Hello lovey humans, If you've ever had a childhood dream that seemed too crazy to imagine coming true, then this one is for you. This one is about a boy who dreamed of owning an island in a lake. This is Randy's story. The Dream Randy's family has been on Long Lake in Naples, Maine. Since the 1960s, when his grandparents built Ricker’s Resort, summers have been spent on the water, winters ice fishing and snowboarding at Pleasant Mountain. He learned to swim in that lake. Learned to fish in...
7 days ago • 3 min read
Hello lovely humans, Lisa Gibbons met her reckoning on a Monday morning in Carcassonne, France. Flat on her back in an Airbnb, fully conscious, fully aware, but unable to move or speak a word. A brain aneurysm and a stroke had paralyzed the right side of her body and shut down her speech and cognition. The Lisa I knew was the life of the party. Pure joy. Flying around the world at the drop of a hat. Effervescent is the word that comes to mind. We worked together for a few years, and my...
21 days ago • 3 min read
Hello lovey humans, After a phenomenal Spring Summit, we're back to our regularly scheduled stories of people designing their next chapter. This week is Roger's story. Note: At the end of this story is a private link to Roger's film Into The Dragon's Lair. Roger and I knew each other in Cape Town, back when we were both tangled up in our digital marketing careers. He went on to be a corporate over-achiever. I was running my own version of the venture funded hustle. When I moved to the States,...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hi lovely humans, I signed the papers last week. The house I've lived in for a decade years has been sold. It's someone else’s memory-maker now, someone else’s Thanksgiving stories. For that reason, we'll be skipping the usual Second Harvesters story. I’m writing this from somewhere between here and the next chapter. Sounds romantic but mostly just means you can’t find the coffee mugs. The choice to downsize and donate most of my belongings is part of an idea I've embraced called via...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hello lovey humans, Some people wake up because the life they built falls apart. Mike woke up at his dear friend's funeral. This is Mike’s story. The Achievement Machine For the first fifty years of his life, Mike Hirshland built the kind of résumé that makes other accomplished people feel like they haven’t tried hard enough. First in his class through law school. Clerk on the Supreme Court. Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Then a hard pivot into venture capital, where he backed and...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Hello lovey humans, A few years ago, Brie found herself at New York Philharmonic concert sitting next to a partner she had worked with for some time. He spent twenty minutes explaining classical music to her. She nodded along. She went home, went to bed, and never mentioned she had been playing violin since she was three years old. The Armor Brie didn’t set out to disappear. It happened incrementally, one small compromise at a time. The violin stayed home. The girl who had grown up with music...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Hello lovey humans, Sometimes the second harvest begins with a referral to a heart surgeon. Ouch! My friend, Moshe Adir has been in tech since before most people had email. He co-founded his business in 1998 in Cape Town, back when the internet was made of dial-up tones and CD-ROMs. Nearly three decades later, he's still designing digital experiences for every major brand in the online gaming industry. The man has stories. But this isn’t about business longevity. This is about personal...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Hello again, lovey humans, Most people collect career titles. Michael Saitow collects first principles. This is his story. The Early Lesson Before Michael was a CIO, he was a freestyle skier and a ski coach. He worked with youth athletes and elite competitors, including Olympic-level talent. Those years on the mountain taught him something that would outlast every job title that followed: success is less about raw ability and more about preparation, attitude, and knowing how to laugh when...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Hello lovey humans, When Nino Maisuradze was nine years old, she watched as her parents lost everything overnight. The Soviet Union collapsed, civil war erupted in Georgia and with that jobs, savings, electricity, and the heat disappeared. What didn’t go out was the warm of friends and families. In the cold, conversations got longer. And a little girl learned something that would take her thirty years to fully understand: that the things which look like losses are sometimes the conditions for...
3 months ago • 4 min read