The Misogi Works
Manifesto.
Written from the mountain. September 2025.
seventh ascent.
My body was done.
My mind was, for the first time in years, clear.
What follows is what I believe. Not what I've concluded from theory, but what I know from the mountain. This is why Misogi Works exists.
Borut Jeglič, September 2025
The 7th Ascent.
Somewhere around the seventh time up, my mind stopped. Not my body. That was still moving, one foot after the other, up the same forested hill it had been climbing for almost two days. But the noise, the planning, the second-guessing, the constant negotiation with myself about whether this was worth it. All of it just went quiet.
It wasn't dramatic. There was a wooden observation tower at the top. Midday sun. A view of the valley I'd been staring at every few hours for 48 hours straight. The same houses, the same fields, the same trail through the trees. Nothing changed except me.
My mind stopped performing. And in that silence, everything I'd been circling for years became obvious. Not as an insight I had to write down before I forgot it. As something I could simply see, the way you see the valley when the fog finally lifts.
I walked back down with the whole thing clear. Not just an idea. A structure, a purpose, a name. Misogi Works existed before I got home. I just had to build it.
Not principles I invented.
Truths I finally stopped arguing with.
They became the pillars of everything I build.
Freedom.
Freedom is not the absence of constraint. It's the presence of choice, real choice, not the illusion of it. Most of the leaders I work with are technically free. They have money, flexibility, a business they control. And yet they don't feel free. They feel managed, by expectations, by the systems they've built, by the identity they've become.
The freedom I'm interested in is harder to get. It's the freedom that comes from knowing, with real conviction, what you would do if you weren't afraid. What you would build if you weren't worried about what other people think. What your life would look like if you were designing it fresh.
This is the first pillar of Misogi Works because without it, everything else is just optimization. You can get better at the wrong thing very efficiently. Freedom is about making sure you're pointed at the right thing first.
Challenge.
Comfort is not the enemy. Stagnation is. And for most successful people, comfort and stagnation have become the same thing. The habits that got you here, the routines, the certainties, the risk management, have calcified into a kind of ceiling.
The only way through that ceiling is doing hard things. Not accidentally hard. Voluntarily hard. Chosen, entered consciously, with intention. That creates a specific quality of growth that nothing else replicates.
When people hear "do hard things," they think marathon, extreme hike, gruelling physical challenge. And yes, sometimes that's exactly what's needed. But my definition is much broader than that. A hard thing is anything you feel drawn to but are afraid of and resisting. Because it's hard.
Changing your career. Writing the book. Setting a boundary with your partner or your boss. Starting the business you can't stop thinking about. Stopping a habit that no longer serves you. Becoming more present with your children. None of those are a mountain. But they're all hard. And you know this because you've probably tried at least one of them and failed.
The people who do this work don't become braver because they did the hard thing. They become braver because they chose to do the hard thing, and they discovered that the choice was enough.
Alignment.
Alignment is the word I use for the feeling when what you're doing and who you are point in the same direction. It sounds simple. It is genuinely rare.
Most high performers I work with are misaligned in some specific, identifiable way. Their business model doesn't match their energy. Their public identity doesn't match their private values. Their time is spent on things that are lucrative but hollow. They can feel the gap. They've often been feeling it for years.
Alignment isn't achieved through introspection alone. Thinking about alignment produces insight. Moving, physically moving, under challenge, in nature, produces something closer to revelation. The body knows things the mind hasn't figured out how to articulate yet.
Every Misogi Works program is designed to create the conditions for alignment: not to prescribe it, not to tell people what their aligned life looks like, but to give them the experience and the coaching to find it themselves.
Nature.
We are not designed for offices. We are not designed for screens. We are not designed for the kind of low-grade, chronic ambient pressure that constitutes a normal modern workday. Our nervous systems evolved in environments that looked much more like the mountains of Slovenia than like Slack.
I take people to the mountains for practical reasons: it removes them from the environment that's maintaining their patterns. You cannot check email at 2,000 meters at midnight. You cannot maintain your usual identity when your body is completely committed to the next step.
Nature is not a setting. It is a collaborator. The changing light, the cold, the altitude, the silence. These are not background. They are active elements of the design. They do work that a conference room cannot do.
The leaders who have done this work consistently report that the clarity they found in the mountains didn't feel like their brain working harder. It felt like their brain finally working correctly.
Service.
Every transformation that happens in a Misogi Works program has to go somewhere. The question I ask, and the question I encourage every participant to ask, is: who does your freedom serve? What does your aligned life make possible for other people?
This is not a call to self-sacrifice. The people I work with are already giving a great deal. This is a call to consciousness, to be intentional about the impact your work has, and to make sure it's impact you actually believe in.
The small cohorts in Forge48 are not just practical. They're philosophical. A group of five or eight people who do something genuinely difficult together and then go back to the world changed, that's a small multiplier on something real. Each person carries it forward.
Service, for me, is the test of whether the work is real. If you leave the mountain with clarity that's only about you, your freedom, your success, your life, something hasn't worked. The best outcomes I've seen are the ones where the leader comes back and the people around them immediately notice.
optimizing what
you have.
what you actually
want.
Misogi Works exists for the second choice. For the leader who has decided, really decided, that the gap between their current life and the life they want is no longer acceptable.
This work is not for everyone. It is for the person who is ready.
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