My Story

A career that became a laboratory

My professional life began in Columbus, Ohio, working alongside my father, who spent virtually his entire adult life as a financial advisor and continued working until shortly before his death at 87. He was also one of my closest friends.

From Columbus, I eventually moved to New York, completed my MBA and found my way into increasingly sophisticated ultra-high-net-worth advisory work at UBS. An opportunity to join the international coverage business changed the trajectory of my career and, in many respects, my life.

I then moved from the United States to Singapore, then Australia, Hong Kong and ultimately Switzerland. Those were the places I called home, but the work itself was considerably more geographically expansive. For years I was routinely on airplanes across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and Latin America, working with clients, advisors and colleagues across cultures and markets.

My responsibilities grew along the way. I became a Managing Director at UBS at 34 and later led a number of the firm's ultra-high-net-worth advisory teams. Our work with sophisticated families went well beyond investments: wealth strategy, asset allocation, investment policy, family-office design, governance, decision-making and the structures through which families organize substantial financial lives.

Increasingly, I also worked with the advisors serving those families. Much of my career became an exercise in helping good advisors become better ones—effectively coaching the coaches.

That mattered because, for years, I had privately imagined that some future version of me might become a writer, speaker, advisor or coach. Eventually I realized that I did not need to wait for some hypothetical second career to develop those capabilities. I could build them where I already was.

UBS became the place where I learned to speak to demanding audiences, organize complicated ideas, write more clearly, advise sophisticated clients and help other professionals improve their own craft. The corporate career and the interests I imagined pursuing someday were not separate paths. Much of the latter was being built inside the former.

Making distant things more attainable

One lesson has repeated itself throughout my life: many outcomes look impossibly distant when you view them from the beginning.

As a young professional, becoming a Managing Director can look like something that happens to an entirely different category of person. Financial independence can look available only to people with extraordinary wealth or extraordinary luck. Moving a family to another continent can appear prohibitively complicated. Large transitions can look frightening largely because we are seeing the finished outcome without seeing the sequence of smaller decisions that produced it.

I have become fascinated by understanding those sequences.

Rock climbing provides one useful analogy. To most people looking at a climber high above the ground, the activity intuitively looks dangerous—and approached casually, without knowledge, training or appropriate risk management, it can be.

My own perspective changed as I learned the activity seriously when I was younger and eventually trained as a climbing guide. You learn the equipment, the systems, redundancy, route selection, your own limits and how to operate well below those limits when circumstances require it. The height does not disappear, and neither does risk. But knowledge changes your understanding of what the risk actually is and how it can be managed.

I have often found the same thing elsewhere in life. Outcomes that initially seem to require luck, unusual courage or exceptional talent can sometimes be broken down into a collection of much more attainable skills, decisions and intermediate steps.

That does not make difficult things easy. But it can make the path visible. And once you can see the path—how the pieces fit together, what needs to happen first, and what can be learned along the way—an outcome that once looked impossibly distant can begin to feel attainable.

Years ago, I published a book called Self-Coaching Essentials to capture some of these ideas. Its underlying premise was simple: we can become much more deliberate about the outcomes we create when we learn to step outside ourselves, examine what we are doing and make more intentional choices.

I still believe that.

Financial independence and the ownership of time

Financial independence became one of the clearest expressions of that philosophy for me.

Money matters, but mostly because of what it can enable. At its most useful, accumulated capital is stored optionality. It can eventually give us greater control over one of the few resources we cannot replenish: time.

I have never believed that work is simply something to escape. My career has provided relationships, intellectual challenge, achievement, meaning, extraordinary experiences and periods of genuine flow. But employment also means that a meaningful portion of your time is committed to an agenda that is not entirely your own.

I place a high value on autonomy and self-direction. Over the years, I began thinking about financial independence almost as the difference between renting and progressively owning more of your life. If each month's lifestyle depends on the next month's paycheck, the economic battery continually needs to be recharged. As assets accumulate, progressively more future time, and autonomy over that time, has already been funded.

The objective, for me, was never simply to stop working. It was to reach a point where work itself could increasingly become a choice—and where I could ask a better question: What is the best use of my time now?

Designing a life for more than one person

Those choices have never been mine alone.

Angela and I have raised Madison and Olivia across countries and cultures, and our decisions about career, geography, education, finances and family have always been interconnected. Increasingly, so have questions about our parents and extended family.

That has reinforced something I learned professionally as well: optimizing individual variables is rarely enough.

The financially optimal decision may not be the best family decision. The most attractive career opportunity may diminish well-being elsewhere. Where you live affects relationships, education, culture, healthcare, taxes, careers, recreation and proximity to people you love.

Life is a system.

The interesting question is not how to maximize every component independently. It is how to construct the system deliberately around what actually matters to you.

Arriving at a moment I had planned for

For many years, my financial models and life plans suggested that somewhere around 2026 I would reach a different level of optionality.

The fact that I would also turn 50 made the year an obvious marker, and for years I told myself that when I arrived there I wanted to be able, at least in principle, to decide differently.

I never knew whether I actually would.

It is one thing to build optionality. It is another to use it. I could easily have arrived at the numbers I had targeted, discovered that the career still felt comfortable and simply moved the goalposts again.

Then my father died.

His death did not create my financial plan or my desire for greater autonomy. Those had been developed over decades. But it provided a powerful reminder that optionality has little value if, when the moment arrives to use it, you are unwilling to do so.

My father had nearly died once before during Covid. At that time I wrote about how quickly a genuine crisis clarifies the difference between what appears urgent and what is actually important. His death brought that lesson back with considerably greater force.

I found myself asking a simple question: if I ignored what mattered now because continuing along the existing path was easier, how would my future self judge that decision?

At almost the same moment, another long chapter of family life was changing. My oldest daughter Madison had left home for university. My youngest daughter Olivia was approaching the final years before she would do the same. After decades of building a career and raising children, Angela and I were approaching a different stage of family life.

For years I had been building toward the ability to choose with greater freedom. Suddenly I had very good reasons to exercise it.

So I decided to step away from my UBS role for a period and give more attention to family, my own well-being, and the question of what the next chapter should contain.

I don't experience that decision as an ending.

I experience it as the beginning of an unusually interesting period of reflection.

What comes next

I am grateful for what my career has given me: the chance to live and work around the world, learn from remarkable people, advise sophisticated families, lead talented teams and develop capabilities that I expect to carry with me for the rest of my life.

But a path can be very good without needing to continue forever.

The next decades do not need to resemble the previous ones.

That idea is at the heart of what I want to explore here.

I am interested in financial independence, internationalism, family, career, health, education, psychology, time and the practical mechanics of designing a life around the things we actually value. I am particularly interested in the gap between outcomes that initially appear unattainable and the smaller decisions and strategies through which they can sometimes become surprisingly achievable.

Some of what I believed when I first began writing about these questions years ago has survived almost unchanged. Some has become more nuanced as my children have grown, my parents have aged, my own priorities have evolved and I have had the opportunity to see life from a different vantage point.

That seems like a good reason to start writing again.

This site is where I intend to do that.