🌀 The Leading Edge of Curiosity
Insights on navigating a dark night of the soul, reconnecting to your curiosity, integrating left & right brain functioning, and bridging money & meaning.
In my latest conversation, I speak to Tom Morgan a former financier turned writer and founder of The Leading Edge, a media platform and transformational community dedicated to sharing world-changing ideas and facilitating life-changing experiences
For 11 years, Tom enjoyed his work in finance relishing the perks and experiences that came with it.
By 2015, Tom found himself at another investment bank, where he observed a strikingly different reality. Despite the stereotype of high-pressure environments, his new workplace was oddly serene, with little to do.
In the words of the late David Graeber this “bullshit job” caused him to gain weight and experience an array of health ailments.
More disturbingly, Tom noticed that many of his colleagues were going through a meaning crisis, several of which ended in suicides.
Desperate to resolve his physical and mental distress Tom quit his job and started looking for other avenues of meaning.
In this timeframe, he had a profound spiritual awakening that altered his perception of reality, heightened synchronicities, and temporarily shut down his internal monologue.
This spiritual high was followed by a dark night of the soul which lasted for two years, only resolving after a set of intravenous ketamine sessions.
Throughout this journey, Tom learned how to follow his bliss, build a community, and live a holistic life.
Today he describes himself as a “curiosity sherpa” and spends his life seeking out the most interesting thinkers and ideas to share with the world.
Click the video below to tune into this wide-ranging conversation where we speak about Tom’s journey from working in finance to exploring wisdom, navigating an existential crisis, integrating left and right brain functioning, shadow work, how to connect to your curiosity, bridging money & meaning and creating a network of transformational communities.
Memorable Quotes 🗣️
On Wisdom:
“Wisdom is the ability to pursue what you love and ignore what you don't.”
“Openness is the number one trait related to wisdom. But if you're too open, your brain falls out.”
On Shadow Work & Dream Work:
“I had a dream that me and my wife were sheltering in the house. And there was something really scary trying to get in. And someone had told me, you're everything in the dream, right? And that idea blew my mind, because I'm like, oh, shit, I'm the scary thing trying to get in.”
“If everything's a metaphor, that guy that really pisses me off, he's me.”
On attractors & connecting to your curiosity:
“The force that gives you life, the attractor that guides you in that direction is incredibly subtle and so if you've drowned it out with whatever your favorite numbing agent is you are not going to be able to orient your life.”
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience and shouts in our pains.” - C.S. Lewis
“When you don’t listen to your daemon it becomes a demon.”
“If I can do anything with my work, it's to make people believe that attractors exist and that they're intelligent and that they're beneficial and you can call it god and you can call it the universe and you can call it evolution and all the words are rubbish but if people have faith that that thing exists and it's grounded in science, that's a huge deal.”
On Balancing the left & right brain hemispheres:
“If you don't give a husky an interesting problem, it becomes an interesting problem. That's how I think about the left hemisphere. That's how I think about my intellect. That's how I think about my ego. My ego now always has interesting problems. And as a result, I can do mono-focus on stuff that I care about. And then when I no longer care about it, I put my head up and I'm like, okay, what's next? You need both.”
“You have to understand that the right hemisphere is always in charge. That switching is somatic and emotional. And that's what needs to be taking priority. And then you need to have the faith to trust it a little bit when it's pointing you in a different direction.”
On Bridging Money & Meaning:
“the stock masculine energy will not spend money on the feminine. It won't spend money on anything creative, anything chaotic, anything intuitive. All of those roles are structurally underpaid in society, but also people don't pay what they should for transformative gifts.”
“There are a lot of people that are doing the right thing whose value has not been recognized by the economic system that we're in.”
Dive Deeper 🤿
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