How to Discover Secrets in Leadership Land, Part 2
How secrets transform into conventional wisdom • What happens when secrets return to the Unknown Abyss • The secret-seeker’s toolkit
In last week’s How to Discover Secrets in Leadership Land, Part 1, we covered the first half of the anti-knowledge life cycle. We also wrote about:
How imaginary time travel encourages a secret-seeking mindset
The Secret Grottos, where anti-knowledge transforms into knowledge. Secrets manifest in the physical world as glowing Cerebrium crystals.
Cerebrium becomes dimmer when more people learn the secret contained within.
Secrets of nature (AKA scientific discoveries) usually reach the surface of Leadership Land by traveling through the Contrarian Caves.
Secrets of people (AKA hidden intentions) rise to the surface by traversing the Taboo Tunnels and Liar’s Lair.
Let’s continue where we left off, which is to see what happens to…
Cerebrium on the Surface of Leadership Land
When a piece of Cerebrium reaches the surface of Leadership Land, its inner light flickers out. The Cerebrium relinquishes its secret into a multitude of human minds, leaving behind an inert lump of crystal. What happens next depends on where the Cerebrium surfaced in Leadership Land.
Institute of Conventional Wisdom
By definition, a secret that is widely known and accepted is no longer a secret; it has become conventional wisdom. If you hop into your imaginary time machine, you’ll see that every piece of conventional wisdom used to be a secret long ago. Something as mundane as cooking a meal was a secret before humans tamed fire. The use of rudimentary stone tools used to be a secret to cave-dwellers accustomed to bashing things with their foreheads.
For this reason, the Institute of Conventional Wisdom is built entirely of inert, darkened Cerebrium. Former secrets of nature are now part of the STEM curriculum. Former secrets of people have become de rigueur in the liberal arts and humanities.
Note that darkened Cerebrium, devoid of secrets, is not worthless. The construction of skyscrapers and touchscreen phones are no longer secrets of nature, but they’re still valuable knowledge. Civic virtue and the rule of law are no longer secrets of people, but they’re still crucial for maintaining a functional society.
We loudly mock the Institute of Conventional Wisdom for its foibles because we fixate on how things could be better. But silently, we appreciate the Institute’s inert Cerebrium – former secrets (now conventional wisdom) that enable the spectacular standard of living that we enjoy today.
Desert of Good Intentions
Cerebrium that surfaces in the Desert of Good Intentions takes the form of unintended consequences. Fragile endeavors are usually harmed by unintended consequences, but anti-fragile endeavors are assisted by them (see Anti-Fragility and Asymmetry: Leadership's Best-Kept Secret). The imaginary time machine can illustrate the latter point:
Alexander Fleming accidentally left one of his petri dishes uncovered before going on vacation. He came back to his laboratory weeks later to discover penicillin – the first antibiotic.
Artificial sweeteners were discovered by chemists who licked their contaminated fingers (strike one). The guy who discovered cyclamate was smoking in his lab (strike two) and noticed a sweet taste when he inserted the contaminated cigarette back into his face-hole (strike three).
Two guys were frustrated that their giant radio telescope was producing static. They tried everything to eliminate the static, going as far as evicting the pigeons that were nesting inside the device and scrubbing out all their poop1 (they didn’t have
cheap laborgraduate students on whom to dump the dirty work). When the static persisted, the two scientists investigated further and realized they had discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. The two scientists later shared a Nobel Prize; the homeless pigeons did not.
There are too many unintentional scientific discoveries to list here. We normally think of unintended consequences as being bad, but that’s only true when you’re fragile. If you’re antifragile, unintended consequences can lead you to secrets!
Straits of Conflicting Interest
When Cerebrium floats into the Straits of Conflicting Interest, people draw battle lines. Harmonious relations become adversarial. Happy families are torn asunder. Team mate becomes team hate. Lawsuits start flying like a birthday cake struck by a ceiling fan.
Remember information asymmetry from last week? There’s even a legal term called “discovery” where lawyers minimize information asymmetry by forcing the other side to reveal their secrets.
Career Swamp
When Cerebrium emerges in the Career Swamp, someone loses their job faster than you can say “scandalous!”
Back to the Shadows of the Unknown Abyss
We mentioned last week that secrets are asymmetrically fragile. It’s difficult to learn a secret but relatively easy to spill the beans (especially in exchange for money, social status, sexual favors, or immunity from prosecution). It’s almost as if secrets want to escape from their Cerebrium cages. If you’re not careful, your efforts to imprison a secret might cause it to leak out faster! More on that in The Streisand Effect: A Cautionary Tale on the Perils of Suppressing Information.
Therefore, to keep your Cerebrium glowing, you must entrust it to the smallest possible number of co-conspirators2. This strategy can keep secrets from leaking out for a long time, but it creates a new problem: if you lose a secret-keeper to retirement, amnesia, or the Grim Reaper, you also lose their secrets.
When secrets are lost, they typically return to the Unknown Abyss in two ways:
When a secret of nature is lost, the inert (darkened) Cerebrium stays where it is inside the Institute of Conventional Wisdom. We typically have plenty of evidence that an invention existed (e.g. Greek fire, Girlamo Sergato’s method for petrifying human cadavers), but the Cerebrium goes dark because no one remembers the recipes and techniques for recreating the invention. When a secret disappears from collective human memory, a vein of Cerebrium glows anew in the depths of the Unknown Abyss. A new inventor must mine Cerebrium in the Secret Grottos, pierce the Veil of (In)comprehension, and recover the secret. This is what happened to Damascus steel and Fermat’s last theorem – they were re-discovered centuries after the original secrets were lost!
Secrets of people are lost upon the death of the last person who knew the secret. The Cerebrium crystal crumbles into oblivion. The secret itself dissolves into the Inconceivabilia of the Unknown Abyss. It’s just like the harrowing scene in the Pixar film Coco (2017) where a dead character dies a “second death” when he’s forgotten by his living relatives.
Secrets return to the Unknown Abyss far more often than intuition suggests. There are 8 billion humans alive today, compared to ~109 billion people who have lived and died before us. How many secrets died with them?
That’s a Mystery that we’ll never answer.
The Secret-Seeker’s Toolkit

We completed a round trip of Leadership Land from the bottom up to the surface, then back down again. Along the way, we observed the full anti-knowledge life cycle by seeing how it becomes knowledge and fades back into anti-knowledge.
If you’re ready to mine Cerebrium, here are some tips to keep in mind:
Curiosity is great…until it kills the cat
Curiosity is a powerful intrinsic motivator toward secret-seeking. If you lost your childlike curiosity, try to regain it. Remember the fable of the emperor’s new clothes: only the child blurted out that the emperor was naked. Try to revert to childlike curiosity…
…but do not revert to childlike naïveté. A more realistic interpretation of the emperor’s new clothes is that the dishonest adults had more to lose than the honest child. The adults faced consequences like retaliation and ostracism for speaking the unvarnished truth; the child gets a free pass.
Think as you like, but behave like the others.
Don’t look for secrets in the Institute of Conventional Wisdom
The Institute will teach you plenty of useful knowledge, but it won’t teach you secrets. The intelligentsia must reach a consensus before a topic is included in the curriculum. And by the time they reach a consensus, any secret will have transformed into conventional wisdom.
Keep your conspiracy as small as possible
If you’re guarding secrets for your organization, you have a job that’s much easier said than done.
Safeguarding Cerebrium is at least as tough as mining it. It’s hard to figure out the balance between a conspiracy that’s too large (unacceptable risk of leakage) and too small (unacceptable risk of loss). Implementing a “need to know” protocol often comes with negative side effects that requires high emotional intelligence to resolve.
Spend more time working alone
It’s very difficult to think independently when you’re constantly surrounded by other people. To look for secrets, spend more time either in your own headspace or in your own office/laboratory/hidey-hole. This isn’t to say that collaboration is bad – it’s to say that excessive collaboration leads to consensus, not Cerebrium.
If you’re a gregarious extrovert, give your introverted staff more space and reduce the frequency of teambuilding activities. If your organization’s job is to discover secrets, resist the current trend of tearing down cubicle walls and replacing them with open-plan office layouts.
Read more history, biographies, and old books
We have a confession: our “imaginary time machine” is nothing more than a series of history lessons wrapped seductively in a sexy dress. Most people are prejudiced against history because of how badly our schools teach the subject. The imaginary time machine was a gimmick to bypass the boredom you involuntarily experience when you think about history classes. You know, the type where you were graded on your ability to remember the exact year that Pope Beneficus XVIII was abducted by aliens, and similarly pointless exercises in rote memorization.
Ask yourself the “Contrarian Question”
In Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One, he provided two formulations of what he called the “Contrarian Question:”
What important truth do few people agree with you on?
What valuable company is nobody building?
Inspired by Thiel, we ask our own versions of the contrarian question for our day jobs and our writing:
What important questions are other people not asking?
What aren’t people telling us in interviews, surveys, and feedback?
What articles about leadership are other people not writing?
What existential risks are other people unconcerned about?
What BS leadership practices happen to be trendy today?
You can come up with your own contrarian questions centered around whatever you’re trying to accomplish.
Follow the anti-knowledge life cycle in reverse
You can reverse-engineer the anti-knowledge life cycle to find the type of secret you’re looking for. From the surface of Leadership Land, you must follow the correct path down to the Secret Grottos.
To find secrets of people (hidden intentions), start by investigating the Taboo Tunnels. What are people too afraid to talk about? Their secrets may be as subtle as an evasive segue accompanied by a break in eye contact…or as obvious as the elephant in the room. What are people lying about? For every lie told in Liar’s Lair, there’s a truth and a secret hidden nearby!3
To find secrets of nature (scientific discoveries), begin your search in the Contrarian Caves. At any given moment, the Caves will be crammed with ideas that are contrarian and wrong…but the few ideas that are contrarian and right are the ones that could incite future paradigm shifts. Investigate counterintuitive findings instead of automatically dismissing them as outliers/noise/someone else’s problem. Remember that many Nobel Prizes and patents were awarded to innovators who said “hmmm, that’s weird…” when they were originally looking for something else.
Follow these lines of inquiry from the surface of Leadership Land all the way down to the Veil of (In)comprehension, and you might be surprised at what secrets you find.
Secret-seeking is not for everyone. Ask your doctor if Cerebrium™ is right for you.
Let’s end by asking the most important question of all:
Should you hunt for secrets?
Secret-seeking is a lonely endeavor. Cerebrium mining is dirty, time-consuming, and fraught with uncertainty. Worse still, secret-seeking can lead you to uncomfortable truths that can tear apart fragile teams, organizations, and alliances. You will probably develop contrarian opinions that make you unpopular with your peers.
Some secret-seekers receive praise and medals for their accomplishments, but there are many more just like them who died in obscurity in the Silent Graveyard (or whom we vilified in life and honored posthumously). Statistically speaking, today’s secret-seekers are far more likely to end up in the Silent Graveyard than in the annals of history. We expect Adventures in Leadership Land to dissolve back into the Unknown Abyss at some point. Since even New York Times bestsellers are typically forgotten within a few years, we won’t delude ourselves into thinking that our writing will outlive us.
If secret-seeking damages your mental health and robs you of domestic tranquility, secret-seeking is probably not worth it. We (the authors) choose to be secret-seekers because we’ve been weirdos all our lives. We have never fit in, have never been fashionable, have never sat at the cool kids’ table. The discomforts and indignities that we experience as secret-seeking adults are no worse than what we endured in our adolescent years. For us, the downside is limited, but the upside is limitless.
If YOU are one of the cool kids and you have a lot to lose by joining the weirdos-only club…don’t do it. Just make sure you hire someone else to do the secret-seeking for you wink wink nudge nudge
We’ve been beating the dead horse of epistemology with a broken record. This is the last article on the topic. Hopefully you enjoyed the tour of Leadership Land by pretending you were playing a D&D campaign set in the universe of the Harvard Business Review.
Next up: Risk and Uncertainty in Leadership: 1-Dimensional Thinking. Hold on to the history lesson in a sexy dress “imaginary time machine” mindset. You’ll need it later once we work our way up to risk and uncertainty in four dimensions.
This is post #6 in the Leadership Land Consistency Experiment, Phase I. We’re building better writing habits by publishing weekly between 12/20/24 – 2/28/25, instead of once every someday. Are we compromising quality for increased quantity? Was this post any better or worse than usual? Please share your comments below or reply directly if you’re reading the newsletter!
The pigeons’ poop, not the two researchers’ (probably – the documents we read were worded ambiguously).
Or split the Cerebrium into shards and distribute them to different conspiratorial “cells” that don’t share information.
This is great in theory, but often difficult in practice. As far back as 1580, Michel de Montaigne wrote in his essay Of Liars:
If falsehood, like truth, had only one face, we would be in better shape. For we would take as certain the opposite of what the liar said. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field. The Pythagoreans make out the good to be certain and finite, evil infinite and uncertain. A thousand paths miss the target, one goes to it.