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Ballast Books

250 copies • Partial manuscript.
Ballast Books is a full-service hybrid publisher that handles all aspects of book creation, design, publishing, marketing, distribution, and platform building. We help our authors sell more books, secure more keynotes, do more consulting, earn more customers, and book more media appearances.

We want to work with the best of the best: Former Special Operations Forces, CEOs, big thinkers, industry-leading experts. Top-performing people with experiences worth sharing and skills that translate into a larger message and goal.

We've seen particular success with military memoirs, but we've also recently hired a children's book specialist, so we run the spectrum of genres. We're a small but growing team and take pride in dedicating more time and energy to all our authors than traditional publishers.

Hybrid publisher , United States All categories

Blooming Twig

Blooming Twig is an award-winning boutique publishing house, media company, and thought leadership marketing agency. Based in New York City and Tulsa, we have represented and re-branded hundreds of thought leaders, published more than 400 titles in all genres, and built up a like-minded following for authors, speakers, trainers, and organizations with our bleeding-edge marketing strategies. Blooming Twig is about giving the people with something to say (“thought leaders”) a platform, walking its clients up to their own influencer pulpit, and making sure there is a like-minded crowd assembled to hear the meaningful message.

Hybrid publisher Worldwide 21 categories

Morgan James Publishing

Looking for entrepreneurship, business, self-help, and personal growth books.

Morgan James Publishing has revolutionized book publishing—from the author’s standpoint, earning 29 NY Times and over 100 USA Today and Wall Street Journal best sellers. We teach authors strategies to leverage their books and grow their businesses—adding value while staying out of the way. Evidenced by more Major Media best sellers than most publishers our size. Regularly ranked by Publishers Weekly as the most recognized and one of the fastest-growing publishers in the nation, Morgan James is reported to be “the future of publishing.”

Hybrid publisher United Kingdom, Canada All categories

1106 Design, LLC

Dear Author,

You worked hard to write your manuscript, and you know that expert assistance is needed to ready it for the market. But perhaps you didn’t realize that working with a publisher is no longer necessary—especially publishers who charge fees to produce your book upfront and "share" more of your revenue whenever a book is sold.

1106 Design is an author services company that has served over 4,000 authors since 2001. We offer all the editorial and design services you’d expect from a publisher, transforming your manuscript into a polished book. But here's the difference: we help you secure print-on-demand printing and worldwide distribution in YOUR name. This means you'll earn several dollars more for every book sold instead of a meager “royalty” and never lose control of your book or your book files.

We understand that your book is not just a passion project but also a potential source of income. No two books or authors are alike. That's why we'll customize a package of services tailored to your needs at affordable prices, starting at $5,555. And here's the best part: after this one-time investment, every penny of revenue from book sales is deposited directly to your bank account, never to ours first.

If this sounds like a better way to publish your book, I invite you to browse our services, design samples, no-surprises pricing, outstanding customer reviews, and educational articles at https://1106design.com. You can download a free PDF of my book, "Publish Like the Pros: A Brief Guide to Quality Self-Publishing and an Insider's Look at a Misunderstood Industry," and request a free, no-obligation consultation.

1106 Design is rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau. We are a “Highly Recommended Expert” at IngramSpark.com and rated "Excellent" at Alli, The Alliance for Independent Authors, at SelfPublishingAdvice.org. Alli's "watchdog list" of the best and worst publishing services companies is an invaluable resource.

How can we serve you today?

Sincerely,
Michele DeFilippo, owner

Service publisher Worldwide All categories

eBooks2go

100 copies • Completed manuscript.
eBooks2go, Inc. was founded in 2011 to provide the missing link for all your publishing needs. Our end-to-end solutions provide the guidance and support that enable publishers and independent authors to pursue their passions. To date, we have helped more than 1,000 authors and 250 publishers worldwide. We offer an array of simple and affordable solutions to assist self-publishing authors at every stage of the book publishing process. Our comprehensive service offering includes editing, print and eBook production, book marketing, cover designs, ISBN registration, and even website designs. We are a single source for all of your publishing needs.

Service publisher Worldwide 22 categories

Working Introduction 

Established trees have always interested me.

It's not simply their age that fascinates me. It's the way they make time visible.

Stand beneath one for a few minutes, and you can’t help but wonder what happened before it reached this point. Years slipped by unnoticed - wet seasons, dry seasons, slow stretches of growth that nobody could track from day to day. Now, it’s easy to admire what the tree has become. But looking back, it would have been impossible to pick out the year that mattered most.

Our lives aren’t so different.

When people tell their story, they usually begin with promotions, companies, accomplishments, or setbacks. Those are easy to recall because they have names. They fit neatly on a résumé.

Life seldom does.

Much of who we become takes shape between those milestones - while we’re learning to earn trust, taking on unexpected responsibilities, making choices without all the answers, discovering strengths we didn’t know we had, and facing the limits we’d rather ignore.

Recognition usually comes only after the work has done its job in a subtle way.

By then, people see only the outcome. Rarely do they think about everything that came before.

I kept returning to that idea.

I noticed it again and again during my years in healthcare, business, coaching, and in conversations with people carrying significant responsibility. Different organizations, different titles, different challenges - but the same pattern kept showing up.We spend far more time celebrating the milestones we can name than reflecting on the intervals that prepared us for them.

Over time, I stopped measuring a life by visible achievements alone. I became more curious about what happened in between.

Those intervals often tell the real story.

They reveal how judgment forms, how trust is earned, how perspective evolves, and how people grow into responsibilities they once doubted they could handle.

This is where the book took form.

Chapter 1: Service Begins Before You Are Ready

Before we get into the sticky moments, gains, and the long stretches where I had absolutely NO idea what came next, I want to give you three handy lines: I didn’t write these, but they’ve been hanging around me for most of my life, similar to how certain songs live in your brain forever. You’d think you’d outgrow lines like these. You don’t. Yours might be different. Maybe pulled from a bumper sticker, your grandmother’s favorite saying, or a fortune cookie. No judgment, we gather all kinds of ideas as we grow. For this chapter, borrow these three from me:

Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.
If you do, hopefully it's what you really wanted.

You don't know what you've got till it's gone.
Then it's usually too late.

The grass is always greener on the other side.
But often, green grass is seasonal. Things certainly do change.

You’ll know which one really connects with you by how much it stings. Mine all sting, in different weather, like a bad knee. Now I’ll tell you why.

I've always been spellbound by adventure. Way before I had a passport, visas, or knew anything about expat life, boardrooms, severance packages, or what it feels like to start over in a place where you can barely read the road signs, I wanted to travel. I was fascinated by old adventure movies and shows: James Bond, Batman, I Spy, Mission: Impossible, Green Hornet, and Hawaii Five-0. I believed in them. It wasn’t just the action. It was the movement. The style. The nerve. The sense that whole other worlds were out there, and some people actually lived differently in them. Bold people living fearlessly called to me. Leading greatly - before I thought much about leadership. Then there was Lucille Ball. I Love Lucy came with its own flavor of boldness. Lucy reminded me of my mom with her constant, excitable energy. My mother was a brunette, but she had the Lucy spirit; many would say her look and demeanor resembled Lucy. Sounds like I'm going off track, but that really brings me to my first big point. Take nothing for granted. I've learned that in a thousand different ways. My paternal grandfather was a respected mayor of his town. He didn’t demand that respect; he earned it, with a dignity and presence that just connected with people. He’d been shot in the arm in a hunting accident as a teenager and lost one of his forearms up to the elbow. Did he let that stop him? Absolutely not! He still carried himself with this amazing, gentle, capable grit. It was always inspiring to see him drive a car with his prosthetic arm. It was quite primitive - cables, hooks, clips, and leather straps - compared to what you see today (thankfully, those things have come such a long, unrecognizable way). He wore it well and dignified, often dressed like business. He seemed like he’d be around forever, a wise elder, giving me someone to look up to and learn from. Then one Spring day, he dropped after moving the lawn, and that was it. He was gone. His wife of multiple decades outlived him, and all their children, making it all the way to the notable age of ninety-six. I was there for their fiftieth “Golden” wedding anniversary celebration years before that; as a kid at the time, it felt like the picture of a long bond and durable life. It still does. Just recently, I remember thinking about how Queen Elizabeth II was also ninety-six when she passed. For some people, ninety-six looks like a full long run. For others, life is over after mowing the lawn or having dinner, or a phone conversation, in shorter years. So again, take nothing for granted.

Quick thing, while we’re here. Picture somebody you assume will still be around for next year’s holiday table. The reliable one. The default. It doesn’t have to be a relative; it could be a friend or a colleague. Got them? Now, notice you flinched a little, just from naming them with this kind of question in the mind. That flinch means you’re paying attention. I’m not going to ask you to call them, write a long letter, or schedule a heartfelt sit-down. Just notice. Then, maybe, if it feels right, drop a text. Send the article you saw that made you think of them. Show up for that little event they invited you to that you were debating skipping. That’s one of the easiest ways to be of service, and it helps you just as much as anyone else. There were enough funerals in my early years that death wasn’t some abstract adult topic to me. I even considered becoming an undertaker at one point. Talk about how your environment shapes you! If you think of it, those events to pay respect were always labeled “services.” Still, life wasn't all funerals and misery. My parents made sure my four siblings and I had plenty of good memories, too, from special meals, themed events, to lifting others up, and particularly from vacations. Every day felt intentional, with blessings. Routine evening prayers. When we traveled, we weren’t flying halfway around the planet. We were going where a Southern family could drive, mostly hassle-free, regionally or a few states away, to make real memories. To see relatives in Mississippi on their farms, in their towns, with their uniquenesses (even eccentricities). The Great Smoky Mountains. Atlanta - Six Flags. Destin beaches. Gulf Shores. Pensacola. Houston. Mobile. And many intriguing stops in between. Fly fishing in private ponds. Water skiing in rivers and bays. Sometimes we visited destinations just for a short day trip away from home. The distance didn't matter; the experience did. Those places really dawned on me emotionally. A big part of travel's appeal for me was adventure and transcendence. The not yet known. The better beyond. I had a deep longing to understand other cultures, too. I’d always been interested in maps, sociology, history, and geography. The big, wide world in general. How we got here. Where we’re headed. When my parents chose a young Black woman to babysit us occasionally in my early years, it was a real cultural bridge. Back then, it was a purposeful choice by my parents, an opportunity to introduce us early to how diverse the world is. I think that made later travel, later friendships, and later global curiosity more natural in me. There were pets around all the time, too. Litters of German Shepherds, rabbits, guinea pigs, and parakeets. Then, eventually, my own Pekingese, a blonde little ball of charisma that came to us from an expanding young family who needed relief from pet care. My mom was often doing random things to help people - this was one of those examples of doing a service. Animals teach a kid plenty. Aura. Tenderness. Care. Responsibility. Resistance. Preferences. How to read energy without language.

A lot of these lessons really started to serve me when my Mother’s health took a dive. I was only in fifth grade, and my mom was already battling cardiovascular disease. That threw family life into a much lower gear. Mom had so much less energy and enthusiasm than before. She couldn't travel as much. Ordinary things got harder for her. The household tightened around her. The strain in the air, the concern, the vigilance, the limits… Everything grew. I was the youngest, and spent more time in the house, so I witnessed these changes close up. I did what I could, of course, naturally tried to lift her spirits, just like any child might hope to do. That went on through high school and into my first year out of high school, when she died one spring Saturday, unexpectedly, after a seemingly enjoyable phone chat, in a sudden critical event. My father, on the other hand, seemed sturdy as an oak from where I stood. Always the pinnacle of health and accountability. I don’t really remember him ever having more than a brief cold as illness. Then, one Thanksgiving, he stood up from the dinner table and said, “I’ll be back shortly.” When he didn’t return as promised, my toddler nephew wandered into his bathroom and found him blue on the floor. The end for him. And for us as a cohesive family. He was the last parent. Now gone. So I grew up with this split right in front of me. Fragility on one side. Apparent solidity on the other. It gives a young person an odd relationship to security. You start to understand that life can be unpredictable, unfair, and still beautiful. All at once. You probably have a version of that experience in your own family ledger. Most of us do by a certain point. A sort of collection of losses, some slow and some sudden, some you braced yourself for, and others that just ambushed you. That’s the thing about life, it’s never as stable as you think it is. Stability is provisional. What I didn’t know, during these early losses, standing around church pews, trying to hold myself together, is that I was learning something I’d spend the rest of my life acting on. The people around you don’t get an unlimited number of chances to be recognized, comforted, listened to, challenged, or supported. No one does. We need to generate the effort while we have the chance. Any way we can. The returns come back multiplied, though not the aim.

As I said, life wasn’t all about loss, illness, and misery. My early years were constantly germinating things in me, as they do for all of us. Building my love of travel, science, discovery, and painting how I’d view the world. For instance, I got a pretty close look at versions of fame and success very early on. In my formative years, I’d spent time around Nelle Harper Lee. I was told she was an accomplished writer and that a movie had been made from her work. Yes, that Harper Lee. Author of To Kill a Mockingbird. The locals referred to her as Nelle. Fine. I was young. The dots hadn’t connected yet. It didn’t hit me the way it would have now. What I remember most is that Nelle didn’t seem like a celebrity in the least. Nothing about her screamed literary legend. I remember the plain clothes she wore, and how normal her home, in an average neighborhood near my school, seemed. The cars she drove weren’t collectibles or showy. A fresh GM model, usually, but nothing too flashy. Years later, when people would find out I was originally from Alabama, and then narrow it down further, they would ask if I knew Harper Lee. That happened more and more over time. Oddly enough, international people asked about it the most. Funny how fame works. You can grow up near it and not know what you’re seeing until others remind you. I think that’s part of why my view of success has always been multi-dimensional. Like all of us, I still wanted it. But I wasn’t sure there was a clear definition of what happens when you “make it.” Looking back, I think that was actually a good thing. The more rigid your definition of success is, the more you get tunnel vision. You start missing the things you’re actually achieving, because they don’t line up with the image you’ve built up. I see that a lot with the people I coach and advise in leadership, business, and the people in my life. Executives, in particular, have a habit. They hit a milestone they spent twenty years chasing, look up, and feel curiously empty. Of course, I did have fantasies of what life could look like if I figured out my own success. I was plenty obsessed with classic and luxury cars. Still love them, to be honest. I had this framed poster when I was young (my very first) that read: "MY TASTES ARE SIMPLE. I LIKE TO HAVE THE BEST," with a classic stately mansion, manicured, lush landscape, designed grounds, and a custom two-tone polished Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud limousine out front. That ignited me. It still makes me smile, even if I don't necessarily define success as a must for having surroundings at that scale these days. Still, even my vague concept of success gave me an initial idea of where I wanted to go. I knew I needed a good educational foundation to start with. Because of the fragile tension surrounding my mother and the general family situation, it never really crossed my mind to go far away for college. We were a unit. Also, with four older siblings and ongoing health demands, there wasn’t exactly a blank check waiting for me to chase some far-off campus. The Ivy League was simply too far away. But I knew I could get "somewhere" without a distant, huge, legacy institution school. All I really needed was an in-state campus in the Southeast. Somewhere I could be close enough to home, get a quality education, and rapidly start exploring what independence could mean. At that point, independence meant so much more to me than success. I was still figuring myself out. Most of us are at that age. I had many interests, almost too many. Maybe I wasn’t one of those natural "A+" students who seemed capable of achieving everything academically, but I had endless curiosity. If something truly interested me, I was relentlessly all over it. History and social studies grabbed me instantly when I started looking at further education, the sense of place, and the story backdrop. Maps and geography came quickly into view when I started considering a new place. Looking back, maybe that really was deeper preparation for later travel. I liked to know where things were. I liked to picture elsewhere as it might be. This also helped me transcend what was in front of me. Not always in a comfortable spot.

At one point, I started investing in travel with fitness and health at the same time, something that would become a predominant theme for my life to come. The first bike I ever bought was a Trek 500 road bike, bright red with big white lettering. I can still picture it! I was running competitions and cycling everywhere in no time. Birmingham, Alabama, gives you green hills, views, and enough terrain to make you feel the work. The Appalachian Mountain Range drops off in town. I started doing local 5Ks and 10Ks, and got it into my head that I might prepare for an Ironman at the local Oak Mountain State Park. Fine outdoor terrain by any comparison. The World Games were held there in July 2022. That was the spirit I had then. I was exploring. If something kindled a flame inside of me, I wanted more of it. Better. Bigger. Abundant. Full appetite. Always moving forward, always defining myself. Ready to upgrade. The more I followed my energy, the more I felt like the path was becoming clear. Of course, that path isn’t always as smooth as it seems once you start walking it. One early morning in my senior year, after starting around five in the morning, maybe twenty miles into a ride on my cherished bike, I came around a curve near Five Points South on Highland Avenue. And the rear tire slid out under me on a wet patch left from a rain shower. I went down hard. Right side. Hip. Cheekbone. Immediately, I felt the CRACK! I slid a few yards, my skin keeping score all the way to a halt. Thank goodness I was wearing a helmet. The aftermath was messy. It was rush hour traffic, and everyone was struggling to get around me. So, not wanting to be an obstacle, I got up and made it off the main road as quickly as I could. That was me, trying not to create any interference to their progress - the least “of service” I could be in the mix. I was moving slowly, and I could feel the throbbing everywhere. I walked the final quarter mile home, wounded, furious with myself. Then I checked a mirror. That was clarifying. When one cheek is suddenly flatter than the other, you know you’re dealing with something unignorable. Off to the emergency department! The doctors sent me home pretty fast, since nothing was "life-threateningly wrong", but I was back the next morning for surgery to "repair my right Zygoma" (cheekbone). Milestone: first broken bone. I graduated from university on time, anyway (a testament to the resilience of youth), wearing a medical pin device in my face that looked like some awkward cotton swab stem sticking up halfway through my nose. It pierced through one side of my face and held things in place on the other side. I knew it, every-second-it-was-there. Believe me. Six weeks or so with that setup is enough to alter your outlook. That ended any fantasies of competitive cycling for the foreseeable future. There was nerve damage to heal, too. But it also gave me another jolt. One more firm reminder that life and success weren't waiting on me. The world keeps going whether you're moving with it or not.

A lot of us walk around for years like we’ve made a secret bargain with the universe: “I’ll get serious about [the thing] when [conditions arrive]. The job settles, the kids arrive, then get older, and the savings hit a specific number. It’s like we think the right moment will show up with a banner and welcome us in. Trouble is that the universe isn’t really listening to that bargain. It never signed the contract. The bike crash handed me that lesson at a very early twenty-something, with a pin in my face and six weeks to think about it. You’re welcome to take the lesson without the pin. I’d actually recommend it. Of course, something going wrong doesn’t have to mean you give up completely. In fact, that’s another recurring theme in this book. I didn’t give up on cycling. You can still have a passion (even if it's not your career). Later, I moved to Manhattan - that’s New York City - and rode that same bike through maddening city traffic, over potholes, inches away from taxis, dodging pedestrians, and all manner of nonsense. Ah, youth. Determination. Resilience. Occasional lack of good judgment. Still, that crash rudely informed me that I wasn’t as “bulletproof” as I might have thought. I wasn’t untouchable just because I was young. I had to make my path and take it. That idea helped push me toward NYC and taking a "bite of the Big Apple." While I still could. I choose to do many things this way. Because I still can. Motivation not required.

Before I started my big-city life, I tested out a few other smaller cities. My early years were all about experimentation and the passion I had for travel, geography, and a diverse understanding. I know a lot of people who were the same way. I spent a short stretch in New Orleans for an extreme difference. Then I went to Boston, in Jamaica Plain by the Pond, then Back Bay. I wanted a comparison and cultural diversity. I wanted to know what felt “like me” before I threw myself into Manhattan, with all the various exposure and influences, and started laying down roots - at that magnitude. That turned out to be a really smart move. By the time I got into the city, I felt primed for it, or ready enough. Along the way, I’d been investing further in my education, focusing on wellness and healthcare, after deciding it was, at the time, the most compelling avenue towards my quest to be of service. When I landed in New York, I was already an experienced Perioperative Registered Nurse, which gave me a unique kind of freedom. A career choice like that gives you so many different routes to explore. And choose from. I did just that. Demand was there wherever I went. Geographical exploits were my oyster. The financial returns worked out well, also. That was a real gift, since the travel bug was already in me. My first quasi-independent trip came with a class cruise to the Bahamas after high school graduation. That felt huge to me then. It was a small taste, but it counted. Another widening lens on the world!

My first real independent trip abroad happened when I went to meet Danielle, a French physician I'd befriended in Boston. She was a wonderful friend (briefly a romantic interest) who lived most of her life in Abidjan, the Ivory Coast. At one point, she just happened to be visiting France, her home country. I got invited to tag along, and I was eager to join her. You’ll notice, throughout this book, that I’m always reluctant to let a choice opportunity pass me by. I recommend living life the same way, if you can. You never fully know the real cost of what you’re missing when you say “no”. I actually landed in Paris several hours before Danielle did, so I had a little time to adjust and find my way to her flat. I’d already taken French lessons at university a few years prior, so I wasn't entirely hopeless as a first-timer in France. Still, this was my first chance to use what French language I knew inside the country, alone at first. When she joined me, we took the overnight train to the South of France, where we stayed with her family in their home in Lezignan-Corbieres. The region was incredible. Rustic architecture, the color of history everywhere, Mediterranean light in summer. From there, the stops kept coming. Toulouse. Marseille. Montpellier. Narbonne. Carcassonne. Nice. Monaco. St. Tropez. Aix-en-Provence. Lavender fields in August, with seemingly all of Europe on holiday at once, crowding the roads. I was wide-eyed. Entirely. And then there was the MGB! Danielle had this pristine classic antique white convertible MGB with a black top. A little gem of a car kept garaged near the family home. We drove it one evening through the countryside, parked it outside, and later it was stolen from the street. It was recovered eventually, but ransacked. Heartbreaking. That whole episode, oddly enough, only added to the sense that I had stepped into a bigger, more intriguing world than the one I had known. Between the beauty and the caper… think Bond. James Bond. Complete with classic cars and dreamy landscapes, international culture, sexy accents, plus intricate architecture - at every turn. Yes, the travel bug had definitely gotten me.

Next came my trip to St. Barts with my Belgian friend Geza, whom I met in Manhattan because I offered bread to him and his entourage from my seat at the bar, while they stood near me waiting for a restaurant table. I was quite the foodie in early Manhattan! That sort of thing happened in New York City. One little generous gesture, and next thing you know, you’re off on a Caribbean island adventure with new European friends. Remember, you’ll always be amazed by how far small acts of service can actually take you. Trust me on that one. Somehow, for reasons I can't explain even now, I didn't bring my passport. I don't know why I hadn’t zeroed in on customs requirements prior. I was running on pure adrenaline. By some miracle, customs let me through on St. Martin for the connection to St. Barts. I really doubt that would happen today. The landing strip there on St. Barts, a small island, good grief! Harrowing. Memorable. On takeoff, the plane heads right toward a small mountain before a drastic lift. You feel every bit of your trust somewhere in your stomach. Once I got there, I started racking up more celebrity sightings, starting with actors Brook Shields and Matt Dillon separately on scooters. I couldn't believe it. This was back in their early prime. Mine too, but I didn’t have as much to brag about. It felt like I was stepping into a universe I could never have imagined before, on so many levels. How I got there, still early in my adult life, is worth reflecting on. Nothing about the chain of events was strategic or even carefully planned out. Not the bread, the conversation, or the trip. Not even the customs officer who happened to be in a generous mood the moment an unprepared American popped up in her line without a passport. All it took was a small, service-led gesture, followed by the willingness to say “yes” and go off the beaten path to see where it took me. That’s mostly what service-as-orientation looks like in the wild. Be slightly more generous than the situation strictly requires, and keep your antennae up for what wants to happen next. Most of the doors in my life opened that way.

I won’t take you on a snapshot journey through St Barts. As I said before, this isn’t a travel guide, and if I spoke as much as I’d like to about every amazing trip I’ve had, we’d never get to my conclusion here. Still, I do recommend adding a few places to your bucket list (including St Barts), and actually making the time to visit and soak them in, if you can. It’s never too late. We’ll cover that more soon. I bring all this up because experience is the actual curriculum. Some of it throws you off course. Some sends you the right way. None of it’s wasted if you’re paying attention, and if you approach it with the right attitude. The grit I saw in my father - a small business owner, the determined consistency I saw in my mother through her illness, the ability to be of contribution in service - all of that got built through the things I was lucky enough to walk into, and the things I was unlucky enough to walk into - and get through anyway. What I slowly learned, through travel and a number of other career experiences over the years, is another big lesson about "success", and what the "best" looks like. A lot of us spend a big chunk of our lives chasing the "next best thing". I chased new experiences with travel, more life, larger exposure, and increased possibilities. But "best" is a very slippery, situational word. It depends a lot on your frame of mind when you're throwing out comparisons. If you'd asked me in high school what the "best life" would look like, the answer would have been very different from my life at the current moment. My first fine framed piece of art in life - that Rolls Royce poster I once cherished - I don’t even own that anymore. Though it’s always with me, all the same. My definition of success kept changing. Yours will too. Picture the version of the “best life” you had at seventeen, or twenty-two, or whichever age you last felt certain you knew where you were going. How much of that picture still looks right today? Most of us edit the image constantly, almost subconsciously, while we’re busy with everything else. Then, one day, we look up and notice the poster on our childhood wall doesn’t match the life we’re living - and more importantly, we’re okay with it. That’s the thing: reinvention isn’t just something that happens to you when things break. It’s usually happening gradually, in the background, without you even noticing it. The breaking moments are just what bring your attention back to the picture again.

As I said, the first “clear path” I really had planned for myself was in healthcare. After many grueling hours in demanding science courses, with intense labs, long days and nights studying, then painful exams, the "best life" for a while felt less about fancy cars and travel (though I still wanted those) and more about a successful career trajectory. One in a field fulfilled by service, of course. When I finally earned the right to practice in healthcare, it felt amazing. Truly validating. There was relief in getting there. Sweet redemption, really. I felt like I was “on track”. But the journey was just getting started. Spoiler from several decades out: that “clear path” was about half a fantasy. Most of what I thought I was aiming at, I’d misread completely. The Rolls-Royce poster turned out to be a stand-in for something else entirely. The Ironman didn’t happen (see: cheekbone). The “mapped out” career took, oh, six or seven left turns I didn’t see coming, several of which you’re about to read about in the chapters ahead. The appetite, though? That part stayed strong. Turns out the appetite matters more than the aim. The aim will change three, four, eight times. Your appetite, what genuinely lights you up, stays embarrassingly consistent. You can leave it on a shelf for twenty years. It’s still there when you come back, dusty but intact, waiting like my childhood Pekingese by the door. What lit you up before anyone told you what to want? Before you started building your resume, or dealing with your parents’ anxieties about your major. Even before social media and internet algorithms started feeding you other people’s dreams in a vertical scroll. What was the kid version of you obsessed with? Mine was all about old spy shows, classic cars, world maps, and the feeling of being helpful to someone who actually needed it. The idea wasn’t about favors returned. I was laying tracks for anyone to follow. Decades on, I’m still working with that same raw stock, just updating the surrounding imagery. Once you’ve defined yours, you can do the same. You don’t have to tell anyone about it, just don’t lie to yourself. And keep an eye out, as we go, for the small places where your version of being of service might already be trying to surface. Reinvention isn’t only what happens when the path collapses underneath you. Sometimes it’s what happens when you finally stop ignoring the obvious thing you’ve been built for all along. Either way, you’re not behind. At any stage, at any age. You’re right on time. We’ve barely started.

Chapter 2: The First Hunger

Here’s how this chapter is going to feel, if you’ve ever lived through your own edition of it. You worked hard. You got the thing. And then right around month 18, or year three, or [insert time period here], the thing stopped being enough. It wasn’t the wrong thing to aim for, necessarily; you just got bigger inside the box you’d built for yourself. That’s the trouble with growing inside the life you “choose”: you outgrow it. What follows in this chapter is my first real bout of that feeling. The first hunger. The one that shows up after you’ve done what you set out to do and realized it was just the audition for something else. Your version of this experience might wear different clothes. Mine wore scrubs.

A few years into front line healthcare and early leadership, thrilled to be “on my way” after living in a few well chosen states and using the career to expand the scope of my life, I started feeling restless. I wondered whether I’d chosen the right career path for myself in the long run, no matter how fulfilling it often seemed. There were days that didn’t fully seem to matter as I might have wanted. The work was worthy and satisfying. I was definitely of service, just like I had wanted. I was earning a decent income and compounding benefits, I was independent, and fortunate enough to take my skills anywhere I wanted. My in-demand career gave me a lot of freedom to explore, learn about the world around me, grief and gratitude, and connect with new people in multiple regions. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I was grateful, thankful for my options, and the fact that I’d prepared well enough to have a lot of them. But there was an underlying itch beneath it all, the same itch that I’ve discovered since, that bothers most of us after a while. I wanted something more. I mused on that for a while, wondering what would give me the gratification I was still missing. It took a while to diagnose, but eventually, wanderlust was confirmed. Was there a cure? I never found one. I did, however, find treatment. Travel. Go. Learn. Grow. Preferably with a purpose each time, and still (at least for me) in service.

You don’t have to travel in high style. I certainly have, from time to time. First class, five-star, corporate card, Michelin -rated dining. But I’ve also gone the other way. Car camping, trekking with a backpack for months, and basic sustenance. I’ve loved all of it. I've taken off to parts unknown, mostly on my own, and I’m convinced I've had guardian angels watching over me more than once. Not every trip went well, let me tell you. But when life handed me lemons (orchards of them, it seemed, at some points), I kept making lemonade. I learned very quickly that I wasn't happy to stay where I was for long. I wanted more from life, and I wanted to give more back, at greater magnitudes, to make a difference and improve things where I might. I had been in service already, yes, but I was beginning to deeply understand that there were more aligned ways for me to be of greater benefit than the first one I chose. That realization didn’t change everything overnight. But it was the start of the questioning that has shaped most of my adult life: “How can I be of better service, now?” and “What does my success make possible now?” If you’ve asked similar questions to that yourself, pause for a second here, because this is one of the under-recognized turns we get to in life. There’s a difference between being of service and being optimally of service in a way that fills that little hole in your heart designated for “purpose”. Most of us don’t bother with the distinction early on. We find one great way to contribute, get thanked for it, and keep at it. That’s not a failure, but it can be a way that loyalty to one path starts to slowly damage your ability to grow. Where are you focusing with your current contributions? Are you driving your energy into the place where your gifts have the most leverage, or into the first place you found that would take you? Many executives I coach realize, twenty years in, that the first big “Yes” they said early in their career has been defining the shape of every yes since. Worth checking which “Yes” you're still answering. If you pick the second answer, there’s nothing wrong with realizing that it’s time to pivot. Think about reinventing.

In New York, moments like that happened regularly. The unusual started to feel ordinary by about the third occurrence. I was standing next to Tom Cruise in a film production on city side walks randomly. Remember the movie Cadillac Man with Robin Williams and Tim Robbins? Actress Fran Drescher was on a career rise at that time, and she had a role in that film, also. Her sister worked with me at one point. So I got little bits of inside scoop on Fran’s career life when she was very much on the rise. I often felt like part of the “in crowd”. Throughout those celebrity encounters, exciting moments, and fast-paced Manhattan days, I kept my attention tuned to signals that might show me where I might be of service next. I started to receive them pretty quickly. Working in healthcare at that level made me see gaps. Systems gaps. Communication gaps. Efficiency gaps. Leadership gaps. The work I was already doing was meaningful. But there were clearly places where things could be better, and those places were not all at bedside or in the OR. Some of them were in decision-making. Some in product. Some in how institutions moved, or failed to move. That’s systemic. I started getting even more interested in leadership, then in business, and then very specifically in the pharmaceutical industry. I saw that as a place where I might have more influence on how care as service happened at scale. That phrase mattered to me even if I didn't say it exactly that way then. I wanted to help much more broadly. I wanted to improve things upstream where possible. So they could be appreciated more downstream. Do you ever get that feeling in your own life? Sometimes the restlessness you feel isn’t a sign you’re fickle. Or desperate for glory. Sometimes it’s your deeper wiring trying to tell you that your gifts may travel farther in a different vehicle. That’s exactly what I mean when I talk about being optimally “of service” in the right way, in the right moment. Quick diagnostic for you, because most of us are still pretty bad at reading our own restlessness, and even recognizing the signs that life holds up for us. Pick one thing that you feel the most dissatisfied with, right now. Your job, relationship, city, body, whatever keeps you awake thinking about it at 3:13 am. Now ask yourself two questions in this order: 1. Am I dissatisfied because there’s something wrong with the thing itself? 2. Am I dissatisfied because I’ve outgrown the version of me that chose it? The answer to the first question leads to a different fix than the second. Most of us answer the first one when the real answer is the second one, and we spend years trying to renovate a perfectly good house when the actual problem is that we’ve outgrown the neighborhood. I see that often in coaching, and I’ve seen it in myself several times before I learned to really tell which question I should have been answering.

After a little soul searching, I decided at that stage that a new version of me was necessary, a new path to follow on my route to being optimally “of service.” So I prepared for a whole new life of work. I didn’t fall into that new identity immediately. One day, I walked into a career networking event in Manhattan and bumped into the woman who would turn out to be my new hiring manager at Abbott Laboratories Pharmaceuticals. I can dress that up now if I want, but the plain truth is that it was a hinge moment. My “here’s the next door if you’re ready to open it” moment. It’s easy for a lot of us to pass that by, thanks to fear and imposter syndrome. I dove in. My first real pivot into big pharma. Neurosciences no less. No playing small here. And it felt pre-destined. A little soul searching, and suddenly I was no longer in scrubs, nor in surgery. I was in a new world, still in service, but differently. Consultative. Commercial. Strategic. Conversational. Even persuasive. I had my brand new identity, and I was ready to learn how I’d fit into it. That took focused work. I needed to enter physicians’ work places in a completely different way, and quickly establish relevance without sounding like a fool or a nuisance. My opening had to count. "Doctor, do you have any patients not fully controlled on their current “x,y,z” medication, or any with side effects from what they’re taking currently?" Something like that. Open-ended. Two parts. Magnetic for initiating dialog and relationships. Simple enough on paper, but those first lines were crucial. They were definitive. They generated deeper interactions. Value surfaced immediately. I was speaking to neurosurgeons, neurologists, and psychiatrists - highly trained and very busy people who had no reason to waste a single second on me. Frightening. Fortunately, I wasn’t being asked to haul pills around in pull luggage and say, “How many do you want today?” That wouldn’t have suited me. I wasn’t a salesperson. I was a professional of service. Persuasion just came naturally. My approach was much more grounded in inquiry, relationship, information exchange, and practice-based realities. I liked that. It fit me. It drew on what I already knew from all my science training and healthcare, while requiring me to use that knowledge differently. Manage what matters. A lot of us think change means throwing away everything we were before. Sometimes. Not always true. Sometimes the next interval works because you carry the strongest tools of the old one into a new arena. When you’re contemplating a real change in location, career, identity, whatever, there’s a voice that tells you you’ll be starting from zero. Throw out the old credentials, and burn the whole playbook. Become a different person. Not necessary. Thoughts like that just get you stuck in the “sunk-cost fallacy” mindset. The thing that made you valuable in your last interval doesn’t have to be a liability in the next one. It can be your unique advantage. The trick is figuring out what to carry and what to leave behind. For me, the answer was “carry the instincts, leave the job title.” My healthcare experience alone didn't get me into pharma. The instincts behind why I went into healthcare did. There's a difference, and learning to tell which is which is most of how reinvention actually works. My credentials were mere framing for my persuasiveness in the hiring process.

I was thrilled to be doing business in neuroscience with a solid healthcare foundation under me. I could quickly grasp the science behind it and speak through that. It felt grounded, earned, and proven. Not fake; like I’d wandered into a suit and hoped no one would notice. I knew enough to be valuable. More than enough in some settings. My background was an invaluable lever. I could relate to the medical professionals I was calling on because I’d lived with their language, schedules, pressure, and their demanding world. Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you I was a natural. So I did well. Very well, in fact. In no time, I was building real ethical business in a complicated highly competitive metropolitan market, getting recognized, meeting, and befriending people like Dr. Gayatri Devi, whose work later became widely visible. You’ve possibly heard about the memory care she gave to singer Tony Bennet, up to his final days. (RIP). I launched a new neuroscience product, gained confidence around branding, and built credibility. Recruiters started noticing. No surprise there. I was working with a hugely successful American Big Pharma company (on the domestic side) and delivering more outcomes than expected. My enthusiasm and competence made me very conspicuous. Then, in the back of my mind, that itch started building up again. My sights were already shifting. Again, I felt the craving for “more”. Specifically, I wanted to work internationally, and I wanted to live overseas. Those things weren’t fantasies for me. They were instructions. And the word got out. Talk about intentionality.

My next interval came faster than the first. Soon, I was recruited into my second big pharma company. A higher leadership position, with a more local American-based headquarters for a fully diversified global conglomerate. This time, I was in the international division. That’s what mattered more to me than the status promise. However, I did enjoy the advancement. I liked the sense of progress. I was already familiar with some of the inside players at the second pharma company, so the transition felt natural. The big appeal, though, was the opportunity for international expansion, exposure, travel, and rapid growth. I’d be dealing with overseas business entities, multicultural specifications, and alternate regulatory guidelines. All with the underlying potential for something bigger down the line. Within a year or two, I pictured being in a leadership position with one of our foreign subsidies. It was already discussed at the VP level. It was an addictive idea. The international route wasn’t pitched as a “most favorable” option in my former company. Here, there was a clear path forward - internationally. I knew what I wanted, so I took the challenge. We don’t know how much time we have left, after all. I knew that better than most, even at that younger age. I knew it in the city, in the medical centers, and particularly after that bicycle crash. Live now. Real-time.

For me, this next move up was also meant to be. Another clear path lay out in front of me, pulling me forward. And into higher circles of leadership I went. I asked for more and more international responsibilities. Bigger challenges. Eye-opening experiences. Countless rewards, both professionally and personally. I was in a growth stretch. In no time, I was commuting from Union Square in Manhattan to headquarters in suburban northern New Jersey. A little over half an hour, give or take, with a drive that moved from city glitz and grit into horse country, mansions, and another kind of reminder of American success altogether. That commute itself felt like a lesson in contrast. On the job, I was now in the marketing, advertising, training, consulting, and coaching side of big global pharmaceuticals. I’d come back to that word: “coaching”, many years later. I didn’t fully understand the importance of the concept then. Mind you, I was still in my twenties. Living independently in Manhattan. Even large for my level, it seemed, in a condo just off Union Square - a heartbeat of the area. Traveling abroad for business tied to an international pharmaceutical portfolio. It was a long way from where I had started. I was adding value comprehensively now. Training differently. Influencing cohesively. Thinking futuristically. And yes, I loved most of it. I started thinking of myself more as a global citizen. Because my life was expanding exponentially. Different markets, cultures, expectations, and people. Different ways of doing business. All of that was sharpening my empathy and my appetite for responsibility at the same time. Exposure changes people. Real living exposure. Not just reading about other lives, but getting close enough to try them on for size. If your world has gotten too small, if your thinking has gotten too cramped, often what you need isn’t a new opinion. Sometimes you need a broader field of experience. That period gave me that. It also gave me Manhattan in full living color.

My home was near Union Square and Greenwich Village then. CBGB wasn’t far away. That incredible music venue everyone seemed to know. It was legendary. You saw fascinating types all over the place there. I met Anderson Cooper over a chat inside once, and even found myself hanging out next to David Bowie. Plenty of recognizable faces floated in and out of view. All of those people were impressive. Successful. Wealthy. They didn’t capture my attention the most. That honor belonged to the international crowd. With the United Nations based in Manhattan, it didn’t take long to find myself around diplomats, expats, global strivers, and people from families and histories far beyond what I had known growing up. Those circles fascinated me. Bright people. Capable people. Decoratedly educated people. Highly achieved people. Some from wealth, some from power, some from both. Young, worldly, and living BIG in Manhattan, the city I quickly came to love. I paid close attention. I got to know a cadre of charismatic people from Brazil, Greece, Belgium, England, France, Italy, Hungary, and many more locations afar. Some were attending elite schools. Some had jobs with reach and status. Others were children of very high-profile families in their home countries. One friend, in particular, was the offspring of a former Latin American President. Some had come to Manhattan partly for anonymity because anonymity can be a kind of safety when your family and associates have been targeted or kidnapped for ransom back home. That was eye-opening because it showed me that New York City in higher circles wasn’t just glamour. It was a refuge for some. Camouflage. A staging ground. Maybe even possibility for an entirely separate freedom. Those people expanded my sense of full experienced living. They were also living in a way that stoked a deeper realization in me. Large summer homes in the Hamptons. International weddings and events. Family estates. Fluency across cultures. Ease around travel and ambition.

They floated through the world as though it belonged to them, or at least as though they were accustomed to it. Bold people living life fearlessly, just like the early fictional characters I’d admired. Gleefully I was invited into intimate space with this crowd often. We shared Hampton summer homes. I couldn’t ignore the contrast with where I had started, and I wanted in. There was no point pretending otherwise. That radical admission, by the way, is harder to make than it sounds for a lot of people. Most of us are raised to act like we’re above “wanting in.” Like ambition is a bit embarrassing, evidence of envy, or a sign that we’re shallow. None of that’s true. What’s actually shallow is pretending you don’t notice. The honest version - yes, I see what they have, yes, I want some version of it, yes, I'm willing to ask how they built it - is what eventually moves you to action. The pretending-not-to-notice version mostly just makes you slightly more bitter every year, and more chained to your early vision of success. Permission, if you need it: you're allowed to want more. As long as you're also willing to give something back when you get what you want. Really, a lot of us are shaped by proximity. You get near a spectacular life, and suddenly your old ceiling starts looking suspiciously low. That can be dangerous if you get shallow about it. It can also be useful if it wakes up a bigger vision of what your contributions might become. For me, it did both. I was bent on the idea of upgrading to the VIP interval of this life of service.

Work travel added even more fuel to that fire. I found myself in Bandol and the south of France on a familiarization trip for a conference center our company might use. Someone had to do the work, after all. Kim, another Belgian friend, joined me. We drove from the west coast of France toward Portofino, Italy. Then, more mileage. Deeper experiences. Full everything. Flying Virgin Upper Class in a jumbo jet just made my desires stronger. Richard Branson certainly seemed to understand customer experience well. Part of me wishes Virgin had never retired its last jumbo jet. Sigh. Still, at least the plan was replacing them with models that are a lot better for the environment. Heathrow airport lounges, all the treats and shiny distractions, the whole branded seduction of service done very well, yes, I noticed all of it. There was Blenheim Palace in England, where I traveled to deliver work events. Deeply historic Oxford, iconic pubs. Knightsbridge in London. Harrods (of course) nearby. Late Michelin rated dinners. Club life, with a VIP wait list. Yes, I was working. I was still having the time of my life while expanding from all angles. Then Amsterdam, which happened to overlap with my thirtieth birthday, and Brazilian diplomats who picked me up, took me to Delft, then on to The Hague, where they were in service to their country abroad. That really impressed me. Still does. Service can wear so many different looks. Throughout that period, more often than not, wherever I landed in the world, there was already a person connected to the place waiting to help me explore, to avoid needing to figure it all out on my own. A friend of a friend. A cousin. A local contact. Someone who wanted to show me their city, their culture, their way of seeing and experiencing the best things. I tried to return that insider edition experience whenever I could in New York City. And in my other home cities that followed. If people were generous enough to open their world to me, I wanted to do the same in mine. That’s service too. It’s special and most memorable. Not always official. It can look like hospitality. Like an introduction. Like helping someone feel less foreign in a strange place.

Again, service-as-orientation is what happens when “service” stops being part of a job description and starts being how you live your life. Same instinct, completely different vehicle. For me, it was initially donning scrubs in medical procedures, then it became suits, and many other things. A dinner introduction in Manhattan, a translation for a foreign visitor, a recommendation that opened somebody’s week. I made valuable friendships by simply offering someone bread during an extended wait. Same compass, totally different terrain. Most people who eventually find their way to a much expanded life make this exact turn somewhere. The realization that the thing they’re actually good at, and the thing they actually love, isn’t the specific role they trained for. It’s the way they show up inside whatever role they happen to be in. If you’ve felt that shift starting to happen in your own life, even faintly, don’t shut it down. It’s the most important kind of restlessness you’ll ever feel. It usually means you’re about to outgrow the box your business card lives in. Possibly in a profoundly better way.

Of course, not all of my experiences during this stint were glamorous. One business trip ended with me returning to headquarters to my compact Japanese car in New Jersey only to find it had been T-boned by a snow removal rig on the corporate lot. SMASH There was rearranged metal everywhere. I was jet-lagged, irritated, stranded thirty-five miles from home in winter, on a weekend, and not exactly at my spiritual best about it. I probably didn’t handle it all as serenely as I could have. But no one was going to pick me up from the suburbs. My thinking, then. Another business trip, but to Marbella, started with my luggage not arriving, then rolled right into a presentation through simultaneous translators that went poorly enough for me to remember it vividly all these years later. I was still stuck in the same clothes I’d worn on my cross-Atlantic flight from JFK in NYC. I just got flushed again reading this now. The views were wonderful from Costa del Sol. Uber-luxurious yachts were visible in the marina near my lux hotel. You could appreciate the topographical outline of Africa in the near distance. Not a dull backdrop. Quite motivational, actually. Intentionally designed to capture that essence, of course. Experience defines hospitality, certainly at the corporate level. Still humiliated about how bad the communication issues were with my presentation. There may have been too little sleep involved. There may also have been too much Dom Perignon, local sherry, or Malaga drink involved. If you don’t know it, it’s a dark, sweet elixir, like liquid raisins. So elusive, with a PUNCH. Careful with the delicious alcoholic beverages; I kept forgetting to remind myself. What a headache afterward. Literally. I was learning. Not always gracefully. Certain lessons I learned more slowly than others. How to handle alcohol after consequences was one of them. Back then, it seemed almost built into the atmosphere of some of those work trips. Fine dining, regional drinks, celebration, and endless hospitality. It all blended. That’s not unusual, especially in certain business cultures and certainly in younger years when confidence can outrun self-awareness. Life evolved. I evolved. I got sober in the summer of 2019. Cold turkey! This was hardly on my radar. Do consider trying a 12-step program if you find yourself questioning the relationship you have with alcohol, or any vice. Don’t wait until the challenges have gone on too long. I had no idea what those meetings were even about. The name seemed so odd until I went. Life-lifting perspective in those. Even if someone thinks they "just have problems with sleep” or a pattern they don’t quite trust. Start where you are. Be honest sooner rather than later. Look at what you are consuming. Quick note before we get back to the timeline. What you just read, me telling you, almost in passing, that I got sober in 2019, is the kind of admission books like this often either dramatize or bury. I don’t want to do either. It belongs in this interval because the same trips that taught me about Virgin Upper Class and Costa del Sol were also the trips that started slow-baking a practice that would take me twenty-plus years to recognize, name, and address. I would trade nothing for my sound sleep now. What a slow reveal. Everyone learns differently. Reinvention has a hidden requirement we don’t talk about enough. Sometimes you don’t just have to pick up something new. You have to put down something old that seemed fine at the time, but was gradually slowing you down. If something in your life is currently the thing keeping you afloat AND the thing slowly confining you, you already know exactly what I’m talking about. You don’t need a lecture from me. You just need a little more company while you start telling yourself the truth about it. I’m right here.

But back to that earlier period. Puerto Rico. Costa del Sol. Madrid. The UK - broadly. Amsterdam. Delft. Rotterdam. Those repeat business trips weren’t just stamps in a passport or perks from the corporate ranks. They were extending and refining me. They were also stirring something else in me. Recalibrating my compass. Watching highly accomplished people around Manhattan, seeing what they did, how they thought, how much they were paid, how visible they were, how much range they had… I once went to a fine dinner celebration for the doyenne of New York philanthropy - Brooke Astor - on the tony Upper East Side of Manhattan. With deep interests in philanthropy, I made it my priority to get into those rooms where relationships were formed as I could. Noticeably, they seemed to be as interested in taking photos of me as I was in being present alongside such a generous philanthropist who had given away triple-digit millions of dollars around NYC. Those numbers were huge in her day. That was pre-AI. Not to try to compare. I wanted more. Of everything good in life, yes. But especially more positive influence, generous options, an extensive platform. That might sound indulgent. For me, it was acceptance. There was a lot about the people around me that I admired. There was also a lot to sort through. So, as I often did in times like these, I started asking questions. What did they study? How did these people get here? What advice did they have for me? Where were doors opening for them? Did they know something I didn’t yet know? What did they love, or hate, about their work? What did they see as possible that I was still only beginning to imagine?

That kind of questioning can change a life if you let it. It started changing mine. The answers started forming a pattern. A lot of those people had good schools behind them. Many had graduate degrees. Many foreigners I knew seemed to know how to navigate the American system with greater confidence than I did, even though I was the American in the room. I noticed that. It stung a little. It also energized me.

I caught hunger from being around them. I started imagining a newly connected identity for myself, all over again. At a certain stage, when people asked what I wanted to do in life, I started saying, "I want to be a philanthropist." Then, inevitably, they’d ask: “Do you have the money, or do you need to raise the money?” Not eager to part with my entire net worth hastily, I’d say “Plan B.” Raise it. The advice I got was simple. Work with money. If money is part of the conversation every day, you get closer to understanding the world that shapes larger possibilities. I took that seriously. By then, I had already come to terms with the fact that front-line health care, honorable and meaningful as it was, may not have been the optimal long-term platform for my particular instincts, drive, and deeper desires. That energized my transition into business first, the primary step to figuring out the next. This meant so much more than these mere words can show. I absolutely wanted to help make a bigger difference for others. I still do. I always did. But wanting to help is not enough. You also have to ask yourself where you can help best. From what vantage point? That’s a hard question, but it keeps repeating in this book for a reason. Asking yourself where you can be optimally of service can feel disloyal to your first calling, the first time you thought you’d found your purpose. It can feel arrogant, confusing, and even a bit frightening. But if you ignore the question for too long, life’s going to end up asking it for you, and usually in a far less pleasant tone. When you don’t know what to do next, you usually don’t need a brand-new dream. You need to ask that same question one more time, more honestly than the last time you asked it. The honest answer is usually the one nearby, just slightly to the left of where you’ve been looking.

Inside the corporate world, among business school graduates and higher-level players, another discomfort started showing itself in me. Social insecurity. Slight inadequacy. What people now call impostor syndrome. I looked around and thought, maybe I don’t know enough. Maybe I am less prepared. Maybe these people have some secret passage I missed. That’s not a fun feeling, but it can be productive if it pushes you into growth instead of self-erasure. What I learned in later years is that when you find yourself in spaces where you suspect you don’t quite belong – where the people around you seem to have a passport stamp you haven’t collected – that can be a good sign, not a bad one. The discomfort of “out-of-placeness” is one of the more reliable indicators that you’ve probably walked into the right surroundings for expansion. You’ve raised your floor. If you only ever felt comfortable, you’d stay standing still, never pushing yourself outside of the boundaries you set for yourself. So I asked the business school graduates why they had even gone in the first place. Their answers were revealing. Contacts. Skills. Pivoting careers. Meeting a partner. Changing geography. Taking a pause to rethink things. Some combination of all of it. I listened. It seemed deeply reflective. It made good sense. The advice was to go to the best business school you could get into. Fine advice, really. But I wasn’t interested in doing it the most obvious way if a more interesting route existed. I had already started applying to graduate B-schools when something happened that I hadn’t planned for, and certainly didn’t see coming. A door closed before the next one opened. Hard.

Chapter 3: The First Big Ending

The tone suddenly changed at the second big pharma company I was working with. At first, it was just chatter. The kind of chatter every team tells itself not to take to heart. Some business entities were underperforming. Revenue was sliding in places. Costs were being watched a lot more closely. Then a little more closely than that. Before long, it wasn’t chatter anymore. It was math. It was in the numbers. And once a company starts doing math out loud, people become line items in a hurry. One day, while I was still digesting my lunch, my direct lead came to my desk and told me the VP wanted to see us in his office. That had never happened before. I wasn’t celebrating an anniversary or getting special recognition. There was no cheerful surprise waiting around the corner. I took it seriously. A few minutes later, I was sitting across from the VP, hearing some version of the usual corporate language. “As you know, we are in challenging economic times internally, and several of our subsidiaries have lost a good deal of revenue due to forces beyond our control. As a result, the company is taking corrective measures to cut costs, from which your position has been eliminated”. Not personal. Business. You’ll have references. Severance. Benefits. A Midtown office to re-reconnect out of. And just like that, this was my last day. That is how fast an interval can close. One minute, you’re living inside the plan. The next minute, somebody else has already written the ending. I thanked them. Then I went back to my desk, packed up my things, handed off what I needed to hand off like a real gentleman, said a few proper goodbyes, and walked out of the building after what I still think of as my “last lunch” at that global pharma conglomerate headquarters. At least I had food in me for the big announcement. There’s a practical lesson there somewhere. Thinking relative to The Last Supper. Never underestimate the value of decent blood sugar during a corporate ambush. That was my first downsizing. My role was the only one of its kind in the corporation. The first known pharmaceutical-industry consolidation of its kind. And my role was one of 2,500 that disappeared in the immediate SWOOSH. Gone. Just like that.

The impending plan I’d been carrying in my head, to become an expat, lead abroad, and keep advancing and contributing inside that company’s international structure, vanished in one sentence. I was okay. A bit stunned, of course. A bit numb. Not great. But okay. Other affected people reacted very differently. Some did not go quietly. Some were escorted out “energetically” by security. That wasn’t my style. I didn’t see any use in fighting the obvious. If you've been through a layoff yourself, you probably know the three traps that show up in the first 48 hours. First, the urge to sprint back into the market and accept anything that'll have you. Driven by panic. Almost always a move you regret. Second, the urge to rewrite the entire arc of your relationship with the company you just left - every kindness reframed as manipulation. That's your brain looking for proof you've been betrayed, so you have permission to be angry. Third, the urge to tell yourself you did something wrong, and then beat yourself up over it. Not so helpful, either. My advice? Eat well, sleep routinely, walk often, breathe intentionally, and relax for a phase. Let yourself adjust and catch up with what happened. It’s okay if you don’t have an instant plan. I often didn’t. This may sound flippant when finances are tight or overleveraged. Many of my suggestions cost little, but the most critical is time. In this case, however, I was a little more prepared than most. I’d already begun to suspect I needed another layer of skill, another degree, another field of play. I was applying to graduate business schools. I was out to heal my impostor syndrome, or put it in remission long-term at least. Not every ending arrives before you’re ready for it. Sometimes you have already been getting ready in ways you didn’t fully understand. Your subconscious does the scoping for you, before you realize what it’s doing. If you look back at some of the major endings in your life- relationships, jobs, friendships, all of that- I’d bet you a $2 bill that some part of you was already collecting supplies for the next interval before the current one closed. That’s what happened with me. The graduate school applications I’d already sent, the peers I’d already confided in, and the references I’d been gathering weren’t a coincidence. Something in me had known I was about to face a route change. The company might have surprised me. Life didn’t. Was I concerned that my ambition had somehow caused the layoff? That someone had gotten wind that I was looking for something new? A little. Actually, more than a little. Even pre-email, cliques could spread gossip at work faster than you can say “Keep this between us.” After email, text, and social media arrived, they just gave that chatter an energy boost. So, maybe understandably, trust has never been simple for me. Still, I refused to sit there second-guessing everything. Why should anyone feel ashamed for wanting to sharpen their skills, broaden their knowledge, or elevate their position in life? I didn’t. I was young, driven, and still forming my appetite for success; sure there was much more for me to do, and a sharper way to do it. So I moved on! Fortunately, I got plenty of encouragement. “There’s something much better for you out there.” I heard that a lot in those days. It did sound a lot like generic consolation at first. Later, it started sounding true. It was still a blow, though. I had already left what looked like a stable health care career path for the white-hot, seemingly infallible global pharma industry. I even stepped out of one of the most successful Fortune 100-Big Pharma giants to pursue my dream of leading larger and living the expat life. Now, in less than a handful of years, I was back in uncertainty again. That can leave a shining bruise on your confidence if you let it. It can also buff off a little illusion. Remind you that your ideal vision of the future might change once, twice, or seven times. Fast realization: I wasn’t back to zero. I built unique skills, advanced transferable experiences, and judgement. I was still ambitious, curious, energetic, and willing to gather whatever fresh skills, relevant degrees, helpful certificates, or lived experience it might take to move up and out into a more extraordinary life. And yes, I wanted to do well financially, too. Not only for the pleasures of it, though I do appreciate a few pleasures. To keep compounding for the freedom of choice. More because I already had this idea in me that I wanted to give back in a more comprehensive way someday. Sooner rather than later.

I still had my “plan” for service through philanthropy (HA, planning). That dream was still alive in me! Maybe more so now. Because if a runway has just been taken from you, you start getting very urgently interested in what still belongs to you. Drive, impact, options, maybe even your nerve. Urgency started bubbling up inside of me, and it didn’t come from nowhere. I was reminded, painfully, of how my mother had died suddenly years earlier, after living with a chronic condition that had already changed the shape of family life. She didn’t meet her 50s. Then, of how my father died suddenly too - without a known illness, on Thanksgiving evening. That second reminder was particularly poignant, as this downsizing had happened just a few months after - now both parents were gone. The roots that would have potentially anchored me during this painful period were gone. No parents or family home. It had become obvious after the loss of my parents that five siblings owning one house together was more of a burden than a blessing. We liquidated for pure simplicity. We were scattered all over. I was living in Manhattan, nowhere near our Southern roots. I’d lost my parents, my home base, my family roots, and now my job, too. That can harden a person, or wake them up. It woke me up. Life can be way too damn short. Don’t rush your life away. Don’t pass up too many worthwhile chances, and if you can help it, don’t sprint right back into work just because the culture worships hustle and can’t stand a blank spot on the timeline. Sometimes the truest thing you can do after a major ending is reflect consciously, and notice your unrushed self. Absorb. Adjust. Let the dust settle enough for you to hear yourself think again. That’s been one of my approaches for years now. It’s not about laziness or avoidance, just recalibration. And because of that, forward from that job stop, what I felt most was something close to lightness. Oddly enough. A sense of freedom. I had just experienced a huge growth phase in short order. Not a comfortable one yet. But it still counted as a major milestone.

I knew I could find a new beginning somewhere with purpose. The trouble was, I had NO IDEA what was next, or how I’d get there. That’s true for a lot of us when we go through moments of loss. It either feels like life grinds to a halt, or starts pushing us too quickly into “repair mode”. Update the resume. Make the calls. Find the next thing fast enough that the last thing doesn’t have time to leave a scratch. I understand that instinct. I do in the fullest sense. There are times when survival calls for exactly that. This wasn’t one of those times for me. What I felt more than panic was a strange kind of opening. I felt ALIVE! Ready to explore-up. A few business schools of real interest had already said yes. But I was absorbing a lot at once. All the loss, melding with possibility. It was like the floor had dropped from beneath me and the horizon had opened at the exact same moment. That can be a gift, if you don’t rush to deaden it. I felt like a sponge in that period. Raw, but ready to soak up new abundance. Suddenly I had time, but with valuable experience, skills I'd collected, and, importantly, enhanced, tested judgment, no debt pressing at my throat just yet, and a powerful need to feel alive instead of boxed in, I decided to do the thing that revives me most: travel. I booked a six-country journey through Southeast Asia. A region I’d never been to before. I was going alone. And I was thrilled. Let’s call it what it was. It was a little bit of a revenge trip. A little bit of a freedom trip. A little bit of a you-don’t-get-to-decide-my-whole-story-from-one-corporate-meeting trip. I would be leaving in less than two weeks. My heart was beating ahead of me. Sure, I’d traveled a lot for my job, but that was mostly saddled with the responsibility of work. It also meant I had an admin team to sort out the pre- and post-travel specifics, after all they were paying. This time, I had to handle everything myself. I was the one setting the route, with a little help from my first Lonely Planet guidebook. This was 1993. No fluid internet access to help with planning. It was not yet a consumer commodity, not in my court at least. Bangkok was the farthest destination I had seriously considered for myself up to that point. And I had a solid reason to go there. A few of my colleagues had gone to top-ranked business schools. And one useful, unique detail got lodged in my mind. Two of those elite schools had collaboration relationships with a well recognized university and graduate business program in Bangkok. One colleague told me, flat out, that if he had known then what he knew now, he would have chosen the Bangkok partner program instead. That spurred a vision in me.

I’d already been investigating business schools, of course, but this gave me a whole new angle to consider. Why do things the obvious way if there’s a bolder, more unique, and more expansive route just sitting there, waiting to be part of? So I started looking seriously at Bangkok. Sasin Graduate School of Management. It was on the campus of Chulalongkorn University, one of the most respected institutions in Thailand. The longest-reigning King of Thailand’s school. The business school itself had deep ties to top American programs: The Wharton School of Finance and J.L. Kellogg School of Management. Even better? That Grad B school program was taught completely in English, and by professors from those two American B schools. I wasn’t just heading out on an adventure here. I was making a smart leap. That was the beauty of Bangkok in my mind. It wasn’t just an exotic distance, but a distance with defined purpose and predictable gains. I could live abroad! Study business at the graduate level. Plug into a fast-expanding, very different part of the world. Meet new and varied kinds of interesting people. And keep building a future instead of just licking my wounds from the last plateau. Still living in and compounding purpose, obviously. Not just sipping umbrella drinks, nor basking in the sun on the dreamy beaches, but if so chosen, able to do that on weekends and holidays if time allowed! I think that really shows what I mean about reinvention not always being bad news. Sometimes you get pushed out of one thing, so you’ll finally consider a bigger, more favorable thing. A lot of the people I’ve coached over the years come to me thinking that a major ending in their life was some kind of punishment. Almost none of them thought of those endings as redirections initially. At least, not until they look back a handful of years later, and see the collected signs. You can save yourself time. At the end of any major ending, ask: “What is this freeing me from that I couldn't or wouldn’t walk away from on my own?” Even better, ask, “What is it freeing me into? Some outsized or more relevant way to be of service? Something closer to the life I really want to be living?” It might take a while for the answers to come to you. But they will.

Before I gave myself over to the full sweep of the trip, I did something important. I tied up the loose ends. I had practical work to do. Severance paperwork, qualifying for benefits, administrative cleanup, end-of-job details, all of that not so fun adult stuff most of us would rather ignore. Then there was the “life stuff”. While living near Union Square, I had a small, reliable, not-particularly-high-valued car (on purpose, for street parking on a whim) in Manhattan, a perfect low-profile comfort car for tooling around the city and countryside without too much fuss or worry about break-ins or theft. One sticking point was the parking garage fee nearest my condo, which was $350 a month. And that was a few decades ago. When I realized I wouldn’t be going back to work so soon, I canceled the garage space and sought an alternative. Big challenge in Manhattan. Fortunately, one of the senior leaders of my recent Pharma Co had space in their garage in New Jersey, about 30 miles from me. They offered to let me leave my car there while I was abroad. The kindness and generosity of other people is truly humbling. Don’t underestimate your connections. Then I handled the “forward-thinking prep” side. Setting up my potential new life. I set up meetings with people at Sasin. Faculty. Staff. Advisors. Friends of friends. People who could help me get a solid sense of what life in Bangkok might be like, not as a tourist, but for a foreigner trying to build something inside there. That was one of the smarter things I did. Most people standing at the edge of a major life shift make one of two mistakes. They overthink the dream until they kill it. Or they romanticize it so heavily they forget to ask whether it can hold any significant structural weight. You need some romance. But you also need traction. Bangkok had both for me. Once I arrived in Bangkok and took those meetings, the whole thing began to move from fantasy into possibility. That’s a very powerful moment when it appears. Something stops being a beautiful idea and starts becoming a legitimate next lever. That changes your posture. It changed mine. Looking back, I can see now that I needed more than a career option at that point. I needed something that catalyzed me as well. The previous stretch of life had left me feeling somewhat contained. I needed an interval of scale, contrast, and some extra space around me. Travel, for me, has often been the way that breathing room shows up. Once I had taken care of the business-first part in Bangkok, I could let the rest of the journey do what it was there to do. I could let the doorway that closed behind me lead to a hallway for something fresh and new. It’s surprising how often that happens. Not every ending leads to somewhere better. Sometimes losses are just losses. But many have a hallway. The trick is being willing to walk down it slowly, without full lights, before you know what’s at the other end. That’s what I did.

• Update #10 - Two Weeks Left. And Encouraging News to Share. Oct. 16, 2026

  With just two weeks remaining in the presale campaign for *Intervals Of Service*, I'm encouraged by the support the book continues to receive.

  Even more …

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• Update #9 - Five Publishers Have Expressed Interest in Intervals Of Service. Now, the Right Connection Could Make a Difference. Oct. 12, 2026

  With fewer than three weeks remaining in the presale campaign, I want to ask something of my network that could make a real difference.

  
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• Update #8 - Join me in a FREE Webinar today, 12 Noon Eastern/9 AM Pacific Time Oct. 9, 2026

  𝗙𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗪𝗲𝗯𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗿:
  

  I'm excited for this one!
  

  𝗪𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘀 𝗢𝗳 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲.  

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• Update #7 - Seth Godin told me to self-publish in 2022. Oct. 6, 2026

  Seth Godin told me something that stuck with me: if you’re writing books and want readers, obscurity is not what you need.

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• Update #6 - A fourth publisher has now expressed interest in *Intervals Of Service*. Oct. 3, 2026

  Thank you ALL!

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• Update #5 - Less than 24 hours - FREE to join: We discuss "Making sense of where success matters now." Oct. 1, 2026

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• Update #4 - 𝗝𝗼𝗶𝗻 𝘂𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗙𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗢𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝟬𝟮, 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲, 𝟭𝟮 𝗻𝗼𝗼𝗻 𝗘𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲. 𝗙𝗥𝗘𝗘 𝗼𝗻 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗲𝗱𝗜𝗻 𝗟𝗜𝗩𝗘 Sept. 30, 2026

  The conversation not to miss is: "What your success makes possible now."
  

  We spend years learning how to succeed, yet few of us are prepared …

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• Update #3 - Why am I writing Intervals Of Service? Sept. 29, 2026

  Why I Am Writing this book:

  I bring more than four decades of intricate experiences across healthcare, pharmaceuticals, a Fortune 100 company, international business, startups, …

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• Update #2 - I’d love to invite you to follow my updates on publishing Intervals Of Service Sept. 27, 2026

  Intervals Of Service is not a biography or a memoir.

  My experiences are the vehicle.

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• Update #1 - I invite you to follow updates on my book: Intervals Of Service Sept. 26, 2026

  Hi Friend,

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