You can become very successful and still lose touch with what you actually want.
You are thoughtful, ambitious, highly capable, and deeply practiced at adapting.
You know how to achieve.
You know how to deliver.
You know how to solve difficult problems.
But over time, something shifts.
Your strategies start creating more constraints than opportunities.
Success becomes an identity instead of an outcome.
Competence replaces curiosity.
The future no longer feels as open-ended as it once did.
I know these tensions intimately because I’ve lived them.
I’ve spent two decades inside institutions where identity, ambition, leadership, performance, and belonging shape people’s lives in visible and invisible ways. I’ve watched careers rise and collapse. I’ve watched talented people slowly narrow themselves in order to succeed.
That’s why I’m drawn to work, conversations, and stories that help people understand what is actually shaping their lives.
Navigating what comes next
Stories Work
An advisory practice for people at a stage of their lives when the strategies that created success no longer provide the same sense of direction, possibility, or meaning.
Storytelling in public
I’m Here Too
Candid conversations and essays about ambition, creativity, identity, work, family, class, and the ways people build lives, move by move, mistake by mistake.
Write the story you want to read
Fiction
Novels about ambition, identity, longing, performance, and the complicated negotiations between who people are and who the world rewards them for becoming.