When I was a kid, my friends dreamed big. They wanted to be professional athletes, movie stars, billionaires—the stuff of glossy magazine covers. Me? I had two wildly different ambitions: to be a diplomat or a professor.
A diplomat because I wanted to travel the world, engage in interesting conversations, and understand different perspectives shaped by diverse lived experiences. I imagined sitting across tables from people whose realities looked nothing like mine, untangling complex problems, and building friendships that spanned continents.
A professor because I’m a voracious learner and incurably curious. I’ve always loved diving into complex topics, breaking them down, and reassembling them into something others can understand and utilize. I wanted to cross-pollinate—ideas, disciplines, people—so that what I learned in one place could spark something entirely new somewhere else.
Then life happened.
On my first day of college, I met a girl. And yes, it’s always a girl. Once I’d wooed her, my mission shifted: marry her, build a career, raise a family. We had kids. We bought houses. I climbed the corporate ladder. You know the drill—mortgages, meetings, milestones. My life was full and busy, but those original dreams became the quiet background music instead of the main melody.
Now, here I am, pushing 60, and guess what?
I travel the world having fascinating conversations with people from wildly different backgrounds. I’ve built friendships on nearly every continent. I’m exposed daily to perspectives shaped by experiences I could never have imagined when I was that kid with the big map on his bedroom wall.
Somewhere along the way, a few of you (you know who you are) started referring to me as “the Professor” behind my back. At first, it felt a bit odd—maybe even a little pretentious—but now it makes me smile. My wife nailed it years ago when she told me, “You’re a misplaced college professor.”
And in a way, she’s right. My work as a coach, advisor, and board member has allowed me to step fully into those early dreams—just in a different form than I pictured. I get to learn constantly, wrestle with complex challenges, and distill what I know into practical, usable insights. I get to connect dots between seemingly unrelated ideas and people. I get to travel—not just physically, but intellectually—into new industries, markets, and mindsets.
I also get to see something that, frankly, is hard to put into words: transformation. I don’t mean minor course corrections or the “tips and tricks” kind of change. I mean profound, identity-level shifts in the entrepreneurs and teams I work with. The type of change where someone realizes they’re capable of more than they thought, or that they can build something that genuinely reflects who they are and what matters to them.
I hope this doesn’t come across as arrogant, because that’s not the spirit in which I share it—but I genuinely believe the work I do is transformational for the people I support. And I’m proud of that.
Looking back, the route here has been anything but straight. It’s been circuitous, full of detours and unexpected stops. But in the end, I’ve landed exactly where that younger version of me wanted to be: engaged in meaningful work, surrounded by people from all walks of life, learning and sharing every day.
Sometimes life delivers on your early dreams—it just takes the long way around.
