The Beauty of Disruption

I was at a Texas Tech event listening to a speech by Dr. Jagdip Singh, a professor at Case Western Reserve University. He was being honored as a Distinguished Alumni recipient, and he was talking about his journey. He talked about how he’d had his sights set on being an engineer, and how he went to get his PhD with every intention of going back to industry. That was the plan. That was the whole reason for the degree.

But then one of his professors challenged him, asking him where he could have the greatest impact—was it really in the engineering industry? And that question disrupted everything.

He chose education instead and walked away from the plan. People were disappointed, especially his family. It wasn't what he said he'd do.

He ended his talk with this phrase: "The beauty of being disrupted." That really stuck with me.

When you're on a path—when you've told people where you're going and why—disruption feels like failure. It feels like you wasted time or like you let people down. Like you didn't have your act together.

Dr. Singh made a decision that disappointed people. But here's what his disruption gave him: 35,466 citations of his work. His research is referenced tens of thousands of times by scholars around the world. His influence gets compounded through every student he taught, every person he shaped, every original thought that became foundational to others' work.

That's the kind of impact that changes the world.

How do you measure that kind of return? He became the good and faithful servant—the one who, by surrendering his own plans for something bigger, impacted the world at a scale he never could have achieved on his own.

This ties back to something I've written about before: the puppet strings. The expectations people hold over us. But also the strings we tie around ourselves when we decide this is the way and there's no other way. Dr. Singh had to cut those strings, the expectations tied to the identity he'd built. The version of himself that walked into that PhD program with industry dreams.

When you cut the strings, you're not suddenly lost. You're suddenly free to move the way you were actually designed to move.

Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy talk about this in 10x Is Easier Than 2x. They call them acceleration points. Moments when disruption hits and, if you actually lean into it instead of fighting it, that disruption becomes fuel for exponential growth. Not comfortable fuel. Acceleration makes you nauseous because you're leaving comfort behind and being thrown into extreme discomfort.

It's the kind of moment where you want to reach for the barf bag.

But when you look back, like when you're where Dr. Singh is now, decades later, you recognize something different. An abundance of gratefulness for those moments that disrupted your plans.

His talk resonated because I've lived through this myself. The disruption I experienced felt catastrophic. But that disruption turned out to be an extraordinary gift. It started with a failure that turned into writing Refined by Failure. Then I started an executive coaching role. Then came the ability to start Refined Completions. All of it was overwhelming, and all of it would have been impossible without that original disruption.

If my plans had worked out exactly like I designed them, I'd have missed all of it.

Dr. Singh didn't talk about his decision as a failure, because it wasn’t, but failure is a disrupted state. Plans fall apart, and people get disappointed when you don't end up where you said you'd be, but failure only destroys you if you let it define you.

God's plans are always bigger than ours. And sometimes He has to disrupt our plans to make room for His.