Sisyphus.gov
You want to feel the problem viscerally. You have been inside an organization that exhausted you, and you need someone to name what happened.
The Catalog
Why do some leaders and organizations make people more, while others make them less — and what determines the difference? The three books are not separate projects. They are three angles on the same intellectual question.
How the books relate
Each book does something the other two cannot. Together they form a single, deliberate argument about how people, leaders, and systems interact — and what it takes to keep a person whole inside a complicated organization.
Book One
A research-grounded framework for what leadership actually is at the level of human psychology — and how to diagnose, in any given moment, which intervention a person actually needs.
Most leadership books coin proprietary acronyms for borrowed insights. The Lost ARC does the opposite. It is a synthesis of five decades of empirical research — Self-Determination Theory, the motivational hierarchy, the trust literature, and a behavioral taxonomy of leadership postures — into a single diagnostic system built around three questions any leader can ask about any person they lead.
The result is a framework that replaces generic leadership advice with diagnostic precision: a way of seeing leadership as the sustained practice of creating conditions in which other people's identities form rather than fragment.
Book Two
A satirical novel about what it actually feels like to push the boulder inside a modern organization — and what a leader does when they realize the hill was designed that way.
Evan Calder arrived at the agency believing public service meant something — that a talented engineer could walk into a federal agency and, through sheer competence and goodwill, make things better. He was twenty-nine then, and stupid. Now he is thirty-three, and tired.
Sisyphus.gov is a sharp, funny, uncomfortably accurate novel about the mythology of the modern workplace — the contradictory directives from on high, the acronym hydras, the watermelon metrics that look green on the outside and bleed red on the inside, and the quiet competents who keep the whole machine running without ever being thanked. It is a workplace comedy with teeth. It is also, underneath the laughter, a serious diagnosis of why good organizations break good people.
Book Three
Thirty short meditations on how a person stays whole when the systems around them do not cooperate.
There is a kind of strength that does not announce itself — a steady, grounded, unshowy way of living that holds up under pressure precisely because it does not need to be seen. Quiet Strength offers thirty maxims drawn from philosophy, experience, and the daily work of staying whole in a world that frequently does not deserve your wholeness.
It is not a productivity book. It is not a motivational shout. It is a quiet companion for the reader who already knows that the loudest voice in the room is rarely the wisest — and who wants language, discipline, and a daily practice for becoming the kind of person others can depend on.
For new readers
The catalog has no required order. But if you are new to the work and unsure which book will meet you where you are:
You want to feel the problem viscerally. You have been inside an organization that exhausted you, and you need someone to name what happened.
You want the intellectual framework. You lead other people and want a diagnostic you can actually use — not another round of abstract advice.
You need personal grounding before you can think about organizations. You are tired, and you want a quieter companion for the work of staying whole.