The Crocodile in the Mud

“You are a small hungry crocodile in muddy waters”

It wasn’t the feedback I expected. It was a Saturday morning, and my coach, Saqib, was describing me to a room full of strangers. We were in a session where the lines between a high-level lecture and a raw confession blurred into something oddly uncomfortable, yet deeply satisfying.

He was addressing my frustration—specifically, my anger over a recently failed affordable housing project. I felt stuck in the muck of bureaucracy and “market conditions.” But in that metaphor, I saw a desire I hadn’t yet named.

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How I got here

As described in this post, I reconnected with Saqib by accident.

Walking into his office is an experience in itself: an oversized leather chair anchored by a massive wall of books. I have walls of books too, but if I’m honest, mine are often more decorative than lived-in. I couldn’t tell you the core thesis of half the volumes on my shelves.

He could.

He would scan the spines, pull a title, and summarize it with a level of precision—down to specific passages—that felt almost implausible. It was either a world-class performance or a level of mastery I hadn’t encountered in thirty years in tech. I left that first session with a list of thirteen books.

I ordered them all that night.

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Radical Hope

The first to arrive was Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope. It shifted my perspective almost immediately. Lear writes about the Crow Nation and their leader, Chief Plenty Coups, facing the total collapse of their civilization.

“When the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground… After this, nothing happened.”

It describes an ontological collapse. Not just losing your job, but losing the very language you need to make sense of the world. At the time, I had just transitioned out of my role at Salesforce. The “noise” was deafening—AI anxiety, the Citrini “2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” report, and Dario Amodei’s warnings about the “Adolescence of Technology.” It was easy to get pulled into a gravity well of resignation.

But Lear offers a way out:

“The task is to live as courageously as possible even when the traditional ways of being courageous have been rendered impossible.”

If the Crow Nation could reinvent what it meant to live a “vibrant life” after the buffalo disappeared, surely I could navigate a career transition in the age of AI.

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The Religion of the Future

If Radical Hope was my emotional anchor, Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s The Religion of the Future was the intellectual mountain I had to climb.

I’ll be honest: it’s a tough book. Unger is a Harvard Law professor, and he writes like he’s defending a PhD thesis or drafting an ironclad legal contract. It’s dense, at times impenetrable, and I found myself needing to unpack specific passages during my coaching sessions just to keep my head above water.

But the core message is worth the struggle: You only get one life.

Unger argues that we shouldn’t let inherited structures—whether they are social, institutional, or even the intellectual “truths” we were raised with—dictate what is possible for us while we are still here. It was a profound call to agency. Why settle for a role defined by a corporate hierarchy or a tradition that no longer serves the world we actually live in?

In hindsight, similar to other major life-changing events I have experienced, this layoff might have been the single most important event that defined my new purpose in life. It forced the question: Whose world am I living in, and whose world am I building?

During our discussions, Saqib wowed me again. He shared a story of a period of deep meditation where he finally “cracked” the text’s complexity, reaching a point where he could even identify errors in the book. It was another reminder that I wasn’t just reading; I was being invited into a level of rigorous thinking that my “decorative” bookshelves had never required of me.

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The Invisible Infrastructure of Work

As I moved into Conversations for Action (Fernando Flores), Ethical Know-How (Francisco Varela), and Mobilize! (Chauncey Bell), things started to feel closer to home.

These books describe something deceptively simple: Language is not a tool for describing reality; it’s a mechanism for coordinating action.

I thought back to a thousand team meetings I’ve sat through—the ones where everyone gives a “status update,” we all nod, and we walk away with nothing actually fixed. These books revealed the invisible infrastructure of every functioning team: Commitments, Promises, and Requests.

Running large-scale systems and global teams for decades, I realized I’d been using management frameworks that ignored the most basic human element: how we actually make and keep promises to one another. I only wish I’d found these texts twenty years ago.

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Learning to Learn (and the Mood Problem)

Gloria Flores’ Learning to Learn was similarly practical, yet different. She explores how “moods” shape our context and our ability to operate. This resonated with the “Crucial Conversations” training I took back at Microsoft, but it took it further by identifying a key weakness of mine.

I realized I had often suffered from moods like resignation or arrogance. I recalled a peer at my last corporate job whom I truly disliked. I had even justified to myself that I had “every right” to dislike them, and as a result, our work suffered.

I learned that triaging your own self into the wrong mood affects everyone’s ability to perform. I have since directly applied this to my current projects that require critical team engagement. You don’t have to like someone to coordinate effectively with them; you just have to manage your commitments.

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Disclosing New Worlds

This book, by Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus, had the most direct impact on my decision to finally start my own company. Even though I’d talked about it for years, I lacked the conviction until I read this:

“The true entrepreneur is involved in holding on to an anomaly and producing something that reduces a disharmony by changing the style of a disclosive space.”

Ironically, my startup, Mistryos.com, is powered by the very AI innovation that many see as a source of fear. Instead of a threat, it is the engine reducing the “disharmony” in how we integrate tech into blue-collar industries.

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Understanding Computers and Cognition

The final piece of the puzzle came from Winograd and Flores. It redefined how I think about user experience and data models. The historical limitations that created clunky spreadsheets and multi-value forms are coming to an end. We have a chance to leapfrog existing products in the $1T market, especially in the previously ignored blue-collar space.

One idea stayed with me: Reality isn’t something we passively observe; it’s something we actively construct. This leads to an uncomfortable implication: what we call “hallucination” and what we call “perception” may not be as distinct as we think. The difference often lies with the observer, not the experiencer. Writing over 40 years ago, their work is more timely today than ever.

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Final thoughts

I used to read a book every few years, usually because it was assigned by a corporate retreat. To find myself now immersed in ontological philosophy feels like a second awakening.

I’m no longer just “managing” or “leading.” I’m trying to live as courageously as possible in a world that is being fundamentally rewritten. The water might be muddy, but the crocodile is still hungry.

For #ELF#