Never Waste the End

My watch buzzed at 5 a.m., a second nudge at 5:15. I skipped the coffee I love and went straight to the shower instead, no time to savor anything. By 5:30 the whole crew — my wife, my kids, three suitcases, and me — stood on the dock in the dark. Fog lay over the lake like a wool blanket, and a sliver of moon lit our path as the boat cut a silver wake across black water.

We tied up on the far shore 14 minutes away, loaded the car, and drove two hours to the Burlington airport, the one with the most flights out. Grace and I burst through the doors to an empty counter. A gate agent appeared as if she’d been waiting behind a curtain and said, not unkindly, “Next time, you’ll need to be a lot earlier. You have exactly one minute.” Rushed goodbyes have one gift: no time for tears, just a hard hug and a sprint through security. Then one more goodbye to Berkeley, headed to another corner of Texas, both of us racing back toward the lives we’d paused for two weeks.

Off the Merry-Go-Round

I’d promised myself I’d be ready to drop everything the second the kids wanted to wakesurf, hike, or just talk. Vacationers sleep late, so I told myself a couple of quiet morning calls wouldn’t hurt anyone. I took two meetings. That’s all it took. My peace evaporated in an afternoon.

That’s the moment I drew the real line: two weeks, no meetings, no email, no business texts, no matter how urgent they seemed to be. I’ve tried the halfway version before, a little work snuck in around the edges, and I always come home still tired. This time I went all the way in, and something shifted. My head is clear. My enthusiasm is back. I can see further than I could three weeks ago.

You don’t feel how loud the merry-go-round is until you’re finally off it. When was the last time you stepped off yours, fully, phone left in a drawer?

A Strange Question

Last week a radio host asked his guest something that stuck with me: “When do you plan to die?” Strange, I know. I don’t have an answer, and I don’t want one; with how fast longevity science is moving, even a confident guess might sell me short.

But underneath the odd phrasing sits a better question, worth asking today instead of someday: what matters enough to finish before you die, and why aren’t you working on it right now?

Vacation gave me a version of this reset, a chance to look at the first half of the year with fresh eyes. You don’t need a lake or a boat to get there. You need distance, and honesty.

So sit with these for a minute. 

What’s actually working? 

Where do you keep hitting the same wall? 

What should you be doing that you keep avoiding, and what are you doing out of pure habit that no longer earns its place?

Some of us, myself included, live a version of Groundhog Day: the same useful, comfortable loop, year after year. That’s not automatically wrong. But would you feel more alive if you cracked it open and let something new in? Or is the loop exactly where you want to stay?

Name the thing you’d regret. The book that’s still just an idea in your head. The project that’s stalled because you can’t see the next step. The relationship that needs one honest conversation you keep postponing. Distance is what makes these visible. Go find some, even a weekend’s worth, a few times a year. There’s still time to make the rest of this year the best stretch of it.

One Phone Call

Twenty-five years ago this week, the country woke to a tragedy like it had never seen. We watched the towers fall live, along with the hotel across the street and buildings around it. I’ve told this story every September for 25 years now, because I need the reminder as much as you might need to hear it.

That week, my company, RadioCentral, was raising money to put music and specialty shows on the internet, ordinary ideas now called Spotify and podcasting, but radical then. We’d already raised millions and still needed more. Mark, my CFO at the time, and I had meetings lined up in New York with Dow Jones and the SEC, then a flight to Minneapolis to meet Hubbard Broadcasting. Our New York schedule had us eating breakfast in Tower One of the World Trade Center at 8:30 on the morning of September 11th, then walking to the SEC’s offices in Building 7, then across the street to Dow Jones.

The Friday before, Ginny Hubbard from Hubbard Broadcasting called to move our Minneapolis meeting up by a week. Disappointed, I agreed, then brought it to my team. We could still fly to New York on Monday as planned and go to Minneapolis a week later, or push the whole trip back a week and travel together. We chose to push everything back.

On Tuesday morning we watched the towers fall on a television screen, knowing we would have been inside Tower One when it happened. One phone call, made for an unrelated reason by someone who had no idea what she was changing, kept my entire executive team alive. My wife was pregnant with our triplets, born the following February, and I’ve had 25 years now to watch them grow into independent adults. In that time I lost that company, built new ones, started an art magazine and a painting movement I never planned on, and I hope left some mark worth leaving.

I ask myself the same thing every September: why was I spared when so many weren’t, and have I done enough with the time I was handed? I don’t have a tidy answer. I just know every breath is borrowed, and mine is due back eventually. Yours is too. What will you do with today’s breath?

Eric Rhoads