Our mission

It was around my 30th funeral (or so I think, they all blur together at this point) that my life changed.

I was listening to a story that hit too close to home, a story about the "almost man". The man who almost hit it big, who was almost successful, who almost followed his dreams.

And I swore to myself in that moment that I would never become the almost man. I would never become the man who had dreams left unspoken, or regrets about the path he'd chosen.

Of course, life forces you into choices and each of those branches means another won't grow in its place. But I mean regret like the kind where you look back in five years time and realise that five more years have gone by and you're right where you were, only five years older.

It was then, in that hall with vaulted ceilings and sloped floors that never quite got warm, even in the summer, that my mission was conceived. It would take many more months for me to realise the pregnancy was in full swing, to start "showing".

A conversation with a close friend, a founder of a unicorn startup in London, put me into my third trimester. He helped me realise that my strength, my calling, was in speaking in public and helping others do so. But it was more than that, because there are loads of speaking coaches, and that's not really what I do. Well, it's not all that I do.

And I've been thinking about that as the year draws to a close, as the first months of my new baby's life are in the books, as I reflect on what we're building here together and where I'd like it to go.

And the mission isn't just to communicate for communication's sake. It's because, as some of our earliest words in the western canon say: "It's not good for a person to be alone." It's communication to draw close, to attend to another. It's communication to give people the tools to speak their dreams into existence. For that is also the primal mode of creation: God speaks, and the world responds.

The mission is simple: to help people communicate so they might commune, so they might join hearts to bring their visions to life, to bring the world to a better place than it was yesterday, in their little circle. It's communication as world-building.

And this is the best that communication can be—unifying, uplifting, inspiring. It's the type of communication that builds synagogues and churches, that lets hearts fill with hope, that spurs nations to defend other nations. It's the type of communication that builds bridges rather than burns them, that brings people together rather than apart, that shows everyone that we're all, deep down, the same. That we all bleed red and love fiercely, that our dreams and our visions are worthy.

This is the mission of Pathos Labs. A place to experiment and fail and keep going. A place that centers the human rather than the inhumane, that understands energy and mood, that's deeply concerned with the person saying the words and not just the words themselves. It's a place to learn that good communication starts with the "other" and in so doing, builds bridges by its very existence.

And it's down and dirty. It's get in the mud and weeds realistic. It's not highfalutin nonsense made to make the speaker sound smart or junk food that makes you feel good but does nothing. It's slow, and quiet, and sometimes louder than loud as it whispers to your heart. It's poetic and inspiring, and all the things that "business" communication isn't, or won't be.

It doesn't start with where we want things to be but where they are, and it creates a path to get there, together.

What we will build, together, you and I, is a place without tricks and traps, without dark psychology or pressure-tactics. We will build a movement of clean influence, rooted in genuine care and respect for the other, never getting too far out of our own breaches.

We've seen people tempted by the sun, and like Icarus, falling to the ocean with melted wings. We see the greats, men and women of stature and dignity, drawn low by their insatiable desire to be loved, faking words and stories about things that never happened. But that's not what great communication is. It's not junk food for the soul. Sometimes it will make you hated, sometimes it plants a flag in the ground and says, "until here. No more." Sometimes it challenges the status quo. Sometimes it dreams.

You and I, we will not melt, for our wings will not be made of the wax of shortcuts or fragile egos and ultra-processed thoughts. We craft our wings of slow, clear thoughts and measured words, of calm, centred beings and deliberate, resonant voices.

This is our mission and our calling. We will learn together and teach the world how to commune with our words, our thoughts, our being.

‍