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Aisle. Up. Out. How Crisis Lessons Drive Career Success
The water doesn’t care how you feel about it. On January 15, 2009, I stood in the aisle of US Airways Flight 1549 as the Hudson River poured in through the back of the plane. I was the last passenger out. In the minutes after both engines failed, an old phrase took on a meaning…
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Seek the Mission First: The Miracle on the Hudson Survivor’s Case for Purpose Over Profit
I did not choose my mission. It chose me, on a river, on a Thursday afternoon in January, when I was the last passenger off US Airways Flight 1549. I had spent years building a career in enterprise sales leadership, and none of it prepared me for what I learned standing in that aisle. Five…
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What Would You Do? A Powerful Leadership Lesson From Flight 1549
On January 15, 2009, I was the last passenger out of US Airways Flight 1549. The plane was sinking into the Hudson River, and I had a choice standing in that aisle. I could feed the panic, or I could feed the plan. Every person on that plane was watching someone. And what I chose…
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Turn the Discomfort of Discipline into the Satisfaction of Success
Nobody tells you the discomfort comes first. They sell you the ending. Nobody shows you the middle part when you’re on the ground with a torn knee ligament. In a hospital hallway, there is no blueprint for what happens next. You cannot finish one length of a swimming pool. I have lived all three of…
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You Can’t Buy a Stairway to a Meaningful Life
What if one of the greatest rock songs ever recorded was never really about a stairway at all? I have wondered for years if one of the greatest rock songs ever written was never really about a stairway at all. I think it might be about the way we choose to live before we ever…
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The Human Performance Optimization Framework: What the Miracle on the Hudson and Tony Robbins Taught Me About Anticipation
Most leadership frameworks measure one thing—skill, or style, or outcomes. None of them measure the whole person operating inside the whole system. That gap is exactly what Don Trone, Dr. Sean Hannah, and I set out to close. The result is the 28-Cell Leadership Matrix, now live inside the Human Performance Optimization Framework. Twenty-eight cells,…
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Strategic Effort Prevents Exhaustion: Robbins and Hudson River Lessons
I once worked eighty-hour weeks for an entire quarter and finished with less business than when I started. A mindful strategy for sustainable performance A mindful strategy for sustainable performance That sentence still stings to write. In my enterprise sales career, I was young and grinding through the ADP years. I had convinced myself that…
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After the Miracle: What Odysseus Taught Me
I sat in a theater watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and about halfway through, I stopped watching it as a movie. I started watching it as if it were my own life. Homer’s story begins right after the Trojan War ends. Odysseus should be able to go straight home to Ithaca. Instead, the journey stretches…
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From Miracle to Complaint: A Lesson in Gratitude
Ten minutes. That’s how long it took for a miracle to become a complaint. I was on one of the first commercial flights to offer transatlantic wifi. Think about that for a second. For the entire history of flight, once those doors closed, you were gone. No calls, no emails, no way for the world…
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Are You Being Restored, or Re-Storied? How Changing Your Narrative Builds Resilience
There is a difference between those two words that took me a long time to fully understand. Restored means you go back to what you were. The original condition. The baseline before the disruption arrived and changed everything. Re-storied means you build something new from what you went through. Not back to before. Forward into…
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