Latest Posts
Thoughts on reinvention, clarity, work, money, and the quiet decisions that shape a life. New essays each week as we explore what it means to build a life with intention.
Five Financial Decisions That Made My Downshift Possible
I was fourteen, shivering in a borrowed tent on the Appalachian Trail in a waterlogged cotton sleeping bag, too proud to ask my dad, a retired Marine, for the gear that was sitting in our basement. Thirty years later, here are the five financial decisions that made my downshift possible, and the lesson it took me a cold night on a mountain to learn.
The Weekday World I Never Saw
In my twenties I sat at the same corner table every weekday morning, life rich and money poor, watching the Blue Ridge disappear into haze. I traded it for twenty-five years of building. This month I walked back into a coffee shop, a gym, and an empty trail to find out what the weekday world looks like before I move in for good.
Already Gone, Not Yet Gone: The Psychology of the Final Stretch
I'm still doing the work, still delivering results, trying to finish strong. The psychology underneath it has changed. This is what the last year of work feels like from the inside, before anyone knows you're leaving.
She Could Have Asked Me to Keep Working
At nineteen I decided a woman might be right for me because she pulled grape at a 7-Eleven. At fifty-two I brought her the biggest decision of my adult life, and she told me that making it on a feeling wouldn't be right. This is the conversation underneath the spreadsheets, and the one almost nobody talks about.
Landing the Plane, Part 1: Building Your Drawdown Framework
Eight years ago I drove through the Valley of the Sun for the first time and knew Arizona was exactly the change we needed. Learning to live there required an entirely new set of rules. The transition from accumulation to distribution is exactly like that.
How to Find Your Next Endeavor
Last week I waded through a red-rock canyon in Glacier's Canadian twin with the people I love most. This week I am at 31,000 feet over Kansas, racing the other direction. Here is the framework I am building toward, and the five paths worth exploring before you leave full-time work.