We ran our second Gatherings Of The Elfs yesterday, a free online event where people get a chance to learn how to create from your inner, honest voice that is 100% you, and how to access the Source, which is often described as an infinite field of ideas that is accessible to everyone.

Do you have to believe in the Source to see it working? No, not really.

But it’s what sooo many musicians, creatives, and artists talk about when they say that what they created felt more like a discovery, or it was channeled through them. And if you’re in the right headspace, you can become an antenna to receive these ideas. And you’ll hear a lot of songwriters, just as an example, saying that the entire idea for the song, including the melody, just appeared in their mind all in one go.

Paul McCartney woke up one morning with the melody of Yesterday already finished in his head, went straight to the piano, and then spent weeks playing it to everyone he knew and asking whether they recognised it, because he was convinced he must have heard it somewhere and accidentally stolen it. He called it Scrambled Eggs until the actual words turned up. Yet, it is important to also mention that Paul McCartney just sat around and waited; quite the contrary, he had already written hundreds of songs before that particular morning, which matters, and I will come back to it.

But this is not limited to songwriting or music.

This applies to any creative expression as a founder, creator, and builder (doesn’t matter what “role” you have; we are all builders, creators, and artists - just different costumes).

BUT you gotta do the work, e.g., from 10 am to 1 pm every day, no matter what, to receive these ideas. It’s like what Rick Rubin said: you are a fisherman, and you’re out at sea, and you’re casting the lines into the water for a chance to catch something. And if you weren’t out there, well, the fish might still be there, but you don’t have any chance to catch anything if you’re not out there in the first place. (Credit to , who wrote about his own creative practice this week and got me thinking about all of this.)

This is also what got Paul McCartney to receive the melody of “Yesterday” - he had written hundreds of songs before, he did the work, he showed up and kept working - he kept casting the lines in the water.

The Source has nothing to do with talent or sheer chance of luck; it is about availability, to be there when the Source is broadcasting an idea to you, and many more.

That’s one part of the work; the other part is to create from your real, honest voice, and you know exactly the difference. It’s when you talk about something where your WHOLE energy shifts and you speak from a place of excitement, playfulness, and pure uplifting energy; this is when your inner Elf is speaking.

And when the Dwarf is speaking, it’s very serious, produced, calculated, cold, disciplined, and talks almost entirely in shoulds and shouldn’ts.

The Tale of Dwarves and Elfs* (no, not a typo)

Once upon a time there were Dwarves, and the Dwarves became masters of building the world, with discipline and precision, so that if a thing needed making then a Dwarf could make it. Look around at almost anything that exists, and a Dwarf built it.

The Dwarf is not the villain of this story, and I want to be careful about that, because the Dwarf is the reason you have a career and a salary and a reputation and the trust of everybody who relies on you.

There is only one problem with the Dwarf, which is that the Dwarf is led entirely by the mind, and the mind can only ever reason forward from what it already knows, which makes it a magnificent instrument for digging deeper and a completely useless one for asking whether you happen to be in the right mine. So the Dwarf digs, and swings a bit harder, and goes a bit deeper, because that is what always worked before. And when the seam finally runs dry, the Dwarf has no way of knowing, because whether this is still worth doing is not a question the mind knows how to ask. So he carries on, in a mine that gave up its gold years ago.

and I were both in Dwarf mode for a very long time. Either value, self-worth, and happiness rose & fell with the success of our companies, and were defined by titles. Or we lost companies to the Dwarf mode, creating from a place that was not the real us, but from a place that was projected, produced, calculated, controlled, and disconnected. Hard working yes; ambitious yes, but from the place that leads you to burning out and leaving you god damn empty inside.

And then there were Elfs.

The Elfs do one thing differently, which is that before they build, they listen. Not to the mind, which can only work forward from what it already has, but to the heart, which already knows. They work through play and connection and curiosity, and the difference in what comes out the other end is this: the mind builds what it can already imagine, and the heart builds what it cannot yet justify.

Nothing here gets abandoned, by the way. Nobody is being asked to quit their job or to fire the Dwarf, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something worse than we are. The greatest work needs both of them. The only question that has ever mattered is which one of them is leading.

And whatever you are doing, if you create from that real, honest self of yours, that’s just pouring out excitement about what you are doing, you will have the BEST chances to succeed with whatever you are doing. Because THIS real you will carry you a looooong way and will allow you to build up the resistance and perseverance to eat any obstacle/”failure” for breakfast with a big hunger for more.

Because the journey is always longer than we expected, we better create from a place of joy, excitement, and honesty, rather than a place of disconnection, calculation, coldness, and shoulds and shouldn’ts.

Finding that voice, that real, honest you, will get you to create not only the impossible, but also maximise your chance of succeeding in your endeavour and making that unreasonable dream become a reality.

Three common limiting beliefs

These are three of the most common things people tell us when it comes to helping them find their voice and learning how to access the Source to create the impossible.

“I don’t need this, I’m already doing the work on my own”: It was true for me for years, and it’s precisely the problem, because doing it alone was the one thing I never thought to change.

Here’s what I missed for far too long: doing it alone makes the work harder. Much harder.

Showing up consistently is hard when nobody notices whether you did. Nobody’s waiting for you, and nobody asks how the thing is going. So on the days when it would be easier not to, you don’t, and nothing happens, and nobody knows.

And then there’s the part I find even more difficult. Catching yourself mid-sentence and realising that was the Dwarf talking, that was the mind and not the heart, is nearly impossible on your own. You need people who know what your real voice sounds like. People who can hear the shift before you can, and tell you: hang on, you sounded completely different two minutes ago, what happened?

You cannot self-diagnose a blind spot; that’s what makes it blind.

“I don’t have time for creativity and play”: Your inner, honest voice isn’t a work thing, nor a creative hobby you schedule on a Sunday afternoon and then put away.

It’s the same voice that shows up everywhere else in your life. In your career, with your family, with your friends, with your partner. Which means the hour you spend finding it isn’t an hour spent on a side project. It’s an hour spent on the thing that decides how you navigate everything, how clearly you make decisions, how deeply you love, and whether what you build comes from excitement or from obligation.

And if you want the maths: one per cent better every day compounds to thirty-eight times over a year. Zero per cent compounds to exactly what you started with.

Small consistent changes over a year get you way further than you might think - and this is GREAT news

“I’m not a creative person”: Picasso answered this better than I ever could: every child is an artist, and the only real problem is how to remain one once you’ve grown up.

We are all born creators and artists, but for many of us, a mind-focused educational system made us forget that.

Become an Elf

We are kicking off a new programme starting on August 17 at Eleven Dunbar - we are a private community of founders, dreamers, builders, and artists, capped at 150 people.

Our mission is to bring people closer to themselves through creativity and play.

That’s what the programme is built for: to help you find your voice, find your people, and create the impossible. Every week there’s a session where we come back to the honest voice, and another where we make things side by side rather than alone.

You’re paired with a 1:1 Elf accountability buddy who knows what you’re working on and helps you realize when you are in Dwarf-mode, and reminds you of your inner Elf. Every season we bring in visiting artists and practitioners who’ve spent their whole lives working this way. And every quarter there’s an art exhibition, where you show what you made to people who genuinely see it.

We opened 10 new spots for the new cycle starting August 17th; you can read more here: elevendunbar.com

I think I am writing all of this because of two things. Yesterday, hearing people describe out loud to strangers what they wanted to build moved me more than I expected it to. And I am beyond excited to start this in August and to watch a group of us make things from the real version of ourselves, because whatever those things turn out to be, they will sound like you, and that is the only foundation I know of that holds up over the long run.

Joy begets joy. Excitement begets excitement.

Peace out ❤️

(This one arrived mostly on its own. Thank you, Source.)

*Elfs is the plural of eleven in German, and we love that it sounds like elves, who are archetypal beings of creativity, serving as living bridges between nature, magic, and boundless imagination.

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You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

This one is just me, no guest, no notes, recorded on a Tuesday morning and published the same day, which is the version of this podcast I like most, because I press record without having any idea what will come out, and then something does. It was short and it stayed close to what has been going on in my own head over the last weeks, so here is the rundown.

The question I end every journal entry with. For a long time I tried Steve Jobs’ mirror question, if today was my last day would I want to do what I am about to do, and I could never get a usable answer out of it, partly because I do think this life ends and then continues, so the whole framing kept sliding away from me. What I write instead now, at the bottom of one small page every morning, is: am I living from my honest voice right now? It is a yes or no question, it takes a second, and it has turned into something I can carry through the whole day rather than something I contemplate once.

Why that question works better for me. Life is a constant flow of micro decisions, small responses, moments where you either say the thing or you don’t, and the honest voice question gives me a way to catch myself in the middle of that, to notice when I am hiding behind something, or not voicing what I feel, or not saying what I need, and then to ask what exactly I am hiding from. I can check it on three layers, in my voice, in how my body reacts, and in what my intuition is saying, which makes it far more grounded than an abstract question about mortality.

The I don’t know intelligence. This came from my conversation with Rohan last week and it has not left me since. How often do we produce an answer purely for the sake of producing an answer, not only in conversation with other people, but with ourselves, about what is next, where we are going, why that, who we are, what the plan is for the next six months. I have started saying I don’t know, and meaning it, and the relief is immediate, because most of the pressure we feel is not coming from society or them or the people, it is coming from the narratives we have built about ourselves, and once you look directly at those stories the mind gets a lot freer.

Confusion is the root of most of the suffering. What I keep coming back to is that the moment we start negotiating with reality as it is, the irritation and the anxiety arrive on schedule, and I don’t know is a way of stopping the negotiation before it starts. Reality as it is right now is already fine, and approaching it without an answer ready leaves room for spontaneity and creativity that a fixed position never allows.

If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way.

Eleven Dunbar is a private community of founders, dreamers, builders and artists who want to find that inner voice again, make real friendships, and bring their ideas into the world without doing it all alone.

Members meet weekly to create alongside each other, and across a season there are visiting artists, shared projects, small group conversations, and people who notice when you go quiet.

The community is capped at 150.

Find Out More

Sam Garrett, mantras, and Nirvana. At the Yoga Junkies Festival in Vienna, where my friend and his partner Alissia ran a brilliant Wim Hof workshop, the closing was a two hour concert by Sam Garrett, who I did not know beforehand and who is mostly known for devotional songs and mantras, the kind you can sing along to after hearing them once. Halfway through he started playing Nirvana covers, Come As You Are, Smells Like Teen Spirit, then Oasis, then Britney Spears, and the contrast with the mantras was fantastic.

What he said at the end. He told us he had been living inside a spiritual box, a very beautiful box that felt true at the time, and that he had come to see how much he was repressing inside it, how easy it is to get lost in positive thinking and love and everything is fine while neglecting your actual human existence. He also named the strangeness of people worshipping him as a guru, and questioned the whole ladder we build in spiritual circles, higher vibrations, higher consciousness, someone further along than you, when the premise of the thing is supposed to be that we are all one. He remembered being eleven or twelve with a mohawk, climbing onto stages at punk concerts and throwing himself into the crowd, and next year he is going back towards that, into psychedelic rock.

Whose essence are you arriving at. This is the part I share with him completely. Coming back to your natural essence does not mean becoming a Buddha, or a Lao Tzu, or a Krishna. Those are examples of people who arrived at theirs. Yours might look nothing like that, and it can be anything, so the question is not which one to imitate but who you are underneath the layers, and what is trying to be expressed through you at that very natural state.

Synthesizers, and a chocolate review that is overdue. My friend Gabriel and I got talking at the festival about the Telepathic Orchid ORC1, which is a beautiful piece of hardware with a proper homage to the eighties in the design, and I have been circling synthesizers since I stumbled on the Teenage Engineering OP-1 Field back in February. I love that they let people like me play with music without first learning an instrument, and I am hoping to afford one by the end of the year, at which point there will probably be live experiments in this podcast and a new intro song. If you play with synths, tell me which one to look at. Also, I have not done a dark chocolate review in far too long, and I intend to fix that.

The invitation. Give yourself permission to say I don’t know more often. If you don’t know, say it, rather than forcing out an answer for the sake of having one, because I don’t know is a perfectly acceptable response to most of the questions life puts in front of you, and it keeps you open, curious, and closer to the mind of a child, which is roughly where the good stuff lives.

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

I want to tell you about my friend Rohan, because he said something on this episode that I haven’t been able to put down since.

is the founder of Studio38, built around a problem he’s been circling his whole life: working on things for which the language doesn’t exist yet, which traces back to his own decades-long attempt to bridge the language gap between himself and his parents. Before that he spent eight years leading Brand Strategy at Twitter, starting with a small team in Singapore, then China, then eventually running a full creative vertical out of New York once the company relocated him there in 2019, work that took him across thirteen countries and clients like Apple, Chase, and LVMH, and closed out with him leading the push to legalize cannabis advertising on the platform, a project that reshaped how the whole industry approached it. Back in Singapore, in his own words, he was the glue of every social circle he touched, the guy who organized things, the guy people called when they wanted a reason to go out, the guy whose farewell party pulled a hundred people. If that sounds like a compliment, it is one. It’s also, as he found out, a kind of hiding.

Here’s what we talked about:

The city that doesn’t let you hide: New York didn’t let Rohan keep doing what worked in Singapore. He landed, and within months the city closed down for COVID, and he went, in his own description, from level one of learning how to be alone straight to level ten, no ramp, no practice runs. No office community, no going out, no five familiar bars where he knew he’d run into someone. Just him, an apartment, and his first winter of actual snow.

The sentence that stopped me cold: What he found in that apartment wasn’t dramatic, he was careful to say that, not some cinematic breakdown. Just a persistent discomfort with his own company, dressed up for years as a love of people. And then this: I was seeking, needing, the validation of other people to justify my presence. And in doing so, I was completely invalidating my identity. Sit with that one for a second. The very thing he thought was his gift, his social ease, his need for people, turned out to be built partly on a fear of finding out who he was without an audience.

The other half of shadow work: This is the part I think most people miss when they talk about confronting their shadow; naming it is only half the exercise. The other half is asking what that same wound is the reason for a strong positive driver in you, without you noticing. Because the same instinct that made Rohan need to be needed also made him, for fifteen years, the person who introduced strangers at a bar because a mutual friend once mentioned his name, the person who took two friends by the hand at his own birthday party and told them to go for a walk together, the friends who have been now married for 12 years and have 2 kids. The wound didn’t just cost him something; it built one of the more generous instincts I’ve ever seen in a person. He didn’t want anyone else to feel the specific loneliness he’d felt, so without ever framing it this way, he spent a decade making sure fewer people had to. Flip your shadow over, and it’s often the exact shape of the good you’ve already been doing in the world, just without a name on it yet.

Why the rats stopped doing cocaine: Rohan brought up an old experiment on rats and cocaine, the kind of thing that sounds like a party fact until you hear the finding. Isolated rats, given free access to cocaine, used it until it killed them. The same rats, given a real environment, other rats, space, things to do, mostly didn’t. The conclusion researchers drew wasn’t about willpower. It was that the antidote to addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection. If you go looking, this particular study has had its share of critics and mixed replications over the years, so treat it as a provocative frame rather than settled science; the point still lands either way.

None of us get to sit this one out: Rohan’s point wasn’t about drugs, though. It was about the rest of us, scrolling, swiping, refreshing, all of it running on the exact same wiring. He referenced a chart from the writer mapping out how nearly everything we do has a fast, cheap, dopamine-shaped substitute now, dating apps standing in for love, headlines standing in for books, an AI summary standing in for the headline. He wasn’t lecturing about it either; he included himself in it without blinking, which is exactly why I believed him.

Catching himself mid-sentence: What got me most happened in the last few minutes, almost by accident. We were talking about honesty, about what it costs to say the honest thing instead of the safe thing, and mid-sentence Rohan just stopped and named it in real time: “every time in this conversation I tried to pull back, bring in other cities, add a disclaimer, it’s because I was afraid people listening wouldn’t like me. Which meant I was less honest.” He caught himself performing honesty about honesty, live, and said so out loud instead of editing it out. That’s rarer than people think.

If this piece made you recognize something in your own life, perhaps you have become very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems, but feel disconnected from your honest voice - you are not alone.

Eleven Dunbar is a private community for high-agency people who want to find their voice, build genuine friendships, and bring their ideas into the world without doing it all alone.

Through weekly creative practices, small-group connection, visiting artists, shared projects, and accountability, members make space for the work, conversations, and parts of themselves that ordinary life often pushes aside.

The community is capped at 150 people.

Find Out More

There’s a lot more in the full conversation: New York as a city built entirely out of collisions, creative conflict as the actual engine behind culture, why the loneliest city in America might also be the most honest one. But if you only take one thing from this episode, take Rohan’s small reframe: whatever you’re still ashamed of in yourself is probably already the root of something good you’ve built without noticing. Look down before you look away.

Thank you, Rohan, for the honesty. All of it.

Where to find more of him: writes about movies, myths, and meaning over at Nothing in a Nutshell, and builds Studio38 around that same core question: how do you find language for the things that don’t have any yet?

and I hopped on a Zoom call to talk about playfulness and ended up somewhere else entirely: the honest voice. It was too good a conversation to keep to just the two of us, so we wanted to share a piece of it here.

We kept noticing that whatever the question actually is - how do I create something that matters, how do I love someone well, how do I stop performing and start living. In other words: how do I stop chasing fulfillment, joy, connection, and aliveness?

The answer keeps arriving at the same starting point, which is knowing yourself. For a long time, I found that a slightly unsatisfying answer, the kind of thing that sounds true in a workshop and empty again by Tuesday morning.

Until I started paying attention to what knowing yourself actually requires, which turns out to be something far more specific, and far more physical, than I expected.

It requires finding your honest voice.

And then trusting it enough to let it speak before you’ve fully worked out what it’s going to say.

1. What Is, and Isn’t, the Honest Voice

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You’ve probably come across the word authentic somewhere along the way, in a caption, a keynote, a wellness app notification, and I’ve always had a hard time getting cozy with it, because it assumes there is a true self buried somewhere, already finished, just waiting to be excavated like something you’d find at a dig site.

Honest feels different. Less like an artifact and more like a verb. Something you do from moment to moment, not something you eventually locate and keep.

And here’s the part that surprised me most when I started paying attention to it: the honest voice isn’t a mental image, or a clever insight, or a piece of internal chatter you can reason your way toward. It’s a bodily feeling. It doesn’t know the why yet. It just knows it’s the right thing to do, the way your hand knows to pull back from something hot before your brain has finished explaining heat.

You already know this, even if you’ve never named it. There’s research that has looked at the literal voice of someone who is depressed against the voice of someone who feels alive, and the difference is measurable, not just felt1. You know it in your own life too. The moment your voice fully vibrates, it feels warm, and rich, and simply honest. And the moment you speak from somewhere else, it goes cold, produced, as if something is quietly blocking your throat.

That second voice leaves a faint aftertaste of performance, of trying to sound smarter, kinder, more certain, more whatever-it-is I’ve decided I need to be perceived as in this particular room.

It sounds rehearsed like a broken vinyl player - a perfect narrative you can reproduce over and over.

It just doesn’t feel honest. It feels less like speaking and more like managing.

The honest voice, by contrast, is less polished. Rawer. Unfiltered, in the way a kid is unfiltered before anyone’s told them not to be.

Your honest voice doesn’t know performance; it will tell the same story in many ways, whatever feels natural at this moment.

And it doesn’t stop at your vocal cords. It runs through your hands, your posture, your whole body. The way you shake a hand, the way you dance badly and don’t mind, the way you write, play an instrument, code, cook, design. The more you express from the honest voice, the more honest the work becomes, an unfiltered expression of the youngest version of you that never learned to perform in the first place.

So where does the other voice come from, the flatter, higher, more careful one?

Mine, for what it’s worth, feels like a slight contraction in the chest. Shorter sentences. Words that end a half-step higher than they should. I catch myself doing it in the exact moment I’m hiding what I actually feel, usually because some old part of me has decided the need underneath it isn’t valid enough to say out loud.

If this piece made you recognize something in your own life, perhaps you have become very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems, but feel disconnected from your honest voice - you are not alone.

Eleven Dunbar is a private community for high-agency people who want to find their voice, build genuine friendships, and bring their ideas into the world without doing it all alone.

Through weekly creative practices, small-group connection, visiting artists, shared projects, and accountability, members make space for the work, conversations, and parts of themselves that ordinary life often pushes aside.

The community is capped at 150 people.

Find Out More

And that old part of me had to learn that somewhere. Nobody arrives disconnected from their own voice; we get disconnected. Usually early, usually by people who loved us, usually without anyone meaning it as harm. A kid who is too loud gets asked to quiet down. A kid who cries too easily gets told to toughen up. A kid who asks too many odd questions learns, eventually, which questions are the acceptable ones to ask out loud. None of this is a conspiracy. It’s just how education, and family, and society at large, teach a person to be legible, to be manageable, to be productive long before anyone asks whether they’re honest.

So we build a second voice, the performing one, because it kept us safe, and useful, and praised. And it’s a genuinely good tool. It just isn’t the whole of us, and it was never supposed to be the one running the show.

Some signs the performing voice has taken over:

• You are constantly in your head, replaying the past or rehearsing the future.

• You feel disconnected from your body and your heart.

• You can’t hear your intuition clearly, or you hear it and immediately argue with it.

• It’s hard to be fully present in a moment without narrating it.

• You feel a persistent need to control everything around you (including the narrative of how you want others to perceive you).

None of that makes you broken. It makes you someone who learned to survive by performing, which was probably the right call at the time. The honest voice was never the one you have to build. It’s the one you already have, and are learning, again, to let speak first.

:

I was sitting in our weekly intimate class, just a handful of students with Carol Gilligan, PhD and she was discussing her research journey in listening to different voice, which at that time happened to be women’s voices. There was a moment in class when she discussed a young girl she was interviewing and the interviewees reply to her was: “do you want to know what I think or what I really think?” Wow. This phrase was and had became a thesis to my life and I didn’t even know it. It’s a question I carry with myself

Voice carries the sound of a person’s inner psychic reality — their thoughts, feelings, perceptions — into relationship with another person. An honest voice is one where what’s spoken matches what’s actually felt or known internally, which Gerhard beautifully wrote about. The alternative isn’t silence exactly; it’s a voice that’s been edited, tuned to what the relationship (or the culture) wants to hear.

Do I even know what I honestly feel and think? and will I be honest with it. Honest voice as defiance for its own sake. It’s closer to integrity, the capacity to stay in relationship and stay true to your own felt perception at the same time, rather than treating those as mutually exclusive.

Gilligan’s research found that girls ages 7–10 are typically confident, direct, and “outspoken.” They say what they see and know without much self-editing. The shift happens at adolescence, when girls hit what Gilligan calls “the wall of Western culture”: the cultural ideal of the good, nice, selfless woman. To stay in relationship and be seen as likable, girls learn to trade honest voice for relational safety.

What they do instead: they say “I don’t know” when they do know. They defer, soften, and go quiet on things they actually have clear opinions about. Gilligan calls this going “underground” — not losing the self, but losing the belief that the self can be spoken and still be loved.

Judy Chu’s research observed preschool-age boys directly and found something that complicates the “boys just aren’t relational” stereotype. At age 4, boys are actually highly attuned — perceptive, emotionally literate, relationally sharp. But by kindergarten age, they’re already learning to mask that attunement to fit a cultural script of masculinity (the “boy code”: toughness, independence, not needing anyone).

What they do instead: they perform stoicism and self-sufficiency. Instead of naming an emotional or relational truth, they act — physically, through bravado, through “I don’t care” or “I don’t need that” — even when Chu’s observations showed they clearly did notice, feel, and care. The loss isn’t a loss of relational capacity; it’s a loss of the permission to show it.

Both losses are adaptive responses to relationship, not individual failures. Girls silence perception to stay likable; boys silence feeling to stay “manly.” In both cases the honest voice doesn’t disappear — it goes underground, and the cost is a slow disconnection between what they know/feel and what they let themselves say.

2. How the Honest Voice Is Nurtured

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Nothing I’m about to share is offered as fact or truth. It’s a reflection of what I’ve noticed across a life lived in seven countries, studying with shamans, plant medicine practitioners, monks, therapists, coaches, and, most instructively, with perfectly ordinary people, much like you.

My path here hasn’t been much of a path, really. More like a dance that got a little more awake, and a little more participatory, as the years went on. The same dance you’re in, actually, in the sense that we’re all moving to the same song, whether or not we’ve noticed the music yet.

Every time I’ve expressed my honest voice, through my actual voice, my hands, my body, I’ve woken up to it a little more, and remembered it a little more. Over time I noticed three parts of this that are less like stages and more like organs, constantly feeding each other: waking up and staying awake, remembering (going inward, toward the emotions and the intuition), and expressing.

It helps to picture a tree. The roots are waking up. The trunk is remembering. The branches and the leaves are expression.

If the roots fall short, everything above them falls short too, which is really just another way of saying this was never a three-step process with a finish line; it’s a lifelong practice, or maybe just a lifelong way of paying attention. There’s nothing to upgrade here, no better version of you waiting past stage three. It’s a constant inquiry, starting at the root, moving up through the trunk, expressed finally through the leaves.

And here’s the part I only understood properly once I stopped trying to do it alone.

Expression isn’t the end of the loop. It gets a response, and that response travels all the way back down to the root. By expressing, you inquire. Through inquiry, the root system grows

But the response doesn’t have to come from inside you. Sometimes it can’t. Sometimes the only way to actually hear your own honest voice is to have someone else reflect it back to you, more clearly than you’re able to hear it alone.

Which is where this stops being a solitary practice.

:

Part of nurturing the honest voice is locating it.

When a child retreats into vagueness, deflection, or “I don’t care” then we tend to treat that as a cue, not a dead end - we get curious. The adult women this version isn’t a dramatic silencing — it’s a well-practiced reflex: deferring before you’ve registered your own opinion, agreeing before you’ve checked if you agree. For adult men who’ve gotten so good at performing self-sufficiency that they’ve lost real-time access to needing anything — not lying, just no longer checking. When adults begin saying, “I don’t know” then I tend to ask myself and clients - what don’t you know. This is when the voice wants to hide. Ask yourself again, differently. Make space for the less socially tidy answer instead of accepting the first smooth one.

This voice isn’t recovered through solitary self-knowledge. It comes back inside relationships that can tolerate it. For adults this means: the work isn’t just “figure out what you really think” in isolation, it’s finding out (often by testing it) whether a specific relationship can survive you saying it. Couples, friendships, and — by extension — teams either become places where honest voice is safe again, or they re-enact the original bargain (stay likable/tough, stay connected; be honest, risk the bond).

3. Finding Your Voice In Relation With Others

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By the time we reach adulthood, most of us have gotten so fluent in translating what we feel into what’s palatable that we’ve stopped noticing we’re doing it. Carol Gilligan’s research on adolescent girls found the moment this trade gets made — trading honest voice for relational safety, learning to say “I don’t know” when you do know, “it’s fine” when it isn’t — but the trade doesn’t end at twelve. It just gets quieter, more practiced, more indistinguishable from personality. The polished diplomacy we praise in adults, the composure we reward in leaders, the agreeableness we call being “easy to work with” — these are often just the adult dialect of that same adolescent bargain, dressed up as maturity instead of named as a cost.

What Gilligan’s work makes clear is that voice isn’t recovered through insight alone — it comes back to life inside relationships that can actually hold it. You don’t think your way back to honesty in isolation; you find out, by risking it, whether a specific marriage, friendship, or team can survive you saying the unedited thing. This is why so many adults can articulate exactly what they think in therapy and still go silent at the dinner table or in the boardroom — the missing piece was never clarity, it was evidence that truth wouldn’t cost them the bond. Which means the real work of reclaiming voice in adulthood isn’t a solo project of self-discovery. It’s a test, run in real relationships, of whether connection and honesty can finally coexist — and often, the first step is simply noticing the half-second gap between what you feel and what you’re about to say, and choosing, just once, to close it.

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“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice; have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, because they somehow already know what you truly want to become.” - Steve Jobs

It’s true. It’s also one of those truths that sounds almost insultingly simple the moment someone says it out loud, as if the only thing standing between you and your honest voice was never having heard the advice before.

Except you have heard it before. Probably a hundred times, and it hasn’t made the doing of it any less terrifying, because a feeling with no argument behind it, no research, no committee of people nodding along, is a genuinely frightening thing to follow, especially when the part of you that learned to perform has spent years building a very convincing case for why the feeling should wait until it can defend itself first.

I’ve spent fifteen-plus years testing this the hard way. Retreats, ceremonies, coaching sessions, rooms full of people crying and breaking open and swearing; this time, they’d actually live differently. And for a weekend, or a week, you do. You come out lighter, clearer, more like yourself than you’ve felt in months. And then you fly home, Monday shows up exactly where you left it, and there’s no one around you who was in that room, no one who watched you find the thing, no one to notice if you let it go again by Thursday. The insight was never the hard part. Integration was. And integration, it turns out, is not something you can do alone in an apartment with a journal, no matter how good the retreat was.

Which is maybe why this was never meant to be a solo project, but always in relation with others, starting with yourself, and a strong community.

4. The Honest Voice in Creativity

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Honest voice and creativity run on the same wiring. Both depend on the same act: saying the true thing before you’ve had time to make it acceptable. Creativity isn’t a separate talent some people have and others don’t. It’s what’s left over when honest voice hasn’t been trained out of you. The gap that determines whether someone can make anything genuinely original is the same gap that determines whether they can say what they actually think — the space between the raw perception and the pre-approved version of it.

Most people don’t lose this all at once. It erodes slowly, usually starting long before adulthood, as staying safe in relationships comes to feel more urgent than staying honest in them. Somewhere in that trade, the instinct to soften, hedge, or preempt gets faster and faster until it’s running before the original thought even finishes forming. This is why so many adults describe “losing their creative edge” with no real drop in skill. What’s actually gone isn’t ability. It’s nerve: the willingness to put forward the answer before checking if it’s the right one.

And it’s why creativity comes back, when it does, under a very specific condition: a relationship or space that can hold the unedited thing without flinching. A good collaborator. A good workshop. A good marriage. What they share isn’t technique, it’s tolerance. They make it safe to say the version that hasn’t been smoothed yet, which is usually the only version worth saying.
Bad creative environments do the opposite. Like bad relationships, they reward the polished, expected, safe answer and what atrophies is nerve, not talent. Which means the fix isn’t trying harder to be creative. It’s finding, or building, a relationship where the unedited first thought is allowed to exist long enough to be looked at - before the trained instinct smooths it into something safer and smaller.

:

There’s a difference between asking what can I build and asking what wants to be built, and it’s a bigger difference than it first appears.

The first question comes from the intellect, and the intellect is a genuinely useful instrument, precise, disciplined, capable of enormous things. Most of us have been trained almost exclusively in this register, because school and work and modern life reward it, it’s measurable, it’s productive, it looks good on a resume.

But the intellect can only rearrange what it already knows. It can optimize, refine, solve. What it cannot do, no matter how hard it tries, is originate the thing that hasn’t existed yet.

That second question, what wants to be built, comes from somewhere else. Rick Rubin calls it the Source 2, the field every idea is already floating around in, waiting for someone quiet enough to notice it. Steven Pressfield spent an entire book naming the thing that stands between you and it, Resistance, the very reasonable-sounding voice that always has a good argument for why not today 3.

I don’t think we invent our best ideas so much as we become still enough to receive them. Every artist knows the feeling of the muse visiting, and every artist also knows how rarely the muse visits a mind that’s busy performing, optimizing, achieving, all the things the other voice is so good at.

Which is why the honest voice matters here specifically, and not just as a nice-to-have alongside creativity. It’s the actual instrument the Source plays through. Tune the instrument, and the signal comes in clearer. Keep performing on it instead, and you’ll still make things, plenty of people do, but they’ll have that same flat, produced quality the dishonest voice always has, technically competent and quietly hollow.

And the ideas that do arrive this way tend to ask something uncomfortable of you: they sit right at the edge of what you currently know how to do, not comfortably inside it. That edge is where the growth actually happens, and it’s also, not coincidentally, exactly where the honest voice is hardest to trust and easiest to abandon.

Which is really the whole argument of this piece, looped back on itself. The impossible thing doesn’t get created by the person with the most discipline, or the cleverest strategy. It gets created by the person who got quiet enough to hear what wanted to exist, and honest enough to bring it into the world exactly as heard, unpolished edges and all.

It starts with knowing yourself

So maybe that’s the actual answer to where any of this starts, whatever “this” happens to be for you today. Not with a five-year plan, or a better morning routine, or the next skill to optimize.

With knowing yourself. With the voice underneath the one that learned to perform. With getting quiet enough, and brave enough, and, it turns out, connected enough to other people, to let it speak first.

The rest, apparently, tends to follow.

Ask yourself every day:

Am I living from my honest voice?

And feel how your body reacts, and peel away layer by layer until you reach the core of your being - your honest voice.

If this piece made you recognize something in your own life, perhaps you have become very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems, but feel disconnected from your honest voice - you are not alone.

Eleven Dunbar is a private community for high-agency people who want to find their voice, build genuine friendships, and bring their ideas into the world without doing it all alone.

Through weekly creative practices, small-group connection, visiting artists, shared projects, and accountability, members make space for the work, conversations, and parts of themselves that ordinary life often pushes aside.

The community is capped at 150 people.

Find Out More

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

Fair warning before you read any further: most of this episode is Justin and I trying to invent a premium salted water brand, discussing whether it’s ethically sound to lie in a flotation pod together, and eventually landing on a tagline that we both agreed sounds uncomfortably close to Papa John’s.

None of that is in this article. You’re welcome, or I’m sorry, depending on how much you enjoy nonsense.

What I do want to pull out, because it snuck up on both of us near the end of the recording and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since, is a sentence we apparently wrote together back in November and had mostly forgotten about until we said it out loud again on the mic.

Here it is, more or less as it came out:

If you’re somewhere in life right now where you feel like there’s more to it, you wake up, you look back, and five or ten years just passed like this, and you’re like, this is it, and you’re really curious about it, because you know there’s someone inside you, and you know there’s more to do, and there are other people who think the same thing, and they’re doing cool shit, and they want you to come do it with them.

I’m not going to pretend that’s a polished line. It wasn’t written to be quoted back, it was written in a doc somewhere as a note to ourselves about why any of this exists in the first place. But that’s usually how you know a sentence is actually true, it survives getting said out loud months later without either of us wincing.

We’ve been at this almost a year now. Not even a full year, technically, which is a strange thing to sit with when you consider how much has actually shifted underneath it, the programming, the messaging, the whole shape of what we’re building. And in a year like that there are always the moments neither of us puts in the highlight reel, the ones where something feels stuck, where you’re staring at a WhatsApp thread wondering if the thing you’re building is landing the way you hoped it would, where doubt shows up uninvited and starts asking questions you don’t have quick answers to.

What I keep coming back to is that none of that doubt has actually been the enemy. If anything it’s been the proof that we’re building something we actually care about, because you don’t lose sleep over things you’re indifferent to.

And the thing underneath all of it, the thing we keep circling back to no matter how many tangents we take to get there, salted water included, is genuinely simple. It starts with knowing yourself. Not as a slogan, as a practice, one that takes longer than anyone wants it to and rarely happens alone.

We really do believe that. We built a place around the belief that you can explore your own honest voice alongside other people, create whatever wants to come through you, and get supported in that process instead of doing it in isolation, which is the harder and lonelier way, even if it’s the more common one.

If any part of that resonates, if you’ve had your own version of looking up and realizing five years went by, we’d love for you to come find out what we’re building. And if none of it resonates and you just came here for the salted water content, honestly, fair enough, that’s most of the episode anyway.

Fnd your voice, find your people, and create the impossible: https://elevendunbar.com/

Paige helps soul-led leaders build authentic personal brands through her community, The Ripple Effect. If you’d like to connect with her or follow her work, you can find her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paigegoldstein

I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you will too.

SORRY FOR THE DOUBLE POST; THERE WERE SOME TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES <3

This week’s episode, my co-founder joins for a brainstorming session on how to describe Eleven Dunbar.

What is it? How do we describe what is happening inside?

We’ve called it a modern third space for immersive community experiences, then a human-only internet, and somehow each clearer attempt inside has made it harder to explain outside.

Naming things is hard.

If this episode inspired you on how to describe Eleven Dunbar, leave a comment :)

Join Eleven Dunbar - The Most Creative, Playful And Humane Corner of the Internet

A place for innovators, dreamers, and builders seeking genuine connection, play, and creativity - capped at 150 people.

Apply here:

https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

No dark chocolate review this time :(

Join Eleven Dunbar - The Human-Only Internet For Genuine Connection & Creativity

A place for innovators, dreamers, and builders seeking genuine connection and creativity.

A global community, capped at 150 - small enough to allow meaningful, lasting relationships to form, and playful enough to overcome the Resistance keeping you from discovering and expressing your soul's creative purpose.

Apply here:

https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

And most importantly, THANK YOU for listening and walking with me on this beautiful journey. You rock (you weirdo).

Join Eleven Dunbar - The Human-Only Internet For Genuine Connection & Creativity

A global community, capped at 150 - small enough to allow meaningful, lasting relationships to form, playful enough to overcome the Resistance keeping you from discovering and expressing your soul’s creative purpose.

Apply here:

https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

This week, we sit down to explore what it actually means to live a creative life, and why your inner creativity doesn't need healing; it just needs to be remembered.

Also, we are hosting our FIRST ‘The 11D Gathering Of The Elfs’ on June 24, 12 pm ET, a free one-hour event for people who want to have more creativity and genuine connections in their lives.

Grab your ticket here: https://www.elevendunbar.com/11d-gathering

Join Eleven Dunbar - The Human-Only Internet For Genuine Connection & Creativity

A global community, capped at 150 - small enough to allow meaningful, lasting relationships to form, playful enough to overcome the Resistance keeping you from discovering and expressing your soul's creative purpose.

Apply here: https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

It was a wild and stormy night when Ashley the Lumberjack, Finch the Banned Doctor, Magda the Thief, Linda the Unpublished Poet, and Mox Folder the Failed Detective approached an island with a mysteriously looking lighthouse on a rocky and hole-ridden boat. They were shivering, strangers in a boat bound by a common mission: reach the lighthouse and find out what was going on.

Little did they know of the horror that was taking place on the island, but soon they would find out, and it would even cost Ashley the Lumberjack his life in an epic battle - a pure act of bravery so others could live. All combined with a never-ending stream of laughter and silliness.

These are not real people, but characters played by our Eleven Dunbar founding members Emily (Ashley), Vincent (Finch), Florence (Magda), Ilan (Mox Folder), and co-founder (Linda). It may just look like another Google Meet meeting, but it was a three-hour co-created adventure that transcended time & space, and bound them together through the vehicle of play.

It didn’t matter that it was purely digital, and it didn’t require a special physical location or fancy technology (although Google Meet is quite something if you think about it) - it required presence, curiosity, and the magic behind play.

So, what is the magic behind play that allows for genuine human connection and creativity, and can make digital meaningful (again)?

What Dungeons & Dragons Actually Is

If you have never played, the easiest way to picture it is this: Dungeons & Dragons is a story you build together out loud, with no screen full of graphics, just a handful of people and their imaginations.

One person, the Game Master, narrates the world into being, describing what you see, playing everyone who isn’t you, and telling you how the world answers back. While everyone else plays a single character living inside that world, deciding what they would do, what they would say, and where they would go, as if they were truly there.

The game loop is simple:

• The Game Master says what’s happening.

• The players talk it over and decide what to try, and then it all begins again.

Whenever something is genuinely difficult or risky, the dice get the final word: a low roll for misfortune, a medium one for the messy in-between, a high one for things in your favor.

There is no winning here, no finish line to cross, only the invitation to be curious, to investigate, to look after each other, and, ideally, to survive.

You may know Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) from the cult series Stranger Things, but it dates way back to 1974, when Tactical Studies Rules published it. There are many ways to play D&D, and it can look frankly quite intimidating with rulebooks & character sheets thick enough to prop open a door. Which is why we got Sebastian from to be our Game Master, who masterfully strips the experience to its essence: pure storytelling, giggles, silliness, and imagination.

Because underneath all the rulebooks and dice, the thing itself is astonishingly simple; a reminder of what we are capable of through shared storytelling, that we are all, every one of us, wildly imaginative beings able to conjure whole worlds together with nothing more than conversation.

Can the Digital Be Meaningful (Again)?

We live in a world that is as connected as it has ever been and also, somehow, as lonely, and the usual response is to point at the screen and say there is your culprit, and as if the solution were simply to step away, to go outside, to find a third/fourth place, to rebuild in person what the digital world has quietly hollowed out.

I do not want to dismiss that impulse, because there is something that moves me about the co-working spaces, co-living arrangements, and co-playing communities that have been quietly popping up over the last decade in cities.

It’s almost a renaissance of remembering we were always meant to share space and that the architecture of modern life has made that harder than it should be, and I find it exciting to see them popping up.

But I also think we misread the loneliness problem when we point at the technology rather than at our relationship with it, how we use it, with what intention, in what kind of setting, because the technology is not doing anything to us that we have not asked it to do.

And there is a more practical problem with the in-person answer, which is that these spaces exist, almost without exception, in cities, which are available primarily to people who choose to live in cities.

Yet, we know that physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness:

“The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It’s psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it’s reversed. Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices-TV, jets, freeways and so on-but I hope it’s been made plain that the real evil isn’t the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity.” - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig

Consider the parent who chose remote work so they could be home when their child comes through the door, and who now wants to pursue meaningful work without wasting hours of commute every day, or being stuck in an office.

Or the digital nomad who moves every few months and is therefore perpetually three days away from having a real community wherever they happen to be.

Or the solopreneur running something small and ambitious from a market town that has no co-working space and no plans to build one.

We have learned that these people are in as much need of genuine connection, play, and creative nourishment as people who live in cities, and to focus on reducing the psychic distance, rather than the physical distance.

So the question I keep returning to is not whether the in-person world has good things to offer, it obviously does, but whether the digital space can be built with enough intention and enough structure to carry the thing that connection actually runs on.

Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question all along, blaming the screen for what is really an absence of the right kind of frame.

What is going on here?

Play has been studied extensively and has been part of humans since the dawn of time. Play as a vehicle to learn, connect, create, or navigate life.

When I studied game design, I read Huizinga's work Homo Ludens1, where he talks about how play happens inside a special, temporary world with its own rules, set apart from ordinary life. He coined it the magic circle - it is a beautiful image, and I have never stopped using it in conversation, but I always found it hard to describe what is actually happening inside the circle, or what breaks the magic of this circle.

It was when I stumbled upon Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis2 that I found the concept I had been looking for, because Goffman starts from the simplest possible question: what is going on here?

A frame is what answers that question in any given situation, the invisible context that tells everyone present what the rules are, what roles are available, and what behaviour is expected, not something invented fresh each time but already embedded in the social context, waiting for people to step into it, often without realising that is what they are doing.

I’d argue that a frame is not only something that is always already embedded, but can be designed and engineered to create a certain feeling, or state of being3.

This is why game designers are masters of designing playful frames, which allow people to step out of their day-to-day persona, and suddenly turn into hyper-curious and resilient learners/adventurers, who eat failure for breakfast, but also connect through shared play.

Consider what happened to Google Meet on that Friday night. For most of us, it carries a particular weight: the platform of the pandemic, of the back-to-back calls, of the muted microphone, and staring into the middle distance. For many, not a place to be intellectually, creatively, and emotionally nourished.

However, nothing about the software changed when Sebastian opened the session: the same grid of rectangles, the same mute button, the same slightly unflattering angle.

But the frame changed entirely, the rules were different, the roles were different, the behaviour expected of everyone in those rectangles was different, and so Google Meet stopped being a place where you report on your quarterly objectives and became, for three hours, a lighthouse on a stormy island where something terrible was about to happen.

That is what a frame designed for play, creativity, and connection does, and it is why Gary Alan Fine, in his work Shared Fantasy, decided to look very closely at what was happening around ordinary tables where ordinary people were playing Dungeons & Dragons4.

What Fine noticed was that everyone playing is quietly holding three selves at once:

• The person they actually are.

• The player who knows it’s a game and weighs the odds.

• The character living inside the story.

The whole fragile thing only works because everyone agrees to keep all three in the air at the same time, which is, when you think about it, a small miracle of coordination dressed up as a Friday-night hobby.

Sarah Lynne Bowman5, a researcher who has spent years studying what actually happens to people inside roleplaying games, calls it bleed: the emotional spillover between the player and the character, the moments when what the character is feeling begins to colour the person playing them, and what the person is feeling finds its way into the choices the character makes.

It is neither a malfunction nor something to be avoided, and for many players it is precisely the point, the place where the pretend world and the real one stop running parallel and start, quietly, to become one.

Which is exactly what happened when Emily decided, somewhere in the middle of a lighthouse horror story on a Google Meet, to have her character, Ashley the Lumberjack, sacrifice his life by battling the strongest opponent in the game, so the rest of the party could live.

She wasn’t only making a tactical call inside the game, she was choosing, as herself, to give something up for the people in the other rectangles on her screen, and the feeling in the room in that moment, the hush, and then the laughter breaking through, wasn’t quite the feeling of watching a fictional character do a fictional thing, it was closer to the feeling of watching someone actually be brave, which is a strange and warm thing to experience on a Friday night through a video call.

And if that weren’t enough, Emily also spent a considerable portion of the session attempting to destabilise Sebastian, our Game Master, with a relentless cheerful silliness that was very much her own and that leaked into every choice Ashley made, which is bleed moving in the other direction, the real person colouring the character, and somehow making the whole thing more alive rather than less.

Ashley the Lumberjack has been a running thread at Eleven Dunbar ever since, a shared reference that surfaces between people who were there and people who have only heard the story, and what strikes me about that is that the thing being remembered is not a dice roll or a game mechanic:

It is a human moment, an act of generosity dressed in fiction that outlasts the session.

The frame held for three hours on a Google Meet, and what moved between the frames, the laughter, the bravery, the silliness, the grief that wasn’t quite grief, was entirely, unmistakably human.

The medium, the technology, the digital-only, it turned out, had nothing to do with it.

A Human-Only Internet For Genuine Connection and Creativity

In my last article Don’t Panic, Be Playful I reignited my hunger to understand play, and to show, rather than tell, how to bring more playfulness into one’s life, in the hope of making it less of a philosophical discussion, but an action-oriented way of living.

To actually help people navigate their life better, to breathe better, to parent better, to create authentically, to laugh harder, and to be seen and see others fully.

Something I have been missing dearly in the spiritual circles, where it has become more of an intellectual exercise than a grounded embodiment practice to help people navigate life better.

Not only is play, combined with interdependence, an incredibly powerful vehicle for genuine connection and creativity, but also an antidote against the inner battles (Resistance6) that stand between you and your soul’s creative purpose.

So, if this is true, then I firmly believe that technology, or the digital space, has never been the root problem of today’s consumer culture that is more lonely that ever.

It has been our relationship with technology, especially the Internet, that has made us more disconnected from ourselves and, therefore, from each other. And as a result, disconnected from our soul’s creative purpose.

And don’t get me wrong, in real life, experiences and connections can never be fully replaced. Replacing in real life was not the goal of creating a human-only Internet for genuine connection and creativity, but the possibility of the Internet as a place where genuine connection and creativity lead to real life - that is what gets me excited.

Technology used with enough intention that the connections formed through a screen eventually find their way off it, into a meal, into a room, into a life.

Because the one ingredient connection actually runs on is not proximity, it is presence and the felt sense of actually being with someone inside a shared world, and that, as a fictional lumberjack on a Google Meet once proved, travels perfectly well through a screen.

Thus, a digital container built with enough intention is a real answer for the parent at home, the nomad, or any person three hours from a city, who experiences psychic loneliness.

Eleven Dunbar is our attempt at it, to create a human-only internet for genuine connection and creativity, capped at 150 people.

A place where we help each other overcome the Resistance to discover and express our soul’s creative purpose.

Even if, occasionally, it costs Ashley the Lumberjack his life.

Join Eleven Dunbar - The Human-Only Internet

We’re looking for the engineer/executive who secretly writes poetry.

The digital-nomad/remote worker who can work from anywhere, but still craves a room that nourishes them intellectually and creatively.

The founder who wants to learn how to play again.

If this resonates, apply here: https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

Around age 13 or 14, I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Even though it is a sci-fi novel, I like to believe that Douglas Adams wrote a spiritual book in disguise. I always jokingly say, for me, that was my first spiritual book.

Douglas Adams took two things that don't obviously belong together, playfulness and profundity, and married them into a story about the absurdity of existence.

A man gets picked up by an alien spaceship the same morning Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. The answer to life, the universe, and everything turns out to be 42, yet nobody knows what the question was.

It sounds like a joke, it is, and yet something in that book quietly rewired me. It said: the universe is fundamentally ridiculous, and the most honest response to that is not anxiety, not hustle, not optimisation...it's delight.

To be playful and profound at the same time has always been the natural way of navigating this world. I guess this book gave me the allowance I needed to read to fully embrace it.

Because I don't think play is what you do when the serious work is done. I think play is the mode of being that makes serious work possible and meaningful.

Playfulness is not a personality trait or a leisure activity; it's a way of navigating, seeing, and experiencing the world.

And I think most of us knew this once, before we got buried under deadlines, under performance, under the accumulated weight of who we think we're supposed to be.

The self that knew how to play never really left, I guess it just got quieter as we grew up?

This is the shared philosophy that brought and me together to start Eleven Dunbar. And the more we build it, the more we realise what it's really for: to remind people of this intuitive way of being.

To give them the same allowance that Douglas Adams gave me: the permission to come home to the natural way of being they never really lost.

It is funny that Eleven Dunbar reminds me of this more than I like to admit. What I mean by this is that it reminds me of my own nature, which I am returning to, which was always there, yet buried in the noise of one’s own mind.

I spent a good chunk of my 20s dedicated to understanding, experiencing, and researching play. During my short stint as a PhD researcher at the University of Helsinki, I published a book chapter on the role of the teacher in game-based learning, arguing that games should not be seen merely as tools to motivate students, but as a genuine opportunity for learning, empowerment, and ownership in the classroom. 1

With Eleven Dunbar, I get a chance to close this circle, which I never thought I would get to do, but this time it is not for education; it is for people like you and me.

Realising this brings me tears, as it feels like coming home after years of wandering. I am still wandering in the gravity world, but I have arrived back home in the sacred world.

Just the other day, I stumbled upon research that I find quietly revelatory. Wulf, Bowman, and colleagues published a study titled Video Games as Time Machines: Video Game Nostalgia and the Success of Retro Gaming, which found that the reason adults return to childhood games has nothing to do with fun. 2 It is about self-continuity, an unconscious attempt to reconnect with a version of yourself that still exists somewhere underneath all the adult noise. What makes retro games more powerful than old songs or films is the interactivity. You do not simply observe the past; you re-experience it. Motor memory, spatial memory, the whole embodied archive of who you were fires at once.

This connects to something psychologists call the Reminiscence Bump, the phenomenon where memories from roughly ages 10 to 25 are stored neurochemically deeper than anything that comes after, because they are formed during the period when identity itself is being shaped. 3 The 90s were not just a time period for those of us who grew up in them. They are literally fused into who we became, and the reason that era feels like more than nostalgia is that it is closer to identity than memory.

Which means the self you are trying to find was never really gone. It did not disappear. It got buried, slowly and quietly, under deadlines and performance and the accumulated weight of who we think we are supposed to be. What feels like searching is actually closer to remembering. And what feels like becoming is actually closer to returning.

It was this research and a conversation with that reminded me to write about play with more rigor. To show, not just tell, that play is nature’s truism. It is how the universe operates, and it is a more powerful vehicle for navigating life than most of us have been given permission to believe.

Not as a philosophy to admire from a distance, but as something lived and felt; a vehicle to help others breathe better, to create authentically, to parent better, to love deeper, to laugh harder, and to help people be seen, and to see each other.

Far more powerful, I would argue, than any guru, any elevation of Jungian consciousness, or any intellectual/mystical framework that keeps the insight safely in the head and out of the body. I call this intellectual masturbation that feels confident and sounds smart, but keeps living in the realm of the mind, and never closes the bridge to full embodiment. (Sorry for that last one - I couldn’t resist).

That is what Eleven Dunbar is really for. The same permission Douglas Adams gave me at 13, to be playful and profound at the same time, to take life seriously without taking yourself too seriously, to trust that delight is not a distraction from the work but the very source of it, given not to one person through a book, but to a community of people, together.

This is not Justin’s vision, nor is it mine. It is older than both of us. It is a truism of nature that humans come alive in play, in genuine connection, in creative expression, and in the company of others who give them permission to remember who they already are.

The next generation won’t be disconnected specialists, but Adaptivists: humans who can feel, connect, create, and synthesize. People who remember that growth is not a solo project, and that becoming extraordinary was never the real goal, but rather remembering what was always already there.

Eleven Dunbar exists to help this generation find each other; to move from isolated individuals into a living network, from self-optimization to shared evolution, and from performance to presence.

A vibrant field of humans who play, build, reflect, and rise together.

So, don’t panic, be playful.

A new week, a new founding member episode! This week we sit down with Chad Hammock: sales leader, sneakerhead, and the man with a sourdough-based business philosophy that somehow explains everything.

We get into the concept of Quality, AI, baseball, and what a bread starter has to do with building great teams. Enjoy!

Join Eleven Dunbar

We only have a limited number of spots open.

We’re looking for the engineer/executive who secretly writes poetry.

The digital-nomad/remote worker who can work from anywhere, but still craves a room that nourishes them intellectually and creatively.

The founder who wants to learn how to play again.

If this resonates, apply here:

https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

Welcome back.

Parts one and two were about the world we’re living in, and the feeling many of us carry that something essential got left behind.

We ended Part 2 by coining the term “The Adaptivist”, who is an expert generalist.

Someone who understands how to marry the dichotomy of doing and non-doing, when to take action, when to surrender, and to have complete trust in life and the outcome of one’s action.

Life becomes more like a dance than a journey, or a pilgrimage with a destination at the end of it.

It becomes participatory.

We’re aware this next part sounds like we’ve spent a lot of time in the mountains - we might have, so bear with us.

The Adaptivist understands that they rely on other humans.

They tune their antenna: their body, emotions, mind, and soul to stay connected to themselves, to others, and to the source of life.

They remember why they are here. And they help others remember why they are here, so we can mature and evolve together.

They understand that two stories are always unfolding in parallel: the world story, and the sacred story.

The world story is this lifetime: identity, vocation, relationships, failures, successes, achievements, losses, and gains. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The sacred story is the soul’s story. It spans time and space and connects us to something beyond us, call it the source, God, Life, or Love.

The Adaptivist stays connected to the heart, so insights from the sacred story can inform the world story, and vice versa.

They care for the body physically, emotionally, and mentally, keeping the antenna clear and receptive. This allows connection to oneself, to others, to the universe, and to life as a whole.

The Adaptivist moves from “I think, therefore I am” toward “I feel, therefore I am.” There is no need for excessive explanation. Their actions speak. And when they speak, they speak from the heart and with embodied truth.

The Adaptivist is a generalist by design.

They do not specialize in narrow fragments of life. They cultivate breadth across mind, body, creativity, relationships, systems, and soul. Because it is at the intersections that aliveness appears.

They develop depth in at least one human dimension, psychology, story, aesthetics, systems, community, philosophy, and weave the rest together with taste.

In a world of accelerating tools and artificial intelligence, the Adaptivist becomes the integrator. Not the one who knows everything, but the one who can connect what matters.

They orchestrate intuitively. Rising tides raise all boats. No one teaches alone. We evolve each other.

They understand that polarity exists within. Love and hate coexist in every human, as if each of us holds a key to the gates of heaven, and the same key opens the gates of hell.

To love fully requires acknowledging one’s own shadow and the hate that also lives within us. By facing it rather than projecting it, we learn to love ourselves and others unconditionally. In others, we recognize ourselves: mortal humans capable of love and hate. And we choose love. As love begets love.

By choosing love, we heal collectively. We do not project our shadows onto the world. We befriend them, carry them, and refuse to let them unconsciously shape the world story.

Our attention becomes our prayer. Where and how we direct it becomes our unique way of expressing love.

This is our creative expression: an expression of love, joy, peace, and mutual evolution.

A finely tuned antenna allows us to receive ideas, visions, and original thoughts. Ideas do not belong to individuals. They move through us, and if not acted upon, they move on, because ideas want to be manifested.

The Adaptivist knows that life is not a journey with a destination, but a dance that requires careful listening: knowing when to surrender and when to act. An active participation in life, and an ongoing conversation with the source and everyone around you.

The question shifts from “What do I want from life?” to “What is life asking of me?” This is a lifelong process, approached with humility, gratitude, curiosity, and humor.

The Adaptivist embraces being human. They are here to experience life fully: failure and success, beauty and difficulty, heartbreak and growth, and the never-ending process of becoming.

They do not escape into spiritual bypassing or spiritual ego. They tune the antenna not to rise above life, but to participate in it more fully.

Be here. Be human.

The Adaptivist plays, creates, and connects.

These are not hobbies; they are the last remaining human superpowers.

They strive for emotional maturity. Not to be ruled by emotions, but to listen to them and work with them.

They take responsibility for their inner world. When triggered, they pause before reacting. Their pain is not an excuse to wound others, but an invitation to grow. They communicate honestly, even when it is uncomfortable.

They know how to hold space for themselves and for others. They can sit with tears without fixing. They can face conflict without collapsing or attacking. Their strength is not hardness, but grounded softness: the ability to remain open when things become difficult.

They lead through integrity. They say what they mean and do what they say. They keep their word, especially to themselves. Their ambition is not to dominate, but to serve: to build, protect, and nurture what truly matters.

They are in a relationship with something greater. They may call it God, Life, the Universe, or simply Love. Success is not measured by status or possessions, but by how much truth and love flow through them.

Independence alone leads to isolation. Codependence leads to collapse. The Adaptivist practices interdependence, the dance between individualism and togetherness.

And they will slip on some days, and be more mature in some areas and immature in others. They are not perfect; they are becoming.

Every mistake refines character, every heartbreak deepens compassion, and every challenge is an initiation.

Emotional maturity is not a destination. It is a lifelong dance between awareness, humility, and courage.

The Adaptivist commits to community and to something beyond themselves.

Perhaps, our founding member Emily captured it in the best way:

“The market punishes you for being a generalist. People want specialization, they want certainty. But maybe we’ve missed out on 50 Leonardo da Vincis because they were told: pick one thing.” - Emily, founding member Eleven Dunbar

None of this is a prescription; it is a direction we trust as it feels more like remembering than becoming anything.

The Adaptivist is not a finished person, but someone who is in motion, curious, open, a little weird, and committed to remembering how to be more alive in the company of others.

Someone who has decided that life and growth are not a solo project.

That is exactly who Eleven Dunbar is built around.

Next week, we will share more about the vision of Eleven Dunbar, and the beautiful thing is, it is less about Justin’s and my vision, and more about the vision of our founding members.

Love,
Gerhard & Justin

ps. If you want to join this awesome squad of people and build something meaningful together, where playful and profound experiences meet, then apply here: https://elevendunbar.com/ - We have a few limited spots open!

A new week, a new founding member episode! This week, we sit down with Sumo and Ami, two unbelievably amazing and interesting humans in the Eleven Dunbar universe.

Dancing, childhood dreams, healing journeys, manifestation, and somehow Google Sheets all made it in. Enjoy!

Join Eleven Dunbar

We only have a limited number of spots open.

We’re looking for the engineer/executive who secretly writes poetry.

The digital-nomad/remote worker who can work from anywhere, but still craves a room that nourishes them intellectually and creatively.

The founder who wants to learn how to play again.

If this resonates, apply here:

https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

This one is different, warmer, and has a healthy dose of 90s and early 2000s nostalgia, back when we experienced this beautiful intersection of the analog and digital world. New tech met old ways of interacting, connecting, and creating.

Let’s go.

There was a time when connection felt slower, more human, and strangely alive.

When the Internet felt like a bridge, not a destination. When people met through shared interests, long conversations, late nights, and curiosity. Not through metrics, feeds, or performance.

We laughed more then, we played, and we made things for the joy of making them.

Creativity was not content, and play was not productivity.

Connection did not need to justify itself.

Many of us grew up at that edge, the late 90s and early 2000s. A brief intersection between the analog and the digital. Technology helped us find one another online, and then we showed up in real life.

Somewhere along the way, that feeling faded. Connection became constant, but thinner. Life became faster, louder, and more optimized. We learned to perform, to stay busy, and to quietly numb the parts of us that needed depth, reflection, and real presence.

Eleven Dunbar exists for people who feel this loss, not as nostalgia, but as a signal. A sense that something essential about how humans connect was left behind, and it does not have to stay that way.

That is why Eleven Dunbar exists: as a modern third space that brings the best of both worlds together. Human-scale, intentional, and relational.

A place where independence matures into interdependence.

Where real, long-lasting relationships can grow again.

An alive network made of original, expressive individuals, who commit to togetherness and to contributing to something greater through their uniqueness.

A decentralized network of interdependence, where fully alive nodes grow together, and where becoming extraordinary is a shared process.

We no longer ask what the world needs. We do what makes us come alive, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

As more people come alive, the network comes alive. As the network comes alive, society does too.

This community lives by one universal truth: love.

Love is the foundation of collaboration, peace, joy, and creativity. Without love, none of these can exist. And without them, love cannot be expressed.

A node is alive when it can play.

When it follows curiosity. When it helps others, when it expresses originality, and contributes to the shared canvas.

Because play is the soul of creativity, and creativity is the soul of life.

At this point, the node becomes an adaptive generalist: an Adaptivist.

The Adapativist is someone who understands that they rely on other humans, but more about this in part 3 :)

So what does this actually look like in practice?

Eleven Dunbar is built around three spaces:

How We Connect - The Relational Space A trusted inner circle where real relationships form, and ideas, opportunities, and collaborations naturally emerge. You’re placed in a pod of 3–5 members, with private WhatsApp spaces, epic IRL events, and virtual gatherings. And we’re building something a little unusual: a 2D digital world, just for Eleven Dunbar. A pixel space that’s always on, part home base, part playground, part the thing you didn’t know you were missing. No feeds, no algorithms. Just humans, showing up for each other.

How We Play - The Eleventh Space Expanded thinking, renewed curiosity, and the creative edge to reimagine what’s next, through play and storytelling. We experiment with AI for creative expression, run community-led experiences, and occasionally disappear into what we call Imagination Land. We won’t explain what that is yet. You’ll have to show up and find out.

How We Transform - The Integration Space Gain more clarity, presence, and alignment in how you lead, work, and live. Peer-to-peer learning, a marketplace for rituals and routines, weekly AMAs, and workshops that are actually worth your time.

This is not a platform, it’s a place, and places only work when the right people are in them.

In the next post, we look at the kind of person this place is built around. Not a user, not a follower, not a member of a tribe. We call this person The Adaptivist, who is an expert generalist.

We opened a limited number of spots for the next round of members at Eleven Dunbar.

We’re looking for the engineer/executive who secretly writes poetry.

The digital-nomad/remote worker who can work from anywhere, but still craves a room that nourishes them intellectually and creatively.

The founder who wants to learn how to play again.

(We are not looking for people who want to optimize their network. They will be gently redirected.)

If any of this resonates, you can apply here: elevendunbar.com

Love,
Gerhard & Justin

Pasi Joronen, founding member, startup-builder-and-investor-turned-musician-and-family-man, and who fell into boiling mud in Iceland (and lived to laugh about it), joins us for this member episode of How to Unreasonable.

We go deep on rediscovering your creative self after 50, the alter ego you didn’t know you needed, and what it really means to stop doing what others expect of you.

Meet Pasi and his other half, Bruce.

Join Eleven Dunbar as an Early Bird

We only have a limited number of spots in the May cohort.

We’re looking for the engineer/executive who secretly writes poetry.
The digital-nomad/remote worker who can work from anywhere, but still craves a room that nourishes them intellectually and creatively.
The founder who wants to learn how to play again.

If this resonates, apply here: https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!

Over the past six months, Justin and I worked on a manifesto for Eleven Dunbar.

It was built through shared laughs, sink bread, long stretches of boredom, at least a dozen donuts, bursts of creativity, and a healthy amount of weirdness.

The way most good things get made.

So, welcome to a four-part series based on the Eleven Dunbar manifesto. We’re going to go on a bit of a journey together, through what’s broken, what we remember, who we’re becoming, and where we’re going.

Fair warning: this first post is the heaviest of the four. We have to name the thing before we can move through it. So bear with us through the diagnosis; the rest of the series gets lighter, more alive, more us. There’s play and laughter on the other side.

Okay. Deep breath. Here we go.

Hope you got your favorite towel somewhere close by.

Engaging a serious tone in 3…2…1…

When we look around, we see a disconnected, fractured, polarized, and lonely society. A society defined by distrust and confusion: a network of people more connected than ever, yet less connected than before - to themselves, and others.

It is worth distinguishing between physical and psychic loneliness. Physical distance has very little to do with it. In our cities, in our homes, in our friend circles, people surround us, and we can still feel lonely. It is the loneliness of not being known, understood, or seen.

The loneliness we are pointing to is psychic; Intellectual, creative, emotional, and spiritual. It is the loneliness of not being known, of not being met. Of moving through your days surrounded by signals and screens and small talk, and rarely encountering another soul who sees you, and who lets you see them.

This is the loneliness Eleven Dunbar is built to answer.

This fracture begins with the individual.

An individual who is confused, emotionally immature, lonely, and disconnected from themselves, and therefore from others and from the world around them. We see rising mental health struggles, rising suicide rates, and a quiet spiritual crisis shaped by the loss of shared purpose, shared stories, comradeship, and community.

In the absence of common meaning, we drift toward zero-sum thinking. We forget how to strive together. We forget how difference can be used to create something larger than ourselves.

This is the legacy of hyper-individualism.

Once, it was a necessary rebellion against suffocating collectives and rigid tribal structures that suppressed individual expression. But the pendulum has swung too far. What we see now is an over-inflated self and a weakened collective. The illusion that we do not rely on one another.

The result is an imbalance, a degradation of the human person, and a forgetting of the soul.

In this state, belonging is replaced by substitutes: consumerism, hyper-productivity, achievement, status, and conditional love. Worth becomes something to earn. Love becomes transactional. Often, what we call “the world’s expectations” are inherited voices: parents, authority figures, unhealed pasts.

Hyper-individualism numbs our deepest longings: connection, service to something greater than ourselves, loving interdependence, and the surrender to a common good.

We sense that something essential is missing from our lives, but many of us no longer know how to name it.

This numbness blocks us from truly feeling. It disconnects us from our hearts, and it buries the inner child along with joy, creativity, and curiosity for life and for others.

Deep inside, we long for unconditional love. Yet we have forgotten a fundamental truth: we can only heal, mature, and grow in relationship. Emotional immaturity leads us to project our inner confusion outward. Instead of taking responsibility for our wounds, we blame others and demand change from the world.

The outcome is often a shallow and unsatisfying life. Some become collectors of pleasant experiences that never accumulate into meaning, because they are not in service of anything larger. Others become insecure overachievers, trying to win love through success. Yet no amount of achievement delivers the belonging they crave.

At the collective level, we see the rise of tribalism: the dark twin of community. Whereas community is grounded in shared humanity, tribalism is built on walls, friend-enemy distinctions, and a “us vs them” warrior mentality. It promises belonging, but cannot deliver it, because it is not rooted in love, comradeship, or common purpose.

Today’s dominant companies and products reflect this inner state.

The largest social platforms promise connection and purpose, yet often deliver addiction, comparison, and distraction. You do not consume social media: it consumes the lonely, confused, and disconnected individual. What remains is a relationship with an algorithm that demands attention, but cannot offer meaning.

These systems are not accidents, but mirrors.

They reflect the inner condition of those who created them, and of the society that sustains them. The result is more noise, more confusion, more disconnection, and less purpose.

Exiting serious tone in 3… 2… 1…

Okay. We made it through the diagnosis. Towel down, shoulders down, you can unclench your jaw now.

This is the world Eleven Dunbar is being built for.

Eleven Dunbar is a modern third space, human-only, playful, a little wicked and weird, intentional, and relational. A place where independence matures into interdependence, and where real, long-lasting relationships grow again.

A community of people who play, create, and connect, who follow curiosity, and help each other come alive, and let what happens between us ripple outward into the world.

This is the first of a four-part series. In the next post, we return to something many of us still carry: the memory of when connection felt different. Slower, more human, and strangely alive.

We opened a limited number of spots for the next round of members at Eleven Dunbar.

We’re looking for the engineer/executive who secretly writes poetry.

The digital-nomad/remote worker who can work from anywhere, but still craves a room that nourishes them intellectually and creatively.

The founder who wants to learn how to play again.

(We are not looking for people who want to optimize their network. They will be gently redirected.)

If any of this resonates, you can apply here: elevendunbar.com

Love,
Gerhard & Justin

You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.

Emily Cabrera, founding member, lawyer-turned-AI-agent-builder, and certified adaptivist, joins us for the first-ever member episode of The Unreasonable Art of Living Eleven Dunbar series. We go deep on the renaissance of the human as ever-evolving adaptivist, why safety is the precondition for creativity, and what it means to stop explaining yourself to the world.

This one’s warm, funny, and genuinely hard to stop listening to.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Join Eleven Dunbar as an Early Bird

We opened 20 spots for the Eleven Dunbar non-founding member round.

We’re looking for the engineer who secretly writes poetry.
The leader/CEO who wants to learn how to play again.
The artist who is curious about how AI can expand their soul’s expression.

Apply here: https://elevendunbar.com/

We look forward to hearing from you!