I have spent most of my career leading through intensity, speed, and relentless effort, without ever forming a coherent leadership philosophy that truly grounded me. Traditional models resonated intellectually but not fundamentally. That changed when I identified harmony as my true north, above all else. By aligning my leadership with natural cycles, I found a way to ground and optimize my decision-making in a way that feels harmonious.

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Leadership is a topic I’m naturally interested in as a founder. As a CEO, I am required to form and apply my own working model of leadership. Yet for most of my life, my leadership ethos was uncomplicated: do more, build faster, push harder. I have never asked, but I assume that everyone who has worked in my companies would agree that I’m single-minded and relentless with regards to pursuing my vision. But I’ll admit that this doesn’t exactly constitute a leadership philosophy.

I have read leadership books and listened to talks on compassion, empathy, servant leadership, and modern management. I respect much of that thinking, and ideas like Robert Greenleaf’s servant leadership resonate intellectually. But none of it ever felt like something I could directly apply. Empathy matters, but it is not a starting point or a true north for how I operate. Growth matters too, but it is not my axis either. The issue was never the quality of these ideas, but that they did not connect to something fundamental within me that I believed could actually guide me toward the outcomes I cared about most. I could adopt the language and even the behaviors, but I could not live the philosophy I did not believe in. At a foundational level, these ideas did not feel like the “leadership primitives” I could honestly orient my professional life around.

That primitive finally revealed itself during a conversation with an Indian employee as I was describing my growing interest in seasonal cycles. He smiled as I spoke, because for him this way of thinking was entirely familiar. Many Indians live with an active awareness of the calendar, its seasons, and its lunar rhythms. At one point he asked what I would ultimately align my efforts toward, and whether I would ever orient myself toward money the way a well-known billionaire does. My answer came instantly, without deliberation: “No, I would align toward harmony”.

And that was it. I had spoken my north star aloud. The answer wasn’t new to me, but it was finally explicit in terms of my priorities in running a business. Money has never been my primary driver. That does not mean I reject wealth or growth, only that they are not the axis around which my decisions turn. In naming “harmony”, I realized I had finally identified the ground I had been searching for in leadership my entire life.

Harmony matters to me because it is the only pursuit that guarantees everything I want. If I chose money as the primary objective, it would not necessarily include time, health, strong relationships, meaningful work, rest, spiritual nourishment, or stability. Money guarantees none of those things. Harmony does. If I could align toward only one thing, it would be harmony, because achieving it ensures I have enough of everything that truly matters to me, rather than an excess of one single thing.

So, while I want my enterprises to prosper, I want them to do so harmoniously. I want growth that nourishes rather than depletes, and I want every member of my enterprise to be able to live a life of security, stability, and dignity. Could that impact the bottom line in certain ways? Possibly. But it is also reasonable to believe that an organization operating in harmony is more resilient, durable, and ultimately more successful over time.

My appreciation for the idea of harmony deepened after I recently had the entire company take the winter period off, from the solstice through the first week of the new year. In that time away, I rediscovered something I had long ignored: natural cycles much older than modern business and management theory. In taking that time off, every member of my team felt aligned with something greater than business cycles because solar seasons, lunar rhythms, and the biological ebb and flow are live and present in every one of us. The time off felt right in a way that nothing else could, and I asked myself why. The answer was simple: winter is a time for hibernation, reflection, and consolidation. It’s natural to withdraw, reflect, and resolve. It’s harmonious.

Out of curiosity, I began tracking my own internal state alongside the solar and lunar cycles, and a clear pattern emerged. My decision quality, creative output, and ability to see things through rose and fell predictably with these rhythms. As a builder, I wanted to remove noise and make this observable, so I reduced it to a single metric I could track and test. I called it “animus intensity”. Animus intensity is not mood, happiness, or discipline; it is the base-level drive to create, express, and complete. On a ten-point scale, ten represents aligned, exuberant creative force with follow-through. One represents dormancy and inward focus. Practically speaking, when I wake with no impulse to build or express, that is a one. When I wake with clarity, momentum, and sustained creative energy, that is a ten.

Reflecting on my own leadership history, I have spent much of my life sowing endlessly. Ideas, systems, platforms, architectures. Always building quality, often without planning for harvest, recovery, or reflection. Others do the opposite, harvesting relentlessly and hollowing out their future potential or alienating their customers and employees. Both are imbalanced and both are destructive in different ways because they are imbalanced.

Once I understood my internal drive to grow and lead a successful, harmonious business, I began looking for a path to achieve that. If profit was my north star, then I’d prioritize growth above everything else. But with harmony as my goal, I need something something objective to ground that orientation in. I realized that what was missing was not more effort or better discipline, nor superficial leadership techniques. I needed something foundational, and I realized during this winter off that I was looking for a calendar built on primitive rhythms that corresponded to my natural animus intensity. As I began aligning my own productivity with solar and lunar rhythms, their interdependence became obvious. At the most basic level, the seasonal and lunar calendars validated how I felt at any given time and gave me permission to lean into those states rather than fight them.

I now see my ideal form of leadership as the intelligent navigation between ebb and flow, rather than an insistence on continuous flow. As a recovering workaholic, my real failure was not working hard, but treating ebb as weakness. When energy drops, we attack ourselves and push anyway, manufacturing friction and then blaming ourselves for feeling it. Once I stopped fighting the cycle, the friction disappeared. I could see when a phase was complete and step away without self-reproach. That alone unlocked more usable output than years of optimization ever produced.

The leadership lesson I have needed my whole life was not about becoming more driven, but about grounding my leadership in something I truly believe in: harmony. Trusting that work, like life, has seasons, and accepting that ebb is not failure, but consolidation and preparation. The seasonal calendar is not a metaphor for this belief, but the mechanism that makes it real. By anchoring leadership decisions, effort, and recovery to natural cycles, harmony stops being an abstract idea and becomes something that can be practiced consistently. From that ground, other leadership qualities I value such as empathy, service, patience, and care for others, have become achievable as natural downstream effects, rather than ideals I have to force myself to adopt.

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