Hello Kind and Curious Leader,

Three weeks ago I was sitting in a Starbucks at Glasgow Airport with ninety minutes before I could check in, at the end of a two-week writing sabbatical off the coast of Ireland and Scotland. I know how that sentence reads. A fortnight on a ship with a laptop is a privilege, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I want you to take from it is not the ship. The thing that changed was the calendar. For fourteen days nobody could reach me, one heavy piece of work got done each morning, and the rest of the day was mine. You can build that with a closed door and a Saturday.

In those ninety minutes I wrote a letter to myself, because something had come loose on the trip and I wanted to catch it before the flight home turned it back into a plan. I have cleaned it up for you. I have not softened it.

Glasgow Airport, August 27, 2026

Jim,

You are sitting in a Starbucks with ninety minutes to kill and two weeks of evidence in front of you. Write this down before the flight home turns it back into a plan.

What the last two weeks proved

You left the desk. You got on a ship with a laptop and a loose intention, and you wrote more in fourteen days than the calendar at home produces in two months. The second book went from a pile of editor’s notes to a finished tenth draft, the one that ships. The third book, which nobody has heard about yet, went from an idea to an outline and a development document. A novel you started in 2020 and abandoned came back to life on a rainy afternoon in the Outer Hebrides.

You also gave away your own book to a stranger, lost a paperback in a hotel move, and came home with a David Sedaris you found in a bookshop in Ullapool. You saw places you had not scheduled and met people you had not researched. Nothing about that was controlled, and it was the most productive stretch of the year.

That is not a nice memory to file under travel. It is data about how you work. The looser hand produced the better result. Remember that the next time you feel the urge to tighten.

What I have been doing wrong

I have been running my life like a launch plan. Dates for the next move. Dates for the move after that. Every one of them sensible on paper, and I built gates into the plan so the decisions would wait for facts. Then I spent the year checking the locks on doors I had deliberately left open.

The plan is not the problem. The posture is. I have been dictating outcomes on a calendar instead of reacting to what actually happens. The line I chose to carry into next year is Control the Controllable, but Leave Space for the Possible. I have been living the first half and skipping the second.

What is in motion that I cannot control

Four things are out of my hands right now, and all four are the reason to wait. A talk I gave will find its audience when it finds it. The second book publishes in the spring, and no launch plan on earth tells me how readers will receive it. The novel goes to market when it is ready, and the market answers on its own schedule. The third book is barely an outline, and the book itself will tell me what it wants to be.

I do not need to decide anything about the shape of my sixties until at least two of those have spoken. Reacting to facts is not passivity. It is the discipline I teach other people.

The clock

Dad died at 72. One grandfather at 69, the other at 71. I am sixty-one and a half, and most days I can hear a clock in my head saying I may have ten or fifteen years left.

I am going to take that clock seriously enough to answer it properly, because it has been giving me two orders that cancel each other out. The first order says compress everything, get the next chapter of life locked in, finish the shift before time runs out. The second order says I am missing something, that there is one more corporate role I should take before it is too late. I cannot do both. A clock that tells me to hurry in two opposite directions is not measuring my life. It is just noise, and I named noise as the enemy months ago.

Now the facts, stated as facts and not feelings. I am the happiest and most fulfilled I have ever been. Joe is the right partner for me in every way that matters. I love the house in Atlanta and the dogs in it. The work stimulates me and fills me. There is no room in that sentence that needs a corporate title added to the last line of a resume. The itch for one more role belongs to the man I used to measure myself by, not the man writing this.

The clock also forgets one thing I already decided. When I sat down to think about how many summers I have left, I did not pick ten. I did not pick fifteen. I picked twenty-five, and then I spent two weeks on a ship writing toward it. Twenty-five more puts me at eighty-six. The number is the rebuttal. The job is to fill summers, not count them.

Where the focus goes now

The pursuit that has been eating me is the one about me: my timeline, my legacy, my next title. I am done letting that drive.

The focus shifts outward. Toward the leaders I coach, the readers I write for, the community I am building, and the rooms where kindness is still treated as a risk. That is not a new mission. It is the one I already have. I only lose it when the clock convinces me the work is about my clock.

Closer to home, it means being the partner to Joe that he has been to me. Supporting his growth, professionally and personally, is a non-negotiable, and I can never take it for granted.

The permission

I give myself permission to relax the grip. To let this year report back before I decide the next one. To say no to the corporate itch without arguing with it. To be fully present on every trip already on the calendar. To put two more weeks with a closed calendar on the books for August 2027, now, before the year fills in around them. To stop counting, and to listen for the signs.

I will control the controllable. I will leave space for the possible. I will never stop working to leave our corner of the world better than we found it.

Read this again in a few years, and see what actually happened.

Jim

I have never published anything I wrote to myself, and I thought hard about whether this one belonged in your inbox. It does, because I suspect I am not the only leader who hears a clock. So one question, and I mean it as a real one: what is your clock telling you, and is it telling you two things at once?

I have already blocked August 2027 for the next two weeks like these. I am telling you so that you will hold me to it, and so that you might block yours.

Today at 1:00 pm ET I am hosting an open conversation about what silence costs us at work. If you are carrying a clock like mine, come.

The link is below

Control the controllable, but leave space for the possible.