what i mean when i say success, rewritten

There's a version of success most of us grew up with.

Work hard, move up, stay consistent, accumulate. Keep going. Don't stop. It's a clean line from here to there, and for a long time I believed in it pretty completely.

Then a few things happened that didn't fit the line.

In 2018, I ended up strapped to a hospital bed and sedated during a manic episode. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and spent the next three months on medical leave. In 2025, I was laid off from a job I'd held for 11 years, on my 11-year anniversary, of all days.

Neither of those moments looked like success. They looked like the opposite.

But here's what I've come to understand: the moments that force you to stop are often the moments that force you to actually look at where you're going. And a lot of us, if we're honest, haven't looked in a while.

It's Not Always the Catastrophe That Changes You

I think we've collectively decided that the inflection points that matter are the big, obvious ones. The diagnosis. The divorce. The loss. The failure everyone can see.

But that's not the whole picture.

My manic episode in 2018 wasn't triggered by something terrible. It was triggered, in part, by getting a puppy. A genuinely happy thing. Something I chose and wanted. The cards had been stacking for years: overwork, undersleep, no real boundaries, a relationship with my job that had quietly become the center of my identity. And one positive change tipped everything over.

I've heard variations of that story from nearly every person I've sat down with since I started working on this show. A baby. A promotion. A move to a city they'd always dreamed of. A sabbatical. A marriage. Something they chose, something they were excited about, and then suddenly they were standing in the middle of a life that looked nothing like the one they'd been planning.

The inflection point isn't always the worst day. Sometimes it's a perfectly ordinary Tuesday that somehow changes everything. Sometimes it's the best day of your life so far.

What This Show Is and Isn't

Success, Rewritten is not a show about bouncing back.

I want to be clear about that because there's a whole genre of content that works like this: hard thing happens, person struggles, person overcomes, person is now more successful than ever. The hard thing was secretly a gift. The end.

That's not what I'm making.

The people I've been talking to are in the middle of things. They've navigated genuinely hard periods and come out somewhere different, not always somewhere better by the metrics they started with, but somewhere more honest. More aligned. More theirs. And a lot of them would tell you they couldn't have imagined their current life before the thing that forced them to change, but they also wouldn't describe themselves as finished or resolved or done.

That ambiguity is the point.

What I've observed after more than a decade talking to entrepreneurs and small business owners is that the best story is almost never "I had a plan and it worked." It's "I had a plan, something interrupted it, and I had to figure out who I was without it." And then, after a lot of uncertain middle, something new emerged that was more honest than the original.

That's not inspiration. That's just what keeps happening when you ask people to tell the truth about how they got where they are.

Who This Is For

If you've hit a wall and wondered what you're actually building toward, this show is for you.

If you've gone through something hard, or something that looked good from the outside but quietly reorganized everything, and you haven't quite found the language for it yet, this show is for you.

If you know someone in the middle of a pivot they didn't choose, share it with them. Not because it'll fix anything. But because sometimes the most useful thing is hearing that other people are standing in the same uncertain middle and still moving forward anyway.

The guests coming on this show are entrepreneurs, executives, athletes, creators, and leaders. They've built things, lost things, rebuilt things. They don't have it figured out. But they've gotten far enough down the road to look back at the moment everything changed, and reflect on it honestly.

That reflection is where the value is. Not in the tidy lesson at the end. In the actual looking.

Success, Rewritten launches March 17, 2026. Episode one is my story. I'll see you there.