What the mountain taught me about systems

I moved to Denver for a conference and never really left. The city had other plans for me.

I came to build companies. I ended up taking the inner work as seriously as the technical kind, years of ceremony, altitude, medicine, and long stretches of sitting with things much larger than language. It rearranged me, and it made me better at the day job, which is not the order I expected.

The initiation nobody schedules

You don’t plan for a city to become a spiritual event. You can’t, almost by definition, because the kind of person who could schedule his own initiation wouldn’t need one. But somewhere between the mountains and the medicine and a community that takes the interior life seriously as a matter of course, the neat separation I’d built, ambition over here, meaning over there, and never the two shall mix, quietly collapsed.

I’m not going to turn this into a confession or a sales pitch for any particular path. The specifics are mine and a little sacred, and a personal site is not the place to litigate the details of someone’s inner life, including my own. What I’ll say is general and, I think, true regardless of the particular doorway: going far out, carefully and with respect and ideally with people who know what they’re doing, can do something a meditation app cannot. It shows you the machinery underneath your own defaults. The automatic reactions, the inherited stories, the patterns you mistook for your personality. And once you’ve seen the machinery, once you’ve watched your own conditioning from the outside even briefly, you can’t fully un-see it. The defaults stop being invisible. They become choices, which is terrifying and freeing in equal measure.

Systems that get out of their own way

Here’s the part that genuinely surprised me, the part that connects the inner frontier to the technical one and that I’d never have predicted before I lived it.

The thing I kept noticing, in altered states and on mountains both, was a single quality present in everything that worked well: it got out of its own way.

A good market does this. It doesn’t need a central planner who knows the answer, in fact a central planner who thinks he knows the answer is usually the thing that breaks it. It just needs the right rules, the right incentives, and then truth leaks out of the gradient on its own, no force required. The mechanism works precisely because nobody is clutching the wheel.

A clear mind does this too. The states I found most profound were never the ones where I was straining toward something. They were the ones where the strain dropped and something underneath, something that was always there, got to come forward because I’d finally stopped getting in its way. The effort was all in the letting go, not the reaching.

And the same shape shows up in well-designed software, in healthy organizations, in good teams. The failure mode is always identical: a thing fighting itself, clutching, over-controlling, a designer or a leader or a mind that can’t stop intervening long enough to let the system do what it’s actually good at.

Markets and minds rhyme. Both work best when you build the right container and then stop strangling the thing inside it. The skill is in the container, and in the discipline to take your hands off.

How it changed the way I build

I started designing differently after I really absorbed this, and the change was concrete, not just vibes. Less control, more incentive, building systems where the right behavior emerges from the structure instead of being forced by oversight. Less cleverness, more clarity, because clever solutions usually mean you’re fighting the problem, and clarity usually means you’ve found the shape that wants to exist. Build the container, set the conditions, get out of the way, and trust the thing to cohere, the way a market coheres, the way a mind coheres when you stop strangling it.

This sounds abstract until you’ve designed a system both ways and watched the difference. The over-controlled version is brittle and exhausting to maintain, it needs you constantly, it breaks the moment you look away. The version that gets out of its own way is robust and almost alive, it handles cases you didn’t anticipate because the structure itself is sound. I learned the difference on mountains and in ceremony, of all places, and then carried it straight back to the desk.

Why the inner frontier matters to the outer one

People assume the psychedelic stuff and the markets stuff are two different lives, a builder with an unusual hobby on the weekends. They’re the same pursuit. Both are about coordination, getting a lot of moving parts, neurons or traders or services, to cohere into something that works without forcing it. Both reward the same rare discipline: building the right conditions and then having the humility to take your hands off.

Denver gave me the second half of a thesis I’d only ever had the first half of. I’d understood coordination intellectually, as mechanism design, as engineering. I hadn’t understood it in my body, as a way of being, until the city and the mountains and the medicine taught me the same lesson from the inside. I build toward that now, systems, and a self, that get out of their own way. It’s the truest thing I know, and I learned it somewhere I never expected to be looking.