I spent most of a friend’s birthday in college talking him down off a ledge, and it took the better part of an hour to get the actual problem out of him, because he kept circling back to the same sentence, which was that this birthday meant he was now cut off from his family. So I did what anybody would do and assumed the worst, running through it in my head, a blowup with his old man, a divorce, somebody dying. I kept asking. And he finally looked up and explained that his trust fund had kicked in that morning, and that from that day forward he was expected to live on it and nothing else. Ten million dollars. He was miserable about it, sitting right there in front of me, on what should have been the best day of his life.

I did the only thing a twenty-year-old could reasonably do with information like that, which was call my father and ask whether I had one too.

I want the record to reflect my emotional state on that call, because it was not curiosity and it was not concern for my buddy, it was straight anticipation, and I had already started spending the money somewhere around the second ring. My dad howled. Not a chuckle, an actual howl, and he laughed long enough that I had to stand there holding the phone and wait him out like an idiot, and when he finally caught his breath he said, “Son, I trust you’ll have fun. You’re on your own.”

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Two years before the end, Brendan called me because his wife had gone to a psychic and he needed somebody to hear it out loud while it was still unproven. He did not believe in psychics. That was the entire reason for the call. Lauren had gone three months earlier and the woman told her three things: Brendan’s mother would get breast cancer, Brendan would have a baby girl, and Brendan would not be working for Tessemae’s. The week before he picked up the phone, they found out his mom had breast cancer, and they found out Lauren was pregnant.

“I needed to tell someone how crazy this is, so this conversation documents the proof,” he said. “If I have a girl, this bitch is real.”

We both laughed. Then I quit laughing, because I had already run the math on number three.

“Not work for Tessemae’s?” I asked.

He stumbled. Then he said, “She said it would end well. There would be a good outcome, like we sell it for a lot.”

I heard his voice change. Right there on the phone, in the half second between the stumble and the sentence, and what I decided in that half second was that Brendan had softened it for me. That he had taken something ugly and wrapped a bow on it because I was his friend and he did not want to say the other thing out loud. I hung up carrying two convictions: the psychic was real, and my guy had lied to me kindly. I held onto both of those for the better part of a decade.

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I drove behind a school bus yesterday afternoon and I watched that back window the whole way down the road. Not one kid mooned me. Not one flipped me off. Nobody pressed his face against the glass and fogged it up with his tongue out, which was standard operating procedure on my bus and got somebody moved up front behind the driver every single week. They sat there with their heads down, all of them lit blue from underneath, and when the bus pulled away at the light I felt something I was not expecting to feel about a busload of children declining to insult me. I felt sad.

We took it from them. Every last bit of it. And we congratulated ourselves the entire time we were doing it.

A study came out of Translational Psychiatry in November that ran almost twelve thousand kids from the ABCD cohort and found that the ones with the most screen time had measurably thinner cortex two years later, in the exact regions that handle attention, working memory, and decision-making. The researchers were careful. They said they could not prove the screens caused it. Fine. I have four kids and I do not need a p-value. The irritability is the part every parent in America already knows without a journal, because the kid comes off the screen like a man coming off a bender and he is furious at the room for existing.

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Essex, Maryland sits inside the Bermuda Triangle of shitty Baltimore towns, along with Dundalk and Middle River, and there is a giant poop processing facility right on the border between the other two. The high schools play an annual game called the Poop Bowl, and whoever loses has to claim the poop tower for the following year. That is a true and verifiable fact about the town where I built my company.

I drove up there every morning of the worst year of my life. Essex was never the problem. Essex was fine, and I would have driven to Essex forever if the days had gone anywhere once I arrived.

Is Hope Helping Or Hurting Me?

Every day of the worst stretch of my life ran the same loop. I woke up, drove to Essex trying to solve our problems on the way, spent the whole day getting so close to solving them that I could touch the victory, and then watched it all get demolished just short of the goal line. Then I went home, went to bed, woke up, and ran the loop again. After enough laps around that track, I figured out that it wasn’t overcoming the obstacles that was going to kill me; it was hope. I actually started to wonder if I could die of a broken heart.

Then one week, with the stress so thick in the air you could cut it with a knife, a miracle showed up in my inbox.

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At twenty-three I sold insurance out of an office above a bodega that looked out on a cemetery, and there was nothing glamorous about any of it, but all I needed was a dial tone. Phones slammed before I could say hello. Receptionists told me to fuck off. I cold-called my dick off and I got better at it every week, good enough that I brought in three of the top five clients the company had, so I asked my boss for a sit-down about my future and he suggested lunch at a Mexican café known for its margaritas. One of those was amazing. Two and I was drunk. Three and I was finished.

We sat outside at a dilapidated picnic table. I couldn’t tell you now what I ordered. One moonshine margarita deep, I made my case.

“I have brought in three of the top five clients for your company, I have built out your sales team from nothing, and I want to be a Partn...”

My boss cut me off before I got the word out. “NO.”

“Why not?”

“You make a lot of money, and I’m not letting you get a piece of my entire company. You don’t need it.”

I played it off like he was right. I made my face do the thing where it looks like a man taking a reasonable business position on the chin, and I let him pay for the margaritas, and I drove back to my cubicle a different person than the one who had left it, and he never had the first idea what he’d just done.

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Maryland in August is hot as all hell. The whole week before had run in the upper nineties with the kind of humidity that sits on you like a wet towel somebody left in a car, and then Friday showed up out of nowhere with a blue sky and no haze in it, and I looked at my calendar and found a window with absolutely nothing in it.

So I dropped the top on the ‘68 Camaro and went out on the country roads by the farm.

I got to the end of my driveway thinking this was about as good as a Friday gets. Then I had to sit and wait on a vehicle coming through, and it was an eighteen-wheeler, and I pulled out behind it and didn’t think one thing about it for maybe four seconds.

Then the smell hit.

Fertilizer. A full load of it, three feet off my hood, doing forty-five on a two-lane road with a double yellow and nowhere to go.

So I spent the next three miles looking at the prettiest sky I’d seen all summer, sitting in a car I love, on the one afternoon all week I had nothing to do, with my nose full of shit.

That’s the point where most people quit the day. They put the top up. They turn around at the next driveway. They decide they’ll go out tomorrow instead, when the road is clear. The road is never clear.

I stayed behind him. The sky was still doing what the sky was doing. The car still sounded the way it sounds. Three miles later we came to the same turn, and he put his blinker on and so did I, and as he swung wide and slow the way those trucks have to, I pulled onto the shoulder and went around him and came out the other side with a clean nose and the exact same blue sky I’d been under the whole time.

That’s what got me. Nothing about that Friday changed. Not the sky, not the temperature, not the car, not the empty calendar. The only thing that changed in three miles was what I could smell, and I had let it take the whole drive hostage.

I’ve had entire years that were those three miles. The thing I wanted sitting right there in front of me the whole time, a load of manure parked between me and any enjoyment of it, and me waiting on the road to open up before I’d let myself have a single minute of it.

Friday was still Friday. The Camaro was still the Camaro.

And there’s always a truck full of horse shit.

I started Tessemae’s in 2009 and I did not take more than a long weekend off until 2020, when the country shut down and the only thing anyone could do was sit on a Zoom call, which meant that for the first time in eleven years it did not matter where I was sitting. We went to northern Michigan for two weeks. I did not get there through wisdom or a book or some quiet realization about balance. I got there because the world closed and took the choice out of my hands.

Given a fork between staying inside the routine and the habits and the work, or flying somewhere to lie around, I stayed and did the thing I do, which is grind. I was a grinder then. I’m a grinder now. I’ve never once been embarrassed about it and I’m not about to start.

But one of the actual keys to our success had nothing to do with staying put. It was manufacturing serendipity. Somebody would mention offhand that they were meeting a buyer on the west coast that week, and I’d hear myself say, “Oh that’s great, of course, I’ll be in San Francisco tomorrow,” and then I’d go buy the ticket and fly across the country and try to make something out of nothing.

So the man who would not take a week for his wife and his children would get on a plane with sixteen hours notice for a stranger with a business card. Same airport, same seat, same money, and a completely different reason.

I learned the counter-argument in the gym, about twenty years later than I should have. As a young man I lifted through colds and through the flu and through a shoulder that had no business being under a bar, and I took maybe six days off a year, and I called that discipline. It was mostly fear of what I’d find if I stopped moving.

A Hungarian doctor named Hans Selye spent the 1930s stressing rats in a laboratory and worked out that a body under load moves through alarm, then resistance, then exhaustion, and Soviet sport scientists took that finding and built the model any decent strength coach will hand you today. The lift does not make you stronger. The lift damages you. Everything you’re actually after, the strength and the size and the capacity, gets built while you’re asleep and eating and doing nothing at all, and if you never give the body that window it quits adapting and just stacks up the damage. Which is precisely what I was doing, every day, on purpose, with pride, for a decade.

Routine and habit are the machinery of everything I’ve ever built and I’ll defend them to anybody who wants to argue about it. But run them long enough with no interruption and they start to resemble the old definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. A grinder’s idea of variety is moving from incline bench to flat bench.

I’m somewhere right now with no routine at all. I don’t know where the coffee is. I’m eating at hours I didn’t choose, sleeping in a bed that isn’t mine, moving my body in ways I didn’t plan, in weather I didn’t pick, and my head is doing the thing a head does when you pull the rails off it, which is handing me ideas I haven’t had in months.

My kids need this more than I do, and it took eleven years and a global shutdown for me to work that out.

They don’t need a break from a company. They need a childhood with more in it than a father who was very good at his job. Genevieve has spent years absorbing the grind secondhand, running a house around a man who was either at work or thinking about work, and she has earned a stretch of days where nobody’s phone rings and nothing is on fire.

Vacations were never really for me. I still don’t especially want them. I get antsy by the third afternoon and start hunting for something to repair, and there’s a version of me that would trade the whole thing for a quiet office and a list of shit to knock out.

So I go anyway, and I sit there with my hands getting restless, and I let the people I love have the version of me they should have had the whole time. I’m still not a vacation guy. I’m just finally old enough to understand that the next twenty years of work will be better because of the weeks I stopped, and that my children aren’t going to remember the twenty years. They’re going to remember the weeks.

The first time I ever set foot in a therapist’s office, I walked in as a joke. It was Matt’s counselor, the one he’d been seeing about how unhappy he was before Denver, and when Matt said the therapist wanted the brothers to come in, I said sure, we’d love that, do we get to lie down on a couch like in the movies? Matt didn’t laugh. The next day Brian and I walked into what looked like a hippy’s dorm room and met William, a big, tall, very happy certified counselor who specialized in addicts, grief, and marriages, and who ran that brutal family session with more skill than most executives I’ve paid six figures. I went in to win an argument. I left having watched a professional handle three stubborn brothers and an impossible conversation like it was his tenth that week, because it probably was. And then I drove back to my war and didn’t think about therapy again for years, because therapy was for other people. I was the guy holding everyone else up.

You know where that thinking ends, because you’ve already read the morning: four a.m., at my desk, pen down in my Moleskine, genuinely waiting to find out whether a man can die from stress. And the part that matters for this chapter is the lesson I extracted when my heart kept beating. I decided that I was alone, that no one was going to help me solve my problems except myself, and I got up and went to the gym and carried on. That conclusion was half right, and the half that was wrong nearly finished what the stress started. Own your problems, yes. Carry them with no one to talk to, no. I should have found someone to talk to years before I finally did. I thought it was weakness. It’s not. It’s survival, and the evidence was scattered all over my own story: the conference room where Brendan and I traded the real weight of it and both walked out lighter, the call to my billionaire buddy before the filing because I needed varsity insight instead of the bullshit going through my head, William’s office itself. Every time I actually talked to someone equipped for the conversation, things got better. I just refused to make it a system.

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If he dies today, do I regret not calling because I was a coward?

That was the only question I had, and I asked it about a man who had spent two years trying to take everything I built, and who was now lying in a hospital bed with the paperwork sitting between us unsigned.

Brendan was the one who called me.

“He’s in the hospital, man. He might not make it.”

He wanted me to make peace with Coach Fred before the deal got signed. Coach Fred was our lead investor and he sat on our board, and his lawyers had been inventing a new accusation against me every few days for years running. Now I was supposed to pick up the phone and be gracious about it. I told Brendan I would think about it, and I thought about it for a full day, and every hour of that day I wanted to tell him no. People talk about eating a frog like it’s a little chore you knock out before breakfast, and that isn’t what this was.

Coach Fred & Crew ran a system on you, and the system was almost impressive. Coach Fred was the head coach, all atta boy and let’s go get ’em, and Frick was the reasonable elder statesman who appealed to your rational side, and Frack was the unemotional entrepreneur who told you war stories to build rapport. They would call you about three different topics on the same afternoon, and not one of those calls ever resolved anything, and by dinner you were tired enough to sign your own house over just to make the phone stop ringing.

He also called himself a man of God and character, and he said it out loud, in rooms, to people, and I had watched him trade every piece of that away over two years for greed and ego and revenge.

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My mother spent my childhood on a lacrosse sideline screaming “Do something, No. 5! Do! Some! Thing!” at her own middle son, who was fourteen, and could hear her, and so could every father standing near her.

No Sports Dad in that league could touch her. She invented the salad dressing for the same reason she screamed at No. 5, which is that her boys would not eat their greens and she does not lose. We ate salads like they were ice cream sundaes. Score one for Mom.

So when I picked up the phone years later to tell her I was taking that recipe and building a company on it, I knew exactly who I was calling.

Can I work with family and friends?

Can I Work With Family And Friends?

The first person to tell me Tessemae’s was a terrible idea was the woman whose recipe it was. I was standing in my kitchen when I called her. “Mom, I’m going to take your dressing recipe and start a salad dressing company.” I paused and waited for the reaction, and it didn’t take long. “That’s the worst idea I have ever heard. That’s never going to work.” My mom doesn’t pull punches, and neither do I, so I told her I was starting the company with or without her and I was going to need the recipe because I was getting it into grocery stores. She laughed, and I hung up. Her name went on the bottle anyway.

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Barney sent the paperwork over and I read it three times looking for the typo.

The day before, Coach Fred had agreed to put in three million dollars. We had been producing product for four weeks with nothing coming back in, our old bank was sitting on a million and a half of our money plus two weeks of receipts, and a buyer at Big Box headquarters had never gotten around to changing a routing number, so every dollar we were owed was floating in the space between two banks while payroll came due like the tide. Fred and I settled it on the phone. His crew gets a second board seat, five seats total, two for them, two for me, one independent. A million wired that day, the rest by the end of the week.

Then his guy Barney called to say he would send over a draft for me to look at.

“Why would it be anything different than the previous agreement?”

“It’ll just include the new board structure.”

What showed up in my inbox proposed that the three million bought them the board seat and an additional thirty percent of my company.

I called him back, because I have always given a man the chance to tell me it was a mistake before I decide what he is.

“Is this a fucking joke? What kind of partner does this type of shit?”

He came right back at me, which I did not expect. “This is market for this type of last-minute request.”

“Do you still live in Connecticut?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Because I’m getting a baseball bat. I’m getting in my car right now, and I’m coming to beat you within an inch of your fucking life in front of your family. I hope you’re prepared.”

“THIS ISN’T PRODUCTIVE,” he squealed, and hung up.

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At two a.m., the night before the biggest meeting of our lives, my phone started blowing up. It took me a while to pick up, because I was in bed, at home, theoretically off the clock, and on the other end was our CMO, drunk and slurring after losing a wrestling match to my brother, and all I could decipher was “I’m fuckin done. Fuck all of you.” Then he hung up, and then Brian called, and I spent the small hours of the morning managing a meltdown from my pillow, and at eight a.m. the CMO called again from the airport to quit nine hours before the meeting. Notice where I was for all of it. Home. In bed. Next to my wife, down the hall from four sleeping kids. For fifteen years there was no off the clock, because the war had my number and I always picked up. I found out we were Inc. Magazine’s Entrepreneurs of the Year standing in a parking lot with 68 unread messages. While waiting on the grocery-chain verdict that would change everything, I went to the gym to burn off the anxiety and checked my phone every forty-five seconds. Board calls happened in the lacrosse parking lot. The phone came to dinner, to bed, to church, to the sideline.

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I wrote my dad a letter for his birthday, and he didn’t write back once, he wrote back three times, and he told me at the top of the first one that he’d rather take his time and walk me through the whole thing instead.

He starts with trees, because he always starts with trees. He ends somewhere I wasn’t expecting, with a dean, a standing ovation, and an admission about how long he has been out there walking by himself.

Unedited, the way he sent them.

Captured

Well, my dear and much admired Son, you have captured the very essence of all of the things I love about you. And of course, you captured my heart about 82 years ago.

There is so much in every phrase and paragraph that I wonder where to begin. If it’s OK, and at the risk of being superficial, I’d like to take a slow, long walk with you through this masterpiece and comment here and there with both the pedestrian and maybe even the….profound? So here goes:

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I was stuck behind a white Prius the other day with the windows tinted so dark you couldn’t see a soul inside of it, and there was exactly one sticker on the back glass, and it said In Fauci We Trust.

I sat at that light reading it like it was written in another language, because a thing like that was never a policy position, it’s a profession of faith. Somebody bought it and peeled the backing off and pressed it onto the glass of the car they drive to work every morning, and what they were telling the rest of us was that they had found themselves a man worth believing in at a moment when they couldn’t work out the truth on their own.

You had one too, and maybe it wasn’t on your bumper, but it was a governor or a network or a guy you followed who was very sure about all of it, or it was your brother-in-law who kept sending you the links at eleven o’clock at night. Everybody picked a knight, because everybody was scared, and being scared and certain feels a whole lot better than being scared and lost. Mine was my own gut, which is its own kind of arrogance, and I’ll get to what that cost me.

Then Rand Paul released more than a thousand pages of Anthony Fauci’s private diary last week, and the knight turned out to be a knave.

Go read the entry from March 15, 2020, where Fauci writes that Bill de Blasio decided to close New York City’s schools after a conversation the two of them had, and that he went on and told the mayor he ought to close the bars and the restaurants too, and that de Blasio said he’d do it on his recommendation. That same day he writes about a call with Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff, who told him that based on his television appearances California was closing its schools and its bars and its restaurants as well. Two of the biggest school systems in this country got shut inside a single afternoon, downstream of one man and whatever he happened to say on TV that morning.

Then read what he wrote about where the virus came from, where in private he is turning the question over and putting down on paper that nobody is a hundred percent certain including him. Out here the rest of us were being told the matter was settled and anybody who asked about it was a crank.

For six years the people who said the quiet thing out loud got called conspiracy theorists, and they got throttled on every platform, and some of them lost jobs, and a lot of them got told by their own families that they were a danger to somebody’s grandmother. The doubt was in the room the entire time, in the handwriting of the one man whose certainty everybody else had been ordered to obey.

Our plant never closed, not one single day of it, because we bought two fifteen-seater vans and hired drivers to pick our guys up at their houses every morning and run them home every night, and we tested every one of them every day and nobody caught a thing, and we told them straight out that nobody was getting fired for not showing up.

One guy had a scare, called out sick, real apologetic about the whole thing, and then stayed out, and by week two he was posting pictures on social media from a beach in Florida with his girlfriend, so we called him up.

“Buddyyyyyyy, I thought you had Covid and were very sick?”

Silence.

“Well, um, my girlfriend had it and then . . . nah man, we went on vacation in Florida . . . I’ll be back in two days, my bad.”

Meanwhile our HR department was coming completely unglued about how barbaric it was to make these people come to work, so we finally quit guessing at it and got everybody together on the floor and asked the guys directly whether they wanted us to shut the whole thing down so they could be home and safe like the television kept telling them to be. Nobody said a word, they just started looking at each other, and then two of them pulled us aside after the meeting was over.

“Bros, this is some white people shit. We don’t believe in it. We leave here and go to block parties until it’s time to come back to work. You motherfuckers are trippin’. We have never been so happy.”

We told them anytime they needed us to sponsor a block party we were in, and we never had a single outbreak in that building, and the only man we lost that year we didn’t lose to a virus.

Jonathan ran our production floor for five years, and he was about my age and had played a little ball at Maryland, and he could make an entire shift go faster just by walking onto it. He was also the biggest ladies’ man I have ever been around in my life. A new woman would start on the production floor on Monday and Jonathan would be involved with her by Friday, and sometimes they’d find out about each other and there would be a full-tilt UFC fight in the middle of my building over who got to keep him.

“Please, Jonathan, this is not going to end well for you if you keep banging other people’s girlfriends.”

He’d laugh at me and go right back to doing exactly what he was doing.

One of his girls called him on a Wednesday evening after work and asked if he’d come help her move, and it was a setup, because her boyfriend was waiting for him and shot him in the street the second he got out of his car, and then the two of them sped off and left him lying there. He was still alive when the ambulance got to him and he made it all the way to the hospital before he died, and then we weren’t allowed to stand together in a church and bury him.

His funeral was live streamed, so we watched a young man get put in the ground through a screen because somebody had decided a church was too dangerous a place for grown men to grieve in. About ten of our key production people never really came back after that, and they tried a couple of times but everything inside that building reminded them of him, and eventually they just quit. Those were the guys who actually made the salad dressing, and they walked away from jobs they loved because they never got to put a hand on the casket and say his name out loud with everybody else.

Jonathan isn’t in anybody’s count, and neither are the ten men who couldn’t walk back through that door. You’ve got your own list too, your kid’s senior year or your mother’s last good year or the business you spent eleven years building or the friend who quit speaking to you over a piece of cloth. None of it ever got counted anywhere, because we only ever counted the one thing.

Then on his way out the door President Biden handed Fauci a preemptive pardon covering eleven years of anything he might have done, which is not a pardon for a charge somebody actually filed, it’s a pardon issued in advance for offenses nobody had bothered to name.

And when the documents were finally public and it was his turn to answer for them the way he had always said he would, he went in front of the Senate on the twenty-ninth of July and gave a short statement about being persecuted. Then he took the Fifth more than a hundred times in a row about the contents of his own diary.

That’s his legal right and I’d defend anybody who used it. But a knight doesn’t need it, because a knight sits down and says here’s what I knew and here’s when I knew it and here’s what I got wrong, and then he eats whatever comes next. That’s the entire reason a person puts a man on their bumper, because they believe he’ll do exactly that on the day it comes around.

Back in 1984 a Soviet defector named Yuri Bezmenov sat down for an interview and explained how you take a country apart without ever firing a shot, and he had been a KGB informant, and he laid the whole thing out in four stages.

The first one he called demoralization, and he said it takes fifteen or twenty years, which is roughly how long a generation spends sitting inside its schools and its media and its entertainment, and the point of it was never to sell anybody one particular lie. The point, in his words, was to change the perception of reality so that despite an abundance of information nobody is able to come to sensible conclusions, and he said that once a people has been demoralized you can put real evidence right in front of their faces and they will not be able to see it.

The second is destabilization, where you go after the economy and the institutions and whatever confidence a country still has in its own ability to run itself. The third is crisis, and his point there was simple, which is that people will swallow inside of six weeks of fear what they’d have told you to go to hell about for thirty years.

The fourth one he named with a completely straight face and he called it normalization, where the new order gets locked into place after the crisis is over and then gets handed to everybody as simply the way that things are now. Sit with that word for a second, because forty years after a KGB defector used normalization as a punchline we sat in our own houses saying the new normal to each other on the news and in work emails and on signs taped to the doors of the churches they had padlocked, and not one of us laughed.

The historians will tell you Bezmenov’s interview is one defector’s account of his own experience and not a verified blueprint for anything, and that’s fair enough, so take it as a description instead of a prophecy, and as a description of right now it is uncomfortably exact. A thousand pages dropped last week and it moved almost nobody, which is the tell, because most people won’t read them and the ones who do will walk back out holding exactly what they walked in with, and that is every bit as true of my side as it is of yours.

What we lost was never trust in one man. It was trust in the science, which used to name a method and now mostly names a guy on television, and trust in the institutions, and trust in the media, and trust in independent journalism, which is the thing this country used to hold up as what made us different from everybody else. And it was trust in each other, in our own neighbors, to look at the same information and sort it out and still be friends on the other side of the argument. Friendships ended over this and Thanksgiving tables split over this, and underneath every one of those losses is the same one, which is that we quit being able to just talk to one another.

That is how you demoralize a nation, and it isn’t done with one big lie that somebody could point at and prosecute, it’s done with six years of being handled, until facts aren’t facts anymore and every last one of us is sitting behind our own tinted glass with our own sticker on it.

I don’t know how we get it back if we can’t discuss what needs discussing. But I know it doesn’t start with the diary or the pardon or the hearing or any of the men involved in any of it, and that it starts instead with two people who disagree about all of it sitting down together and getting through a single hour without either one of them reaching for a team.

So go find your one person this week, and make it the hard one, and ask them what the last six years actually cost them, and then shut your mouth and let them tell you.

When I was ten I wanted to pitch, and that job went to the coach’s son the way it always does, so they stuck me out in right field where I couldn’t hurt anybody. There were ground bees living out there. I spent a whole season getting stung in the outfield of a game nobody was letting me play, thinking this sucks, and then one afternoon I looked over at the next field and saw a bunch of kids in helmets beating the shit out of each other with sticks.

That was lacrosse, and it became my ticket to college and my brothers’ ticket to college and the reason I coached for twenty years, and I found it because a coach played favorites and a nest of bees wouldn’t leave me alone. My mother wasn’t going to plan that for me either, and she was no soft touch about any of it, because she spent our entire childhood on the sideline hollering at my brother in his number five jersey.

“Do something, No. 5! Do! Some! Thing!”

But if I’d been the parent standing on that sideline instead of the kid in the outfield, I would have gotten my son moved to pitcher. I’d have had a quiet word with somebody and told myself I was being an advocate, and I would have taken the bees and the boredom and the whole miserable summer away from him, and lacrosse never happens.

You did some version of that this week. You had a bad meeting or a bad scan or a bad phone call, and you walked through your own front door with your expression already fixed, and you decided the loving thing was to carry it by yourself so they’d never have to see any of it.

We have it backwards, both of us, and it took a surfer and a sword to show me how far.

Laird Hamilton did an interview where he compared raising kids to the way a Japanese sword gets made, and the way he tells it you get the steel red hot and beat the hell out of it and dump it in cold water and then run the whole thing again, over and over, until you’ve got the hardest sharpest blade in the world. Then he said it’s called parenting and not childing, because the process is for us and not for them.

The forge is even better than he made it sound. The smith paints the blade with clay before the quench, thick along the spine and almost none along the edge, so the bare edge cools fast and turns into martensite while the covered spine cools slow and stays soft, and that soft spine is the entire reason the sword survives contact with anything. The same hardness that lets an edge cut will also make it snap, and a blade hardened all the way through shatters the first time somebody hits it. The elite version of that tool was never the hardest possible version, it’s the one where a man who knew what he was doing decided in advance which parts to leave soft.

I could have used that around 2018, when I was doing my best impression of a blade hardened all the way through. Everything was on fire at once and I’d sit up at night running the same loop about what Coach Fred was going to do and how we’d ever pay Ryan’s group back in April, and none of it was problem solving, all of it was worrying, and worrying does nothing but cost you sleep you can’t afford. So one night I sat down to write my way to an answer, and I started with all my problems and somehow ended up writing about all my blessings instead, and by the end of it I’d made a promise to myself and signed my name to it.

The next morning I woke up in peace and I still cannot tell you why, because nothing had changed and things were in worse shape than the day before. Somewhere in that writing I’d come to the realization that the whole journey was happening for me instead of to me, and that one preposition rearranged everything, and it took me years to notice it was the same sentence Laird was saying about his daughters.

When God wanted David to be king He sent him Goliath, and He didn’t send a crown or a coronation or a mentor with a five-step plan, He sent a nine-foot problem every other man in that army was too sensible to walk toward. The giant was never in the way of David becoming king, the giant was the mechanism.

And not one of us wants any of it, which is the part nobody says out loud at dinner. We want the blade without the forge and the wisdom without the decade and the character without the humiliation that manufactures it, and if you could buy it or download it we’d all own it already, me first in line. But character is not information and you cannot be told into it, and it gets installed by pressure over time, the same way that edge gets installed by heat and water and a patient man with a hammer.

When it finally ended we burned fifteen years of my life on a pile of pallets, and my four kids stood there in the dark and watched it with the grown-ups. For most of those years I thought my job was to protect them from the fire, and I was wrong in a way I’m still embarrassed about, because the job was to let them watch a man walk through it and get back up. Nobody had lied to them about a single day of it, so that fire was a ceremony instead of a trauma.

Joseph Campbell spent his life mapping these stories and found that the hero never gets to keep what he earned down in the pit, because the last movement of every one of them is carrying it home and handing it to somebody who hasn’t been down there yet. That’s what Laird meant. It’s for us and not for them, because we’re the ones getting forged out here, and the forging is only worth a damn if we bring the blade back and put it to work for the people we made.

So whatever is stinging you right now, and something is, that’s the clay and the water and the hammer, and it is not happening to you and it is not an interruption of the life you were supposed to be having.

Let them watch you take it. Then go look at the next field over.

I have never once regretted throwing a man out of my building.

What I regret, more times than I can count, is the opposite. Sitting politely through the rest of a meeting because the guy across the table had a title, a flight itinerary, and a way of talking that made disagreeing with him feel like proof I didn’t understand my own business.

That same year, I let a piece of feedback I couldn’t stand rewrite the entire company. Both were the right call. For a long time I couldn’t have told you why.

When should I ignore feedback vs. pivot?

We were desperate for an investment banker, and a guy out of Chicago who “specialized in growth businesses” said he could fly in the next day. We set up the conference room to put our best foot forward, brought in lunch, put on polo shirts, and got ready to impress him. The man who walked in looked worn down, could have been forty or sixty for all I could tell, with skin that hadn’t seen natural light in years and glistened from stress like he was covered in Vaseline. He sat down and started selling me like a whiny first grader. “I don’t know how anyone is going to get this done,” he said. “This business is kind of a piece of shit. No wonder the first guy fucked it up. You really need to be an expert in these types of shitty deals to be able to navigate the chaos.”

My blood started boiling, and after about five minutes of this nonsense, I looked at him and told him to pack up his shit and get out of the building. “Are you kidding me? I just flew here from Chicago to help you raise money.” I stood up. “You have three minutes to get out of the building before I beat you within an inch of your life.” He scurried out.

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We were walking to a meeting in Boston when it started to snow, big fat flakes coming down over the street, and I remember thinking it was actually beautiful. Then we stepped into the lobby of the building where we were pitching and our finance chief took her briefcase and softball pitched it into the wall and screamed, “I HATE GETTING WET!”

The whole lobby stopped and stared at her. I broke the silence with, “Are you fucking cool? What the fuck is up?”

She was on the verge of crying. “I hate getting wet. I hate it.”

“OK, that’s fine,” I said, “but we have a meeting in five minutes, so why don’t you get your shit together.”

Upstairs we walked into a room that was entirely mahogany, with old oil paintings of ships this guy’s family probably owned back when they were conquering America, and she pulled out her laptop to run the numbers. It was destroyed. The throw had detached the screen from the keyboard, wires were hanging out of the side, and the screen was cracked straight across. I gave her a nasty look, turned to our host, and said, “These Boston streets are mean even for laptops. Thank God we aren’t Yankees fans.” Everybody laughed, I gave the presentation from memory, and we salvaged the meeting.

I flew home concerned. Concerned is the actual word I used at the time, and concerned is not a decision. I was worried she wouldn’t make it to the finish line of the money deals we were closing, and worrying was the entirety of what I did about it.

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A woman has cleaned your house every other Thursday for six years. She has a key, she has met your kids, she knows where things go better than you do. One afternoon you go looking for the two hundred dollars you left on the kitchen counter and you count a hundred and forty.

You count it again. You decide you probably tipped the landscaper out of it. You did not tip the landscaper.

It wasn’t the first time. It was the first time you caught her.

Nobody wants that conversation. She’s been in your life for six years, she’ll cry, she might be innocent, and the benefit of the doubt costs you absolutely nothing this afternoon, so you’ll take it. I took it for years, with people who cost me a hell of a lot more than sixty bucks.

This one comes from The Undressed Field Guide, one question a week, sixty in all, each one something I’ve been asked or asked myself more times than I can count.

Today’s is the one I answered wrong every time it came up.

How Do I Handle Employee Theft?

Over the years, people stole from me. Product walking out the back door, cash that never quite added up, hours billed to the company that nobody ever actually worked. And I’m a little embarrassed to admit that almost every single time, my very first move was to build the thief an alibi inside my own head.

Maybe inventory got miscounted. Maybe he was going through something at home. Maybe I misremembered what the drawer was supposed to hold. I could construct a reasonable, generous, entirely fictional explanation faster than any prosecutor could have torn it down, and I did it eagerly, because the explanation let me off a hook I badly did not want to be on.

It wasn’t a misunderstanding. Not once.

What I was really protecting when I did that was never the person. Admitting that someone I trusted had stolen from me meant admitting I’d been played, that my read on a human being I had let inside my own company was flat wrong, and that particular wound cuts deeper than whatever cash actually went missing. The rationalization was never mercy for the thief. It was anesthesia for my own ego, and while I was busy numbing myself, the theft kept right on happening.

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My brother Brian stood on the porch of a townhouse he owned, knocking on his own front door, and nobody answered.

My mom’s Suburban was parked in the driveway. Somebody was inside. Brian stood out there long enough to understand that the door was not going to open, and then he got back in his car and drove home.

Darren was Brian’s oldest friend from high school. He came up the way a lot of guys we grew up around came up, in and out of trouble, and my dad spent years driving to courthouses to stand up as a character witness for him. When Darren was facing his last strike, my dad made the judge a promise. Give this kid one more chance and I will get him into college. Then he went out and did it, and got Darren a lacrosse scholarship to a D2 school out of state.

Darren turned it down. He got his girlfriend pregnant with twins, started selling drugs, and somewhere in there took a knife from his sternum to his belly button in a fight and got gutted. Years later we spotted him working a road crew in Annapolis. We called him that same afternoon and asked if he’d rather make salad dressing instead. He said yes before we finished the sentence.

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I was in the school pickup line the day the Big Box miracle landed. We had just won the thirty-six-million-dollar contract, all four kids piled into the car, and as we pulled out, Coach Fred called. “I’m wiring three million right now, and my associate will wire the other two million Monday.” I asked him what he meant, why now, and he said, “Because I said I would. You still want it, right?” I laughed, said yes please, hung up, and somewhere in the back seat somebody asked what was for dinner.

That was the good version. For every call like that one there were fifty of the other kind, taken in the same seat, with the same audience, four kids reading my face in the rearview mirror. When we were drowning in debt and lawsuits, my kids knew something was wrong. Kids always know. The only question I actually controlled was what they did with the knowing.

I learned that the year there was no money for presents. Genevieve and I piecemealed a Christmas together out of pocket change and I performed joy like my life depended on it, big smiles, big morning, Dad’s fine, everything’s fine, while every day outside that living room was a slog in the fucking muck. Adults would have extended me the professional courtesy of pretending to believe it. My kids just stared at the performance with those unblinking eyes, and I watched them file it away. I wasn’t protecting them from the storm. I was teaching them that Dad’s smile and the truth are two separate weather systems.

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