Authentic purpose-led leadership is only fully available to a leader brave enough to confront their own finitude.
This statement is the “executive summary” of this “long read” over the next two days, in which I share a new level of awareness in me, and that brought forward this learning that I feel is valuable for leaders brave enough to embrace. So, now to share how I arrived here.
Learning now something that shifted in me four years ago
On March 3rd, 2022, I had a colonoscopy, a routine follow-up to the test done after receiving an invitation for the NHS bowel cancer screening programme after my 56th birthday. They’d picked something up in my sample and asked me to come in.
It was all routine, until the moment it wasn’t, when the Doctor said, “Mr McCallum, there’s one more thing”. They’d found an early-stage cancer tumour; they would be removing half of my colon, and soon.
The operation then happened on March 31st.
Whilst the prognosis was and remains excellent, everything changed for me, though it has only been in the last week that I’ve recognised that shift, thanks to studying Heidegger.
Memento Mori (Remember you will die)
I had been studying the Stoics for years, even writing a post entitled Memento Mori, a sentiment I consider to be both very positive and as a tool for leaders. I also talked in that post once again about the Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement speech from 2005, one I have often shared as it is so well constructed and delivered. I now realise, though, that what truly elevated his delivery was his private knowledge that he was dying of cancer. Consider this passage through that mortality lens:
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
I had always sincerely meant my thoughts around the Stoics, around Steve Jobs’ speech, but I now know that I was simply teaching concepts, not fully living them. It was as if I were Marcus Aurelius reading about mortality; I had not yet become Marcus Aurelius confronting his own.
That difference matters enormously, not just for me personally, but for the leaders I work with.
What the Diagnosis Actually Did
From that March 3rd diagnosis, through major surgery on March 31st and three months of chemotherapy through July 2022, I had time to notice what actually happened to me, not as a philosophical exercise but in what I experienced moment by moment.
The first and most immediate feeling was gratitude. From the very day of diagnosis, I anchored myself consciously to gratitude: for the NHS screening programme that caught it early, for the medical team, for family and friends, for the privilege of a life that meant I had nothing financially to worry about while I healed. I wrote about this when I returned to writing in May 2022, after almost six weeks of silence, by far the longest my daily blog had ever been quiet.
However, beneath the gratitude, something else was happening that I am only now finding the right language to describe. The abstract had become concrete. “One dies”, the anonymous, impersonal fact that everyone acknowledges and nobody truly inhabits, had become “I will die, and it could be soon.” That shift, from the philosophical to the personal, from the concept to the body, changed something fundamental.
The questions I had always asked, such as: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” (by Mary Oliver, the first line I ever wrote on this site), suddenly had a different weight. Not an urgency, simply clarity.
In those early days back writing, I found myself on a train ride home from London, just a few weeks after surgery, reading a quote from the film Contact: “how rare and precious we all are”, and writing instinctively in reply: “Something else that has made me feel my insignificance is also tiny. Cancer. About to undergo chemo as they found a single cell cluster 0.4mm in size. Humility and the power of certain tiny things.”
Rare and precious. That was it. That was what the confrontation with mortality had given me as a direct experience rather than as a concept.
Sein zum Tode (Being Towards Death)
I noted earlier that I am only now finding the right language to describe the shift I have experienced. We are four years on from that moment when I learned that I had cancer, and something recently brought me new self-awareness and the insights I now share.
I have recently been exploring the work of Martin Heidegger, specifically his book “Sein und Zeit” (Being and Time), and particularly the concept he named Sein-zum-Tode (Being towards Death). “Being towards Death” The more I sit with this, alongside the work of the Stoics, the more I see that these two traditions are pointing at the same thing, just from slightly different angles.
Seneca puts it with characteristic directness: “Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day.” Marcus Aurelius, ruling an empire, returns again and again in his private Meditations to the brevity of all things: emperors, reputations, and empires all turn to dust. Their message? The contemplation of death is not morbid; it is clarifying. It strips away the noise, the vanity, the borrowed urgency, and returns you to what genuinely matters.
Heidegger agrees on the clarifying function but pushes further in a way I find particularly honest (and challenging, even confronting). Death, he argues, is our own possibility, one that is unique to ourselves, the one thing that cannot be transferred, shared, or delegated. Nobody can die my death for me. Nobody can feel my death for me.
Crucially, Heidegger encourages us to sit with our anxiety, our angst, not to seek Stoic equanimity too quickly. Confronting our own death is meant to remain uncomfortable, unsettling, even unreal, as it is those feelings that keep us truly awake to the choices that are ours to make.
-Tom
Tom McCallum is a Sounding Board to brave leaders ready to lead massive change in their business or organisation. He is passionate about “Open Leadership” and “Leading from Purpose”, frameworks that came as distillations of his thousands of blogs. He chose not to put any of that into a book, but instead you can “talk” to him through his GenAI, AskTom.chat