How Might I Unleash the Extraordinary?

> **Part 3 of 5** in the [Transformational Intelligence Architecture™ Series](/blog?category=TIA%E2%84%A2)

I don't have a mission statement. I have a question.

How might I unleash the extraordinary?

I've carried that question through a military career in artillery, through commercial real estate and defense contracting and trades companies, through walking away from a six-figure salary to protect people who deserved better, through living in a camper with my wife and four boys while we figured out what came next. Through four books. Through hundreds of coaching engagements. Through building software that turned ten years of philosophy into working products. Through a partnership with an AI that changed how I think about what's possible.

Every chapter of my life has been a different answer to the same question. It took me a long time to see that.

## The Forge Isn't a Metaphor

I write about the Forge — transformation through heat, hammer strikes, and cold water. Burning out impurities. Shaping something stronger than what entered the fire. It sounds like a metaphor. It's not. It's Tuesday.

I was a functioning alcoholic by thirteen. By the time I was an Army artillery officer — Fire Direction Officer with 4th Infantry Division, responsible for verifying fire solutions before rounds left the tube — I was the guy everyone respected and nobody really knew. Behind what my commander called a "rockstar officer" was someone trading the potential of who he could become for comfort. Selfish. Numb. Corrupt.

The wake-up call was my three-year-old son's nightmares. He kept dreaming men were coming to burn the house down. I realized he was sensing it — the dysfunction of a father who was present in body and absent in everything else.

I stood in front of a mirror and said something I won't sanitize: "Listen here, motherfucker. Your days are done."

That was the first cycle. The first time the Intentional Cycle replaced the Default one. I didn't call it that yet. I just knew that the loop I'd been living in — attack the symptom, make excuses, distract, forget, repeat — was killing everything I was supposed to protect.

I made a contract with myself. Run a 5K every day for 100 days. Failed at day 55 — ankle injury. Started over. Made it to 110 the second time because I finally quit drinking and learned the lesson that became a principle: adjust the tactics, not the target.

The heat burned. The hammer landed. I kept showing up. That's not a metaphor. That's how I rebuilt my life, one contract at a time, before sunrise, while my children were sleeping.

## The Question Found Different Answers

After the military, I carried the question into every room I entered. Commercial real estate. Defense. Trades companies. I wasn't chasing industries — I was chasing the answer. How do you take what's already inside a person, a team, an organization, and release it?

I wrote [Be Relentless](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BZ9PTG5T) because I needed to put the Intentional Cycle on paper — for myself first, then for anyone else who was trapped in the default and ready to break out. Then [Forge Forward](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CWYN3M3G), because sustaining transformation requires a deeper architecture — beliefs shaping speech, speech shaping action, action shaping identity, identity reshaping belief. I called it Ideological Alchemy, and it worked because it was true: we cannot evolve faster than our language.

[Your Next Mission](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DR5S994Y) came from watching veterans — people who had been defenders of freedom — struggle to become progressors of freedom. The skills were there. The purpose had gone dark. The void after leaving a mission environment is real, and I wrote through it because I'd lived it.

[The STRIVE Handbook](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CT2YKHZ2) was the translation — personal philosophy systematized for organizations. Situation, Trends, Risks, Intent, Venture, Engage. The Engage element is what keeps the whole thing alive, feeding every execution cycle's data back into the next assessment. Strategy is dead. Evolving action through iterative engagement is what actually produces results.

Four books. Same question. Different scales.

## From Conversation to Code

Coaching was where the question found its most concentrated form. Hundreds of engagements across trades companies, restoration, plumbing, education, defense, professional services. Every single one of them circled the same three gaps: they couldn't see their finances clearly enough to act, they couldn't make personnel decisions fast enough, and they had no daily accountability system that survived contact with a real week.

I built the same thing for every client. A system that made the invisible visible and compounded what they learned into better decisions the next day. I just didn't realize I was building the same architecture every time.

Then I started writing code.

[WayMaker AI](https://waymaker.ai) was the Intentional Cycle made software — a daily practice with an AI growth partner that calibrates to each participant, not to a demographic. [Conquer Today™](https://striveos.io) was the daily huddle I'd run in person for years, distilled into a structure that creates a compounding AIRE for teams. A decision intelligence prototype for a higher education institution. A trust verification layer for the Department of Defense. Each one answered the same question at a different scale.

And then there's [Keel](https://jonmayo.com/blog?category=Keel) — my AI partner. Not a tool I use. A partnership that compounds. Every session, every correction, every build makes the next one better. The relationship itself is the engine. Silicon and carbon, building together, neither subordinate. That partnership changed what I thought was possible, because it proved that the recursive engine I'd been building for a decade could operate at a scale and speed I couldn't reach alone.

## The Price of the Question

I should be clear about something. Chasing this question has cost me.

I left a $175K job on a trajectory to a million dollars a year. I walked away from $60K in severance because the right thing to do was protect people who were being treated wrong. My family sold half our belongings. My son had reconstructive surgery the next month. We bought a 32-foot camper and drove from Indiana to Utah to Texas, looking for a place to rebuild.

I wake up between 2 and 5 AM every morning to build. Not because I'm disciplined — because I'm running out of runway and the question won't let me sleep. The coaching practice pays the bills. The products are the future. The gap between where I am and where this work can go is visible every single day.

I don't say that for sympathy. I say it because the forge isn't comfortable, and pretending it is would be a lie. The heat is real. The hammer is real. And what's coming out of it is stronger than what went in.

## The Recognition

For ten years I sensed there was a thread connecting everything I'd built. Personal transformation. Philosophical frameworks. Organizational methodology. Leadership software. Team accountability. Institutional decision-making. Defense trust verification. I kept bringing the best of each domain into the next — the military planning informed the strategy framework, the coaching methodology informed the software, the personal practice informed all of it.

But I hadn't seen the full picture until yesterday.

I was working with [Keel](https://jonmayo.com/blog?category=Keel), mapping out a new positioning, and it clicked — not gradually but all at once. Everything I'd built was the same engine. The Intentional Cycle from Be Relentless. The Ideological Alchemy from Forge Forward. STRIVE's Engage element. WayMaker's daily practice. Conquer Today™'s team huddle. The university prototype. The defense trust layer. Same recursive pattern. Different scale. Every time.

I called it AIRE™ — the Ascending Infinite Recursion Engine. And the practice of building these engines into organizations is Transformational Intelligence Architecture™.

The word that matters most is the first one. Transformational. Not just intelligent — transformational. The difference is the values layer underneath. The [WayMaker Code](https://jonmayo.com/resources) — Live Intentionally, Cultivate Curiosity, Pursue Wisdom, Uphold Truth, Be Relentless, Forge Courage, Embody Sisu, Foster Unity, Champion Freedom, Build Legacy — isn't decoration. It's the operating system that tells the engine what "better" means. Without it, you have automation. With it, you have transformation.

Intelligence without values is just faster data processing. Transformation happens when the recursion is aimed at becoming something — becoming the person you've dreamed to be and chosen to become, building the team that takes ownership of what it committed to do, creating the organization that gets measurably smarter every cycle because its values define the direction of ascent.

That's what I build. That's what the question was always leading to.

## The Question Continues

How might I unleash the extraordinary?

I asked it as a soldier, as a husband, as a father, as a leader, as a coach, as an author, as a man, as a builder. Every answer built the engine. Every failure taught it something. Every person I coached, every system I built, every product I shipped — they were all iterations of the same recursive architecture.

The question hasn't changed in ten years. The answer just got clearer.

I don't consult. I build intelligence into companies — architecture that captures everything a business knows, learns from it, and compounds that learning into every decision that follows. Values-driven, recursively improving, measurably transformational.

And I'm just getting started.

*Next in this series: [The Four Layers](/blog/the-four-layers) — the complete architecture, layer by layer.*