Ancient Modern
Building on what came before
Something about traveling to a city with ancient ruins always hits a deep nerve in me. Perhaps it was my fascination with the book “Charoits of the Gods” as a young boy.
I was mesmerized by what the ancients built and wondered how the hell they moved those giant blocks to create a perfectly symmetrical temple, a 20,000-seat amphitheater, or gravity-fed aqueducts. It was the precision and imagination that really caught my attention.
And that happened again, by wandering into the city of Tarragona, Spain.
Most cities tell their history through museums.
Tarragona lives inside its history.
Walking through the city, you move effortlessly between Roman amphitheaters built more than two thousand years ago, medieval walls, Gothic churches, modern cafés, apartment buildings, and bustling plazas. Nothing feels frozen in time. Every era is still participating in the story.
The city isn’t preserving history.
It’s living with it.
NOW
We often think progress requires starting over.
Technology encourages this mindset. Businesses rebrand. Leaders reinvent themselves. Societies chase the next innovation as if everything that came before has become obsolete.
Yet Tarragona quietly offers a different lesson.
Its Roman foundations from the 2nd century BC still shape the city. Centuries of Roman rule gave way to Visigoths, Muslim influence, Christian kingdoms, Napoleon’s occupation, modern Spain, and today’s European society. Each era left artifacts, architecture, language, customs, and texture.
Not every chapter was peaceful. Many were born through conquest, imposed belief systems, and the displacement of those who came before.
History isn’t clean.
But it is cumulative.
NEW
Recently I’ve been working with clients in Australia, where conversations around Indigenous culture are approached with deep respect and growing intentionality.
Standing here in Tarragona, I couldn’t help drawing a parallel.
Every civilization inherits something.
Some inherit knowledge.
Some inherit trauma.
Most inherit both.
The question isn’t whether history happened.
The question is what we choose to carry forward.
Imagine if modern societies spent as much energy integrating ancient wisdom as we do inventing new technologies.
Imagine if organizations honored institutional memory instead of constantly reorganizing it away.
Imagine if our personal narratives viewed every previous chapter, even the difficult ones, as structural beams rather than baggage.
Perhaps wisdom compounds the same way capital does.
NEXT
This trip has become an unexpected companion to my word for the year.
Reimagine.
Reimagining isn’t abandoning who you’ve been.
It is becoming a better steward of everything that brought you here.
Narrative Worth works the same way.
Every experience, relationship, success, failure, culture, place, and lesson becomes another tessera (tile) in the mosaic.
Over time, the picture gains depth because nothing meaningful is discarded.
Ancient.
Modern.
Not opposites.
Partners.
The strongest narratives aren’t the newest ones.
They’re the ones that have learned how to compound across time.
Closing Reflection
As I stood overlooking Roman ruins while listening to the sounds of a modern city, I realized something.
The future may not belong to those who build the newest foundations.
It may belong to those who learn how to build the next layer without forgetting the ones beneath it.
If you know someone wrestling with how to tell their story at a pivot point, a new role, a career shift, or a stage they’re stepping onto, send them this issue.
[note: real pictures from my trip were used to inspire these narrative mosaics.]
I’m Tobin Trevarthen.
I’ve spent the first 30 years inside the companies doing the work, building my Narrative Equity from a horizontal lens. I spent the last 12 years working across companies and executives to find the story that holds only to discover, somewhere along the way, that the deeper work was always about something else.
We are not linear, chronological beings. We are spatial. Cumulative. Mosaic.
Every encounter adds a tile. Every shift — in role, in identity, in what the world asks of you — changes the image. The meaning only becomes visible when you step far enough back to see the whole.
A holistic view similar to a Living Mosaic™. And the value it accumulates over time, through clarity, coherence, and conscious design, is what I call Narrative Worth™.
Today, I work with founders and executives at the moments when the old story no longer holds, and the new one hasn’t formed yet. That inflection point is where I live. My perspective represents a lived experience.
This includes neurodivergent executives whose minds were never meant to fit the standard frame and whose most extraordinary tiles often go unseen for exactly that reason.
Helping them build the mosaic that finally holds all of who they are is some of the most important work I do.
ShiftStory™ is where we do that work together.
I would be honored to help you shift your story. I believe your Narrative Worth™ is the most valuable asset you will ever own.