Last week I told you about failing the GMAT and feeling like a misfit. About learning that intelligence comes in forms our education system doesn’t measure or value. This week, I want to talk about Steve Jobs. But not the Steve Jobs you think you know. In 1995, Jobs sat down for a raw, unfiltered […]
(Why We Need Misfits to Save Us) For the longest time, my biggest regret was failing the GMAT. Not because I desperately wanted an MBA. Because that exam was my ticket to an executive MBA program, as a mature student, fully paid for by my employer. That failure proved something I’d suspected my entire life: […]
I spent decades in boardrooms where the pressure was to DO something. Make the call, launch the initiative, give the board answers we didn’t have yet. The people who cracked under that pressure weren’t less intelligent. They just couldn’t tolerate the feeling of not knowing. So they’d react, pivot, and or overcorrect. They’d do anything […]
I’m six months out from hand surgery. Most people would be completely done and at 95% of what they used to be. As a member of the 1% outlier club, I can report that after a TON of work, I am finally at 75%-85%, with little upside remaining. AND I still have another six months […]
We’re barely two weeks into 2026, and I’m guessing your “fresh start January” looks more like “higher level of insanity.” Every conversation I’ve had lately – regardless of continent – lands in the same place: shell-shocked by world events, frustrated by rising costs, dealing with some crisis at home. Makes concentrating on what actually matters […]
I’m referring, of course, to that loud strike of midnight between one year and the next. Have you noticed how we’ve all bought into this fiction that January 1st possesses some kind of transformative magic? As if the arbitrary point where we flip the calendar suddenly grants us a burst of willpower we didn’t have […]
Every January, they’ll sell you the same thing with a new label. New strategies. New frameworks. New ways to scale faster, optimize harder, extract more efficiently. The world treats each calendar flip like collective amnesia — as if everything we knew last year is suddenly obsolete. I fell for it for decades; I bet you […]
Today, December 21st, the winter solstice arrives. It’s the darkest day of the year, when our ancestors had no choice but to stop. Not because they were lazy or unambitious, but because the world itself demanded it. Short days, long nights, and the simple biological truth that human beings cannot extract indefinitely without breaking. They […]
“The market demands higher returns.” You’ve heard it. Maybe you’ve said it. My journey in the C-suite spanned 30 years, and not once did the market come knocking on my door. But you know who did? Private equity firms with term sheets. Activist investors with 2% stakes and PowerPoint decks. But never the stock […]
It’s early Sunday morning. November 2nd. Coffee in hand. Still buzzing. Last night, the World Series ended in heartbreak for the Blue Jays. I’m not even a huge baseball fan, but I watched every pitch of that game. And this morning, I can’t stop thinking about what I saw. Not the stats. Not the plays. […]