Pop leadership development has perfected the art of chasing altitude for its own sake, offering us mountains of airport bestsellers—each promising new shortcuts to the summit, hacks for instant confidence, tricks for disruption, and five-step strategies for outpacing the competition. We peddle the fantasy that leadership is all about speed, self-optimization, market adaptation, “winning the game”, and personal triumph—as if true greatness could be measured by how frantically or fashionably we scramble ahead of the equally misguided rest of the pack.

But wisdom is not about conquering the summit; it is about cultivating ourselves. The mountains worthy of us are always structurally unattainable—they stand as moral horizons, calling us forward yet never permitting final arrival. Leadership, in this frame, is the slow and difficult inward labour of continual becoming: letting go of the race for achievement, discerning which heights truly matter, and remaining receptive to the horizon’s silent demand. In orienting ourselves toward the right peaks, we become through doing—not by scaling the heights, but through ongoing approximation, shaping our life and action to mirror, ever more closely, the splendor of the mountains that guide our path.

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