A few years ago I fired myself from the day to day management of TrueML. The pressures of heavy travel and daily firefighting were wearing me out and also taking away from the focus I needed to have: working with investors and thinking strategically about the group and its future. I hired an incredible President and refocused my energy on high leverage work.

This post isn’t about that. It’s about what comes after that: Nothing.

No emails. No mid-night fire fights. No screaming customers. No surprise audits. The slowdown from running at a speed that was too hard to sustain to doing the opposite almost gave me whiplash.

For a while I thought my life was over. Not in the physical sense, but the figurative one: I still run a company, so I’m not going to start another one. I was already in my 40s, had several exits, was (and am) married with kids and a house and some pets. I had nothing to prove: if there’s a game, I’m on the podium. I was set, but I was also terrified: is this it? Will my life just look like this until I die? Is there nothing else to look forward to?

Yes, a typical mid-life crisis. You’re probably right. Lots has been written about them; I probably won’t say something new altogether. I’m writing this post to organize my thoughts and to give others in the same situation a sense of what worked for me. The good news is I didn’t blow up my marriage, act like I wasn’t my age, or get a face lift. 

What did I do? I had a few deep thoughts and discovered at least one solution that was embarrassingly simple: I realized that my identity wasn’t about being a decision maker at a company or a board member. I wanted to have relevance in a system of value that meant something to me, one with real stakes. What do I mean by that? I’ll say more in a series of short posts that discuss what did and didn’t work for me.