The Red Thread

This is the whole picture.

Feb 28, 2026

I’ve been thinking for months about what my first post here would be.

Something topically sharp, maybe. Something about AI and the collapse of competitive advantage. Something clever or contrarian that would make you think, “I should subscribe to this.”

But the truest thing I can offer is what’s actually been happening. And I think starting there — rather than performing a polished entrance — is the whole point of building a space like this.

So. Here’s what’s been happening.

A friend called this morning. Her mother is back in emergency. I could hear it — the crack in her voice, the tiredness underneath the composure. And then, almost in the same breath: “How am I supposed to keep my business going? What happens if I go quiet on LinkedIn for a month? I have a tween, a partner, and a parent in crisis — and I’m supposed to be posting high-value content?”

After we hung up, I sat with it. Not because her situation is unusual, but because I know exactly where she is. I’ve been there. I’m still there.

In the summer of 2024, my mother broke her back. What followed have been two years I’m still inside of: ambulances, midnight calls, a hundred-kilometre hospital drives, hallucinations from medication, and the slow work of building her a new normal. She’s a fiercely independent, almost-89-year-old woman with a sharp mind and a deep distrust of the medical system - the kind of woman who smears manukah honey on her wounds instead of following protocol and gets ‘fired’ by her community nursing team for non-compliance. (I didn’t know that was possible either.)

Things got serious. Antibiotics failing. Gangrene starting. Four surgeries. A dementia diagnosis. Ten weeks in hospital. And then - remarkably - home. She’s improved since, which feels like a small miracle. But I took over all of her executive functions along the way - finances, appointments, medical decisions, groceries - and I know more is coming. I just don’t know when.

Through all of this, I was parenting an eleven-year-old navigating her own transitions. My husband was diagnosed with prostate cancer this summer. (Yes, the good cancer. Still cancer.) I was running a consulting business, finding new clients, producing work for CEOs who deserved nothing less than the best, not wanting to let down a partner, and maintaining a professional presence that looked sharp and composed. Because when you’re self-employed, there’s no brand to hide behind. No corporation paying your pension. No work, no pay.

I don’t think I even realized how depleted I was. There were warning signs - physical, emotional - but I pushed through them. Because what else do you do?

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

There’s a red thread that runs through all of it - the strategic decisions, the personal crises, the moments you hold someone else’s fear or pain while managing your own. We pretend these are separate lives. They aren’t.

The founder who seems to make a sudden, strange strategic pivot? There’s often a depth of personal reality driving it that they’ll never share publicly. The consultant who quietly disappears from the circuit for six months? The executive whose decision-making shifts and nobody can figure out why? There’s a story underneath — a parent in decline, a diagnosis, a child in crisis — and it’s shaping every professional call they make. The world just doesn’t see it.

But the thread is there. The skills we build navigating personal complexity - making decisions with imperfect information, researching and advocating under pressure, holding steady when the ground moves - these aren't soft skills. They're the same capacities we bring to a boardroom. We've just built professional cultures that pretend the thread doesn't exist.

That costs us. Not just personally - strategically. Capacity is a finite resource. When it’s depleted, everything downstream gets more expensive: decisions get worse, relationships get brittle, the strategy that looked clear on paper stops translating into action. The person holding everything together is a variable in whether anything else holds. Pretending otherwise isn’t professionalism. It’s a blind spot.

The past year changed something in me. A clear recognition that the compartments I’d been living in were no longer working.

Somewhere along the way we decided that smart people talk about work in one place and life in another. I don't buy it anymore. The AI rabbit hole I fell into at midnight, the financial decision that's keeping me up, the book that reframed how I think about ambition, the founder I can't stop thinking about -that's not four different conversations. It's one.

This is the salon where that conversation lives.

A space to pull on the thread that weaves through all of it — the strategic and the personal, the books and the decisions, the patterns you spot at work and the ones that follow you home. Because the thread was always there. We just stopped tracing it.

In Designing Your Life, Stanford’s Bill Burnett and Dave Evans distill their entire philosophy into ten words: Get curious. Talk to people. Try stuff. Tell your story. They also point out that whatever chapter you’re in right now is roughly 14% of your total life experience - which means there’s an enormous amount of unlived life ahead, and you find your way into it by living, not planning.

So that’s what this is. Getting curious. Trying stuff. Telling the story.

Some weeks I’ll write a longer essay connecting ideas across technology, finance, leadership, and life. Some weeks it'll be ‘rangier’ - whatever I'm reading, watching, or arguing about (ahem) over dinner. It won’t always be this personal. But it will always be this honest.

Pull up a chair. I’m glad you’re here.