Page 72 of The Session

“There’s time. What about the rest of Summit? The part here?”

“It’s bigger than I realized.”

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Tru answered. “And I need you to brace yourself for your next one. We only have a few minutes, and I want you to understand I have your back—but now it’s going to be on you.”

“What does that mean?”

“A decision has been made to accelerate you,” Tru said as she pressed the elevator button.

“Great. Again, what does that mean?”

“We’ve got two major events coming up. One is a CEO conference, which is pretty high-stakes for us, and then Conclave. That’s a Summit Strategies annual event where a lot of decisions are made. I know I might be pushing things faster than I told you, but if you’re in, you need to be in,” she said.

“I still don’t understand what that means.”

“We can’t just anoint you and say you’re a key player. You have to demonstrate to the organization that you’ve earned the right,” Tru explained. “But given the time constraints, we have to do this quickly, and it’s not going to be easy.”

“Is this, like, some kind of written exam?” Mark asked.

“Part of it will be, but we’ll make sure to tutor you for that. No . . . this is going to be something else, and that’s what we’re deciding right now.”

The elevator doors opened, and Tru escorted Mark down the hall to a conference room he hadn’t been inside before.

Eight people sat around the table. They were complete strangers to him, except for one, Max Lightman, his father.

“Hey, Mark, have a seat. We’re just going over strategy here and wanted to run some things by you,” Lightman said nonchalantly.

Over the last several days, Mark had played out this scenario over a dozen different ways in his head. Would he meet his father at his island mansion? Would it be a big ceremony? Would it happen by phone? What he hadn’t expected was a casual greeting in a corporate environment.

“Thank you, Mr. Lightman,” Mark replied, trying to be as casual as his father acted.

“‘Mr. Lightman.’” Lightman chuckled. “Listen to him.”

Mark had only been able to do a superficial survey of his father’s writings and philosophy, but one term stood out to him from his ChatGPT summaries: “hyperadaptation.”

According to the tech, this was a social or physical shock used to force someone’s nervous system into an instantaneous reframe.

Lightman believed that if tragedies and short-term trauma like battlefield experience could trigger shell shock and permanent personality changes, so could hyperintense positive experiences. He used examples of fathers meeting their newborn children for the first time, the first kiss between lovers, a wedding ceremony, and emotional movies.

Mark recognized that his father’s goal was to normalize their relationship as quickly as possible and demonstrate to everybody that it was business as usual.

While Mark suspected that the reasons were primarily selfish—to help Max Lightman move past the awkwardness—he was relieved not to need to make a dramatic first statement to his father. From that, the public forum saved him.

Still, he felt the adrenaline of the moment. Moreover, he felt an instinctive need to prove . . . no, that wasn’t the right word for it . . . to assert himself. All this talk about him lacking ambition had gone on too long.

Mark leaned back and spoke in his commanding coach voice: “So we’re here to figure out how to put me over the top.”

Lightman nodded and smiled appreciatively at the professional wrestling jargon. When searching for anything his father had ever said about sports, Mark had come across a lecture that broke down the psychology of pro wrestling.

Ice broken, Tru introduced Mark to the other people in the room, including an older man, Chad Jameson, who spoke with a light Jamaican accent; a stocky man named Ted Connelly, who worked in operations; and a woman named Delilah Rawling, who had an Australian accent.

Jameson was with the Accreditation and Compliance team. His job was to make sure that everything they did was legitimate.

Rawling was director of content. According to Tru, she knew every single course in certification that Summit Strategies had ever offered to its employees or clients.

Tru began the meeting, addressing the room but looking at Mark. “The thing about Summit that outsiders don’t understand is that you can’t buy authority. It doesn’t matter if you’re a celebrity or wealthy as fuck. It’s the only thing we don’t sell. Now, as you were told previously, the easiest way to get authority is to be an excellent earner for the company. But that takes time. And it’s not the only way. There are a lot of roles that aren’t directly connected to sales that are very important. So we’ve created other ways for people to demonstrate capability that can be converted into authority.”

“We need to be able to point to what you’ve done,” Lightman added, “and that’s why you’re here.”