That’s what TEDx Apex demanded and it’s hard. So many ideas, so many ways of presenting them. It’s a daunting task to distill a lifetime of learnings on Leadership down to ten minutes. Our curator, Eraina Ferguson, held me and our entire cohort focused on that single task. She has a gift for cutting to the point and asking the question every speaker needed to hear: *What do you actually believe?*

What I believe is this: leadership is not as complicated as we’ve made it. We’ve layered it with frameworks, titles, and prerequisites until it becomes something unnatural. My talk is a pushback against that. We are all capable of being extraordinary leaders, it’s just a matter of being honest — and OK, maybe a few more things. 😉

Here’s one of them: the most effective leaders I’ve encountered don’t have all the answers — they create the conditions for others to find them. That’s it. No framework required. No title required. Just the willingness to get out of the way and trust the people around you. That’s what I tried to say in ten minutes.

I was humbled to share the stage with a cohort of brilliant, generous thinkers. Watching their talks reminded me that the best ideas aren’t always the loudest ones — they’re the honest ones.

If you have ten minutes, I’d love for you to watch “Leadership: It’s Not That Complicated” on YouTube. And if what I say has meaning for you — or if it doesn’t — I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts. Let’s start the conversation.

Leadership: It’s not that complicated | Richard Greene | TEDxApex — YouTube

Your phone knows more about your attention than you do.

It knows the exact length of the video you keep watching. The emotional triggers that make you stop scrolling and pay attention. The moments you’re most likely to grab the phone for the distraction you crave. Our screens have conditioned us to being uncomfortable alone with our thoughts. Algorithms aren’t malicious. But they are great at keeping your anxiety levels high and locked into whichever website is making money on you.

We’ve done it to ourselves. According to several surveys we spend between 7 to 10 hours a day on screens — working, scrolling, seeking news, seeking gossip, seeking solutions to what ails us. We organize our days around those screens, from our first waking moments, until we close our eyes in the evening.

The result isn’t distraction and amusement anymore. It’s fragmentation.

We even have an acronym for it: FOMO — the fear of missing out. It’s our non-stop quest to keep up. With what — we aren’t sure but have no fear the algorithms have the solution.

It’s the mindfulness revolution, with an app guaranteed to guide us through the chaos: ten minutes of mindful breathing. A streak. A calming voice telling us we’re doing great.

But the noise and distractions don’t stop because we breathe slower, because we dive back into the noise.

It’s not the noise — it’s the focus

Quieting the noise isn’t about sitting quietly. It’s about being present in every sense of the word. It takes work and discipline.

It’s a conscious effort to decide where you give your attention. It’s the work of building an inner life that doesn’t collapse when the Wi-Fi goes down.

This restlessness we face today isn’t a new problem. Suffering, uncertainty, and fear have been a part of humanity since the beginning of time.

The ancient Stoics of Greece and Rome, the teachings of Lao Tzu recognized suffering as part of the human condition, and they developed frameworks for coping and thriving.

Those frameworks weren’t based on a 10-minute breathing/meditation session. They were based on ethical behavior and the discipline to act in accordance with it.

Twenty-five hundred years ago the Buddha taught the Noble Eightfold Path. It’s not a meditation technique, rather it’s a method for reclaiming your attention from everything that wants to own it: your ego, your fears, your cravings for control.

The path isn’t eight separate habits. It’s eight linked actions that cultivate wisdom, ethical conduct, and mental discipline. The path isn’t passive. It’s a practice that you actively pursue every day.

Mindfulness is a part of the path, but it’s not foundational.

The foundation is honest self-examination, ethical conduct, and the daily choice to tend to your own mind. Without that foundation, ten minutes of guided breathing is just the wellness industry selling another version of the same distractions.

Presence is not a setting you can toggle on.

In my book Finding the Eye of the Storm I write about five behaviors — Compassion, Curiosity, Gratitude, Humility, and Kindness. Those behaviors when built on a foundation of Honesty form the architecture of a calm and directed life. None of them are passive.

Curiosity means staying open when you’re certain you’re right. Humility means holding your opinions loosely in a culture that rewards certainty. Kindness means choosing decency even when you’re stressed. They are disciplines. They require effort and consistency, not just a ten-minute window with your eyes closed.

The algorithms are designed to capture and hold your attention. You are not going to out-distract them. You are not going to scroll your way to serenity. The only action that works is the one that requires the most from you: building a character strong enough that the endless drone has less to grab onto.

“Serenity isn’t found. It’s built — one honest, humble, deliberate choice at a time.”

It’s slow, unglamorous work. There’s no streak, no badge, no notification telling you that you’re 14% calmer than last Tuesday.

No shortcut gets you there.

Just the quiet — the kind that’s earned. The kind an algorithm can’t penetrate.

“I explored these ideas more fully in the essay — An App Can’t Do It.”

For years I didn’t have a name for what was driving me. I pushed myself, worked harder, achieved more, sought acceptance in places that I’d never get it. I told myself it was ambition. It wasn’t. It was fear — very specific, familiar, and unspoken. The kind that doesn’t make you tremble. The kind that lives, as I once wrote, in the isolation of our spirit. I didn’t recognize it until I finally stopped running long enough to look at it directly.

What I found were small internal fears. The familiar questions that nag at us; the fear of failing, of not being good enough, of losing what matters, of not belonging. These fears don’t need volume to influence us. They simply need to remain unspoken.

Our doubts, insecurities, and fears will always be rooting around in our brains, but we can address them, name them, and in doing so we begin to tame them. The truth is: if we don’t name our fears, they will name us. Our fears will define our limits, our reactions, our relationships, and our sense of possibility. They will keep us tethered to what is familiar, even when it doesn’t fit anymore.

Most of us resist naming them because we think saying the fear out loud makes it more real. It doesn’t. It makes it smaller. Naming a fear doesn’t make us weak. It makes us honest. And honesty is the first step toward reclaiming authority over our lives. When we name a fear, we can finally ask what that fear is supposed to be protecting. Some fears are wise. Many are just insecurities, and insecurity loses its hold on us when we stop running from them.

Internal fear limits the ability to see possibilities — it isolates our spirit from humanity and from our soul. Naming our fears is the first act of reconnection; with ourselves, with others, and with the deeper sense of belonging. It’s how we step back into the present moment, into life with all its wins and losses.

We don’t need to conquer our fears. We don’t need to silence them. We simply need to recognize them — or they will name us.

It’s a privilege to die and return to the living. Perspectives shift — sometimes slightly, sometimes radically, but they do shift. Something in us can’t go back to where we were before. Dying removes all the noise. Even if it’s just for a few moments, you can see the world without filters. You see the Oneness of Creation and how there is no separation between any living thing. You see that the story of our individuality, the one we so urgently grasp, is only part of the truth.

When I died, I didn’t come back with answers. I came back with clarity and a different way of seeing everything around me. It was quieter. It was connected. It was an understanding that the boundaries we defend so fiercely are thinner than we think. The separation we assume is real is mostly habit. Mostly fear. Mostly noise.

In that moment beyond mortality, I remember a quiet that felt both familiar and alien. It wasn’t dramatic or cinematic, it was more like remembering. Like waking up inside a truth that had always been there: we belong to each other. We always have.

Coming back doesn’t lessen the chaos in our lives. It’s always there. The awareness death brings doesn’t make life easier. But it does make it clearer. We notice how much energy we spend protecting our egos, defending our positions, proving our worth. We notice how often we choose being right over being kind. How we push past the moments that anchor us.

I find that I pay closer attention to the way people soften when they feel seen. I speak more slowly. I listen more intently. I notice things I used to move past without registering.

And in that noticing, my “I” started to feel less like a fortress and more like a doorway.

I’ve come to appreciate that steadiness isn’t earned through achievement or mastery. It’s accessed when we stop fighting our perceived differences and begin aligning with what we share. When we stop gripping our individuality so tightly and allow ourselves to be part of the whole. Moving through the world with clarity instead of panic. Curiosity instead of defensiveness. Connection instead of separation.

I didn’t bring back a system for navigating life or a set of answers. It was simpler: the present moment is the only moment we can affect, and each interaction is a chance to return to what matters.

Dying taught me that life isn’t about outrunning storms. It’s about learning to stand in the calm center of them. To listen intently. To be aware. To choose connection over fear.

The storm will always be there. The center is a choice. That choice is ours.

What makes someone a decent human being?

When I look at my own life, I keep returning to something more powerful than DNA or circumstances: the values we absorb from watching how the people who raised us treat others when no one else is watching.

Today on this Mother’s Day, my mother would have been 96, and while she’s no longer on this earth — she is

The Woman Who Taught Me Everything

Anne E. Greene née Steir entered City College at sixteen and earned her master’s from Columbia at twenty. The daughter of immigrants from Austria-Hungary and Romania, she understood what it meant to be an outsider looking in.

Over her decades as a teacher and administrator, she touched thousands of lives — including, John Travolta and the Isley Brothers. She lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and the assassinations that shook America in the 1960s. She witnessed breadlines, explicit antisemitism, and neighbors turning against neighbors during the Red Scare.

Through it all, she never stopped believing that every human being deserved dignity.

She didn’t preach this. She lived it.

I watched her treat the janitor with the same courtesy she showed the principal. She listened to people others dismissed. She had a sharp wit and could see through pretense in seconds, but she chose compassion over cleverness every time.

Why Now

We live in an age of algorithmic outrage. Division is monetized. Cynicism is currency of social media. We’re trained to see each other as ideological avatars rather than complex human beings trying to make it through the day.

My mother lived through worse.

And yet.

She refused to let those experiences turn to bitterness. Her faith in humanity wasn’t naive — she’d seen too much for that. It was deliberate. A daily choice. An act of resistance against the forces that profit from our suspicion of each other.

The Practice of Decency

My mother’s approach wasn’t sentimental. It was practical:

Listen first. Everyone has a story that explains their behavior — even if you never get to hear it.

Assume complexity. People contain multitudes. Someone can disappoint you today and surprise you tomorrow.

Make dignity non-negotiable. It doesn’t matter if someone is powerful or powerless, agreeable or difficult. Their humanity comes first.

Believe in growth. People can change, even when they’ve given you reasons not to hope.

This wasn’t weakness. It was strength.

It takes courage to keep your heart open when the world gives you reasons to close it. It takes discipline to see the human being behind the behavior you dislike.

My Inheritance

I wonder what she’d make of our current moment. I imagine her shaking her head — not in despair, but with that knowing look that said: “We’ve been here before. We’ll get through this too.”

The challenges we face — polarization, loneliness, algorithmic rage — won’t be solved by winning arguments or raising our voices. They require something my mother understood in her bones: the radical act of seeing each other as human beings first.

My mother didn’t leave me money or property. She left me something more valuable: the understanding that decency isn’t determined by the times we live in but by the choices we make within them.

The Choice We All Face

In a world that profits from our worst impulses, choosing to see humanity in others isn’t just personal virtue — it’s a form of rebellion.

It’s insisting that beneath the noise and division, most people want the same things: safety, dignity, connection, a chance to be understood.

Every generation faces the same choice: cynicism or compassion, suspicion or dignity.

My mother chose dignity. Every single day.

That’s the inheritance I’m trying to live up to.

And in this moment, when it feels like everything is pushing us to forget each other’s humanity, it might be the most important inheritance any of us can claim.

Thanks Mom, you are always with me

What values did the people who raised you live out when no one was watching? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

I did want to understand how we build value in our lives, how we can thrive professionally and personally in chaotic and often cruel world.

The answer turned out to be two answers. One external. One internal. And you can’t have one without the other.

The first book is Building Value: The Five Keys for Achieving Success

It’s the external story — the outer architecture of a business worth owning. The systems, the leadership behaviors, the structures that make an organization genuinely transferable. What separates a business from a very demanding job. It’s practical, specific, and drawn from four decades of working with owners who were asking the right questions, and those who aren’t sure what to ask.

The second book is Finding the Eye of the Storm.

It’s the internal story — the tools we need to navigate life. It came from a near-death experience that returned me with a different way of seeing: less urgency to be right, more awareness of how we treat people in ordinary moments, and a clearer sense that the human foundation underneath everything we build is the only thing that actually lasts.

One book looks at the business.

One book looks at the person inside it.

They’re really one story told from two directions.

That’s what I’ll write about here — Look for my weekly Thursday post. It will be short and conversational. If you want to go deeper, I write longer essays on Substack.

I’m glad you’re here and look forward to the conversation.