Success rarely follows the version of the story we imagined at the beginning. Sometimes growth means persevering. Sometimes it means letting go. And sometimes it means creating an entirely new table when the one you were trying to reach no longer fits who you are becoming.

Dhar Mann is an entrepreneur, creator, and founder of Dhar Mann Studios, one of the world’s largest digital storytelling companies. His path has included extraordinary success, major failure, reinvention, and the experience of building again from moments that could have looked like endings.

In this episode of From the Culture, Marcus Collins and Amanda Slavin explore how we know when to keep going and when to release an old version of the dream, what failure can reveal about who we are becoming, and how our definition of success changes over time.

Because sometimes the most important thing we can do is keep going. And sometimes it is realizing we are allowed to build a different table.

Adam “Smiley” Poswolsky is a bestselling author and speaker whose work explores friendship, belonging, purpose, and human connection, including Friendship in the Age of Loneliness and The Quarter-Life Breakthrough.

In this episode of From the Culture, Marcus Collins and Amanda Slavin explore the relationship between connection and agency. They talk about the people and communities that help us trust ourselves, what it means to create the conditions for someone else to grow, and how workplaces and relationships can expand our sense of what we are capable of becoming.

Because agency may begin within us, but the conditions that allow it to grow are often created together.

Children are already forming opinions, making choices, creating culture, and developing their sense of who they are through the media and technology surrounding them. Jennifer Kotler Clarke is a developmental psychologist and leader whose career has spanned Sesame Workshop and Google, working at the intersection of children, media, learning, and technology.

In this episode of From the Culture, Marcus Collins and Amanda Slavin explore the media and technology diet surrounding kids, the role those experiences play in developing agency, and what changes when children are treated as active participants in shaping the world around them.

They talk about understanding the whole child behind the digital experience, creating healthier agreements with technology, and designing a future that makes room for kids’ ideas, perspectives, choices, and voices.

Because the future is already being shaped. The question is whether kids get to help shape it.