The Bottom 90 Introduction
Most leadership blogs focus on what leaders do.
This one focuses on the forces that create them.
I’m not here to offer hacks or one-size-fits-all advice. There are plenty of books and blogs for that.
I’m also not claiming to be the best leader in the room.
But what I’ve studied and learned over the years is that the most effective leaders are shaped by something deeper than charisma or vision. They’ve been formed through pressure, failure, reflection, and discovery. Over time, they’ve uncovered who they are as leaders. And it’s that discovery—not just surface-level self-awareness—that everything else is built on.
The Iceberg
Leadership is like an iceberg.
The visible part—the ten percent above the surface—is what most people notice: confidence, communication, strategy, and results. And for a while, you can get by polishing that ten percent. You can sharpen your presentation, manage your image, and work hard enough to get the next promotion.
But the larger part—the ninety percent below the surface—looks very different. We know the bottom of an iceberg is denser, darker, and shaped over centuries of pressure. Leadership is the same. What you see on the surface—decisive communication, confident presence, strategic results—is supported by something heavier: years of trial, failure, resilience, and the long grind of becoming someone worth following.
Here’s the reality: everyone has a bottom 90 percent below the surface that makes up who they are. Yours may be shaped by self-doubt, need for control, traits developed in childhood, or by years of believing you’ll never be enough. Or it may be shaped by reflection, discipline, and intentional growth. Either way, it exists—and it’s already driving the decisions you make each and every day and how you lead.
The problem is that most people don’t see it. Tasha Eurich’s research on self-awareness shows that while 95% of people believe they’re self-aware, only 10–15% actually are. That means most of us are leading on autopilot—blind to the deeper forces beneath the surface.
But the Bottom 90 isn’t about quick fixes or even just “self-awareness.” It’s about discovery. It’s about being willing to dive beneath the surface and face what you find. It’s about taking risks, failing, and learning. It’s about choosing to become a lifelong student of leadership—because the bottom 90 never stops forming. It’s always being shaped.
The Bottom 90 is where where the psychology of leadership meets the philosophy of why we lead.
What You Can Expect
This blog is for people who don’t just want leadership advice—they want to understand the deeper systems and psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and much more that sustain it.
It’s grounded in research. Every topic brings together many peer-reviewed psychology studies, medical literature, behavioral science, and high-quality thought leadership—and connects them generate a collective insight that hopefully helps you reflect and see concepts in a new way.
Each article is not guaranteed to be short, but they will be practical, and backed by resources you can trust. Topics will include things like:
Emotional regulation and how it shapes team culture
Cognitive overload and how leaders reduce mental friction
Decision fatigue, burnout, and managing mental energy
The link between self-worth and how you show up
Health as a reflection of identity, not just physical fitness
Identity-driven discipline and habit formation
Curiosity, listening, and staying open without losing direction
Bias, clarity, and how great leaders challenge their own assumptions
Feedback loops, internal storytelling, and narrative control
Leading with calm in noise—not by doing more, but by thinking better
The psychology of presence, psychological safety, and invisible influence
Pattern recognition and decision speed in experienced leadership
These aren’t leadership “tricks.”
They’re the systems beneath the surface that quietly drive everything else. We will decode every bit to uncover the ‘why’ beneath concept to help you discover why your active engagement in leading others is so important.
Learn the Theory, Not Just the Formula
One of my engineering professors once told me:
“I’m going to teach you the laws and principles, because if you understand that, you don’t have to memorize the list formulas. You will be able to derive them simply enough to create the equation needed for your problem”
That stuck with me. And it applies to leadership.
Most content today simplifies success into formulas: five steps, seven habits, three hacks. And yes, those can be useful. But they’re still outputs. What matters more is the input—the way of thinking that produces them.
Leadership is more like engineering than most people realize. Both begin with a vision of what you want to create, and both are built through trial, error, and refinement. Engineers spend long nights troubleshooting, re-engineering, and starting over. The breakthrough isn’t just when they find the right solution—it’s when they’ve trained themselves to see differently. Over time, they learn to break problems down into components, understand each part’s purpose, and constantly keep the thought of how the system fits together at the forefront of their brain.
That shift is more than technical—it’s cognitive. Studies on expert performance show that deliberate practice changes the way we perceive patterns and connections. What once looked complex becomes almost intuitive because the engineer has rewired how they think.
Leaders go through the same process. Except the work isn’t technical—it’s personal. It takes countless attempts, hard decisions, and failures before you begin to see yourself and others with that same clarity. You start recognizing the patterns behind behavior, the forces driving people, and the unseen dynamics shaping your choices. And just like an engineer, the breakthrough is not just that you solved a problem—it’s that you became someone capable of seeing leadership differently.
That’s what this blog is about. It’s about helping you see leadership differently—by uncovering the laws and principles behind it, not just the formulas. Each article is designed to bring thought-provoking concepts and reflective questions that push you below the surface, guiding you through the kind of discovery that shifts how you think about yourself and how you lead.
One Core Belief
At the heart of The Bottom 90™ is this:
You don’t become an extraordinary leader by memorizing someone else’s steps.
You become one by doing the internal work—by developing the unseen foundations of your own leadership.
Every great leader who has ever been studied was shaped not just by what they did, but by who they became. Beneath their strategies and successes were discipline, humility, reflection, and the willingness to keep learning.
The Bottom 90™ exists to help you explore that unseen 90%—to uncover the psychology of leadership and connect it with the philosophy of why we lead. Not so you can copy someone else, but so you can discover your own path.
That’s the journey I’m on. And if you’re here, maybe you are too.
Not just to get better at your job—but to become the kind of person your team, family, and future self can trust to lead with purpose and passion.
Thanks for reading.
-Ryan Cotton