As you read, you’ll realize that these Nine Lies have taken hold because each satisfies the organization’s need for control. Large organizations are complex places, and a strong and understandable instinct of their leaders is to seek simplicity and order—not least because this makes it easier to persuade themselves and their stakeholders that they are moving toward their objectives. But the desire for simplicity easily shades into a desire for conformity, and before long this conformity threatens to extinguish individuality. Before we know it, the particular talents and interests of each person are seen as inconveniences, and the organization comes to treat its people as essentially interchangeable.

Instead, we are drawn to activities in which we find joy. We can’t always explain why, but some activities seem to contain ingredients that breathe life into us, that lift us up out of ourselves to reveal something finer, more resilient, and more creative. Each of us is different, of course, so each of us finds this joy in different activities, yet each of us knows this feeling. And when our work does indeed bring us this joyful ingredient, when we do indeed feel love, even, for what we do, then we are truly magnificent.

As with all the lies we’ve addressed in the book so far, the lie that people have potential is a product of organizations’ desire for control, and their impatience with individual differences.

But what if we made the attempt the entire point of work: To teach our kids and our college graduates, our workers young and old, our people in the second decade of their first career and our people in the first year of their third career, how to use the raw material of work to find their very own red threads and then to take responsibility for weaving them into something fine and strong?

Each truly effective leader cultivates his or her mastery in a way that communicates to us something certain and vivid. It’s as if we trust leaders only when they’ve proven to us that they’ve opened more doors than we have, seen round more corners than we have, dived deeper than we have, taken themselves more seriously than we have. We trust the seriousness of this. We trust its predictability. We are drawn to its specialness. We sense its authenticity. We are attracted to the beautiful clarity of great ability, the brief moments of awe. We ignore everything else.