Hello again, lovey humans,

Some people start changing when they're forced to, others take a more gentle approach. This is Boris's story.

The Loudest Brand in the Room

For five years, Boris ran Red Bull Germany. Before that, he held senior roles at Disney and RTL, and built the Campari and Aperol brands across European markets. His career had the shape that most people spend decades chasing. He was, by any measure, successful.

He was also, somewhere else entirely.

Boris was moving through a high-octane life while simultaneously doing something almost no one around him knew about. For over fifteen years, he had been training as a Zen monk under Japanese masters. Not as a weekend hobby. Not as a productivity hack. As a genuine, sustained practice that ran alongside his corporate life like a river beneath the surface.

The Glass Stops Stirring

Boris didn’t leave because the work exhausted him. He left because the silence got loud enough that he could no longer ignore it.

He describes it this way: “Like the muddy water in a glass that clears once you stop stirring, silence is the place where things become visible.”

When he finally stepped away from the executive track, he wasn’t retreating. He was arriving somewhere he’d been moving toward for a long time. The Zen practice hadn’t been an escape from the work — it had been the quiet preparation for what came after it.

Today, Boris works with leaders, founders, and change-makers with a simple mission: Silence Leads. His practice isn’t built on frameworks or five-step formulas. It’s built on something we could all do more of: listening. Sitting still. Letting the water clear.

His process begins with an unusual ritual. Before any engagement starts, he asks clients to make a donation to a cause of their choosing. Not as a fee. As a gesture — a small act of turning attention outward before turning it inward. “It’s not payment,” he says. “It’s a shift. It creates space for clarity.”

What Red Bull Couldn’t Teach Him

There’s a particular kind of man who arrives at midlife with an impressive resume and a quiet restlessness he can’t quite name. He knows how to build things. He’s good at being impressive. He’s spent twenty or thirty years being very good at being who everyone needed him to be.

Boris knows that man. He was that man.

What he found on the other side wasn’t softer. It was sharper. The Zen training gave him something the boardroom never could: the ability to sit with discomfort long enough to hear what was actually trying to come through. Not the noise of the next goal or the next reinvention, but the quieter signal underneath all of it.

That is the work he now does with others.

We had the privilege of working with Boris at our both our Austrian and Girona retreats last year. Meeting him felt like meeting someone I had known my whole life. There is a quality of presence about him that is rare in people who’ve operated at his level — an absence of performance, a genuine stillness that makes the people around him feel seen rather than evaluated.

One of our guests put it plainly: “For years, I was meditating, but not really dropping in. Just checking a box. Meeting Boris was a catalyst for me, helping me get comfortable sitting with discomfort. Thank you for reminding me how important it is to be still.”

What the Other Side Looks Like

Boris isn’t running from his past. He’s built something that only became possible because of it. The decades at Red Bull and Disney and RTL weren’t detours, they were the raw material. He brings the strategic clarity of a senior executive and the grounded presence of someone who has spent fifteen years learning how to get out of his own way.

His work is gentle by design. He doesn’t have a podcast. He doesn’t post daily content. He doesn’t have a proprietary method with a catchy name. What he has is depth and a room full of people who’ve sat across from him and walked away changed.

That is, in its own way, a second harvest. Not the dramatic pivot. Not the public reinvention. Just a man who built something significant, stopped long enough to hear what was actually true, and then rebuilt around that.

More of us should be so brave.

You can find Boris at borisbolz.com and reach him at guidance@borisbolz.com.

More stories like this soon.

— Richard & Devon