The Adventure Ahead

Everyone Wants To Rule The World

Photo by Dimitar Donovski on Unsplash

I lost my father in December. Unexpectedly. The kind of loss where you don’t get the long goodbye, the hospice conversations, the chance to say the last thing you meant to say for forty years.

One day he was there, the quiet center of gravity my entire family orbited, and the next he wasn’t.

My father spent his life leading people, and he did it without ever needing anyone to notice how good he was at it. He was excellence without an audience. That is the hardest kind to be, and the hardest kind to lose, because there’s no highlight reel. Just an absence shaped exactly like a man.

The six months since have been the hardest of my adult life. Grief doesn’t move in a straight line and nobody warns you about that. Some weeks I ran my search practice, wrote my newsletter, coached candidates through interviews, and felt almost normal.

Other weeks I’d be on a call with a client and a sentence would land wrong, some offhand mention of a father-son dynamic on a leadership team, and I’d have to mute myself for four seconds to get my voice back. Loss doesn’t respect your calendar. It shows up in Q2 board meetings and grocery store parking lots with the same indifference.

I’m telling you this not because I think my grief is special.

Grief is the least original thing a human being can feel. I’m telling you because I’ve spent six months learning something about time that I think applies to every one of you reading this, whatever you’re carrying into the back half of this year. Here it is: the past has a gravitational pull, and grief amplifies it, and if you let it, that pull will keep you circling the same six months indefinitely.

You will optimize for looking backward. You will get very good at it. And you will miss the entire second half of your life happening in real time twelve inches in front of your face.

My father never once, in the eulogies I’ve now heard secondhand from a dozen people who loved him, described his own life as a retrospective. He described it as an assignment. Every day was the assignment. That’s not a metaphor I’m imposing on him after the fact to make myself feel better. That’s just who he was, and it’s the single loudest thing echoing in my head six months later.

So here’s where I land, and here’s why I think this matters for anyone building something, whether that’s a company, a career, a family, or a search firm named around the idea that the work itself is the reward.

Living in Forward Motion

Looking back is not the same as living backward. You are allowed, you are required, to carry the people and the losses forward with you. What you cannot do, what none of us can afford to do, is let the rearview mirror become the only mirror you check. The adventure is not behind you. It was never going to be behind you. The adventure, infuriatingly and mercifully, is always still ahead, waiting on the other side of whatever grief or setback or bad quarter you’re currently staring down.

I think about the state of the labor market right now and I see the same trap everywhere. Recruiters and hiring leaders spending the first half of the year cataloging everything that went wrong. The layoffs. The ghost jobs. The AI disruption nobody fully understands yet. The candidates who ghosted, the offers that got declined, the budget that got cut in March. All of it real, all of it worth learning from, none of it worth living in. The back half of the year does not care how hard your first half was. It only cares what you build next. That’s not a cruel feature of time. That’s the most generous thing about it. Every single day is a hard reset if you’re willing to take it.

Embracing The Reset

I’m choosing to take it. Not because the grief is resolved, it isn’t, and I don’t think grief for a man like my father ever fully resolves, it just changes shape. I’m choosing to take it because the alternative is spending the next six months performing sadness instead of honoring the actual man, who would have found that performance insufferable. He didn’t build a forty-year career on being memorialized. He built it by showing up on the next ordinary Tuesday and doing the work again. If I want to actually carry him forward instead of just carrying his absence, the only honest way to do that is to go build something. Write the next essay. Take the next call. Close the next search with the same judgment he brought to every congregant who walked into his office needing something he couldn’t always fix but could always sit with.

This is the frame I’d offer anyone heading into the second half of the year with a hard first half behind them, grief-shaped or otherwise. Layoffs, a health scare, a company that didn’t hit its number, a marriage that got harder before it got easier. Whatever your version of December is.

You don’t owe the past your entire future.

You owe it acknowledgment, you owe it the lessons, and then you owe yourself the audacity to keep going like the story isn’t finished, because it isn’t. Nobody’s story is finished at the halfway point of any year. That’s just where the plot happens to be sitting when the calendar flips.

My daughter is going to grow up mostly in a world where her grandfather exists as photographs and other people’s memories instead of a voice in the next room.

I cannot fix that.

What I can do, what I am doing, is make sure the adventure ahead of her, and ahead of me, doesn’t get smaller because of what’s behind us. That’s the whole inheritance I actually control. Not the grief. The forward motion.

So if you’re reading this wondering whether it’s reasonable to be optimistic about the second half of the year while you’re still sitting with your own version of a hard six months, here’s my answer. It’s not just reasonable. It’s the only responsible move left. Pessimism is a rearview mirror with delusions of being a windshield. It feels like wisdom. It’s actually just fear wearing wisdom’s coat. The people who built anything worth building, the companies, the families, the legacies, all of them took a hard six months and used it as fuel instead of an anchor. That’s not toxic positivity. That’s just math. You cannot drive forward while staring exclusively backward, and you cannot mourn well by refusing to live.

We’re at the beginning of the half of the year that hasn’t happened yet. Nobody has written it. Not the market, not your competitors, not grief, not me. I don’t know exactly what I’m building in the back half of this year, but I know it will have my father’s fingerprints on it whether I mention his name or not, because judgment, patience, and quiet excellence are the only inheritance that actually compounds. The adventure is still ahead. It was always still ahead. The only real question left is whether you’re willing to walk into it, or whether you’re going to keep facing the wrong direction while it passes you by.

I’m walking into it. I hope you will too.