Now the bell is ringing, but the sound isn’t stopping; it’s vibrating through the floorboards, traveling up the soles of my feet, and settling somewhere in the base of my skull. Paul R., our mindfulness instructor, is sitting 5 feet away from me with his eyes closed, looking like a man who has solved a puzzle that the rest of us haven’t even started yet. He’s been teaching for 15 years, and in that time, he’s probably heard this bell 25,000 times. But today, something is different. I am not thinking about my breath. I am thinking about the word ‘segue’.
I realized, precisely 5 minutes ago, as I was walking into this 85-dollar-a-session workshop, that I have been pronouncing the word ‘segue’ as ‘seg-you’ for the last 15 years of my life. I haven’t just said it in private. I’ve said it in boardrooms. I’ve said it at dinner parties where the wine cost more than my first car. I’ve said it with the kind of unearned confidence that usually belongs to people who own yachts. No one corrected me. Not once. They just let me wander through the linguistic wilderness, ‘seg-youing’ my way from one topic to the next, while they likely stifled a laugh or felt a wave of pity. This realization is the physical sensation of a cold bucket of water being poured over my ego. It’s an uncomfortable question that hangs in the air: if I’ve been that wrong about a simple word for 15 years, what else have I mislabeled? What other ‘Idea 20’ concepts am I holding onto that are fundamentally broken?
Idea 20: Optimizing Distraction
Paul R. finally opens his eyes. He has this way of looking at the 25 of us in the room that makes you feel like he’s reading your search history. He doesn’t start with a ‘today we talk’ or a ‘welcome’. He just sighs, a long, 5-second exhale that seems to deflate the entire room. “The core frustration for idea 20,” he says, his voice like sandpaper on silk, “is that we think we can achieve presence by optimizing our distractions.” He’s referring to a concept he calls Idea 20-the 20th attempt at finding a ‘hack’ for the human condition. We buy the $45 apps. We set the 5-minute timers. We track our REM cycles until the tracking itself becomes the thing that keeps us awake until 1:45 in the morning. We treat our consciousness like a piece of hardware that just needs the right firmware update.
But Paul’s contrarian angle 20 is different. He believes that distraction isn’t the bug; it’s the feature. He argues that the moment your mind wanders to your grocery list or your linguistic failures is the only moment you are actually awake. The rest of the time, you’re just running a script. This is the opening scene 20 of our session today: a room full of people trying desperately to be ‘here’, while their brains are everywhere else. We are obsessed with the ‘perfect’ flow, the ‘perfect’ segue. We want life to be a series of seamless transitions, but the reality is a jagged, stuttering mess of ‘seg-yous’.
I find myself thinking about how we treat our lives compared to how we treat the digital tools we use. In the world of tech, we acknowledge that things break. We know that code is a living, breathing, failing thing. We hire people to find the cracks. It’s funny, actually. We are so much more forgiving of a glitchy app than we are of a glitchy afternoon.
[The failure is the only honest thing left in the room.]
Building Through Assumed Failure
I remember a time when I worked on a project that required 125 different integrations. It was a nightmare. We spent 45 days just trying to get the login screen to stop crashing. We were looking for a way to ensure that the transition between the user’s intent and the software’s response was invisible. That’s when I first heard of
ElmoSoft, a team that understands that the invisible work-the testing, the QA, the relentless search for the ‘what if it breaks’-is actually the most vital part of the creation process. They don’t just hope the code works; they assume it won’t, and they build a path through that failure. There is something deeply mindfulness-adjacent about that. It’s about looking at a system and saying, ‘I see the flaw, and I accept it.’
The Glitch as the Claim
Why don’t we do that with ourselves? Why do I feel like such a fraud because I’ve been mispronouncing a word? The deeper meaning 20 of this whole experience, according to Paul R., is that our ‘mistakes’ are actually the only points of contact we have with the real world. When I say ‘seg-you’ and someone winces, that wince is real. It’s an authentic interaction. When I sit here and my leg falls asleep after 15 minutes of cross-legged torture, that pins-and-needles sensation is the most honest thing I’ve felt all day. It’s not ‘zen’, but it’s true. The relevance 20 of this is that in an age of AI-generated perfection and filtered Instagram lives, our glitches are our only remaining claim to humanity.
The Statue vs. The Human
“
We spend so much time trying to be the person who doesn’t make mistakes,” he says, without turning around. “But the person who doesn’t make mistakes is a simulation. A statue. A 5-cent toy. If you want to be alive, you have to be willing to be an embarrassment.
I think about the $575 I spent on this weekend retreat. I could have bought 115 books on linguistics. I could have paid for 5 months of a gym membership I wouldn’t use. Instead, I’m paying a man to tell me that I’m a mess. And the weirdest part is, I feel more relaxed than I have in 25 weeks. The pressure to be ‘correct’ has been punctured by the simple fact of my own stupidity. There is a profound liberation in realizing you are the joke. It takes the teeth out of the world.
The Pressure Dynamic (Conceptual)
Uptime Requirement
Acceptance Achieved
The Longevity Build
We often believe that certain behaviors are essential for success-that we must be polished, that we must have the right vocabulary, that we must never have a ‘bug’ in our public-facing interface. We treat our reputations like a product that needs 105% uptime. But that’s not how growth works. Growth is 5 steps forward and 35 steps back into a hole you dug yourself. It’s the 25th time you try to quit a bad habit and finally realize that the habit is just a symptom of a deeper hunger.
Her ‘software’ was old and patched, yet fully functional.
I once saw a 105-year-old woman in a documentary. She was asked what the secret to a long life was. She didn’t say kale. She didn’t say meditation. She said, ‘I stopped caring if people thought I was crazy.’ She had reached a point where her ‘software’ was so old and so patched together that she didn’t care about the glitches anymore. She was just happy the machine was still running. She had achieved a level of quality assurance that no lab could replicate. She was her own version of a final build, complete with all the legacy errors and deprecated functions.
As I sit back on my cushion, I try to lean into the ‘seg-you’ of it all. Imagine a first date where you list your 5 most frequent social blunders. Imagine a resume that includes a section for ‘Words I am Definitely Mispronouncing’.
It would be a 555% increase in efficiency because we’d stop wasting time pretending.
There is a peace in that knowledge. There is a trust that forms when you know exactly how something is flawed.
The Sound of Presence
Paul R. rings the bell again. This time, it’s a short, 5-second burst. The session is over. I stand up, my knees creaking like 105-year-old floorboards. I walk up to him, feeling the 75-watt glow of social anxiety starting to dim.
“I’ve been saying ‘seg-you’ for 15 years,” I tell him.
He looks at me, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “I once told a group of 85 CEOs that the ‘epitome’ of success was ‘epi-tomb’,” he says. “I said it 5 times in one speech.”
We both stand there for a moment, two grown men who have spent a significant portion of their lives being confidently wrong. It’s the most ‘present’ I’ve felt in 25 days. I don’t need a hack. I don’t need a new app. I just need to remember that the static in the signal isn’t something to be filtered out. It’s the sound of the world actually happening.
As I leave the building, I see a sign for a 45-minute yoga class. I keep walking. I think I’ll go find a sandwich instead. A messy one, with at least 5 different ingredients that will probably fall out of the bread and onto my shirt. I’ll eat it while sitting on a park bench, looking at people who are all, in their own way, ‘seg-youing’ through their afternoons. And for the first time in a long time, that feels like more than enough. The frustration isn’t the wall; it’s the door. And I’ve finally found the key, even if I’m probably turning it the wrong way.