The resignation letter had been sitting in my drafts folder for months. I had told the people closest to me what it meant. I had made the private commitment. And yet there was a version of the story I was still telling myself, quietly, underneath everything else, that softened what I was actually doing. The circumstances were changing. The industry was shifting. The timing had arrived. All of that was true. None of it was the real reason.
The real reason was that I had looked at the life I was building and decided it was not the one I wanted. That sounds simple. At the time it did not feel simple at all. It felt like the most presumptuous thing I had ever considered, that I had the standing to walk away from something that worked, that performed, that carried real consequence, in favour of something that did not yet exist and might never amount to anything.
Jordan Peterson's work arrived in the middle of that internal argument. Not as reassurance. As a question. Specifically: whose fault is it if you do not go?
I have never met Peterson. I want to say that plainly, as I have done in every edition of this series. I have not attended a lecture or had any exchange with him beyond reading what he has published and watching what he has spoken publicly. He is also, I am aware, a figure people have strong reactions to. I am not writing about the version of him that exists in political argument. I am writing about the clinical psychologist who spent twenty years sitting with people who were struggling, trying to understand what it actually takes to build a life you can defend to yourself, and who then wrote it down clearly enough that it arrived in my life at the exact moment I needed something to push back on.
The man who made responsibility feel like the only honest answer.
Jordan Peterson was born in 1962 in Fairview, Alberta, a small, genuinely remote town in northern Canada. He studied political science at the University of Alberta, switched to psychology, and completed his PhD at McGill in 1991. He went to Harvard as a faculty member, then returned to Canada and spent the better part of two decades as a professor at the University of Toronto. A researcher, a clinician, a teacher. For most of those years, by his own account, he was working out a question that had troubled him since adolescence: how do people find the will to keep going when the structures that gave their life meaning collapse?
His first book, Maps of Meaning, published in 1999, was his attempt to answer that question at academic length. Dense, serious, rooted in comparative mythology and depth psychology. It took nearly twenty years to reach the audience it deserved. His second book, 12 Rules for Life, published in 2018, reached millions of readers across fifty languages, not because it was simple, it was not, but because it was honest about something most self-improvement writing sidesteps entirely: life is genuinely difficult, suffering is structural rather than incidental, and the productive question is not how to avoid it but what you are going to do while you are in the middle of it.
That is the Peterson I am writing about. Not the version that exists in headlines. The clinical thinker who sat with people for twenty years while they were struggling, and asked them, carefully, persistently, without comfortable shortcuts, to stop explaining their situation with reference to what had been done to them, and to start asking what they were going to do next.
Stop explaining yourself with reference to everything outside yourself.
The hardest thing Peterson's work demands of a reader is also the first thing. It asks you to sit with the possibility that the circumstances holding you back are real, the obstacles are genuine, and none of that changes what you can do from here. The moment your story becomes fundamentally about what was done to you, the industry, the timing, the people who failed you, the structures that did not support you, you have handed the controls to something outside yourself. And handing the controls away does not make the difficulty disappear. It just removes you from the equation.
You cannot be protected from the things that frighten you and hurt you, but if you identify with the part of your being that is responsible for transformation, then you are always the equal of the things that frighten you.
I sat with that question, whose fault is it if you do not go, for longer than I would like to admit. Not because I did not know the answer. Because I did know it, and knowing it removed the last place I had been hiding. The version of the story I had constructed, the circumstances were changing, the timing had arrived, was not dishonest. It was an arrangement of true things that pointed away from the one true thing underneath: I had made a choice. Privately, internally, completely. And I was using the language of circumstance to avoid standing behind it out loud.
There is a particular kind of dishonesty that contains no lies. The facts are correct. The framing is doing the work. And the framing was protecting me from the vulnerability of saying plainly: I decided that the life I was building was not the one I wanted badly enough to keep building. That is a different thing to say than the circumstances changed. It removes the exit. You cannot later blame the conditions for a choice you made with your eyes open.
When I finally put it to myself in those terms, I chose this, not the circumstances, me, something shifted. Not comfort. Clarity. The difficulty that came with the transition was mine. Not evidence of unfair conditions. Not something that had happened to me. Mine. Which meant it was mine to solve. And that, it turns out, is an entirely different relationship to have with a hard thing than waiting for someone or something else to make it easier.
I did not leave because the conditions pushed me. I left because I chose to go. That distinction is the whole difference between someone building something and someone waiting to see what happens next.
What you carry when the title is gone.
The second thing from Peterson's work that has lodged permanently in how I think is the distinction between status and character. He makes this separation with a precision that I have not found anywhere else, and it matters most at exactly the moment most people are least likely to be thinking about it, the moment of voluntary reinvention, when you are choosing to walk away from accumulated position in order to start building something new.
True ambition focuses on character and ability development rather than status, since status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go.
When I moved from managing critical national infrastructure to the early work of building a technology company, the status differential was immediate and it was felt. There were rooms, early client conversations, introductions, the ordinary social mechanics of professional life, where I could sense the recalibration happening in real time. The institutional weight that had been behind the previous role was not there anymore. The organisational context that told people what I was worth before I had said a word: gone. I was the person from the early-stage company, and that meant something different, and some days it was fine and some days it sat on the chest in a way I had not expected and had not prepared for.
What I kept coming back to, in those periods, was a question Peterson's work had already planted: what am I actually carrying? Not what did I leave behind. What came with me. The engineering discipline. The ability to hold a complex system in mind and see where it will fail before it does. The operational instinct, built across years of managing infrastructure that genuinely could not afford to fail, that always asks about the second-order consequence rather than the surface response. None of that transferred with a credential. It transferred as a way of seeing, ground into me through real engagement with genuinely high-stakes work. No reorganisation could remove it. No market shift could devalue it. It was mine in a way the title never had been.
That distinction, status is positional, character is portable, is the one I return to most often when I am talking to people who are considering a similar move. The question is not what you are leaving. The question is what you are carrying. If the honest answer to the second question is strong enough, the first question becomes considerably less frightening. Not easy. Less frightening.
When happiness is the wrong question entirely.
In 2024, during the months when the resignation letter sat in my drafts and I was still working out whether I was going to act on what I had already decided internally, I was not happy about it. That is worth saying directly, because I think there is a version of the founder narrative that compresses those months into confident momentum in retrospect. It was not that. It was a sustained period of sitting with genuine uncertainty, carrying the weight of a decision that had not yet been made publicly, in a role I was still performing at full commitment while privately knowing I was going to leave it. That is a specific kind of difficult. It does not look like anything from the outside. Inside, it is constant.
It is not suffering that breaks people. It is suffering without meaning. People can bear almost any difficulty if they understand why it is worth bearing.
There were stretches in the early work at Sharktech where nothing was going right. Not dramatically wrong, just the steady accumulation of things that did not work, calls that went nowhere, builds that needed to be reconsidered, the gap between what we were and what I believed we could become sitting wide enough on some mornings to be genuinely discouraging. In those periods I was not happy. I knew I was not happy. And I also knew that asking whether I was happy was the completely wrong question, because happiness was simply not available as a currency and had not been for some time.
What was available, what had to be there, or the whole thing stopped, was the answer to a different question: does this matter? Not does it feel good. Does it matter. Is the problem real, is the gap consequential, is the cost of staying in it proportionate to what we are actually trying to build. Peterson calls this meaning. I call it the reason you are still at the desk at five in the morning after three weeks where almost nothing has worked. It does not make the work feel easy. It makes stopping feel impossible. And for someone building something over a long horizon, that is the only fuel that does not run out.
Getting the foundations right before the walls go up.
One of Peterson's most direct principles, and one that sounds deceptively simple, is the instruction to set your house in order before you begin critiquing the world. He is not talking about tidiness. He is talking about sequence. About the relationship between what is stable underneath and what is possible outward from it.
The argument, as I understand it, runs like this. You cannot lead effectively through external complexity if the foundational structures of your own life are in disorder. Not because adverse personal circumstances make good leadership impossible, people perform under genuinely terrible conditions all the time. But because unresolved disorder at the foundation costs attention, energy, and presence that should be going outward. The leader who has not sorted what is underneath is, to some degree, always managing two things at once: the problem in the room and the unresolved problem they brought into it.
For me, this principle is not abstract. The Himalaya ride, the solo motorcycle journey to Umling La at 19,024 feet, among the highest motorable roads on earth, was part of sorting this. I want to be honest about what that trip was. It was not adventure tourism. It was not a break. It was the deliberate act of removing every layer of noise and obligation and performance to find out what was actually underneath, because I needed to know that before I could make the next move with any real honesty.
There is a particular kind of clarity that only arrives when you strip away the things that normally define you. At that altitude, in that cold, in that remoteness, there is nothing to hide behind. The professional context is gone. The infrastructure of identity that a working life provides, the title, the portfolio, the daily rhythm that tells you who you are, none of it is there. What is left is whatever is actually true. And what I found there was not complicated. It was the people I was going home to, the work I was building toward, and the understanding, arrived at without any argument or deliberation, that both of those things were worth whatever the next chapter cost.
Not a ranked list of priorities. A felt certainty about what the foundation was made of. Peterson's principle, sort your house before you go outward, had made intellectual sense to me before the ride. At 19,024 feet it made the kind of sense that does not require words. You cannot lead people into difficulty from a place of personal disorder. You cannot sustain the weight of building something significant if the things beneath it are unresolved. Not because you are weak. Because you are human, and human beings need solid ground underneath before they can move outward without losing themselves.
Three things I still carry.
Peterson writes about incremental improvement with a consistency that most people, I think, underestimate because the examples he uses, clean your room, tell the truth, keep your promises, sound almost insultingly small. But the point is precisely the scale. The compound effect of a thousand small decisions made correctly is what builds a person you can trust, and an organisation you can trust. Not one dramatic gesture. A thousand unremarkable ones.
Own the Outcome Before You Own the Role
The title follows the accountability, it does not precede it. I have seen this clearly in both directions across my career. Leaders who wore the authority and deflected the accountability produced organisations that were exactly as good as they had to be. Leaders who carried the accountability before anyone formally assigned them the authority built something. When I took on the transformation of Sharktech from early-stage operation to multi-platform technology company, I did not wait for a mandate. I picked it up. That is the only way this kind of work gets done, and Peterson's framework is the clearest articulation I have found of why that ordering is not optional.
Trustworthiness Is the Only Asset That Compounds Without Ceiling
Peterson writes at length about what he calls characterological development, specifically, the practice of being someone whose words and actions are the same thing. Not as reputation management. As internal architecture. Every time you say something and do not do it, a structure erodes. Every time you say something and do it, a structure reinforces. Over time these two orientations produce entirely different people, and entirely different teams. The team around me will be as trustworthy as I am. There is no gap between those two things, and pretending there is one is the most expensive mistake a CEO can make.
The Unglamorous Days Are Where the Company Actually Gets Built
Peterson's most counterintuitive idea, that significant achievement runs through incremental, almost boring consistency rather than through dramatic moments, is also the one I have found most practically true in the work of building Sharktech. The dramatic moments are when other people notice something. The unremarkable days, repeated with discipline and honesty, are when the something actually gets built. Every day we make one thing work that did not work yesterday is a day that compounds. That is not an inspiring sentence. It is the job description.
Closing reflection
I want to say something honest about why this particular edition of the series was harder to write than the others. Naval Ravikant gave me a framework for what I was building. Ajay Banga gave me a model for the career arc I was moving through. Peterson gave me something more uncomfortable than either of those: a mirror. Not the flattering kind. The kind that shows you the version of yourself that is explaining why the circumstances are responsible for where you are, and quietly asks: is that actually true?
The resignation letter sat in my drafts for months not because I was gathering my thoughts. It was there because I was genuinely uncertain whether I had the standing to act on what I believed about myself. That is an uncomfortable thing to say publicly. It is also, I think, the most useful thing I can say, because if you are reading this at the same point I was at, that specific uncertainty, that private question of whether you are actually the person you believe yourself to be, that is the moment Peterson's work is most valuable. Not as reassurance. As a question you have to answer. And the answer only means anything if you are honest about it.
What I know now is that the uncertainty does not go away when you act. You carry it with you into the work. What changes is the relationship to it. An uncertainty you have walked toward on purpose is different from one that has arrived uninvited. One is yours to resolve. The other is just something that happened to you. Peterson's contribution, at the level I needed it, was helping me understand which one I was dealing with, and what it would mean to stop pretending it was the second kind when it was always the first.
The work continues. It is hard in ways I expected and hard in ways I did not. What has not changed is the understanding that the difficulty was chosen. That means it is mine. And that is exactly the right relationship to have with the thing you are building.