By the [run]Book: Episode 13

About this Series

This discussion guide is part of Rising Tide’s Winter 2026 book club, where we’re reading Think Naked by Marco Marsan.

If you’re just joining us, here are a few pages you’ll likely benefit from:

• Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity for why we started a book club for a technical team here

Chapter Summary

“If you want to be more creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society” - Jean Piaget

In Chapter 2, You Lost Your Marbles, Marco Marsan explores how people don’t simply “grow out” of creativity — they are systematically conditioned out of it. The chapter argues that over time, fear, rigid rules, institutional norms, and social conformity slowly strip away curiosity, playfulness, and experimentation.

Marsan frames this loss through several forces:

• Fear: mistakes become costly as adults (financially, socially, professionally)
• Senseless rules: norms persist long after their original context or usefulness
• Institutionalized regurgitation: being rewarded for having the “right answer” rather than learning how to think
• Tough-it-out culture: endurance replaces reflection
• Numbness: accumulated stress and responsibility dull engagement

The chapter opens with a consulting story where a leader dismisses Marsan outright, using it as a framing device to explore how organizations often reject discomfort, challenge, and unconventional thinking — even when they claim to want innovation.

Discussion Questions

Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!

• What does “losing your marbles” mean to you — and what might you have lost that still matters?
  • 'Lose Your Marbles' Saying - Meaning & Context
  • Rather than meaning “you’ve gone crazy,” the group explored the older meaning: marbles as something valuable children possessed — and something adults may have lost, not gained, over time.
• Where have fear or consequences made curiosity feel unsafe? How do power and authority shape how you show up creatively?
• How often do you ask why a rule exists, rather than whether you’re allowed to challenge it?
• Where have institutions (school, work, industry norms) rewarded compliance over thinking?
• What would play look like in your work if you weren’t worried about being wrong?

Rising Tide Input for your Consideration

• Your brain is capable of great creativity and capacity. How you use it matters. Here is some research behind some of the concepts Marsan mentions.
  • Beyond the Myth That We Use Only 10 Percent of Our Brains | Psychology Today
  • A Healthy Brain: Use It or Lose It! | USU
  • Machismo, Marianismo, and Negative Cognitive-Emotional Factors: Findings From the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos Sociocultural Ancillary Study - PubMed
• Creativity and Learning require play — and play requires safety.
• We discussed Montessori education, language learning, or professional growth, the group emphasized that playfulness, repetition, and “looking silly” are critical to learning and are exactly what adults are trained to avoid.
• Conformity isn’t safety, it’s a creativity suppressor.
  • The group referenced classic psychology experiments (Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram Experiment) to explore how authority, group pressure, and institutional roles can override personal judgment and moral reasoning. Stanford prison experiment - Wikipedia
  • Dead Poets Society - Conformity Scene (1989) HD w/ Subtitles
  • https://youtu.be/GDWAKvQemlU?si=AVbkNGLEhC8vn7KV
  • Organizational Culture and the 5 Monkeys Experiment | Intersol
• Are rules ever useful?
  • Rules are not inherently bad, but we propose that unexamined rules are dangerous. There are rules that deliver shared value and coordination, but there are also rules that persist simply because “that’s how it’s done”
    • A recurring Rising Tide pattern emerged: looking for the rule beneath the rule (the underlying reason a rule exists) rather than accepting it at face value.
  • As Marsan suggests, “Any Rule represents, at best, the latest thinking on a subject,” but we also considered that a rule represents what was left over from an unfinished discussion, and not even the best answer. It just reflects the last time someone argued about something and not a timeless truth.
• Learning is experiential, not transactional.
  • We discussed how conformity, rote memorization, and “teaching for the test” suppress critical thinking and actual learning in many modern educational systems.
  • True learning involves play, repetition, discomfort, and curiosity, all of which feel inefficient or risky in adult systems optimized for output.

About Rising Tide and our Book Club

Rising Tide helps MSPs and service-focused teams build better systems: the kind that align people with purpose.

Every Friday at 9:30 AM ET, we host Rising Tide Fridays as an open conversation for MSP owners, consultants, and service professionals who want to grow both professionally, technically, and emotionally. In Winter/Spring 2026, we’re walking through Think Naked.

If that sounds like your kind of crowd, reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Teams link. Bring your coffee and curiosity…no prep required.

‍

About this Series

This discussion guide is part of Rising Tide’s Winter 2026 book club, where we’re reading Think Naked by Marco Marsan.

If you’re just joining us, here are a few pages you’ll likely benefit from:

• Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity for why we started a book club for a technical team here

Chapter Summary

In the introduction and first chapter, Marco Marsan proposes to the readers that creativity is not lost as we age — it is trained out of us. He cites research suggesting that young children test at very high “genius” or creative problem-solving levels, and that this capacity sharply declines by adulthood.

To return to this childlike, “genius” mindset, Marsan introduces five “rules” that mirror how children naturally engage with problems:

1. Wear your cape (be fearless)
2. Blockbuster (question defaults and conventions)
3. Look at Your Neighbor’s Paper (learn by copying and remixing)
4. Show-N-Tell (learn publicly and collaboratively)
5. I’m the boss of me (take ownership and agency)

Discussion Questions

Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!

• What did you agree with in these chapters?
• What did you disagree with in these chapters?
• Do you agree that creativity declines because of conditioning rather than capability? Why or why not?
• Who or what defines a genius?
• Do any of the five lessons intrigue you more than the others? Which of the five principles feels most uncomfortable to you right now?
• Where do you avoid experimentation because the cost of being wrong feels too high?
• Where in your work do you default to “this is how it’s always been done”?
• What would “thinking more like a kid” actually look like in one small, real decision this week?

Rising Tide Input for your Consideration

• What causes us to lose our creativity?
  • The team proposed that people don’t lose creativity as they age, but rather they close off the permission rather than the capability because creativity becomes risky. As adults, mistakes have consequences: reputational, financial, professional. Most environments reward predictability over curiosity, so people adapt accordingly.
• Are children actually ‘geniuses’?
  • Evidence that children become less creative over time (and how to fix it) - Idea to Value
  • As a team, we felt that the label “genius,” isn’t particularly useful. It’s poorly defined, and even more poorly measured. What matters is not intelligence labels, but how people approach problems: curiosity, iteration, and willingness to engage with uncertainty.
    • In fact, as a team we consistently seem to pushback on: Labels (“genius,” “best practice,” or “industry standard”), Claims without sources, and Metrics without definitions.
  • Children also don’t ask if they’re allowed to participate, they assume they are. Adults often operate transactionally, constantly checking for permission. That hesitation suppresses experimentation and ownership.
• How does technology factor into creativity loss?
  • Convenience is a trade. Offloading is good if the saved energy is reinvested into higher-order problem-solving. As a result, technology can either dull skills or enable deeper thinking depending on how we use it as a tool.
  • Automation is welcomed after understanding exists. Technology should support people who know why, not replace them.

About Rising Tide and our Book Club

Rising Tide helps MSPs and service-focused teams build better systems: the kind that align people with purpose.

Every Friday at 9:30 AM ET, we host Rising Tide Fridays as an open conversation for MSP owners, consultants, and service professionals who want to grow both professionally, technically, and emotionally. In Winter/Spring 2026, we’re walking through Think Naked.

If that sounds like your kind of crowd, reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Teams link. Bring your coffee and curiosity…no prep required.

‍

About this Series

This discussion guide is part of Rising Tide’s Fall 2025 book club, where we’re reading The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann.

If you’re just joining us, here are a few pages you’ll likely benefit from:

• Chapter One – The Go-Getter for an introduction on how to use these Discussion Questions
• Book Clubs, Conversations, and Curiosity for why we started a book club for a technical team here

Chapter Summary

In the final chapter of The Go-Giver, we meet Claire, who is on her way to meet the partners behind an amazingly (even stratospherically) successful new business: Rachel’s Famous Coffee. Chapter 14 ties up the story of The Go-Giver in a neat little bow, showcasing the stratospheric success possible, and encouraging us to share the secret with others along the way.

Discussion Questions

Use these open-ended prompts to guide reflection and conversation. Remember, there are no right answers!

• Joe ends the book in a completely different role than he started. Did that feel like success to you?
• How has your own definition of success changed over time?
• How do you tell the difference between quitting, failing, and evolving? Would this ending feel different if Joe were less financially secure?
• What did you learn from this book? What do you think your key takeaway will be?

Rising Tide Input for your Consideration

• Joe didn’t land the sale, he completely changed his trajectory. What does that mean for you? Sometimes success isn’t what we imagine or set out to accomplish, sometimes it’s adjacent.
• Joe isn’t keeping the secret or the process to himself, he’s actively sharing it with others and using the same framework Pindar gave him.
• As a team, we didn’t really like this book and wouldn’t recommend it to peers who already have practical experience in business or leadership.
  • The parable format wasn’t great for our team. It was a good basic overview, but it didn’t go as deep as we felt some of these concepts deserved. While we get that it’s a book with a story that needed to be simplified to get the author’s key ideas across, seven days isn’t enough time for meaningful personal or professional change, and we felt the timeline and simplicity undercut the book’s credibility. Many felt the book oversold its lesson without adequately showing how it applies in complex, real-world situations, added to the fact that since Joe doesn’t apply the lessons over time and he’s rewarded through proximity to power, it made the ending feel uncomfortably like access solves everything.
  • The main character wasn’t relatable or aspirational. The team generally struggled with Joe! He started unlikable and never quite crossed into someone the team wanted to root for or become, in fact, as a result, the story ended up feeling like it was more about “who you know.” and being in the right place at the right time. While generosity mattered, only once the right people were involved, which ignores how uneven access to networks really is.
  • There are possibly better books out there that communicate similar ideas more effectively. Here are a few of our favorites:
    • Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
    • Dare to Lead - Brené Brown
    • The Four Agreements – don Miguel Ruiz
• We hope you’ll join us in 2026 for our next book: Think Naked: Childlike Brilliance in the Rough Adult World by Peter Lloyd Marco Marsan | Goodreads. Get a copy of the book and mark your calendar for January 09, 2026 to talk through the cover and reading plan.  

About Rising Tide and our Book Club

Rising Tide helps MSPs and service-focused teams build better systems: the kind that align people with purpose.

Every Friday at 9:30 AM ET, we host Rising Tide Fridays as an open conversation for MSP owners, consultants, and service professionals who want to grow both professionally, technically, and emotionally. Our book for 2026 Quarter 1 is Think Naked: Childlike Brilliance in the Rough Adult World by Marco Marsan.

If that sounds like your kind of crowd, reach out to partners@risingtidegroup.net for the Teams link.
Bring your coffee and curiosity…no prep required.

‍