18: Tom Morgan - Wisdom in the Woo
Tom Morgan (X, Substack) is a "curiosity sherpa," writer, and podcaster who runs The Leading Edge, a community for leaders focused on personal transformation and authenticity.I first encountered Tom and his ideas during his talk at Sohn on Iain McGilchrist, left vs. right brain, and curiosity. Tom writes about complexity, curiosity, and consciousness, and wades into the deep end of various topics that most of us would place in "woo," mystic, and spiritual territories. He spent most of his career on Wall Street and brings a scientifically-inclined, rationalist approach to researching and amplifying some of the most surprising modern and ancient ideas about the nature of humanity and the universe.With this conversation, I aimed to create a primer on Tom's writing, approach, and the ideas he returns to most. We discuss following your energy, how curiosity is a guiding force, complexity and emergence, and why the world is overrated toward left-brain rationalism. We explore practical questions—How do you know your gifts? When should you pivot or persevere? What does real exploration look like when the world offers no safety nets? And then we wade into much stranger, or even heretical ideas—at least for a modern, intellectual, western audience—including the notion that consciousness is much vaster than what we've come to understand, and how we are just a small part of a much bigger whole.I hope you enjoy the conversation and consider some ideas that are much more fringe than you're used to. I definitely left it with more questions than answers.
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Speaker A: Welcome to Dialectic, episode 18 with Tom Morgan. Tom is a writer, podcaster, and as he calls himself, curiosity Sherpa, who runs The Leading Edge, a community for leaders focused on authenticity and personal transformation. I first encountered Tom when he gave a talk at the SOWN conference about a year ago on Iain McGilchrist. Left versus right brain and curiosity. And I've since gone down many rabbit holes around Tom's ideas on complexity, consciousness, and many topics that I think I and most of us would put in fringe categories we'd call woo-woo, mystic, or spiritual.
But Tom spent most of his career on Wall Street and brings a rational, open, and scientifically inclined approach to ideas and thinkers that are quite surprising. Speaker B: With the conversation, I wanted to strike a balance for big brain ideas and practicality. Speaker A: So while we do talk about some stuff I suspect you'll find bewildering, if not outright ridiculous, we also focus on a bunch of practical questions like how to follow your energy, understand what your gifts are, and how to charter a new path for your life when it seems like you're at a dead end.
Again, while many of these ideas are somewhat out there, I couldn't help but find myself intuitively nodding along in agreement to many of them. The notion that we are all a small part of a bigger whole and that authentically playing our individual part in that whole is a notion that I find incredibly powerful. So if you're skeptical, I especially hope you listen with an openness and hopefully it stokes the flame of curiosity. If I were to share a thesis statement for the conversation, it would be that Joseph Campbell quote that Tom loves so much: "Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were only walls."
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