Positive Intelligence and the Second Mountain

The Second Mountain is a book by David Brooks (2019) and I use his idea of there being a “second mountain” in our lives to frame what it may be like for you to consider using Positive Intelligence (PQ) to take your sense of self to a new level. If more of the same is no longer an option, PQ is a way for you to explore a more expansive reality.

The First Mountain

I believe that we (humans) typically scale the first mountain of our lives by letting our saboteurs drive us to the top. As examples, we might hyper-achieve and do quite well in striving for exemplary results. We might allow restlessness to drive our excitement and curiosity to the extreme; we are seen as a “creative” and we get put to work as such. The ability to get good at controlling outcomes gets noticed and we’re elevated as a high performer. Or the drive toward perfection may lead to real improvements and such process development goes far in our modern world. I’ve chosen these saboteurs for their obvious alignment with the desires of the grownups in our young lives: our parents, teachers, and employers. They love these traits in young adults! Even less obvious saboteurs like the Avoider, Pleaser, Victim, or Hyper-vigilant are beneficial because they give us a way to feel calm and normal in our own minds, enough to be able to move with relative ease in the chaotic surroundings of our youth: to be a peace-maker, to center others, to be known as sensitive or a cautious type, to be observant and consistent. In the collective, our saboteurs can help us do well in our lives, even quite well. And, you don’t have to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company to stand on the top of your first mountain. I believe our saboteurs can reliably bring us to an adulthood that has many of the hallmarks of success, e.g., income, family, material possessions, and social standing. However, CEO or humble adult of modest means alike, we know we’ve reached this metaphoric mountaintop when our saboteurs can’t take us any farther.

As someone who is exploring PQ, you may already know that when governed by your saboteurs, the dimensions of life are limited—and may not be enough for you. As someone who may be standing on top of your First Mountain, you may also suspect that there is more. Especially if the “drive” of your saboteurs has taken you to the top of the first summit and you’ve been there long enough to double down on success—e.g., you’ve ticked multiple boxes of reward and recognition, reached goals that your young mind set out to pursue, gotten your advanced degree (or maybe a second one!), maybe even found some celebrity—and somehow you still feel unsatisfied, doubtful, anxious, an imposter… I believe PQ opens a perspective that allows us to see Brooks’ Second Mountain as a mental landscape of expansive possibility.

The Second Mountain

The Second Mountain of life is one upon which you are drawn rather than driven. I believe it doesn’t have a peak but rather, is wider at the top than it is at the bottom. This second mountain is full of possibility because it is where your Sage Powers live. It is generative and expansive. The Second Mountain is also mysterious; you may find things on your journey into this generative space, not because it’s what you were looking for but rather, because that thing you are becoming has been looking for you. The Second Mountain is one of discovery that does not have an end—there is no finish line that you need to cross to be complete. Instead, the Second Mountain connects you to a wholeness that is already there, ready to be expressed, unconditionally so.

Difficulties along the way

So why is the Second Mountain so hard, almost impossible to even imagine? Because it is terrifying! (There’s a reason people circle around endlessly on top of their first mountain.) To step off onto the Second Mountain is to call into question the way you “know” the world to work. Assumptions for how to be a whole person are broken and this is deeply troubling. Our human need to have a working knowledge of ourselves in the world is strong and can hold us in the certainty that our saboteurs promise to us if we stay on the First Mountain. It will feel very vulnerable to not know what the rules are for success, like being on a high wire without a net. That’s what it feels like to contemplate the Second Mountain from a First Mountain perspective. The security that your saboteurs promise is hard to forsake but you will find that when you are no longer subject to the existential constraints they propose for being in the world, a whole new horizon of possibility opens up.

Get ready to harvest the wisdom of the First Mountain

Everything you got good at on the First Mountain of your life, when considered from the perspective of your Sage Powers, has the potential to elevate you on your journey up the Second Mountain. You may even have gotten in 10,000 hours of experience caring deeply about things for which your saboteurs gave you the agency to act (Gladwell, 2008). The pursuit and practice of your goals, even when mediated by your saboteurs’ way of seeing things (including what you couldn’t do), did help you express a version of yourself that was free to act. This was real work and if you got good at it (to the top of the First Mountain!), it’s the better part of a lifetime’s worth of skill development that you get to take with you.

Upon reflection, you may also realize that as a young adult you somehow found the steps to take in expressing who you could be, with no real reason to trust in your abilities to do so. You can say you were driven, mentored, and guided to face those First Mountain challenges. If this is the case, I suggest that you have your saboteurs to thank. They were your friends because, while they drove you, they also gave comfort in the promise that things would be OK if you colored inside the lines they drew. The experience of getting to the top of the First Mountain may thus hold this paradox: you’ve gotten good at being driven (the saboteurs are your friends) even as the summit you’re standing on is not all it was cracked up to be (the saboteurs are not your friends). You know you have something to show for the climb and yet it feels incomplete. What’s up with that?

The Second Mountain unlocks the potential that has always been in you

Take the skill development, knowledge, and wisdom you’ve gained in life onto the Second Mountain. Value your abilities differently because you get to abandon the way that your performance on the First Mountain held the power to define you. Be freed from the conditions that your saboteurs imposed on you for being “enough.” Your inborn strengths can be used differently with your Sage Powers, as saboteurs often misuse (or abuse) those strengths. And know that you’re not starting over from scratch. Consider that the fear-based operating system of your saboteurs gave you a way to make use of your talents, building bandwidth for cognitive agility, analysis, judging, switching, and sensing. When it comes to the Second Mountain of your life, explore how your saboteurs’ drive kept certain parts of the brain’s motor “tuned up,” and that your Sage Powers will help you find a new gear in the way your power gets put to work in the world. You can expect the Second Mountain of your life to be a leap forward, to bring you a transformed sense of possibility, and to extend your learning and reach as a human being.

Citations

Brooks, D. (2019). The second mountain: The quest for a moral life. Random House.

Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The story of success. Little, Brown and Co.