The real thing

I've been away for a while.

Artemis II has consumed most of my bandwidth for the last several months — the simulated mission events, the long days, the kind of focus that doesn't leave much room for anything else. My website went stale. LinkedIn went quiet. Publishing my book slipped down the priority list. I've also been rehabbing a long-time knee and shoulder injury as I ramp up my weightlifting, and working hard to protect my sleep. Something had to give, and I made a deliberate choice about what it would be. This isn’t an apology for that (I think emotionally strong leaders apologize too often, but that’s a different post. I'm mentioning it because it's relevant to what I want to talk about.

In my Technical Leadership Thursday emails recently, I've been digging into a question that John Winsor raised in HBR earlier this year — whether AI has effectively ended thought leadership. His argument is that generative AI has collapsed the barrier to producing content that sounds authoritative. The collapse has been so complete that the category has lost its meaning. Anyone can prompt their way to a compelling framework or a quotable insight. The volume keeps going up. The signal gets harder to find.

The term "thought leader" has always sat uncomfortably with me. It edges too close to influencer territory, and my feed is full of advice that seems to have skipped the part where you actually lead anything. Polished hooks. Tidy frameworks. Five things to do Monday morning. Helpful, maybe. Earned, often not.

Winsor calls what's replacing it "thought doership." It’s a little awkward, but it describes the difference between describing the future and building it, between advising from a safe distance and staying through the hard part with skin in the game. I see it as something simpler: the difference between content that was lived and content that was assembled.

Around the same time I read the Winsor piece, I came across an article in The Transmitter by a Penn lecturer named Nora Bradford. She was writing about neuroscience students and what she calls "friction maxxing" — her argument being that fighting through a difficult paper, sitting with confusion long enough to work through it, builds something that an AI summary bypasses entirely. The shortcut skips the learning.

I kept thinking about our debrief culture on the Artemis II team when I read it. We debrief after every major simulation event — not just to examine what went wrong, but what went right and why. When something works, the instinct is to move on. Sitting with a success long enough to understand which decision, which dynamic, which process made it work means you can apply it somewhere else. The suboptimal outcomes get examined the same way. Not "who dropped the ball" but "where did the system fall short of what the team needed." Blame finds a person and stops there. Process analysis finds the gap and gives you something to fix.

That kind of learning accumulates through repetition, through the specific texture of your team, through the institutional memory of having been in the room when things went sideways and choosing to understand it rather than move past it quickly. It can't be downloaded.

I know this because I've spent 35 years learning it the hard way.

At 26, I walked onto a launch pad for the first time. I was the only woman in the room. I didn't have a mentor who knew what that felt like. I knew no one who had stood in that specific kind of alone and figured out how to stay standing.

I did what a lot of us do. I came in earlier, stayed later, and researched harder than anyone else around me. Competence felt like the only currency I had, so I hoarded it. This all cost an enormous toll that was running up in the background — hospitalizations, burnout, an autoimmune disease that showed up like a bill I hadn't expected.

This is why I wrote The Emotional Architect. I describe it as 200 pages of ways I've made mistakes so you don't have to. What I have to show for 35 years in complex technical environments isn't a tidy list of best practices. It's a messier collection of moments where I got it wrong before I got it right — and what I learned about relationships, leadership, and emotional intelligence by living through them. I offer my experiences. The lessons you take from them are up to you.

The leaders I most want to reach are the ones who feel like they have to be better than everyone else just to be taken seriously. I see the leaders throwing themselves at situations without accounting for the personal toll (and I recognize the hypocrisy of my own self-sacrifice during this Artemis II mission). I talk to leaders who are competent and quietly collapsing at the same time.

That feeling of not being enough is real, and it deserves more than a five-step Instagram carousel. It deserves someone who has been there, who can say "I know what that room feels like" and mean it because they've stood in it.

No AI summary gets you there. No framework assembled from other people's experience gets you there. What gets you there is someone willing to share the mistakes, the growth, the impacts — good and bad. You don't need a checklist. Value comes from watching someone else navigate the tricky waters so you can see how you'd like to do it yourself.

I want to bring that real experience forward. I want to show that you can be a great leader and not sacrifice yourself along the way. That’s why I shifted my focus and gave myself a little grace. History was calling, and I didn’t want to miss my front row seat. The book talks about sustainable leadership, I’m doing my best to show one way leaders can make choices for themselves - and maybe you can take your own lesson from that.