The Last Sacred Message
TR

The First 34 Verses — In my own words Translation

In the name of the one true leader, full of love and always ready to forgive. (servant leadership)

Holding on to a purpose, through love or hate

  1. READ (Look into it, UNDERSTAND it, and SAY what you think) In the name of your teacher, who looks out for you: MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD! (self-management, self-awareness, open communication; coach, mentor; everyone's voice being heard)
  2. The human being wasn't made to be a cold list of memorized facts, but to hold on to something, to a PURPOSE, because they care about it: through love and interest (or through anger, hate, hostility). In other words, through CONNECTION. (shared purpose, engagement)
  3. READ (Look into it, UNDERSTAND it, and SAY what you think) Your teacher is very generous: the source of dignity, self-respect, and FREEDOM. (empowerment, autonomy, psychological safety)
  4. The one who TAUGHT us to write WITH A PEN is your teacher. (documentation, knowledge management, transparency, working out loud)
  5. Your teacher TAUGHT people what they didn't know. (Now you do the same: teach others what you know and they don't. Teaching is the best way to learn.) (knowledge sharing, peer learning, learning organization)

The one who keeps away from people — the one who stands alone

  1. Hey, you who HIDE AWAY ON YOUR OWN! (The one who pulls away from people and would rather be alone; the one who doesn't want to deal with other people's nonsense! the silo; the expert stuck in a silo)
  2. Do something: GET UP and warn people! (Show up; tell them they've got a lot of things wrong, including the last sacred message, and that they're going the wrong way. Share what you know. Show them the right way. break the silos; change agent, feedback, sharing the vision)
  3. Show respect for your teacher; that way, STAY OPEN TO LEARNING. (Respect whoever teaches you; try to really understand what they teach. Everyone is everyone else's teacher. growth mindset, active listening)
  4. Show up CLEAN in front of your students. (Students should respect their teacher, and the teacher should respect the students too. mutual respect, leading by example, professionalism)
  5. You stayed away from people so their dirt wouldn't rub off on you. Now that you've been told "get up and go be with people," DON'T GET DIRTY. (Stay away from doing wrong, from lying, from crime. Keep your good character, your honesty, and your sense of fairness. integrity, ethics, fair process; no office politics)
  6. DON'T THROW IT IN PEOPLE'S FACES: the good you did, the things you taught. (That way, you'll be ready to give even more. Keep giving, even if you don't see anything coming back; giving matters more than getting. giving without expecting anything back, giver culture, intrinsic motivation)
  7. For your teacher, BE PATIENT and HANG IN THERE WHEN IT GETS HARD. (Life and your students will teach you. Be patient with life and with your students. Pushing back against change is normal: other people do it, and so do you. Change is hard for you too. Be ready for your own pushback and for other people's; in other words, for the hard part. change management, resistance to change, resilience, retrospective)

The time of passing between ages

  1. Let the TIME BETWEEN TWO AGES speak up! (We need to talk about the problems and the chances of our time. We're moving into a new age built around AI: the old age isn't over yet, the new one hasn't fully started; we're right in the middle. transition, AI transformation, open space)
  2. People are FALLING BEHIND THE TIMES. (They don't keep up with what's going on, so they fall behind. Not everyone catches up with the new age at the same time; some, more than others, are late. skill gap, continuous learning, adoption curve)

An idea coming to life

  1. SPREAD IDEAS AROUND, CHEER PEOPLE ON, so nobody stays quiet because they're scared. (hypothesis, ideation, divergent thinking, innovation, psychological safety)
  2. PICK UP THE IDEA AND CARRY IT WITH A SIMPLE PROTOTYPE (put it on the cloud and turn it into an MVP, a first simple version that actually works. Set up the first CI/CD pipeline, try it out, write down what you learn. prototyping, minimum viable product, cloud, continuous integration, build-measure-learn)
  3. Like clouds drifting across the sky, TURN THEM INTO PRODUCTS THAT MOVE SMOOTHLY, STEP BY STEP, ALL THE WAY TO REAL USERS, CHECKED BY AUTOMATIC TESTS (test automation, continuous delivery, DevOps, flow, promotion across environments)
  4. As more and more people use it, SPREAD THE TRAFFIC SMARTLY ACROSS Service Providers/Servers/AI Agents (scaling, load balancing, deployment, production, go-to-market)
  5. WHAT YOU'VE BEEN PROMISED IS FOR SURE. How the results will be measured is clear from day one (nothing works without measuring and without owning the results. Being open and taking responsibility are a must. KPI, observability, transparency, accountability, evidence-based decision)
  6. And THE DAY OF RECKONING WILL COME, NO MATTER WHAT. The result is either success or failure (rewards and consequences can't be avoided. The consequence is wasting what you were given; the reward is creating more value than you used up, and getting more to work with. performance review, ROI, resource allocation, reward and consequence, sustainable growth)

The race for more

  1. The RACE for more, the kind that doesn't serve the PURPOSE, kept you busy; it kept you from your goal in the future. (What matters is the PURPOSE; the purpose is a goal out in the future. More stuff, more people, more titles, more features, more money: all of it is worth only as much as it gets you closer to that goal. When the race for more takes the place of the purpose, you lose sight of the goal. shared purpose, goal-oriented, vanity metrics, growth for its own sake)
  2. It went so far that, to get ahead in the RACE, you counted your dead. (When the living weren't enough, you went to the graveyard: you added old wins, finished projects, and past glory to today's score. When the race makes you forget the PURPOSE, even what's never coming back gets counted. You visit a grave; you don't move in. The goal is up ahead. resting on laurels, vanity metrics, sunk cost fallacy, forward-looking)

Solid ground, rising sea

  1. By the MOUNTAIN! (It looks down from above, it doesn't shake, it shows the way; it's the place where the vision is received. A fixed point everyone can see. vision, north star, shared purpose)
  2. By a BOOK WRITTEN LINE BY LINE, (Decisions, rules, lessons learned; written one at a time, in order. What isn't written down, gets forgotten. working agreements, standards, knowledge management)
  3. On an OPEN PAGE, (What's written isn't rolled up and hidden away; it's laid open for anyone to read. transparency, open documentation, information radiator)
  4. By the FULL, LIVING HOUSE, (A house people come and go from, live in, and take care of; the team's shared home. team, community of practice, engagement)
  5. By the RAISED CEILING, (The bar has been raised; there's room to grow. A ceiling isn't something to stand on; it's a limit you keep pushing up. high bar, stretch goal)
  6. And by the SWELLING, BURNING SEA: (The wave of our time is rising; AI, competition, the market, all of it is boiling. The mountain and the house stand firm; the sea, does not. uncertainty, VUCA, disruption, AI wave)
  7. The OUTCOME your teacher saw coming WILL HAPPEN, NO DOUBT; (Whoever doesn't hold on to the mountain, the writing, the house; whoever gets caught up in the race for more; whoever falls behind the times, gets swept away by the wave. It's not a threat; it's just how things work. inevitable transformation, obsolescence, consequence)
  8. NOTHING can STOP IT. (The wave won't turn back: not if you deny it, not if you put it off, not if you count your old wins. The only way, is to be ready. resistance to change, irreversibility, adaptability)

One team, can't be split

  1. Say: the ONE TRUE LEADER is not a "one" made of pieces, but ONE THAT CAN'T BE SPLIT. (One means "not two": the one who leads and the ones who are led aren't two separate things. The leader isn't some separate boss sitting outside the system. The leader is the system itself: the ocean. The rough sea is just the surface; waves rise on top, but deep down it's one and calm. The ocean isn't split by the fish in it or by its waves. A fish is the ocean; but the ocean isn't a fish. A company works the same way: it might look like it's split into teams, services and microservices, but it's one body. Decisions aren't made by one person; they're made by that one body. unity, non-duality (in Sufism: wahdat al-wujud, the unity of being), one team, self-management, deciding together)
  2. Everything TURNS TO the One; there's no hole in the One, nothing missing: the One is WHOLE. The One holds everything, but isn't just the sum of it. (The whole is more than its parts added up. Everyone in the house faces the same way: toward the mountain, the PURPOSE; toward the NUMBERS written down on a page everyone can see; and toward LEARNING. Nobody's boss decides if an idea is good. The numbers decide, and they were written down before you started, where everyone can read them. You drop the idea into the water as a small test, and the ocean answers. Money from customers is the clearest version of that answer, but not the most valuable one. The most valuable thing is the mountain, the purpose. People don't decide; they answer. If it works, you grow it. If it doesn't, you drop it. You don't keep pushing, because you can't undo the result. If someone can't face that direction, they leave the house. For the house, that's like a death. For the person, it's not the end: the ocean is big, there are other houses. For a person, there are no mistakes; there's only stuff you haven't learned yet. The ceiling gets pushed higher; there's no limit to learning. shared purpose, north star, alignment, team agreements, open information, build-measure-learn, MVP, customer feedback, vanity metrics, learning organization, stretch goals)
  3. The One had NO KIDS, and was NOBODY'S KID. (Between a parent and a child there's a before and after, an above and below. In the whole, there's none of that. Nobody is anyone's boss, and nobody is anyone's underling. Nobody is worth more, nobody is worth less. Authority isn't born from anyone and isn't handed down to anyone; it lives in the whole itself. So everyone is FREE: no person tells another person "you can't." The only thing that says "you can't" is the NUMBERS that were written down beforehand, and the numbers speak through feedback from people, from customers. An idea doesn't wait for a boss to approve it. It goes out as a test, and the ocean answers. Asking for advice isn't asking for permission: you ask the people your decision affects, but the last word isn't theirs and isn't yours. It's the result's. flat organization, autonomy, empowerment, advice process, customer feedback, evidence-based decisions, psychological safety)
  4. And nothing has ever been EQUAL to the One. (Only the whole has no equal. No single part can stand in for the whole and decide for others; nobody is above anybody. No single point of authority, equality, no dictators, not unity of command but unity of the whole)