“Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person. If you don’t have enough of it, you’re out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you’re really missing something.”

- Peter Drucker

Every valuation begins with the valuer. After years advising CEOs, founders, and executive teams, and sitting on both sides of the table where people are evaluated, I know this:
Careers are shaped by more than capability or performance. They're shaped by the room.

A bull entered the china shop, and things began to break. Delicate porcelain plates perched high against the walls. Dainty teacups rested in blue, velvet boxes. Everything had been carefully selected and arranged. But customers had stopped buying, and the shop had lost its way. So, the owners made a call that changed everything.

I'm looking for signs of life in people and places that have stopped believing much can change. Sometimes those signs are buried beneath disappointment, fear, criticism, uncertainty, regret, or a lack of direction. Sometimes people mistake those experiences for the end of the story. But they're not.

As we grow older, we can become more conscious of how the rhythm of our life makes us feel as the beats are being stitched together. The rhythm is how we feel when we’ve rushed through a full morning of meetings, glance at the clock and notice that we won’t have no time to stop for lunch or make a personal call. It’s that feeling around 7pm that we’re running out of time before today ends and another day begins.

I relished being a business-minded, analytical, problem-solving professional, but I also longed to be a successful creative artist. It felt as if each side - my lawyer side and my artsy side - was preventing me from moving full speed ahead in either of those respective directions. Forging ahead with one side didn’t feel right when it would cause me to abandon the other. What was my career without the balancing effect of music and creativity?

Someone, somewhere right now, is prying open a watery can of fruit cocktail and about to take a bite. In between the toddler-sized chunks of pear cores, triangular bits of peaches, and olive colored, halved grapes, that sad someone is surveying the can for a single crushed piece of scarlet, red cherry.