Over 500 years ago, in an old stone quarry near Tuscany, workers extracted a massive piece of marble from the bowels of the Earth. Encrusted with dirt and bearing the scars of ropes, this slab looked like any other piece of rock cut from the ground. It was heavy. It was inert. It was dragged to Florence intended for a great statue, but the stone was difficult to manage. Two different sculptors tried to carve it, but they gave up and left it in a cathedral yard, exposed to the rain and wind for thirty-five years. It was considered a ruined object. Then, a 26-year-old named Michelangelo walked into the yard. He didn’t see an abandoned rock; he saw something else entirely. He picked up the tools he had forged with his own hands, and for two years he chipped away everything that wasn’t the statue. The young Michelangelo freed a man from the stone. He named him David. And when he finally stepped away, the world didn’t just see a piece of art. They saw magnificence. They saw that he had liberated a Subject from an Object. Four hundred years later, another young man walked into a quarry. It was 1940, and Poland was under Nazi occupation. This man wasn’t an artist; he was a laborer trying to avoid deportation. He spent his days swinging a sledgehammer in the freezing cold, splitting limestone. He watched the men around him – good men – get broken by the work. He saw how the crushing weight of the “output” threatened to turn them into objects, too. He felt that the stones had the power to crush the sculptors. In the dust of that quarry, a philosophy began to form in his mind. A philosophy founded in a six-thousand-year-old tradition, but revealed for a modern world that had invented new ways of oppression. Forty years later, he shared that philosophy with the world. The man was Karol Wojtyła. The philosophy was called Laborem Exercens – “On Human Work.” And he published it under his new name: Pope John Paul II. In it, he wrote these words: “Toil is something that is universally known, for it is universally experienced. It is familiar to those doing physical work under sometimes exceptionally laborious conditions. It is familiar not only to agricultural workers, who spend long days working the land, which sometimes ‘bears thorns and thistles’, but also to those who work in mines and quarries, to steel-workers at their blast-furnaces, to those who work in builders’ yards and in construction work, often in danger of injury or death. It is likewise familiar to those at an intellectual workbench; to scientists; to those who bear the burden of grave responsibility for decisions that will have a vast impact on society. It is familiar to doctors and nurses, who spend days and nights at their patients’ bedside. It is familiar to women, who, sometimes without proper recognition on the part of society and even of their own families, bear the daily burden and responsibility for their homes and the upbringing of their children. It is familiar to all workers and, since work is a universal calling, it is familiar to everyone. And yet, in spite of all this toil – perhaps, in a sense, because of it – work is a good thing for man. [...] It is not only good in the sense that it is useful or something to enjoy; it is also good as being something worthy, that is to say, something that corresponds to man’s dignity, that expresses this dignity and increases it. [...] Work is a good thing for man – a good thing for his humanity – because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfilment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes ‘more a human being’.” About twenty years later, I sat in a men’s group and studied Wojtyła’s work. That document changed the trajectory of my life. I was inspired. I knew I needed to weave this philosophy into my daily life. Laborem Exercens was sitting in the back of my mind as I grew my career and stepped into fatherhood. This was because Laborem Exercens gave me a vocabulary for something I had felt intuitively but could not articulate: the distinction between the objective and the subjective dimensions of work. Here is what I came to understand: The objective dimension refers to the output. It is the technology, the tools, the capital, and the profit. The subjective dimension is the internal reality. It is the person doing the work. Wojtyła’s central thesis was simple: Work is for man, not man for work. The world has historically rejected this premise. It became especially clear in the Industrial Revolution when machines started to blur the lines between the output and the person. We are not immune now, either. In the modern digital landscape, we continue to invert the proper order of work. Scrolling on our phones, we jump at every email and text message while flirting with 32 open apps and honestly think we are productive. We work asynchronously and brag about our “flexibility” while our partners just wonder when we will come to bed. We bought the lie, but deep down inside we know the truth – we are just middle managers of our own digital existence. We have allowed the tools (the objective) to dominate the person (the subjective). The stones in our quarries continue to crush us. No wonder we need therapy just to deal with work. Think Like a Director™ is what I use to correct this inversion. The Trap of Titles We are obsessed with titles. We believe that a “Director” is more important than a “Manager” because of their rank in the hierarchy. In Think Like a Director and in the protocols, the term “Director” does not refer to a job title on a business card. It refers to the inherent state of the human person. You are a Director because you possess an intellect and a will. You are a Director because you were made to govern your faculties, not to be governed by your tools. This dignity is inherent. It is not earned by a promotion. It cannot be lost if you lose your job. It is yours to keep. Therefore, Directorship is not something to strive for. It is something to operate from. This is why, in these pages, Janitors are Directors. And Directors become free. The great lie of modern productivity is that our work gives us value. We actually believe that if we produce enough, we will matter. We treat work as if it bestows dignity upon us. This is backward. Your dignity is already complete. Therefore, work does not bestow dignity; it reveals it. Work can now be understood as an epiphany of the person. It is a mechanism by which we make the internal reality of our personhood visible to the world. When we understand this, the tools we use must necessarily become subservient to us. If I lose myself in a digital vacuum, spending hours doing “just one more thing” while my toddler sits on the floor and eats dry cereal in front of a tablet screen, I have made the person subservient to the tool. I have degraded the revelation of the person in favor of maintaining a system. But this realization can trigger a dangerous extreme. If my dignity is already complete, shouldn’t I just close the laptop forever and only play with my kids? No. As humans, we must hold two truths in perfect tension. Dignity Necessitates Output Reliance on inherent dignity is not an excuse for laziness. In fact, it is precisely the opposite. Because our dignity is inherent – and because we are the sculptors, not the stone – we are compelled to create. Output does not equal dignity, but dignity necessitates output. There is a way to execute our work while still fiercely protecting our humanity. This is what you will learn in the pages that follow. We can simplify our systems not so we can do less, but so that we can focus on meaningful work. So we still produce and we still create value. The difference lies in approaching our work as the Sculptor with a chisel instead of wandering endlessly in the rubble of the Quarry. And then… we rest. It’s built into us. We stop feeling guilty when we sit on the floor with our kids and eat some dry cereal with them. We stop confusing tactical work (the object) with value (the person) so that work becomes a means by which we reveal our personhood. We become who we are by doing who we are. This philosophy of human work changed my life. It is rooted deeply in my faith. But early in my career, as I moved up the ranks in corporate operations, I faced a massive tension: How do I take this profound truth about human dignity and actually live it out on a manufacturing floor without proselytizing? How do I apply a theological framework in a secular environment that has its own set of values which may be different from mine? Isn’t this the struggle with anyone’s worldview? Whether you are a devout believer, a modern Stoic, an unapologetic individualist, or just someone trying to hold onto your soul in a corporate environment, the tension is the same. I had to operationalize my beliefs. I had to distill this deep theology into a secular operating system that the corporate world couldn’t reject, because the output was irrefutable. Think Like a Director is the result of that translation. I did not build this system because I am a philosopher – because I’m not one – and I did not build it from an ivory tower – because I don’t have one. I built it because I have a ton of work to do, a ton of kids to raise, relationships to nurture, and sanity to preserve. I am a human being who has made a lot of mistakes in life and in leadership. I built this system because I was surviving the Rubble, and I needed a lifeline to keep my soul intact while doing my job, and trying to do it well. You do not need to adopt ancient Roman theology to learn discipline from Marcus Aurelius. In the same way, you do not need to adopt Roman Catholic theology to recognize the undeniable truth of Wojtyła’s philosophy on human work. The physics of the Quarry apply to everyone. The dignity of the h
