Peek inside the meeting rooms, hallways or garages for the ones who bend the arc of ideas or culture toward better and beautiful and you see some, well, unorthodox habits. The clash of conflicting views and violent disagreement in storms. Leap-of-faith assumptions that make no logical business sense. Naïve, piercing questions to jolt people out of preconceived ideas. Feeling disequilibrium in a crisisof confidence. And it’s good.

Wait, what?

How do confidence-shaking crises and disequilibrium not cause emotional vertigo? Why does the allegedly anti-soft-skill behavior make people feel alive and relevant instead of spiraling on a surge of cortisol? In a word, gravity, aka, gravitas.

Gravity doesn’t run on type-a, hypercompetitive intensity. It runs on relevance, not status. It is captivating by insight, not charisma. Gravity is influence that pulls people out of certainty into curiosity, cuts through ego with a machete, flips the script on status by equalizing everyone in the room, balances us emotionally—if even by a thread—in disequilibrium.

When a message is starved for meaning, a project lacks life, a startup needs a clue more than capital, or conversation is skipping along the surface, this book isn’t a self-help quadrant or communication model that looks like quantum mechanics. It changes your instincts.

From science-shifting discoveries in the jungles of Tanzania to the whiplash of pivots in Silicon Valley, Smith and Marcum’s ten-year study makes us witnesses to the indispensable forces of gravity that shape who we are in a brave new world. This is the science and soul of, “Oh the places you’ll go.”