.

You hold your beloved close,

breathe her in like prayer,

mistake this moment

for the whole story.

But the ocean calls

from beyond the ridge.

You can hear it some mornings when the wind shifts

that azure invitation,

that ancient pull.

And the only way there is the dust road down.

This is what the path teaches;

that love leaves its mark,

that scars are evidence of having dared the distance,

that freedom comes

not from avoiding the dusty road

but from walking it with open hands,

with dust in your mouth,

with love as your companion

and uncertainty as your north star on a cloudy night.

If you found this worth your time, share it with someone who's still running their organisation on fear and calling it rigour. ¡Gracias, Gracias, Gracias!