Allow the Fear: J.M. Nickels on Conscious Leadership, Strategy, and Choosing Your Life's Objective Function

J.M. Nickels defines leadership broadly as having influence in the world, which means everyone qualifies: people influence their kids, their partner, their community, the way they vote, the way they show up. The 'conscious' half of the phrase is about waking up to your interior world — your background, your biases, and the belief systems you inherited from parents, church or community that often go unquestioned until they produce conflict. Conscious leadership, in his framing, is becoming aware of that inheritance and then taking responsibility for the influence you exert.

Asked about the power of soft skills, J.M. says his own style has evolved away from arriving with the right slides and being the loudest, rightest voice in the room. As a senior leader he is more aware of power imbalances: junior people don't feel comfortable speaking up, and a casual 'that's not a good idea' from him can shut a conversation down. So he tries to hear from others first, create space, and remember he doesn't need to win the argument in the meeting — there will be a follow-up, a luxury junior people don't have when it's their one presentation to the CEO in six months.

He describes joining Uber in 2014 during the Travis Kalanick era, when the mission was making transportation as reliable as running water for anyone, anywhere, and the electricity in the air was palpable. He credits Kalanick as a visionary product leader who started ATG and Elevate, and says the product reviews were stressful at the time but taught him a great deal. At the same time, he is blunt that it was not a conscious-leadership environment: it ran on fear, because carrots and sticks do work.

In 2015 J.M. was a junior product manager in over his head, doing weekly reviews with Travis while building Uber Pool, with a six-month-old daughter and a recent move from Chicago to San Francisco. He remembers thinking he was going to snap, and that moment is what led him to meditation and inner work. The pivot came in a pricing meeting full of PhDs — including the economist Garrett van Ryzin — where everyone had reverted to lizard brain and was arguing about rider pricing, driver pricing, incentives and surge; he realized the conversation didn't need another content expert, it needed a shift out of fear and righteousness into a curious, collaborative, trusting space, which got him interested in coaching individuals and teams.

When his daughter asked how to stop thinking about a nightmare, J.M. used the pink-elephant demonstration: telling someone not to think of something guarantees they will. His first coach had a phrase for it — what you resist will persist and what you fear will appear — and he describes the cognitive-emotive loop in which a thought like 'Dara might think I suck' generates stress, which generates more stressful thoughts. The way out is not to fight the thought with other thoughts but to allow it, recognizing that thoughts and emotions are transient, a point he credits to the Buddhist lineage.

Once he can take a breath, the next move is more radical for most people: he doesn't actually need the CEO's approval of his presentation in order to be okay. He describes approval, control and security as things we try to extract from the world — do you approve of me, and if not, can I control outcomes to get approval, the job, the bank account, the house. Chasing that externally, he says, makes you a hungry ghost: no number of Michelin-star meals, promotions or titles is ever enough, like a sugar addiction. The alternative is coming home to 'I am okay even if Dara thinks I suck,' and remembering the moment isn't permanent — it's practice, and feedback becomes a gift rather than a threat.

J.M. names a paradox he lived through: for his first few years at Uber he focused heavily on optics, how he showed up, and having a good deck, and he stayed a senior PM. What correlated with finally moving up the product ladder was dropping that focus and pouring energy into the work itself — being a conduit for what wanted to happen in shared rides and trying to make an awesome product that leaves riders, drivers and cities better off. Communication and alignment still matter, but as means to a more meaningful end than his own career, and paradoxically the work got recognized more.

He is careful not to overcorrect: work and optics need balance, and the mix shifts with company size and seniority. At a senior level the 'optics layer' genuinely influences executive resource allocation — how an idea is communicated can decide whether a team gets more engineers — but it remains an input, not the outcome. His shorthand is the Buddhist image: don't mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon; the presentation and the OKR are the finger.

Asked how someone gets better at strategy and vision, J.M. says there is no magic toolkit and he long ago gave up believing he was one book away from the answer. Step one is working somewhere he has tremendous passion, because that is the fuel that gets him through to a strategy — he could not credibly devise one for reforming the healthcare system, but he gets chills thinking about how mobility work could shape his daughters' future city. That emotional charge is not decoration; it's the engine of the thinking.

Step two is depth. Rather than jumping between crypto, generative AI and whatever is next, he has spent roughly a decade in mobility and adjacent last-mile logistics. In his experience it's hard to produce a great strategy after six months in an area, and problems like shared rides are nuanced enough that sustained immersion is a prerequisite rather than a nice-to-have.

He applies first-principles thinking in the literal, physical sense: why does moving one human three miles require a 4,000-pound vehicle? Even pooling two or three people leaves the energy expenditure wildly inefficient, and that question is the doorway to bikes, scooters and smaller form factors. The general move is to interrogate why things are the way they are, ask whether the current arrangement is optimal, and treat any inefficiency as an opening.

The most transferable technique is simply imagining the future at maximum range: close your eyes and describe a city 10 years out — what happens to parking garages, are they parks now, what modes of transport exist, do autonomous bus-like vehicles connect to bikes and scooters, do people move further out or does the city become cheaper and denser. The point isn't being right; it's developing a salient picture that fires you up and that you can articulate to bring others along. From that picture he extrapolates near-certainties — autonomy arrives, sensor costs fall, remote support gets cheaper — and then reasons that induced demand, the phenomenon that made free text messages explode and extra highway lanes clog, means shared rides must remain central rather than everyone owning a cheap robot car.

J.M. insists this work cannot be scheduled into 30 minutes between OKR reviews and one-on-ones. He starts alone, in a quiet contemplative state — running, hiking in Marin, jotting notes or recording voice memos — because the first requirement is escaping the day-to-day. He is still amazed at how many product leaders run back-to-back 30-minute reviews on meaty topics, answer email in the gaps and cram in PRDs, which in his view simply doesn't work; he carves out a couple of hours to get his head into the five-to-ten-year frame.

Only once he has an outline does he bring it to a group. He describes a recent all-day Monday with eight people in the office working on the future of the marketplace — laptops down, whiteboard up, which he calls a lost art. From there the work moves into co-creation, in the spirit of Pixar's brain trust: a group riffing on ideas with no judgment and no attachment to being right, where someone improves or corrects his picture of the future.

One concrete output of that work is the recognition that UberX was a comparatively simple product — essentially a taxi meter with a time-and-distance rate plus supply-and-demand surge — while the future is multimodal on both sides. Supply now includes taxis, fleet providers, Waymo, Cruise and others, each with different availability and cost-quality trade-offs; demand includes shared, reserved, comfort, X and priority, which must be priced and ranked relative to one another, with feedback loops back into matching and pricing. He calls it an infinitely cited marketplace problem that nobody has ever built, layered on top of what he considers the best logistics marketplace technology on the planet.

At the micro level, the same discipline applies to the calendar: he doesn't keep a 20-item to-do list but a list of three highest-leverage things with broad impact across the company, and he lets the top one marinate. He connects this to the PayPal-era notion of giving one leader deep responsibility for one core thing so they can immerse themselves in it, and to the value of getting every open loop out of your head and onto paper.

J.M. frames vision versus execution as balancing two opposing forces rather than picking a side. His cautionary tale from early Uber is the future-of-pricing effort around 2017, an attempt to unify driver time-and-distance rates, incentive bonuses and surge pricing into one sophisticated system: the best minds locked in a room for two weeks produced a beautiful whiteboard diagram, and the engineers' reaction was that it was boiling the ocean. He says marketplace teams still carry that bias, joking that they get wrapped around the axle of a hypothetical problem that could occur two years out if certain teams generate a certain amount of demand.

DoorDash, in his experience, sometimes failed in the opposite direction — leaders half-joked about 'ready, fire, aim,' and the ethos was 'I'm going to run through a wall; I have no idea if it's the right wall, but at least I know I'm running through a wall.' His own preference, if forced, is to bias toward action, because running through a wall generates learning either way, while the bigger failure mode is deliberating so long that nothing ships. The right setting depends on the moment: a pivot or soul-searching phase calls for leaning into strategy, while a baked six-to-twelve-month plan calls for pedal to the metal.

He cites two contrasting models from an Acquired event at the Chase Center. Mark Zuckerberg described how, once Facebook aligns on a direction, there will be a Mark-shaped hole in any wall that appears. Daniel Ek described Spotify's value that talk is cheap not as a dismissal of talk but as an advantage: conversation costs little compared with building, so the company invests heavily in refining ideas before committing. J.M. connects that to the Amazon practice of a crisp narrative document followed by a messy meeting that picks it apart.

J.M. attributes much of the difference between Uber and DoorDash to their founding DNA. Uber started rider- and consumer-centric — an origin story about getting a ride in Paris and beating the taxi experience — and he argues it took that too far for a while, treating drivers as a commodity before correcting to invest in the supply side of the marketplace. DoorDash began with Tony Xu growing up in his parents' restaurant kitchen and a thesis about helping small businesses succeed, with delivery as the first instantiation of that meta-purpose, making it merchant-centric.

The same selection looks different depending on motivation: Uber Eats wants a customer to have great Thai food and sushi as a means to a great eater experience, while DoorDash wants every Thai restaurant in the city to thrive, which happens to produce better selection as a byproduct. His analogy is that Uber is to Amazon as DoorDash is to Shopify, and he stresses there is no right or wrong — both are great strategies, but attempting both would cost focus.

At Waymo, he watched a company largely solve self-driving in a place as complex as San Francisco, with cars handling fog, rain and puddles. The lesson he was helping deliver is that building a self-driving car on a test track is a different problem statement from scaling a fleet of thousands: operating, cleaning, charging and maintaining vehicles, and then building a ride-hail network with an app, user acquisition, marketplace matching and pricing. Hiring and building culture around those commercial skills was genuinely hard inside an organization whose center of gravity was perception and planning.

That experience now looks prescient, because Uber's stated strategy is to be an aggregator, partnering with Waymo, Cruise, Motional and players in China so that every vehicle, autonomous or not, can sit on its platform. J.M. frames the choice facing autonomy operators as build-your-own ride-hail network versus plugging into Uber's demand for faster utilization, which in turn unlocks financing and more vehicles. He notes that Waymo is hedging — working with Uber in Phoenix while also building Waymo One — and that autonomy engineers notoriously underestimate the ride-share iceberg: marketplace technology, rider and driver support, logistics, EV financing, regulators, safe pickup points and more.

For Contrarian Corner, J.M. pushes back on the workplace norm of keeping feelings at home and showing up as a purely logical, data-driven operator. He describes whole-body intelligence: the head offers logic, data and left-brain reasoning, but the heart and gut carry their own signal, and an emotion is simply energy moving in the body, often correlated with a thought. Discounting that channel discards information he uses constantly.

He maps specific signatures: fear sits in the center of the chest, sadness sinks in the stomach, anger tightens the jaw and furrows the eyes, and each person should locate their own markers for joy and creative energy. The instruction each carries is what makes them useful — fear means something wants attention, which at Waymo translated into rigorously checking edge cases like a dog or a ball or a child in the street; sadness means something wants to be let go of, like a vision or a feature that won't happen; anger means something isn't in service of you, your people or your mission; joy wants to be celebrated rather than steamrolled by the next OKR; creative energy wants to be born into the world.

The next step, which he admits is radical, is naming emotions out loud. He imagines an OKR review where the team is behind target and blaming each other, and someone says 'I notice I feel fear about this' — the tone of the room would transform. The conventional belief is that emotions don't belong at work; his experience is that welcoming them, and occasionally voicing them, makes individuals and teams more effective and decisions more intelligent.

J.M. spends his working life thinking about objective functions — algorithms optimizing matching and pricing across short- and long-term effects — and argues that everyone runs one for their life, usually without knowing it. The default objective function is inherited from a church, a community, parents, or whatever earned praise, and people bob along inside it. He points to Ray Dalio's advice to write down your principles and to Clayton Christensen's How Will You Measure Your Life?, which asks why so many Harvard classmates who became Fortune 500 executives ended up divorced with kids who won't speak to them.

Christensen's illustration is a Sunday-night choice: polish Monday's presentation for the CEO, or play with your daughter. Type-A, successful people tend to be short-term objective-function driven — the presentation is tomorrow, the daughter will be there next week — and by repeating that choice for years they discover the relationship is gone. J.M.'s own method is to reason from future me: five years out he won't care that the deck was marginally better, but he will care enormously about his relationship with his daughters, which means today's and tomorrow's actions are the inputs to that outcome.

He draws on the Stoics — Seneca, Marcus Aurelius — for a mindfulness of death that he says reorders priorities. Most people pretend they'll live forever, and the horror is that they succeed, eating ice cream, going to work, taking vacations, never confronting the end; awareness that the journey terminates punctuates reality and forces a re-examination of the afternoon's plans. He tears up saying it, then lands the line that stuck with him: the only people who will remember you working late every night is your kids.

The practice he most wants listeners to take away is breaking out of victim consciousness. Real injustice and hardship exist, he acknowledges, but most of us live at the effect of circumstances and feel life happening to us; the radical shift is taking responsibility for how you see the world and treating events as growth opportunities. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning is his exemplar — a man in horrific conditions who retained compassion even for his guards — and J.M.'s conclusion is that if Frankl could choose his relationship to that, then showing up differently in a product review or a conversation with a partner is well within reach. His recommended reading is The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Diana Chapman and Jim Dethmer (Diana is still his coach), Nancy Duarte's Resonate for its tension-and-release storytelling between the world as it is and as it might be, and Alan Watts for a satirical, unserious Eastern perspective; he loved Inside Out 2 with his kids, swears by the Eight Sleep temperature-controlled mattress for deep sleep, and carries Ram Dass's 'beyond all polarities, I am' as a working mantra. He also shares that Travis Kalanick used to close the blinds in 1455 Market's conference rooms because he was convinced Lyft had drones outside spying on the presentations, and that the best place to find him is rhythmofbeing.com, where he occasionally takes on coaching clients.