It wasn't live, just a dummy practice grenade my father had kept as a paperweight since his years in the military. I asked to borrow it for a persuasive speech assignment. Heck, he didn't just say yes. It was his idea to bring it in the first place, to use it as what he described would be a great foot stomper. The opening move meant to grab a room before you've said a word worth remembering.

Sixteen years old, I pulled an inert grenade out of a backpack in front of my class and got exactly what I came for. Attention. A story people might still remember twenty years later. What I didn't get, not for two more decades, was any real understanding of what I'd just learned how to do.

Before this Waymarker there was the fire, and grief moving through like water nobody noticed rising, then finding your position when the instruments go out, then the trap of holding someone else's ruler up to your own life. None of those are required reading, but this Waymarker lands right as most of the US walks back into the first weeks of school starting, calendars filling back in, and everyone getting the engine running again.

Now, the part that took me a long time to go back and understand was that grenade didn't just get me a grade. It taught me a method. If you want a room's attention, don't reason with people, control their emotions. One way to do things is to find what they're afraid of and press on it. It works almost every time (until it doesn’t and comes at a cost). Nobody in that classroom, including the adult who suggested the prop, was asking whether it was right.

We were asking whether it would land. Would this be effective?

At sixteen I didn't have language for it. A value is a thing you want. Attention. A win. To be remembered. Wanting is easy. Almost anyone can want to be honest, want to be patient, want to do right by the room they're standing in, or the people they are entrusted to lead.

A virtue is different. While a value is something you want, a virtue is the lived and trained capacity to actually do the “thing” when it costs you something. That gap, between who you want to be and who you've actually built the muscle to be, is exhausting to live inside. You can spend years wanting the harder, better thing and still reach for the fast lever every time, because wanting was never the part that was missing.

That's what the grenade was. Somewhere in there I am sure I wanted to be someone people respected for the right reasons. But that wasn't the question I was actually working. The real question was smaller.

What will this get me?

Not how does this treat the room, or people, in front of me. Not what does this room actually need to hear. Just, what will make them look up. I found a value, that hit dead center, but by a method that had nothing to do with virtue at all.

Discerning what is true, what the moment requires, and which choice serves the good rather than simply producing the quickest result. At sixteen, standing before a room with a speech to give, I could have asked what the moment required of me. Instead, I focused on what would make the room react.

The distance between those two questions became a foundation I built upon for nearly twenty-plus years without turning around to inspect it. When my decision-making was finally challenged during a really dark season, I became more concerned with how others interpreted my actions than with understanding what had actually driven them.

I am sure my father only wanted to see me succeed. He reached for the most effective thing available. A relic from a life where effectiveness could mean the difference between coming home and not. In that world, there was rarely time to weigh what worked against what was right. Survival rewarded reaction, and over time, that way of moving through danger could become a way of moving through life: always on edge, responding to the world without ever feeling fully at home within it.

He handed me something that worked. The question of whether it was right remained unspoken, perhaps because no one had ever taught him to ask it either.

You have one too. Everyone does.

Some way of getting what you want that works well enough you never had to ask if it was right.

My therapist asked me once how two people can live through almost the same thing and come out with completely different lives. I've thought about that question longer than almost anything else he's said. Some of it is what happened to us. Some of it, maybe most of it, is whether anyone ever goes back and checks what you built everything on top of.

People, doors, environments, the ones that shape you before you're old enough to evaluate them, lay a foundation whether or not you ever realize it. I've watched it in coaching rooms with people who have more talent than they know what to do with, and none of that protects them from accelerating in a direction they never meant to go, because the ground under all that capability was never checked.

I still feel the pull of the grenade. Not literally, but the instinct is still there sometimes. The fast lever, the thing that gets a reaction now instead of the true thing that takes longer to land. In an argument. In a pitch. In a leadership position. In the way I've tried to get my own kids to listen to me (please use your fork for the last time).

The part nobody warns you about is effectiveness doesn’t know how to clock out.

I for one learned it the hard way during a season of my career that never really slowed down. High-tempo work, constant pressure, and one bad call that kept playing in my head long after the shift ended. It took time, a chaplain, and more than one hard conversation to understand what had happened. I had become so practiced at doing, managing, fixing, and producing that I had forgotten how to simply be somewhere.

Even at my own kitchen table.

The habits behind everything I had become so capable of doing followed me home. They taught me how to perform, but never when to stop performing. They helped me solve problems, but never how to recognize which problems were mine to solve, or who I was when nothing needed fixing.

That distinction now sits beneath the choices I make. Not only whether something will work, but what using it will ask me, and the people around me, to become.

And that’s about wraps up this next small step along this wayward path for this week.

Until the next Waymarker,
— Will

Disconnected data and tools make it harder to understand your customers. HubSpot's Agentic Customer Platform brings your data, teams, and tech stack together with AI built in to help your business work faster and create more personalized customer experiences.

Why HubSpot and what's new

Connect more of your business in one place and give every team a smarter way to work. Get set up quickly and start checking off your hardest tasks.

Get started free