In Minnesota hockey, the 9–11 age group is called Squirts. It’s a window of innocence that often marks the last time kids will dance to locker room music before heading out on the ice.

Zach’s team won a lot of games, collected several tournament trophies, and finished second in the district.

What stood out at the end-of-season party wasn’t winning. Each player stood up and shared their favorite memory. What came up over and over were knee hockey and water slides at tournament hotels, wall ball before practice, one player who kept everyone laughing, and a teammate’s only goal of the season that had the whole bench going crazy.

I wasn’t surprised. Those are the things I remember from when I was their age. Knees scraped up from hotel hockey and smelling like chlorine.

As a coach, the end of the hockey season brings a familiar question from parents: what should my kid do in the off-season? There are two responses, the one I want to give and the one I actually give.

The one I want to give is simple. We just finished five months of non-stop hockey. Put the gear away and go do other things. If they like playing sports, play as many as possible. Be curious. Try new things. We’ll see you at the pre-season skates next fall.

The answer I give is different. I still point them toward spring and fall leagues and summer camps. If you’re not advancing in the off-season, it feels like you’re falling behind.

We watch a lot of NHL hockey in my house. I’ve never watched a game and thought: these players just aren’t good enough. We need to spend more time preparing our youth to raise the level of play.

Yet the year-round structure we’ve built for kids suggests otherwise.

If that’s not the case, what problem are we actually trying to solve?

The game is already incredible at the highest level.

My kid is competing against yours for a limited number of spots on the top team. If yours is doing leagues and camps and mine isn’t, it feels like I’m lowering my chances.

And you and I choose the leagues and camps, driven by our own competitiveness and the fear that our kids might fall behind. We’d likely agree it’s a little crazy, then give each other a sheepish wave at the rink later that summer.

If every player had to hand over their gear at the end of the season and not return until next year, would you be okay with that?

It might feel like a relief, like a quiet ceasefire.

That might also be the smarter play.

I was volunteering in a high school classroom. The topic was the law of diminishing returns, and I was trying to find a way to make it easier to understand.

So I brought in a large bucket of ice cream, cones, and a handful of scoopers. We timed how many cones we could make in a minute with one person scooping. Then we tried two people, then three, and so on. After a certain point, adding more people didn’t help. It actually slowed us down. We’d hit diminishing returns.

It’s easy to believe more is always better. But at some point, another hour of ice time doesn’t help the way we think it does. There’s no clear signal, no moment when you know your time would be better spent somewhere else.

Add in coaches and programs with their own incentives, and the pressure to keep up, and it gets harder to think clearly.

By the time our kids turn 18, roughly 90% of the time we’ll ever have with them is already behind us.

These years together are a window. It opens and it closes.

We get one chance to fill that time.

In 2020, as COVID set in, I texted Beau’s baseball coach to ask the odds we’d play that summer.

His reply: 1%.

That was all we needed. We booked a small cabin on a lake a couple hours north of the Twin Cities.

We ended up having a shortened baseball season, but it looked nothing like normal. No seven-day-a-week schedule stretching into late July. Just a couple of days each week, with a few tournaments scattered throughout. Everything was optional.

His coach’s message was simple: enjoy your summer.

We invited friends and their families to the cabin, all of us with wide-open summers. No schedule juggling. It just worked.

Mornings on the porch with coffee. Days outside — hiking, biking, tubing on the lake, stickball in the yard, golf and pickleball. We added a smoker, and dinners became big group meals around the picnic table. Bonfires at night. Music, s’mores, everyone hanging out.

What made it special was the people, the shared time, and the randomness of it all. No one had anywhere to be.

The following summer, back at the ballfields, we could feel what was missing. So we made a change, shifting to sporting options that were weekday only, with weekends mostly left open.

You don’t need a cabin to have that kind of summer. You just need the space for it.

The season ends, and we fill it right back in. It’s hard to leave it open — not because it’s clearly the better choice, but because what we lose is harder to see.

What we gain is easy to point to: more reps, more chances to improve.

What we give up is the time that never gets created — the things that don’t happen.

Lately, with hockey over and nothing new started yet, things have opened up. My youngest gets home, grabs his bike, and disappears for hours. He comes back dirty, sweaty, and full of stories.

The path doesn’t always go the way we imagine. I see it in my own house. All three of my kids have stayed with hockey, but everything else has shifted — softball to lacrosse to track, baseball to lacrosse to golf. Their interests change. New things take hold.

Year-round focus, specialized training, and constant progression make sense for a small number of players. Some kids are wired for it, and some may truly have that kind of upside.

It’s just hard to know that early, and easy to act like we do. We’re making long-term trade-offs based on a future only a few will actually experience. There was a time when you were excited for the change of seasons — when putting the bag away felt safe.

My kids are all better athletes than I was. In our area, they’re probably solid B athletes.

I love my B athletes. Competitive, engaged, fun, with just enough edge.

The odds of them playing varsity sports in high school are low.

There’s some peace in being honest about it.

When I meet with parents before the season starts, I remind them that most of our kids won’t play this sport competitively beyond high school.

What we’re really doing is grooming future Thursday night bar league hockey players.

That line usually creates an uncomfortable shift in the room. It should. The bigger job is raising good humans, and it deserves as much thought as the off-season schedule.

Leagues and camps do have value. My kids do them. It’s the weight we put on the decision, the quiet fear that we’re somehow setting them back. The real benefit is staying active and being with their friends.

My oldest son Beau is a math wiz. Ever since grade school, he’s been in accelerated classes. Now he’s a junior taking AP Calculus, tutoring other students, and scoring high on the ACT. It comes naturally to him. It still amazes me.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit it hasn’t once crossed my mind to put him in a math league or a math camp.

The need for his wrist shot and skating will fade, but problem solving will stay with him for life. The pressure and the glamour are elsewhere right now. No one is looking at this.

I don’t think the spirit of what we remember changes much after Squirts.

It won’t be about wins and losses. It’ll be about the people, the time together, the laughs, and the moments nobody planned.

The sport is just a conduit. So is the cabin. So is the bike they disappear on for hours. What matters is having enough variety to encourage exploration and detours.

This window doesn’t stay open forever.

Years later, we named our family dog Charlie. He was small, oddly indestructible, and like most dogs, offered unconditional love. When it came time to put him down, my normally stoic Dad said it was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. For months afterward, Charlie’s yellow leash sat in the back window of his car.

Later on, I stumbled upon a book called Poor Charlie’s Almanack. The title alone made me pick it up. It’s a collection of Charlie Munger’s talks on decision-making and human behavior. One idea stuck: bad outcomes often stem from flawed thinking, not bad intentions.

After reading it, I found myself trying to work his lines into everyday conversation. I imagine Charlie as the elderly neighbor you pass at the mailbox, muttering something that leaves you thinking for days, and I’ll borrow him as my guide.

About halfway through my entrepreneurial journey, I was serving on a board that used a behavioral survey to better understand how we showed up as individuals and as a team. What made it compelling was its focus on natural tendencies — patterns shaped by genetics, early environment, and years of reinforcement that tend to remain fairly stable once we reach adulthood.

We met virtually to review the results. One of the first slides listed each member’s name alongside a snapshot of their dominant behaviors. When I saw mine, a few themes jumped out. A need for control. Impatience for results. A tendency to push harder when challenged. I wanted to disappear from the call.

It wasn’t that the labels were wrong. It was the first time they had been named publicly, with an objectivity that made them hard to dismiss. Some might say these behaviors fit a business leader or entrepreneur. But they didn’t fit the way I wanted to show up. I noticed the words attached to others. Collaborative. Steady. Adaptable. I admired them. I could feel the heat rising as my mind went straight to justification.

My first mailbox conversation with Charlie went like this.

Me: These behaviors are what made me successful. They get results. Letting go of them feels risky. They are hard-wired, not chosen.

Charlie: That may be. But above all, never fool yourself, and you are the easiest one to fool.

My reaction to those labels comes from a part of the brain built for protection, not reflection. It scans for threats and pushes us toward speed and certainty, an encoding shaped for prehistoric dangers that no longer apply.

If it had a big brother, it would be ego.

Ego arrives next, tasked with defending, justifying, and creating a story that makes it feel reasonable, even necessary.

When this loop takes hold, the body reacts. Heat rises. Breathing shortens. Vision narrows. Urgency starts to feel like clarity. Justification follows with certainty.

And once the story has been told, the system is primed to defend it against the next time it’s challenged. Even if part of you suspects it isn’t true, the instinct is to double down.

In a calmer, more rational state, I could see that these labels were not how I wanted to be experienced, and that change mattered. I could still drive results, but with softer edges, knowing it would take work to unwind some of those tendencies.

Once I became familiar with the threat–ego–story pattern, it started showing up everywhere.

I’ve coached youth hockey for nearly a decade and have watched the same sequence play out hundreds of times. A slash to the wrists. An instant slash back. Then comes the argument with the referee on the way to the penalty box, followed by the explanation to the coach. He deserved it.

A friend of mine, a role model for young women, was asked why she wasn’t coaching her daughter’s soccer team. Her answer came without hesitation. I don’t have the patience to manage a large group of six-year-olds. This from an elite athlete, successful entrepreneur, and published author.

I watched an executive publicly challenged over a failed software integration that cost stakeholders hundreds of thousands of dollars. When pressed to bring in an outside auditor to better support future integrations, he pushed back. His team, the same one that had overseen the failure, had already investigated and identified the root cause. We understand what went wrong. There’s no need to bring anyone else in.

Different situations. Same response. A perceived threat. Ego steps in. The story follows. And once it does, you feel the need to defend it. Something harder goes unexamined.

I started to see how this pattern extends beyond defending ourselves and into the belief systems we adopt. Author Morgan Housel says it well:

The best definition of independent thinking is when your beliefs on one topic can’t be predicted from your beliefs on another topic. If you tell me what political party you belong to and I can instantly and accurately guess your views on immigration, abortion, taxes, and guns, are you really thinking independently, or just going along with your tribe?

Few things trigger our defenses faster than being told we’re not thinking for ourselves. But it’s worth asking how much of what we believe is truly ours. How much did we absorb from our parents and communities? How much continues to be shaped by the environments we move through? At some point, the more useful question is what have we actually examined — and what are we simply running on autopilot?

At the next mailbox meeting with Charlie.

Me: I’m starting to wonder how much of what I believe I arrived at on my own, and how much simply came from the environments I’ve lived in.

Charlie: That’s human nature. Just remember, if you follow the herd, you tend to regress to the mean.

It hit closer to home than I expected.

As a Minnesotan, I live in an area that recently became the focus of a large federal immigration enforcement effort, sparking protests, lawsuits, and intense political debate. Two local residents were killed in the events that followed.

As my wife and I prepared for a family conversation and the questions our kids would inevitably ask, it became clear how little we had actually thought through the topic of immigration. We wanted to be ready, but the more we looked, the less certain we felt.

The issue revealed how law, economics, border security, humanitarian responsibility, and the realities faced by families trying to build better lives are all connected — pulling on one affects the others.

There were no simple answers. We’ve always tried to help our kids draw their own conclusions rather than hand them ours. As the five of us moved from one thread to another, the conversation was thoughtful, open, and at times spirited. We weren’t always in agreement.

And this is where Charlie’s guidance is reassuring. Charlie often warned that if everyone accepts the current consensus without questioning it, the consensus itself never improves. It calcifies. Progress depends on people willing to question it and think independently.

I’m part of many herds. Family member. Dad. Entrepreneur. Hockey coach. Health optimizer. Writer. Terrible golfer. Herds offer identity, shared values, and a sense of place. They show up when things get hard. They pass down wisdom. At their best, they make you more than you’d be alone.

The executive who ran the board I mentioned earlier would gather us for a couple of days at a time in a retreat setting. The first few sessions frustrated me — we never seemed to decide anything. Eventually I realized that was the point. He wanted people to think out loud, debate, and wander off the beaten path so he could challenge his own thinking, not confirm it. He understood that deciding too early closes the learning. We all left better. That’s a herd working the way it should.

Yet herds run the same loop we do. A challenge arrives and the defense begins — not because the challenge is wrong, but because the tribe has always protected itself this way.

What’s harder to see is that this response was shaped for a world that no longer exists. Belonging to the tribe once meant survival, and that instinct never left.

But a herd that can’t tolerate dissent doesn’t get smarter. It just gets louder.

I saw Charlie the next day at the mailbox.

Me: I’ve been thinking since our last conversation, how do I know if I’m thinking for myself or just following the herd?

Charlie: Invert, always invert. Don’t ask if you’re thinking for yourself. Ask what you would do if you wanted to never think for yourself. All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.

The exercise is simpler than it sounds. Just invert the question. What would you do if you wanted the opposite outcome? Then don’t do those things.

I don’t want to be overweight. What would I do if I wanted to be overweight?

I want my kids to be confident and capable. What would I do if I wanted to raise insecure, dependent kids?

I want my team to trust me as a leader. What would I do if I wanted my team to distrust me?

I want to think independently. What would I do if I wanted to never think for myself?

The answer to the last question, channeling Charlie, might sound something like this. Surround yourself with people who all think alike, and never leave that circle. Read only what confirms what you already believe. Let discomfort be your signal to stop thinking rather than to keep going. Defer to whoever is most confident in the room, because confidence feels like competence. Form your opinions based on who holds them, not why. Protect your social standing at the expense of your own thinking. If you do all of that faithfully, you will never have to think for yourself again, and you will be rewarded for it constantly, right up until the moment you no longer like who you’ve become.

Health is one area where I’ve been confidently wrong more than once. As the science evolves, so does the guidance. The experts I trust most are the ones willing to change their minds when new evidence supports a different conclusion.

At one point, I adopted intermittent fasting for its proposed autophagy benefits, only to learn years later that when autophagy actually kicks in is still largely unknown and likely not within the fasting window I had been following. Meanwhile, the greater risk for an aging person is inadequate protein intake, something my collapsed eating window likely made worse.

More often, I’ve been the beneficiary. Advances in training, recovery, and nutrition that challenged long-held assumptions have meaningfully changed how I experience each day.

It’s almost impossible to push knowledge forward and always be right. At some point, you have to act on your best current thinking, knowing you might be wrong. Being wrong is often part of how we get it right. But that only works if people are willing to be challenged and change course when the evidence supports it. The ideas that prove true raise the mean for everyone else.

For me, the better question has become not whether I’m right, but how I might be wrong.

The discomfort of asking is almost always smaller than the cost of not asking. With AI assistants available to anyone, it’s easier than ever to learn, gain perspective, and widen our understanding. It just requires a willingness to explore.

Charlie Munger died at 99. He joins my Grandpa Charlie and my dog Charlie among the Charlies in my life now gone.

On my right wrist, I wear a band that reads Memento Mori — remember you will die — a reminder that someday I’ll join them.

Useful when certainty outpaces understanding.

In the end, the number of times we were right probably won’t matter much.

But our willingness to question ourselves could. You might just avoid fooling yourself.

On the way, I often passed my co-worker, Sandy, driving her grey Chevy Lumina in the opposite direction, down North Oliver to 13th Street. After seeing her do this enough times, I walked to her office one morning to ask, “Why do you take the long way to work?”

She looked at me like the answer was obvious. “Because I love my slow drive in. Going thirty miles an hour, drinking my coffee, listening to country music. I show up relaxed and ready for the day.”

Her response has stayed with me for twenty-five years. But at the time, I wasn’t able to truly understand what she meant. I was young, ambitious, and charging full speed into my career.

It’s rare for any of us to stop and examine the micro-choices we make throughout a day that quietly ramp up our pace. The alarm goes off, and we grab our phones to see what the world wants from us. Coffee to wake and stimulate us. The news blares in the background as we scan social media. Maybe a quick kiss for our loved ones. Then we’re out the door, already speeding into the day. And it only amplifies from there — a workday packed with competing priorities, meetings to get through, and emails and internal messages rolling in long past the time when the workday should end. Add a family and kids’ schedules to the mix, and we’re moving from sunup to sundown.

A fast life rarely arrives all at once. It builds through small pushes — rushed mornings, extra commitments, the phone pinging all day — until the pace takes on a life of its own. It’s a flywheel we don’t even realize we’re spinning. At first, we’re the ones pushing it. Eventually, the pace is pushing us. We tell ourselves this is just how life works. After all, everyone around us is doing the same.

I’m four months removed from a 30-year career built on full days and constant demands. And even though that life stopped, my Oura ring still shows my body running at high stress levels, even on days when I feel completely relaxed.

This raised a simple question for me: why was my body still running at this level? Deb Dana’s work on how the nervous system interprets safety and threat helped explain what was happening. Our nervous system is constantly scanning our environment. When it senses a threat, we shift into a sympathetic state built for action — focused, efficient, fast — but pulled away from presence and calm. When it senses safety, we settle into a parasympathetic state where we can slow down, connect, and feel. After years of living in that action-oriented mode, the body makes it the new normal. So even when life finally slows, the nervous system may not, which is exactly what my Oura ring was showing me. My body had learned to stay ready for the next punch, even after the fight was long over.

The difference is stark when the body shifts into that parasympathetic state. For me, I get glimpses of it in a warm shower, in a hot sauna, or while walking in nature. Solutions appear. I’m present enough to process my thoughts with clarity and reach conclusions in places where I’d previously been stuck. But these moments are often brief, because life pulls us back into motion before we realize it.

A good friend and former colleague of mine manages a high-revenue portfolio of service businesses across North America. He keeps an incredible pace, carrying the weight of decisions, people, and the constant pressure to grow. At a seminar, the presenter invited anyone to come forward and be coached in front of the room. My friend stood up, and when he spoke, the room went silent: “Teach me how to be present with my young family at dinner.”

The uncomfortable truth is that we can’t go from a hectic workday to genuine presence on command. Even if we can momentarily calm our nervous system, actual presence requires more space than a brief pause can provide. Played out over many years, this has profound consequences.

Several years ago, in an effort to better understand myself and what I wanted out of life, I participated in a multi-week workshop on meaning and fulfillment. During one session, as we sat knee to knee in pairs, we coached each other to help flesh out our own definition of fulfillment. I was struck by how many people in the room were moved to tears. When we regrouped afterward, I understood the tears hadn’t come from joy or recognition. It was the opposite. For many, it was the first time they’d had the space to realize the lives they were leading weren’t actually fulfilling them.

Here’s what makes this so difficult: no one will stop you to ask if your life is fulfilling. They’ll cheer your achievements, celebrate your promotions, and admire how you manage it all. The world rewards the pace — it doesn’t pause to question whether any of it actually matters to you.

Achievement and fulfillment ask for different things from us. Achievement thrives on speed — the next goal, the next win, the next milestone. And once you reach one, your mind is already scanning for the next. Fulfillment asks for something else entirely: presence, intention, a pace slow enough to actually feel your life. When achievement becomes the primary driver, it crowds out the conditions fulfillment needs. In the chase for more, fulfillment is often the one left behind.

And this becomes the ultimate price we pay — a pace that steals presence, which then steals intention, and ultimately steals fulfillment. Days slip into weeks, weeks into years, and we find ourselves wondering where the time went. Not in dramatic fashion, but quietly, day by day, until we can’t quite remember what we wanted in the first place.

If a fast pace is built through micro-choices, the way back is built the same way. The flywheel doesn’t stop all at once. Some of the simplest early steps involve removing the constant stream of stimulants we use to keep up. The extra caffeine to wake us, the news to inform us, the phone to connect us — each sends another signal: we need to stay alert, stay moving, stay prepared. Small shifts like these don’t change our lives overnight, but they begin to slow the spin just enough for larger choices to eventually come into view.

We have a new driver in our family. Beau recently turned sixteen, and even after several months behind the wheel, he still has one fear — merging onto the freeway. My instinct was to give him the standard advice: use the on-ramp to match the speed of traffic, drive confidently, and trust that others will make space. But as I heard myself explaining it, I caught the lesson that had been waiting for me for twenty-five years. You might try 13th Street instead. Just follow Sandy.

Before he answered, he glanced at the 1-liter bottle of Diet Mountain Dew in my hand — my third of the day, and it wasn’t even noon. I was buzzing on more than 400 milligrams of caffeine when he walked me through the rest of the list: a herniated disc in my neck, building one house while trying to sell another, three kids under ten, and three businesses — two of them still in their infancy and burning cash at an unsustainable rate.

It was a boiling-frog situation: I hadn’t noticed how far off course I’d drifted. The truth was, I wasn’t seeing clearly anymore. I had buried myself in patterns that only fueled anxiety and depression. Looking back, I can see how that constant push to be better pulled me in — I never stopped to examine where I was headed or to ask what the pace was costing. While the surface looked polished and impressive, everything underneath was cracked, strained, and on the verge of imploding.

In an effort to move in a better direction, a mentor of mine suggested I begin a gratitude practice. I vividly remember the first morning I tried. I opened the page and just stared at it — blank page, blank mind. The more time passed, the more intimidating that blank page became. I couldn’t name a single thing that sparked gratitude. Not one. Not because nothing existed, but because I couldn’t see any of it.

In that moment, being this lost for words felt lonely.

That raised a harder question: how does this even happen? How do we get so buried in life that we stop noticing the good that’s right in front of us? My Headspace app introduced me to the idea of “dark clouds” — the choices that slowly distort how we see the world. When I applied it to my own life, the list came quickly. Lack of sleep. Too much caffeine. Poor diet choices. Too much drinking. Unhealthy relationships. A calendar that never lets up. No wonder it was so hard to find gratitude — I had slowly covered my own blue sky.

One of my favorite parts of flying on a gloomy, cloudy day is breaking through that layer — gray one minute, bright blue the next. The sky didn’t suddenly appear. It was there all along. I just couldn’t see it. Gratitude works the same way.

There’s a difference worth naming: being thankful is usually a reaction — something good happens, and we acknowledge it. Gratitude is different. It’s deeper. It’s a mindset, the quiet discipline of noticing what’s already good, even when life doesn’t hand you something obvious to celebrate. You’re thankful for an afternoon with a friend; you’re grateful for the friend themselves. That difference matters because thankfulness depends on something happening to us, but gratitude doesn’t. Gratitude is something we can build and strengthen — which means we don’t have to wait for anything to change before we begin.

For me, gratitude became the first domino. Being intentional about noticing the small things I already had was the spark that led to positive adjustments in other areas of my life. As the fog lifted, I began to understand why.

Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman explains that gratitude meaningfully shifts three brain systems. It engages the prefrontal cortex — the part that handles perspective and emotional regulation. It turns down the amygdala, reducing the sense of threat. And it activates the serotonin pathways in a steady, grounded way that supports calm and well-being. His research reveals something surprising: the strongest effects come not from listing what we’re grateful for, but from receiving gratitude or witnessing others receive it. You can revisit the same moments — what matters is truly feeling them. A few minutes of real, felt gratitude a few times a week can create measurable changes within weeks.

In practice, this became simple. Each morning, I write down two or three things from the day before — the quiet of the early morning, a meaningful moment with my wife or one of my kids, the colors of the fall leaves. I also revisit gratitudes I’ve received or witnessed — a thank-you card from a youth hockey team I coached, where one parent noted how much everyone learned from me, or one of my kids expressing appreciation for their mom, who they absolutely adore. After each one, I pause and breathe it in so I can feel it, not just record it. Both practices work together: one builds the muscle of seeing, the other creates the deeper rewiring. I do this right after making coffee. The rare mornings I skip it, I feel the absence — like I’ve started the day without a foundation.

I’ve always loved a good sunrise, especially at the coast. I’d get up early and head down to the beach to catch it.

As my gratitude practice evolved, so did what I was willing to create around experiences like this. These days, I’ll often scout out the coffee shop the night before, walk to the beach with a warm cup in hand, find the right spot in the sand, and admire others there for the same reason. I settle in and watch the waves roll in, soaking into the sand. The horizon shifts from deep blue to orange; the sun breaks the water like a golden disc, and with each inch it climbs, the colors of the sky and ocean transform. Each sunrise feels like a miracle — I could watch a thousand of them and never see the same one twice. What used to be something I’d rush down to witness became something I truly feel.

As with anything you focus on, the ability to notice sharpens. I started seeing more. What began as an effort became instinct, and moving through the world that way feels lighter — even quietly lucky, as if I’ve been gifted the ability to notice what’s good.

What gratitude gave me was a starting point, and it’s one available to anyone. When I think back to staring at that blank page, unable to name even one thing, it feels like remembering someone I barely recognize. Not because life is perfect, but because I’ve cleared enough sky to actually see the quiet mornings, the sunrises, my wife and kids, and the moments that had been sitting in front of me all along.

This was the text I got from my 16-year-old son, Beau, after a grueling four-day tryout for the Junior Varsity team of one of the top hockey programs in Minnesota.

He’d gone in with realistic expectations — a deep, well-known talent pool stood in front of him. Not making the team felt easier to accept than the regret of not trying. But he had a strong tryout, and hope crept in.

As he sat with his peers, they were called one by one down the long hallway in the bowels of the rink to hear their fate from the coaches seated across the table. If you got good news, you walked across the hall and picked up your gear. If not, you returned to the group empty-handed, your rejection now visible to everyone waiting their turn while holding back the pain of the moment. When Beau’s turn came, the message was simple and blunt: “Let’s keep this short and sweet — we don’t have a spot for you.”

The cut itself was tough; it’s the way it was delivered that will reverberate.

Building great teams requires hard choices and delivering tough news. That’s part of sports, part of business, and part of life. But the way that news is delivered matters just as much as the decision itself.

Yet many of us pride ourselves on simply being willing to deliver hard news face to face, as if that alone checks the box. We tell ourselves that’s the hard part, and the rest is up to the person on the receiving end to interpret, absorb, and ask whatever follow-up questions they need for clarity. And yes, Beau could have asked for more — but in moments like this, especially for a 16-year-old sitting across from four adults who hold all the power, most of us don’t. We freeze, nod, and walk out carrying questions we weren’t prepared to ask.

And it raises a harder question: why should any of us care how our decisions impact the person on the receiving end?

The honest answer most of us hold, even if we don’t say it aloud: we don’t need to care. In Beau’s case, this was the end of any chance to play high school hockey, and he’ll never be part of that program again. The same is true in business — the candidate who goes through a two-week interview process and hears only “You weren’t a fit” is gone. They’re no longer our concern.

But here’s what we miss:

It’s the ripple effect — the accumulation of small moments we often treat as insignificant. Every interaction, every conversation, contributes to shaping a world where people quietly question their worth, their confidence, and who they are. It matters greatly.

In my work with groups of adults, I start with a simple question: how many thoughts run through the average mind each day? The answers vary widely — from a few hundred to tens of thousands. Then I ask what percentage of those thoughts are negative. The response is almost always the same: somewhere between 70% and 90%. And here’s what really resonates: most of those negative thoughts aren’t new. They’re loops — the same doubts and fears replaying over and over.

Brené Brown offers a truth about human connection: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” Without clarity, people fill in the blanks themselves — and rarely with generous stories. We fill them with self-doubt, blame, and assumptions that shape our self-image. “You weren’t a fit” becomes “I’m not good enough.” “Let’s keep this short” becomes “My effort didn’t matter.” Each vague phrase becomes a story we replay for years. It’s no surprise our thoughts skew negative; unclear moments create the mental loops we carry.

The greater the consequence of a message, the more intentional we should be about how we deliver it. This applies to any communication that will leave a lasting impression on another human being. Still, most of us don’t treat it that way. We put almost no thought into the delivery. We rush it, soften it, or generalize it to avoid discomfort, forgetting that how we communicate matters more than the decision itself. This isn’t about long explanations or hour-long meetings. Clarity doesn’t require time in the moment — it requires intention ahead of the moment. A few thoughtful sentences can change how someone walks away from a conversation.

Beau has invested nine years in this program and gave everything he had in this tryout. So hearing only “Let’s keep it short and sweet” in exchange landed differently than the coaches intended.

The child who proudly brings over their work gets a distracted ‘uh huh,’ left wondering if anyone even saw what they made. The patient receives life-changing news during a rushed doctor’s visit, with no time to understand what comes next. The friend or partner who pulls away without naming the distance, leaving the other person to fill the silence with assumptions.

We all play one of these roles — coaches, parents, partners, leaders, friends. Our words, or our lack of them, land heavier than we imagine. A little more clarity could change how someone processes the experience.

And there are reasons we let ourselves off the hook. Ego convinces us we’ve already done enough by showing up. Authority lets us get away with saying less. Legal risk, time pressure, or how we were taught become our justifications. But these aren’t reasons — they’re defaults we’ve never stopped to examine. And they’re ours to change, because our communication shapes the story the other person takes forward.

On the car ride home a few days later, Beau had already accepted not making the team. What lingered was something else: the way the coach looked past him during those fifteen seconds. The phrase “short and sweet” replaying in slow motion, and what it said about the four days he’d just given.

He will be fine. He has people around him who help him make sense of moments like this in a way that protects his dignity. But not everyone does. And even with that support, he’ll carry this — not as something that breaks him, but as a memory of how it felt to be on the receiving end of someone’s efficiency.

This was never just about being cut. It’s about what we leave people with when we deliver hard news without intention. In the end, our words — or our lack of them — create the echo. Choose clarity. Choose care. Let your words close the loop, not create it.