It didn’t happen in a boardroom. Not during some grand revelation at a conference or while reading a best-selling leadership book. It happened in the grocery store parking lot, in the middle of a Tuesday. I’d just gotten off a call, closed a deal that once would’ve lit a fire in my chest. But there was no spark. Just the low hum of exhaustion, like an old refrigerator that never turns off.

That moment—the stillness of it, the hollowness—was when I realized something had shifted. I had spent years running after a version...

It started with a glass. A cheap, foggy thing in my mother’s cabinet. I must’ve been nine. I’d just come home from school, still in uniform, still hungry. And I dropped it. It shattered in a way that didn’t just pierce the tile, it pierced her. My mother.

She didn’t yell. Didn’t scold. She inhaled sharply, knelt, and began to sweep the pieces. But something about her silence that day — tight-lipped, trembling — cut deeper than any broken edge. It was the sound of generations not allowed to scream...