Late in the afternoon, I decided I needed a break from the desk. In true barefoot philosopher style, I wandered outside with a coffee and Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life, laying down in the grass underneath our event shelter to shield myself from the sun.

I only managed a few paragraphs before a phrase stopped me mid-sip: “Philosophy has to be more than just discourse. Choosing philosophy as a way of life is about being willing to undergo radical transformation.”

It got me thinking about personal transformation. What does it actually mean to transform? The term gets batted around everywhere these days—splashed across Instagram feeds, whispered in productivity podcasts, and packaged into morning routines. But what is it, really, when we strip away the marketing copy?

I had a conversation with Claude and then plugged it into NotebookLM to produce this audio deep dive:

What I discovered from this deep dive is that real transformation requires moving beyond consuming wisdom into embodying it. It’s not about reading more books or optimizing your performance metrics. It’s about the willingness to sit with not-knowing, to let your assumptions dissolve like sugar in water, to face the mystery of being here at all.

This path often involves what I call beautiful disillusionment–discovering that many things you thought were solid and important are actually quite flimsy. Your carefully constructed identity. Your need to have everything figured out. Your attachment to being right about your own story.

But instead of leaving you cynical, this dissolution opens space for something more authentic to emerge. Like clearing dead wood to let new growth flourish.

The transformation I’m seeking isn’t about becoming a polished, optimised version of who I am. It’s about discovering what remains when everything else falls away. It’s about learning to move with whatever is actually calling me, rather than what I think should be calling me.

And perhaps most importantly, it’s about recognising that the deepest wisdom often comes not from having answers, but from learning to live fully within the questions themselves.