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, I lost track of him. But a few years ago, I started noticing his name in the credits of films I was watching. Along the way, the guy I’d known in boardrooms had become one of the best underwater wildlife cinematographers alive. He was working on documentaries for National Geographic, BBC, and Netflix. He'd won a BAFTA for Blue Planet 2, an Emmy nomination for Our Planet, and lead cinematography on My Octopus Teacher, which went and won an Oscar.

So I asked Roger how he navigated his way through multiple chapters. Seemingly designing a first, second and third harvest.

One: the allergy.

Roger spent his whole life believing he had to be a performer. If you performed, you were cool. The operating system worked as intended. It got him through school, through his twenties, into a high-paying job at a Fortune 500 financial firm. And then, at 36, it just stopped working. “It was as if I had developed an allergy to the food that had always nourished me,” he wrote, “and I just couldn’t bear to eat another bite.”

People told him he was brave to leave corporate. He says there was no bravery in it, "there was no other choice." The exit collided with the end of his marriage, and what followed was messy and painful: financial, emotional, and spiritual free fall. An ego death, he calls it. It was a very difficult time.

Two: the tribe.

He had no plan. He only knew it couldn’t involve managing conversations with people in a box all day. So he reached back to the moments that had made him feel fully alive — spearfishing. But this time he traded the speargun for a camera. He started shooting the underwater world on a single breath hold.

Then came the chance encounter. At a film festival, he met two filmmaking brothers, Craig and Damon Foster. They were taken with his story. They believed in him at the precise moment he’d stopped believing in himself. Having accomplished people show that kind of faith at such a low point, was the most incredible gift he could imagine. Within months he was on a BBC shoot, where he met one of Jacques Cousteau’s own cameramen. The threads converged into his first film: a story about diving with the enormous Nile crocodiles in the Okavango.

That’s how finding your tribe works. By being close to people aligned with your gifts and passions, you get ambushed in the best possible way. Roger’s collaboration with Craig Foster runs all the way to My Octopus Teacher and beyond. Along the way there were dozens of other chance encounters with other tribes. Great whites, leopard seals, bowhead whales, and even flashlight fish and Bobbit worms.

Three: the heart.

Life wasn't done with surprising Roger just yet. Three weeks before a 2022 shoot in Antarctica, a routine dive medical found a problem with his heart. Within days he had a stent inserted. Had he gone south as planned, he’d very likely have died down there. Worse, it looked like he might never dive again. It looked like the entire architecture of his life might be gone in an afternoon.

Fortunately, six months later he was medically cleared to dive. But the brush with mortality rearranged everything. It drove home, the cliche we all ignore, that you should never take tomorrow for granted. And it gave him the resolve to finally end a long, difficult relationship he says he should have ended years before.

This part sounds a bit like a fridge magnet, but there is a moral to this tale of many seasons. Roger boils it all down to three words: openness, connection, appreciation.

The one he calls foundational is openness. "When you’re not open," he says, "you default to the familiar, the safe, the trodden path. But, the familiar can’t change you." What changes you is the encounter with the very thing you couldn’t have planned or predicted, "Recognition is the enemy of creative thinking."

What's next?

As Roger enters his mid fifties he's redesigning his life again. He's launched The Ocean Footage Mastery Program and expanded his speaking engagement platform. We'll be joining Roger in the Azores this summer to get an up close look at how he works.

If you're a feeling stuck, there’s something valuable for everyone reading Roger's story. Most importantly, remember that you're adaptable in ways you probably don't even understand yet. Your identity, Roger says, is something you co-create, with yourself, and with the people around you. Which is exactly why he emphasizes choosing your tribe wisely. Roger’s tribe started with two brothers at a film festival who looked at a broke, raw, corporate man and saw someone worth backing.

Second Harvest is a tribe of people who see a better chapter ahead and support each other in getting there.

Roger has shared a private link to that first film, Into the Dragon’s Lair, for anyone who wants to go a little deeper (pun intended).

— Richard & Devon