Your fairy tale is just beginning behind this door.
If you’re in The Conspiracy, you’re working on a Worthy Goal — something that is thrilling, important and daunting.
(And if you’re not in The Conspiracy yet, your chance to join ends tomorrow when doors close for the May cohort. Learn more here.)
That’s the deal. A Worthy Goal asks courage of you.
It asks the community of you. It asks something real of you. And it gives your days a shape and a meaning that “fine” never will.
But what nobody really tells you …
Is if you stay with a Worthy Goal long enough, you will have a moment — probably several — where the fire goes out.
You’ll feel unmoored and wonder if you picked the wrong thing, or if you’re the wrong person, or both.
The goal goes grey on you. It feels heavy and stale and a little bit, dare I say, stupid.
That’s not a flaw in the system. It is the system.
It’s one of the more reliable signs you’re actually doing worthy work.
Easy goals don’t do this to you. Only the real ones do.
The danger is when you decide the grey is the truth, pack it away, and tell yourself you were never really cut out for it.
So the question is: how do you find your way back?
A fairy tale, of all things
I’ve been reading Martin Shaw’s new book, Liturgies of the Wild. Shaw is a mythopoetic storyteller — drawn to the old stories and their deep rhythms. The things under the things.
He tells a story about working with a woman who’d been through a trauma. She kept recounting what had happened to her, and every time she told it, it came out flat and lifeless. So Shaw asked her to tell it again — but this time as a fairy tale. And to cast herself as the hero.
Something cracked open for her, so I thought: I’d like to try that too.
My own stuck place
I’ve been working on the Change Signal podcast and newsletter for about a year and a half. It’s small but real — around 3,000 listeners per episode, and the ones who like it really like it.
I’ve interviewed some of the best minds in change.
By some measures, it’s working. By others, it isn’t.
I’ve spent about $400,000 on it and made nothing back. I can see ways to monetize it that don’t excite me, and ways to grow it that would feel like building a gilded cage.
Meanwhile, I’m more and more convinced there’s a really good book hiding inside all of this — and that the podcast has been R&D for it all along.
So I’m at a crossroads. And I’ve been walking around with a knot in my chest about it.
So I went for a walk
I pulled up Claude on my phone and talked into it for about ten minutes. I dumped everything in. The origin story. The motivation. The metrics. The money. The ambivalence. The tough choices. The dilemma I can’t seem to resolve.
Then I asked it to recast the whole thing as a fairy tale.
The first version was… fine. It was serviceable and predictable.
A knight, a quest, a clear moral. Not wrong. Just not alive.
So I tried again and asked for it to be more mythic.
Start the hero in a humbler place. Make it more obscure. Let it be strange.
The second version did the thing.
It didn’t solve my dilemma. But it let me see my dilemma from outside my own head, which gave me something I could hold up and look at.
Try this when you’re stuck
But the fairy tale on its own was only half of it.
This next step is the most important part.
Read it out loud to someone who knows you, which I can tell you from experience, feels a bit ridiculous, but also exactly right.
Because they can do things the AI can’t — they push back, they ask questions you hadn’t thought of, and they know you (the real you), which changes everything.
That’s the thing about being witnessed by real people who are also in the middle of their own worthy work. They’re not just reflecting your story back at you. They’re bringing themselves to it.
So yes — try the fairy tale. Get it out of your head and into a shape you can see.
But then bring it to someone. Better yet, bring it to a room full of people who are in the middle of their own worthy work. That’s what The Conspiracy is for.
