What life taught me

Most of what is on this page I had to work out for myself. Two of them I was simply given.

Focus on what you do want.

You don’t judge someone by their words. You judge them by their actions.

Both came from my mother, and both are on her page, where they belong. I put them first here because everything else I learned got built on top of them.

I was abused as a child, and into my teenage years.

It made me angry, and I didn’t know what to do with that. I would stuff all of the emotion away until it exploded. The outbursts were massive. They put me in a mental hospital when I was ten, and again when I was twelve.

Somewhere in there I realized I was on a path that didn’t suit me, and that if it was going to change, I was the one who would have to change it.

The first thing I had to learn was self acceptance. I could not make any progress until I learned to accept what I was experiencing and how I was feeling.

Accept. Not agree with.

That distinction is the whole lesson. I did not have to approve of what happened, or of the anger, to admit that it was there. But until I admitted it was there, I had nothing to work with.

The second thing I had to learn was where my control actually was.

There are some things I do not have control over. Being abused was one of them.

There are some things I absolutely have control over. How I show up is one of them.

It sounds simple written down. It was not simple to learn, and I learned it young because I had to.

People who work with me notice fairly quickly that I can show up steady in pretty much any storm. That isn’t temperament. It is a decision I made as a kid and have kept making since.

I had my first child when I was sixteen.

When I think about it now it seems crazy. At the time it was just me. I didn’t know what being twenty-one would even look like. All I knew was that I was sixteen, and a father, and had to navigate that. I was in college, yes, at sixteen, and at the top of my class.

When my son was three and a half months old, I got custody. His mother didn’t have the support I did. She couldn’t handle the responsibility, so she gave him to me.

That is the other half of this lesson. My mother was supportive, and so was my stepfather. I am not sure what would have happened without them. I navigated what was in front of me, and I was able to because somebody was standing behind me.

My stepfather was a workaholic. I felt the flip side of priorities before I had words for it.

So when I started my own business in 1998, with five kids in the house, and found out I didn’t need to work full time to make a living, I made time with my family a core value. Not a nice idea. A rule.

It had a ripple effect. I had to turn away business all the time to protect that time. And I had to learn how to make more money without spending more hours.

Those were my prime years. I had purpose and I could see it all around me. We were active all the time. It was a really fun life with the kids. The pictures are here.

I was in tech. I needed to make more money without working more hours, and what I found was that the answer was not more work. It was a better conversation with my clients.

For me that meant seeing the details of a business. The systems and the process, together with the people and the culture.

It took a few years. Then one day I was casually chatting with a client and they stopped the conversation and got up. When they sat back down they apologized. They had needed a pen and paper. They started taking notes.

Interesting.

A while after that, companies started reaching out who wanted that conversation and did not need the IT services at all.

Even more interesting.

I never had a step-by-step plan. It was natural to me, and I also developed it on purpose. Both are true. I could sit down with any business, on any topic, and find a way to be useful.

That is still the work. I do tech things, mostly around AI now. But what I actually do is help companies step into whatever is next.

I watch and listen to energy more than words.

Specific words mean different things to different people. But if I come in hot and heavy, mad, yelling, everybody knows that’s bad. It does not matter which words I used.

I have also learned that when I leave a room, people remember how I made them feel over what I had to say.

My mother taught me to judge people by their actions instead of their words. This is the same lesson pointed back at myself.

I used to think I had answers.

Now I realize I am more like the village idiot.

That is not self-deprecation. It is quite the opposite.

As the village idiot, I can walk into the room and ask questions, even dumb ones. It takes courage to be the idiot in the room.

I once invited someone to let their guard down with me. Then I told them the rest of it: an invitation to let it down is only valuable if keeping it up is an option. And it was.

I think you can’t be both grounded and guarded. One pulls you away from the other. But nobody gets argued or pushed out of being guarded. The most I can do is make the invitation real, which means the answer can be no, and the answer can be not yet.

I work the same way. I don’t push a business owner toward a change. I invite, and I mean it when I say whenever you’re ready.

I worked very hard to have stability.

Then, starting in 2019, my life went through a significant, life-changing event every single year. My stepfather’s end of life started it. My mother died a year later. It kept going from there.

Some things in life cannot be controlled. I knew that already. What I had not learned yet was the second part.

The things we tend to identify with as core to who we are aren’t necessarily who or what we really are. Life has a funny way of testing that.

It’s now 2026, and even still each year has looked significantly different from the last. Stability, was it really my core? Maybe even at high tide the biggest of rocks can feel overwhelmed. I’m not sure. But I do know the past few years have been rough, and I feel my growth through them.

We met at work in 1998. She had two kids and I had three, and our youngest were still in diapers. We married in 2004.

She had always wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, so she stopped working then. After that she fell into a deep depression, and she missed much of the kids growing up.

I chose to stay. I supported her as best I could, and I did my own growing alongside it. There is a great deal I am leaving out, and leaving it out isn’t entirely fair to either of us.

The truth is, I loved her dearly, even still do. She meant the world to me, and I spent years doing everything I could to show up in a way that would support her. I learned over the years that I didn’t have what it took. Her life is hers to navigate as much as mine is mine.

We remain on good terms today. Probably even better now. I know that she will always be part of my life. We’ve been through a lot together and I will always value and cherish that.

Being fully present with someone means being fully exposed. And it really does hurt to show up that way and have it crumble.

I sat with that. I decided I am willing to take that pain, which is honestly more of a sting than true pain, for a better shot at being fully me.

So I try to be fully present, and I accept that I may get hurt along the way because of it. It is not easy, and I am not perfect at it.

I would much rather find success or failure from a place of authenticity than from anywhere else.