The Inevitable™ from Normal 40
Normal 40: The Podcast
#69: The Five Dead Ends — A Conversation with Tait Arend on Image, Isolation, and Choosing Something More
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#69: The Five Dead Ends — A Conversation with Tait Arend on Image, Isolation, and Choosing Something More

Tait was eight years old, riding his sister’s banana-seat bike down a steep hill and a road too busy.

No brakes.
No helmet.
No shot at stopping.

He hit the side of a moving car and broke every bone in his face.

But this episode isn’t about that crash.
It’s about the ones that came later.

When he got the degrees, the job, the image—and still felt empty.
When he realized most men aren’t broken… they’re just alone.
When he saw how we all build lives we think we should want, then quietly suffocate inside them.

Tait Arend is a leadership coach, leader, and Co-host of the Bridging Connections podcast. But he’s also you, if you’ve ever looked around at your life and wondered how something that looks so good can feel so off.

In this episode, we talk about the Five Dead Ends—the invisible traps high performers walk into with no exit plan:

  1. Cynicism

  2. Isolation

  3. Numbing

  4. Disorientation

  5. Powerlessness

And then we talked about what to do with it.

Listen to Episode 68 and if one of those dead ends sounds familiar, reply and tell me which one.

I’ll go first: mine was disorientation. And I waited too long to name it.

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