The Ship of Theseus (and the Leader You're Becoming)

Last week, a leader I’d coached reached out to me on LinkedIn. She’d been part of an intensive leadership program last October and had been revisiting her development plan.

“A year has passed, and I haven’t held myself accountable to my goals,” she admitted. “I wrote a note to myself—remember the Ship of Theseus—but now I can’t quite recall the story. Can you please remind me?”

The program she mentioned was an annual highlight for many years. Along with the intensive in-person event facilitated by our executive team, each leader in the cohort also received multiple assessments, debriefs, and coaching to create an actionable leadership development plan. For the final session (on the application of learning to fight Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve), I recall drawing upon Shankar Vedantam’s TED Talk, “You Don’t Actually Know What Your Future Self Wants.”

The gist of it was something like this:

When the Athenian warrior Theseus returned home after slaying the Minotaur, his people celebrated his courage by preserving his ship as a monument in the harbor. But over time, the sea took its toll—salt, wind, and waves weathered the wood. To keep the ship seaworthy, one plank after another was replaced. Eventually, every single element had been renewed.

And so began the famous philosophical question:If every part of the ship has been replaced, is it still the Ship of Theseus?

In a way, each of us is our own Ship of Theseus. Our bodies, our thoughts, and our habits are in a constant state of renewal. Our cells turn over. We change our minds. We adopt new ways of behaving. You are not the same person you were at twelve, or thirty, or even before the pandemic.

And the good news is, the more you are aware of this, the more intentional you can be about your leadership development. Growth isn’t about replacing who you were. Rather, it’s about staying seaworthy while the inevitable tides of experience shape you into who you’re becoming. When you return to your normal routine after this leadership program, you’ll be the same. And you’ll also be different. The real work of leadership is noticing both.