Thirty years ago, Robert Kegan built a book on a single governing metaphor: that modern life is a school none of us enrolled in — running a hidden curriculum of demands — and that measured against its coursework, most of us are in over our heads. The metaphor became one of the most cited ideas in adult development. It also stayed a metaphor.

For two decades we talked — about many projects, many dreams. And for lack of a name, we fell into a habit: whenever the conversation turned to the one dream — a global course capable of promoting humanity's growth — we would just say the course. No name beyond that. "When we build the course…" "That belongs in the course…" It went on like that for years. It was always, only, the course.

Fast forward. The course had been created and tested at Harvard; years of development had turned it toward the public. I was looking for a URL, typing possibilities — thehumandevelopmentproject.com, maybe. And then I stopped and thought: why not the name we have always used? So I searched for the one we most wanted — thecourse.org — and lo and behold: available. Very expensive — held by a broker, waiting — but available. And wow, did I pay. But it had always been the name of our course, and there it was, and so… why not.

But is Bob's story worthy of it? Most definitely. It is the grandest story of them all — the story of our becoming: that we are capable of more than we are, that our deepest nature outruns our current sight, that growth does not end at adulthood. If the world assigns the curriculum, someone must finally teach the class — not another course about coping with the school, but the course the school has been silently demanding all along.

Hear the definite article, because the T-H-E carries everything. For the earlier movements of the human mind there have been ways beyond counting — every tribe its rites, every faith its catechism; the Dao named itself The Way and meant it. But for the movement from the socialized mind into self-authorship, and from self-authorship toward the self-transforming, no curriculum has ever stood up and said: this is the course.

We did not name it modestly, because the name is not about us — it is about the vacancy it fills.

— The foundersThe Human Development Project