Every person I've talked with for more than an hour has heard this question from me:

Not what they think they should want.
Not what sounds impressive.
The actual thing – the goal behind the goal.

I've asked it in job interviews, in evening chats with friends, and sometimes on calls with strangers. The words change, but the question stays the same.

What surprises me is how rarely people have an answer ready. They describe a problem: they're stuck, or stressed, or can't figure out why they keep ending up in the same place. They offer guesses – maybe it's the job, the relationship, the city.

Then, around the twenty-minute mark, they say something offhand. Almost by accident. – "Say that again." Silence. We both realize they just found an answer.

I can't help but smile when this happens. Sometimes it's the first time they've heard themselves say it out loud.

I started Ceremony Garden because that moment should be easier to reach. The tools exist, but most of what's available doesn't actually work. Apps treat you like a demographic. Courses assume your goals match everyone else's. "Gurus" figured out that confidence plus marketing can stand in for rigor.

So we're building something different. I'm going to describe it by talking about mirror neurons, bats, telescopes and good teachers.

You can't see your own face.

You can see your hands and feet. If you focus, you can even see your nose. But the thing other people use to recognize you? Only the reverse image in a phone's front camera or a bathroom mirror – which isn't even how others see you.

In 1992, Italian scientists were studying how monkeys control movement. A researcher reached for a peanut, and the monkey's brain lit up – as if the monkey itself had reached. That was the accidental discovery of mirror neurons.

These neurons wire the brain for understanding others. You see a face, and you start modeling what that person might feel. Mind-reading is as automatic as breathing.

Reading your own mind is harder.

Introspection Illusion. We assume we know why we do what we do. We're often wrong. We invent reasons after the fact, mistake feelings for facts and confuse what we want with what we think we should want.

"What do YOU want?" should be easy.

You need tools. The right questions at the right time. And pause long enough to hear yourself think.

That's what we're building.

In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel published "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"

Scientists have studied bats inside and out. Sonar exists because of that work. But no human will ever know what it feels like to navigate by sound.

The same is true of you.

No other human and no AI will ever access your experience the way you do. They can observe behavior and listen to words. But the felt sense of being you – the weight of your fears, the texture of your hopes – that's yours alone.

No one else will ever be the expert on you.

The wellness industry got this backwards. It places expertise outside the person – in the guru, the app, the twelve-step program. There's a business reason: scalability. Selling one solution to a million people is easier than helping a million people find their own answers.

That model produces frameworks built for the average user, who doesn't exist.

Ceremony Garden is the opposite. Our job isn't to tell you who you are or who you should become but to create conditions where you can find the answer yourself.

Galileo didn't invent the telescope. A Dutch spectacle maker, Hans Lippershey, filed the first patent in 1608. Galileo just pointed it at the sky.

Obvious, right? Of course you'd aim a telescope upward. But the device was built to watch ships approach from far away. Everyone had the tool. Galileo had the question.

I think about this when people ask what makes Ceremony Garden different. We're pointing the telescope somewhere useful. Taking insights from academic silos and assembling them into something you can use on a Tuesday morning.

INNER Magazine makes research usable. The 4EF Assessment names what you've always felt. The Ceremony App shows you the path you're already on.

The breakthrough isn't always new knowledge. Sometimes it's new direction.

A strange goal for a company: we want you to need us less.

Every teacher faces this tension. Your job is to pass on knowledge. Do it right, and the student stops needing you. The best teachers make themselves obsolete. The worst cultivate dependency – positioning themselves as gatekeepers to wisdom the student could access directly.

Most apps want the stickiness. Engagement. Reasons to come back. They engineer hooks – streaks, notifications – that make leaving feel like failure.

We're building something closer to a mirror that becomes a window. You look at it until you can see through to what's actually there. Someone uses the 4EF Assessment and walks away with vocabulary for their strengths. They read something in INNER that reframes a friction they've fought for years. They use Ceremony to build a practice so second-nature they forget the app exists.

That's success.

The best outcome is when someone doesn't need us anymore. That means we did our job.

The word "Ceremony" comes from Latin caerimonia – sacredness, reverence. Etymologists argue about whether it connects to an older word for care. What interests me is how the meaning drifted. A ceremony now means a formal ritual. Something performed. But underneath the performance is the original sense: attending to something with care. Treating a moment as worthy of attention.

That's the space we're building for.

Fill the gap between who you've been told you are and who you sense yourself to be.

Most software ignores this space. Hard to monetize. Hard to measure. Hard to describe without sounding vague. But it's where real shifts happen.

We're trying to protect the space. To build tools that help you stay there a little longer, be a little more honest, and leave with something that's actually yours.

That's the work. Everything else is logistics.