The Book—Chapter 1

Pause.

As promised, here’s Chapter 1 of Refr(action), called Pause. This is the last chapter I will share publicly as the work is now focused on getting the book proposal in the hands of the kinds of people who make books happen. If you know someone like that, let me know. The more the merrier.

All feedback is appreciated, of course.

Enjoy.

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First Movement: See

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“The owl is the wisest of birds because the more it sees, the less it talks.” — African proverb

The owl sits in the tree and watches. It takes in the whole scene before it moves. By the time it acts, it knows exactly what it is looking at.

Before you can transform your view, you have to see it. Clearly. As it actually is right now, without the weight of judgment or the rush to fix it.

Most people nod at this and then skip it entirely. They react before they see. They defend positions they have never clearly articulated, hold views they have never examined, and argue for ideas they could not write down in a single sentence if asked. The owl watches. Most people are already talking and doing.

But when you actually see your view before you act on it, something shifts. You stop being dragged around by impressions you never examined. You stop defending positions you fell into by accident. You get to choose what you actually think, instead of discovering it only after the damage is done.

See is the discipline of pausing long enough to recognize your current view for what it is. This is where reflection and affirmation do their best work. Reflection helps you examine the view. Affirmation helps you hold it without shame. Together, they prepare you for what comes next.

Four practices:

Pause. Stop the automatic reaction before it takes over.

Name It. Articulate what you actually think in clear and specific terms.

Own It. Claim the view as yours without defensiveness.

Question It. Ask what might be incomplete or limited about what you currently believe.

Refraction starts with the pause. That moment before you react, when you can still catch yourself. That is where we begin.

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Chapter 1: Pause

Abraham Lincoln wrote a lot of letters he never sent. Historians call them “hot letters.” When someone did him wrong, when a general fumbled, or a politician played games, Lincoln sat down and unleashed with loaded words, sharp sentences, and devastating precision.

During the American Civil War, General George Meade allowed the Confederate army to escape after the Battle of Gettysburg. Lincoln was furious, his blood boiling. He wrote Meade a scathing letter, full of pepper. Lee “was within your easy grasp,” and failing to close upon him would “prolong the war indefinitely.” Lincoln laid into Meade, and made it clear that the President of the United States was deeply displeased with his general’s performance.

The letter was found in Lincoln’s desk after his death. Marked “Never Sent. Never Signed.”

Lincoln used writing as catharsis. He got the anger out of his system and onto the page, where he could see it with clarity. In the pause between writing and sending, he could see things a bit better, without all the drama. Meade was an exhausted general who had just won a major victory against a formidable enemy. A presidential rebuke might crush morale and do more damage to the Union than Lee’s escape. The pause saved Lincoln from additional chaos and preserved the command structure of the army.

Historians found many of these peppery hot letters after Lincoln’s death, still in his desk drawers, addressed to people who never knew how close they came to receiving the President’s full wrath.

Today, hot letters are emails drafted at midnight, thumbs flying across phone screens while the anger is still hot. They are DMs sent with zero review. They are Slack attacks in the debrief, stream-of-consciousness with pepper. The tools have changed. The speed has changed. It is FAFO galore out here. Folks will learn who they are messing with. What took Lincoln an evening with pen and paper now takes thirty seconds.

The pause matters more now than ever. People skip it more now than ever.

Lincoln understood something most people learn too late, or never learn at all. The moment between what happens to you and what you do about it is where the real wahala gets unleashed or contained. Fire back instantly, and you have reacted. Now the situation spirals, and it is on like Gladiator. But hold that space open, let it breathe even for a few hours, and you get to look at your own response before it leaves your hands. You get to see it and ask whether this is really what you want to send into the world.

The Stoics built entire philosophical concepts around the pause. Epictetus taught that it is not things that disturb us, but our judgments about things. The judgment happens fast, almost before we know it. The discipline is catching it before it crashes out and goes off seeking heads and scalps.

In my house, we call it the red haze. It’s like in the video game God of War when you activate Spartan Rage, everything goes red, and all the enemies in your immediate vicinity get rocked. Savagely.

The Yoruba have a saying: suuru ni baba iwa. Patience is the father of character. No patience, no character. No pause, no choice. Just reflex, again and again, wondering why nothing ever changes.

Lincoln’s pause was the beginning of seeing clearly. And this practice of holding space before reacting runs deeper than one president’s habit. It shows up across centuries and continents, in ancient philosophy and modern product thinking, in African wisdom traditions and cognitive science. The principle is the same everywhere it appears: what happens in that space between stimulus and response determines everything that follows.

This ability to hold the pause, to stay in that space before reacting, separates the person who keeps playing the main character in a soapy drama from the person who sees the drama for what it is and what it is not. Many read pausing as weakness, passivity, slow reflexes, or getting owned. But being on point, and on alert enough to catch yourself before the red haze takes over? That is the level up. Awake enough to ask what is really happening here before you decide what to do about it. Pausing and seeing the impression for what it is.

In the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, the mentor Bruce Pandolfini gives a clean instruction for the contemplative pause: “Don’t move until you see it.” When the young prodigy Josh Waitzkin complains that he cannot “see” the board without moving the pieces, Pandolfini wipes the pieces off the board, forcing Josh to visualize the entire reality of the game in his mind. Pandolfini teaches him to see before he moves.

The same discipline shows up in boardrooms. Amazon has a ritual that turns the standard corporate meeting into a sanctuary of silence. Rather than starting with a PowerPoint presentation, which Jeff Bezos considered a tool that hides sloppy thinking, major meetings begin with a six-page narrative memo. For the first 20-30 minutes, no one speaks. The room sits in a study-hall atmosphere where executives read in silence, taking notes in the margins. Bezos realized people rarely read in advance. They skim, then react with bluffing and college-style arguments. The forced pause gets everyone on the same page before a single word of reaction hits the air.

To fully understand the value of the pause, look at what happens when it fails.

In the 2006 World Cup final, Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi in the chest. Zidane was known for majestic composure, for dictating play while everyone else scrambled. But in the 110th minute, with the world watching, he lost his pause. Materazzi said something to him, and instead of letting it breathe, instead of seeing it for what it was, Zidane charged and drove his head into Materazzi’s chest. Red card. Exit. France lost the shootout minutes later.

It was the shameful finale to a brilliant career. Zidane spent decades mastering the game, reading the board, staying three moves ahead. And in the moment that mattered most, the red haze won. The pause is fragile. Even the greats lose it when the stimulus hits hard enough and they let it bridge straight into reaction.

When was the last time you fired off a response you wish you could take back? Recently, right? You might still be stuck in the aftermath as you read this paragraph. What made you go off like that? Why did you accept the first impression as truth and then build a series of events on top of it? Sit with that. It grounds “seeing” in your personal reality.

First impressions move fast because they are designed to. They show up fully formed, urgent, demanding a response right now. The Yoruba call purposeful rest isinmi, a deliberate cessation that prepares you for action. Isinmi is the recognition that what comes next matters too much to rush. The space between the impression arriving and you doing something about it is where you decide what kind of response this situation deserves.

Without the pause, you may eff around and find out.

Product people and entrepreneurs learn this the hard way. We get a eureka moment in the shower or while listening to a podcast in the car, and we have that idea. The one. The idea no one else ever thought of. The one that will change the game. We are about to get rich, biyatch. So we go off and get the wheels in motion. Then reality walks in and takes a seat and we realize the first idea usually isn’t the best one. It felt right in the moment, obvious even, and then you build it, ship it, and look up six months later wondering what flavor of delusion ganja you were smoking.

The same thing happens in life. The first impression of a situation, the first read on what someone meant, the first instinct about what you should do next. These are starting points, not conclusions. The pause gives you the chance to treat them as data points for further inspection.

You know that feeling when Waze tells you to take a left and your every instinct says no, that route is garbage, I know a better way? Most of us override the GPS at least once a trip because we “know better” and refuse to follow instructions blindly. But somehow, we let our first impressions drive us around all day without ever questioning the route. The impression arrives, and we follow it like it knows where it’s going.

Silicon Valley built a whole religion around skipping the pause. “Move fast and break things” was Facebook’s motto for years, Mark Zuckerberg’s prime directive to his developers. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough. Then came the bugs, the scandals, the realization that when you break things, you have to stop and fix them. Zuckerberg retired the motto. The new version was “Move fast with stable infrastructure.” He admitted it did not have the same ring to it but he had learned his lesson: you need stability to get to the next level. The Swahili have said it for generations: “To run is not necessarily to arrive.” Speed without sight gets you nowhere worth going.

The pause is needed more often than our culture of fast movers gives it credit for, and your body usually knows before your mind does. Sometimes it is the red haze arriving, or the heat rising at the back of your neck. It may be your heart rate climbing, your visual focus narrowing until all you can see is the thing you are about to react to. Sometimes it’s subtler, like the fog of overwhelm, where everything feels urgent but clarity is nowhere in sight. These are signals, not commands. They tell you this moment deserves a closer look before you move.

The pause is not always something you have to manufacture. Sometimes it’s already there, waiting for you to notice.

I was wrapping up some consulting work at the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva, saying goodbye to the Director General’s assistants at their desks. As I turned to leave, I caught the view outside the wall-to-wall windows. The Swiss mountains were in full view, standing majestic, the kind of scenery people travel thousands of miles to see.

“Holy mama,” I said. “Your view is amazing.”

The bespectacled lady with a chokehold on the DG’s comings and goings, who can block and tackle harder than a Barça defender, chuckled. “Yeah, well, we really don’t get to enjoy it. We are so busy.”

I was stunned. “Wait. You have a view like this at work, and you don’t wallow in it like mousse in chocolate?”

My head shook in disbelief as I stepped up to the window. “If I had this view,” I spread out my arms like Moses parting the Red Sea, “every day I will designate 30 minutes. Swivel my chair, kick my feet up, and just bask in the awe of it all. And get my stuff straight.”

They joined me at the window, and we all stood there for about five minutes, silently gazing out the window. It was like they were seeing that view for the first time again.

The means to calm the freak down is usually right there in front of us. The pause we need is not always something we have to create from scratch. Sometimes it just requires us to look up and take it in. Then we get back at it. We keep rolling.

So how do you really pause? Catch the trigger moment. Create distance. Then interrogate the impression—what are you actually looking at?

The trigger moment is when the impression first lands and you feel the pull to respond. Something happens, someone says something, a situation shifts, and your whole system leans toward action. The pause begins here, in the space before you do anything about it.

Creating distance is the practice itself. Lincoln did it with pen and paper, writing the hot letter and putting it in a drawer. Amazon does it with an extended period of silence before anyone speaks. You do it by putting the phone face down and walking around the block, or saving the draft and coming back tomorrow. The method matters less than the habit. You put space between the impression and your response.

Once you have that space, you ask what you are actually looking at. What am I about to do, and why? What impression am I acting on? Have I tested it, or am I assuming it’s true? The Zulu have a word for this state of calm examination: ukuthula, deep peace. It is where you stop reacting and start seeing.

In product land, we see this when urgency takes the wheel. A stakeholder ambushes you with a Defcon 1 request, or a competitor launches a feature and puts your team in the two-minute drill. The impulse is to code and ship in response. But shipping without seeing is expensive guessing. As product guru Christian Idiodi says, “The most expensive way of learning is by launching in the market without discovery.” The pause is your personal discovery phase. It gives you the chance to see the impression before it goes out into the world, to test it before you act on it. You check the depth of the water before you jump in with both feet.

Pause creates the space needed to reflect and take a chill. Step back and tune your lenses. Handle the impression before you spiral out of control and crash out.

That third step, where you ask what am I actually looking at, is where Pause hands off the work. You have created the space. You have caught the impression. Now you need to name what you are actually seeing.

That is Name It.