Unbecoming
The Ecology of Success and How Wilderness Widens Us

What if the qualities that make us successful can also make us smaller?

American culture teaches us to move quickly. Decide confidently. Control outcomes. Measures results. These qualities are rewarded in the institutions we create. Over time, they shape the people we become.

But we carry those adaptations home.

In Unbecoming, entrepreneur and former CEO Tim Toben traces a life from childhood wonder in the creeks and forests of the American South through the exhilarating demands of business success—and ultimately into loss, wilderness, and a radically different understanding of what it means to live well.

His journey takes him from boardrooms to a four-hundred-acre North Carolina forest; from divorce and the death of his father to ecological restoration, community, marriage, and fatherhood; and eventually into the mountains, where hundred-mile trail races become unlikely teachers.

There, the qualities that once brought success prove insufficient.
Mountains cannot be controlled. Weather cannot be negotiated with.
Bodies have limits. Certainty gives way to attention, independence to interdependence, and achievement to a deeper question:

If our environments shape who we become, what kinds of human beings are our cultures and institutions shaping, and are those the kinds of human beings that the future is asking us to become?

Tim Toben

Tim Toben is an entrepreneur, environmentalist, and endurance athlete whose life has moved from the boardroom to the wilderness. In Unbecoming, he explores how the environments we inhabit shape who we become—and how we might widen our lives again.