Never Fully Still

He didn't learn Portuguese for his career. He learned it because he wanted to understand the songs sung in the roda, and to know what the Brazilian instructors were laughing about. When his wife spotted a job advertisement at an international company and sent his application in, they laughed over dinner at the idea that anything might come of it. A few weeks later Tomasz Tomczyk had the job. For years he told that story as a happy coincidence. Only later did he see it differently: Portuguese was the first very specific skill he brought to work from a place that had nothing to do with work. It wasn't the last. "Never Fully Still" is a record of twenty years spent moving between a training hall and an office. Tomczyk sets what capoeira teaches alongside research on flow, resilience, thin slices, psychological safety, collective intelligence and the planning fallacy — without pretending that one proves the other. A study describing how people behave in a laboratory isn't a study of capoeira. Where he sees a resemblance, he says plainly that the interpretation is his. The book unfolds in three acts — the individual, two people, the whole circle — and every chapter closes with two short sections: one for people who teach, one for people who work in organisations. Not to persuade anyone to take up capoeira. To show what can happen when we take something seriously for long enough — something that was only ever meant to be a passion. The lesson is the same at every scale: have enough ground under you to be never fully still.