A welder lowers their hood. Everything goes dark until they strike an arc and the work comes into view.
A football player buckles their chinstrap. A catcher pulls on their mask. A goalie settles into position. A motorcyclist puts on his helmet and positions his goggles just right.
Before that moment, there’s anticipation. Replaying the plan. Thinking about what might happen.
Then the helmet goes on.
Distractions fall away. Our attention shifts to the task at hand.
We stop rehearsing life and start living it.
We can spend hours, days, or even years preparing for something important.
From January 2013 to October 2026, I published 421 posts covering approximately 120 different topics and themes…and around 300,000 words.
That’s a lot of thinking out loud.
What Keeps Coming Up?
Leadership, courage, growth, perspective, learning, and service appeared more frequently than almost anything else.
Family, faith, gratitude, forgiveness, relationships, humility, and the importance of making intentional choices about how we spend our time appeared repeatedly as well.
What stands out:
-People deserve encouragement.
-Leadership is an opportunity to serve.
-We grow through experience, including experiences that don’t turn out as planned.
-Our relationships deserve our attention.
-Our time is valuable, and we should choose carefully how we use it.
In 2014, I wrote Your Employees Don’t Work for You, arguing that managers exist to help their employees succeed. Eleven years later, I was exploring coaching, creating room for failure, and building organizational environments where people can grow.
My underlying conviction hasn’t changed. My understanding of how to put it into practice has expanded.
I noticed a similar evolution in my posts about failure.
Initially, I emphasized perseverance, overcoming obstacles, and personal accountability. Later, I began exploring failure as an experiment that could produce valuable learning. More recently, I’ve written about helping others feel comfortable taking risks and learning from unsuccessful attempts.
In 2014, I wrote Start Anywhere!, encouraging people to begin rather than spending endless time preparing. In 2026, I wrote Solving the Right Problem, questioning our tendency to become more efficient at things we might be better off eliminating.
In 2015, I wrote The Truth About Grudges, exploring the burden we carry when we hold on to resentment. In September 2026, Selfish Forgiveness revisited essentially the same idea from a different perspective.
The Stories Behind the Ideas
A rewarding part of this review exercise was rediscovering stories.
My dad getting ready for family camping trips. Experiences from my childhood in Southern California. People I’ve worked with, learned from, and occasionally struggled with.
Lessons from starting, buying, operating, and selling businesses.
My daughters growing up, and now watching my grandkids experience the world from their perspective.
Stories about faith, friendship, adventure, disappointment, forgiveness, and ordinary moments that have become more meaningful with time.
In a recent post, The Things We Forget to Remember, I reflected on how details of our parents’ and grandparents’ everyday lives disappear. We remember important events but lose the ordinary details that made them who they were.
Without realizing it, I’ve preserved lots of those details in these posts.
Something happens. It catches my attention. I write about it. Years later, I can revisit that experience, relive a memory, and occasionally discover something new in a story I thought I already understood.
So, What About the Next Ten Years?
I’ve spent most of my adult life helping organizations solve problems, develop people, improve performance, and prepare for the future. I’ve enjoyed that work tremendously.
But many of the things I find most rewarding extend well beyond my professional responsibilities.
Learning something new. Helping someone see an opportunity they hadn’t considered. Encouraging someone who’s struggling. Exploring an interesting idea. Sharing an experience that might help another person.
These activities have been part of my life for decades, regardless of where I happened to be working.
I’d especially like to help people discover the freedom that comes from discipline. Saving early, taking care of our health, and staying focused on our goals despite competing distractions will provide greater freedom and more choices down the road.
Life is a series of marathons and sprints. We rarely know which one we’re running at the time. Discipline prepares us for both, giving us the endurance to stay the course and the ability to make the most of opportunities when they arise.
Any New Projects?
I have a bunch of things underway.
For the past two years, I’ve been working on a book and companion workbook that bring together my faith and experiences in leadership. I explore connections between Scripture, the lives of the saints, and the fundamental principles of good leadership. Both are nearly complete.
I launched the Grandpa Bob Encouraging Leadership podcast earlier this year. I’ve published ten episodes so far. It’s a collection of stories and lessons from life and leadership, intended for my grandkids and anyone else who might find them helpful. I’ve let other commitments and shiny objects distract me from it, but I’m looking forward to getting back to recording.
There are trails to clear and sheds to build, campsites to finish, concrete to pour, and countless unnecessary opportunities to put my tractor and mini-excavator to work around our property.
And I’ve got a crew of grandkids I plan to keep involved in as many of these projects as possible. They’ll learn a ton, and we’ll enjoy making memories together.
I hope some of the days working alongside Grandpa will become stories they’ll tell.
I’ve traveled to lots of countries and nearly every state, but somehow, I’ve never made it to Mount Rushmore.
We’ve been talking about making that road trip since at least 2010. I thought we’d finally make it in 2013, but other commitments and adventures jumped ahead of it.
Sixteen years later, Mount Rushmore is back on the short list.
An employee uses ChatGPT to draft a proposal and sends it to a colleague. The colleague feeds it into their ChatGPT for an evaluation and sends back the feedback. The first employee asks ChatGPT to incorporate it and returns the revision.
A few rounds later, everyone agrees the work is finished. Success. Two people produced a proposal in a fraction of the usual time.
Notice that nobody asked the other person a question. They only exchanged answers.
Did they actually collaborate? Did they challenge each other’s thinking or understand the problem any better? Or did they trade AI-generated work until both systems agreed it was good enough?
I see this pattern a lot.
For decades, organizations have rewarded productivity. More output, less waste, less time. AI is very good at exactly that. Work that took hours now takes minutes.
The obvious move is to do the same work with fewer people. The savings are immediate and measurable, and companies do have to survive.
The alternative is to point the reclaimed time at the business itself. Imagine a team that uses its saved hours to interview ten customers a month and discovers a need no one had on the roadmap. Or a manager who replaces weekly status reports with a weekly session to brainstorm new solutions to problems we didn’t have time to explore in the past.
That all sounds great, but it’s harder than assigning tasks and measuring their completion.
It’s unstructured. It demands curiosity, judgment, and a willingness to take risks. It runs on conversations rather than statuses and finished assignments. It doesn’t produce neat deliverables or impressive slides.
We’ve become far more comfortable measuring completed work than evaluating the benefits of creative thinking.
And employees have adapted. Many have spent years accepting assignments, completing them, and moving on to the next task. They learned to wait for direction rather than offering opinions or challenging assumptions.
We’ve conditioned people to deliver answers. Now we need them to start asking questions.
That’s a challenge for managers and employees alike. Leaders have to create room for independent thinking, and employees have to rekindle their curiosity and the confidence to use it.
AI can serve either goal. It can write the proposal faster, or it can help us test assumptions and explore ideas. The first makes the business we have more efficient. The second builds a better one.
Ask your team what question they’d explore with five extra hours. Their initial reaction will tell you something about your culture. But their answers might tell you something important about your future.
Doing what we’ve always done more efficiently is now the price of admission. Discovering what we should be doing next is the real prize.
And getting there before our competitors do is how we win it.
Most of us know FUBAR as the old military acronym for something that has gone terribly wrong (f’d up beyond all recognition). There’s another FUB that can help companies avoid getting there.
Fear. Understand. Build.
Fear
Fear gets a bad rap in business. Leaders are supposed to be confident, decisive, and optimistic about the future. But fear can be useful. A new competitor appears. Technology changes what customers expect. An industry that seemed stable suddenly isn’t. AI makes something possible that would have sounded ridiculous three years ago. If that makes you a little afraid, good, that means you’re paying attention.
The problem isn’t fear. It’s what we do next.
Companies rarely respond to disruption by doing nothing. They form committees, hire consultants, buy software, launch pilots, and look for ways to respond. Activity feels like progress.
AI is a great example of this. Ask companies what they’re doing with it, and many will describe activities. You’ll hear that developers are writing code faster, reports are getting better, repetitive work is disappearing, and some SaaS applications are now built internally. Then someone shows the board a slide that says 47 AI use cases are underway, and everybody feels a little better.
The company is doing something.
Activity helps us learn, but it becomes dangerous when we mistake it for understanding. A company can get very good at using AI to improve its existing operating model without asking whether that model is the one it will need.
Understand
It’s reasonable to ask: What can we do with AI?
But that turns our attention inward to the easier questions. How can we automate more work? Reduce process costs? Increase efficiency?
The harder question is: How will AI change the things that determine whether our business succeeds in the future?
Understanding starts with the questions every business has always had to answer. AI adds new urgency and new possibilities, but the customer should still be at the center:
Do we know what customers value most?
Why do customers choose us today?
What would make them leave tomorrow?
What are they tolerating because they don’t have a better alternative?
Where are we making life harder for customers than it needs to be?
What will future customers expect that seems optional or trivial today?
What could a competitor offer that makes our product look expensive, slow, or obsolete?
These questions bring the customer back to the center. They force us to look beyond internal efficiency and understand what customers value, where they experience friction, how their expectations are changing, and what could cause them to choose someone else.
That’s the perspective we need before deciding what to build.
AI can improve how we operate, but its bigger impact will be on customer expectations and competitive possibilities.
While one company uses AI to polish yesterday’s machine, another is building the machine that replaces it.
Build
Building takes money, people, time, and a willingness to be wrong. That last one is the hardest.
The present always has the advantage. It has customers, revenue, problems, and deadlines. Established organizations are built around these realities. Budgets back known priorities, managers are rewarded for predictable execution, and mistakes draw more criticism than the opportunities nobody pursued.
The future arrives differently. It shows up as ideas competing for people, money, and attention against something already producing results. The same systems that run today’s business can quietly squeeze the life out of what comes next.
Steve Jobs had a blunt rule about this: “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.” Cannibalizing yourself requires taking resources from something that works today and putting them behind something that might replace it tomorrow.
That takes deliberate leadership. Good leaders create room to build. They give people permission to work on problems whose answers aren’t already known. They fund small bets before a traditional business case can prove they’ll work and accept that some ideas will fail along the way. When something starts working, they move people, money, and attention behind it.
None of this requires betting the company. Build something small, put it in front of someone, learn, adjust, and build again. Small bets create information, information improves understanding, and better understanding supports larger bets.
It’s the leader’s job to protect some capacity for tomorrow from the demands of today.
Organizations follow the questions their leaders ask. Celebrate the number of AI use cases and you’ll get more of them. Reward cost savings and you’ll get more efficiency. Both have value, but adaptation requires a lot more.
Leaders should reward learning, customer insight, and the willingness to pursue an idea before everyone agrees it’s obvious.
The real advantage comes from creating an organization that can move into uncertainty, learn quickly, and change direction as the evidence develops.
Then someone has to build.
Because while we’re debating what the future might bring, someone else is creating it.
Fear. Understand. Build.
Embrace a little FUB. It might keep you from becoming totally FUBAR.
Hat tip to Atlas Berry, whose FUB framing started me thinking about how businesses respond to disruption.
Photo by Urban Gyllström on Unsplash – the customer gets the final vote on whether it’s good.
A wall buried under centuries of soil. Pottery, tools, foundations, scrolls, and whole settlements remain where they were left while the earth slowly covers them.
We live at the surface, standing on everything that came before us, most of it invisible.
Some of the past reached me through stories. More came through school, books, photos, letters, and knowledge gathered by people I’ll never know.
I don’t control where I entered this story or what has already happened. I inherit discoveries, mistakes, questions, and unfinished work. Some of it I can change. Some I can only understand and accept.
The world still holds layers we haven’t reached, truths that were present long before anyone noticed them.
For as long as there have been people, our bodies have carried a genetic text billions of letters long. Our ancestors lived, loved, and died never knowing it was there.
What else is waiting to be revealed? Processes we can’t detect, relationships we haven’t recognized, and questions we don’t know enough to ask. The universe doesn’t explain itself just because we’ve arrived.
I find that humbling and sacred. We enter something already underway, uncover a little of what’s hidden, and leave far more waiting to be found.
My kids will see things I’ll never see. Their kids will ask questions none of us have thought to ask.
I get to add what I can, leave something useful behind, and wonder what those who follow will discover from the layer we share today.
Twenty-five years later, I can still remember how September 11, 2001, began.
We lived in Orange, California. My alarm clock was set to KNX 1070 Newsradio in Los Angeles. When it came on that morning, the first thing I heard was that they were receiving reports of a plane crashing into one of the World Trade Center towers.
My mind immediately pictured a small plane. Maybe a Cessna. Some kind of private plane that had gone way off course.
I got up and went through my normal morning routine. I poured a bowl of cereal and turned on CNBC to see what was happening in the stock market.
They were showing the burning tower. Every channel was showing the same picture.
Smoke billowing out where the plane had hit. I remember being amazed that a small plane could cause that much damage. We still didn’t know that a large commercial airliner had struck the first tower.
Maria Bartiromo was reporting from the New York Stock Exchange that morning about what was happening from her perspective several blocks away. Then the discussion turned to whether or not the stock markets would open for trading that day (they didn’t).
As I was finishing my cereal, I watched another plane fly into the second tower.
I remember Mark Haines, the CNBC anchor, immediately recognizing what it meant. This wasn’t an accident. We were under attack.
Everything changed in that moment.
The first plane could have been an accident. No way the second one was.
And we had no idea what was coming next.
Were there more planes? Were other buildings in other cities about to be hit?
My wife and kids were traveling at the time. I talked to them the night before when they were in San Francisco on their way north to visit cousins in Oregon. Suddenly I found myself wondering whether San Francisco might be a target too.
As I got ready for work, the news kept getting worse. I heard that all aircraft in the United States were being ordered to land. Then we learned that the Pentagon had been hit. I don’t think I knew about the plane that went down in Pennsylvania until later in the day.
Information was coming faster than we could absorb it.
Until that day, I’d never experienced fear so physically.
I remember feeling pressure in the back of my head. I was unusually aware of my heartbeat pounding in my ears. There was constant background anxiety about what might happen next.
But I still went to work a few minutes after watching the first tower collapse. A pillar of smoke and dust seemed to hang in the shape of the building that had just fallen.
I had recently started in a new leadership role, and there were things we had to deal with. We needed to figure out where our people were and if we should close down work for the day (or week). Was our building safe? Who was traveling? Who might be stranded somewhere because the airplanes had been grounded?
We had an off-site strategic planning meeting scheduled in Palm Springs a week later. We found ourselves discussing whether we should cancel it.
I’ve thought about that many times since.
Thousands of people were living through unimaginable horror. People were dying. Families were losing people they loved. Our country was under attack.
And we were talking about whether we should cancel a planning meeting.
That sounds so absurd 25 years later, but I think that’s part of how human beings experience events like this. The enormous and the ordinary happen at the same time.
We feel the fear. We watch the tragedy unfold. We wonder what it means for our families, our country, and our future.
And then there are countless decisions to make and people depending on us.
By that afternoon, I had talked with my family and knew they were safe. They made it to their destination in Oregon.
I came home to an empty house.
At some point that evening, I went outside and sat in our hot tub.
What I remember most is the silence.
In Southern California, airplanes are part of the normal background noise of life. But that night, with commercial and private air traffic grounded across the country, the sky was unusually quiet.
As I tried to relax in the silence, I heard what I assumed were a couple of military jets flying overhead. I remember feeling relief.
Whatever was happening, whatever might come next, we had a strong military and there were people up there protecting us.
We didn’t know whether there would be another hijacked airplane, another building hit, a bomb going off somewhere, another city attacked. We fully expected that there would be more attacks.
And yet, the sky was eerily quiet that night.
The quiet didn’t mean we were safe.
It only meant that, for the moment, nothing else was happening.
Postscript
I wondered whether there was any reason to add one more story about 9/11 when so many people experienced that day firsthand. But 25 years later, there are millions of people who were too young then to remember it or weren’t yet alive.
For them, 9/11 is another piece of history. It’s photos, video clips, documentaries, movies, and stories told by people who were there.
Even for those of us who experienced it from afar, the memory is visceral.
We remember what it felt like not knowing how the day would end or what the years ahead would bring. The uncertainty, the sense of foreboding. The far-reaching consequences of that day were still in front of us.
Today we look back through 25 years of hindsight and tell ourselves we understand what happened and what followed.
On 9/11, we didn’t know what would happen next or where any of it would lead. But before that day ended, nearly 3,000 people had their lives taken away from them.
Their lives, and the lives changed forever that day, are why we continue to remember.
Strong leaders find ways to align the two, so the right behaviors are worth choosing.
That alignment can come through compensation, recognition, autonomy, opportunity, trust, or simply making sure people aren’t punished for doing what the organization says it values.
When incentives point one way and stated goals point another, people usually follow the incentives.
The strongest systems make it easiest for people to advance their own interests while also advancing the organization’s.
A friend posted a short video this week asking about the “when” of things. When do you act? When do you wait? When do you pivot?
I just turned 60, so that probably changed how I heard his questions.
I can’t think of many important decisions where I thought, I’m completely ready for this. And I’m increasingly convinced we have readiness backward.
It’s easy to imagine that first we’ll prepare, then gain confidence, our uncertainty will disappear, and finally we’ll be ready to take action.
Life doesn’t always work that way.
Sometimes, the only way to gain confidence in something is to do it. The doing becomes part of the preparation. It creates clarity we can’t get from thinking alone.
Does that mean we should always move first and prepare later?
Nothing is that simple.
Preparation and thinking are important. But past a certain point, more analysis is just another excuse for waiting.
The harder part of these “when” questions may be determining our level of commitment.
Being ready isn’t the same as being casually willing to try. It means I’ve prepared as well as I reasonably can, accepted that I may still be uncomfortable, and decided that uncertainty no longer gets the deciding vote.
But if I’m not willing to bring the commitment required to see something through, I shouldn’t start.
Turning 60 is a reminder that our time is finite, whether we think much about it or not. Every decision to wait is also a decision about how we’ll spend that precious time.
I have no idea what the next decade will bring. The best parts of my first six were mostly unpredictable.
There’ll be more opportunities, more decisions, more things worth building. Also, more uncertainty, doubt, and hesitation.
Wisdom isn’t knowing exactly what to do, or precisely when to do it.
It’s recognizing when we’ve thought enough, prepared enough, listened enough, prayed enough, and waited enough.
Then committing to move.
Photo by Gennady Zakharin on Unsplash – Sometimes we have to start moving before the path makes sense.
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