Today is my birthday. I turned 65. And if there’s one thing thirty years of leadership burnout resilience work has taught me — it’s that purpose has a way of finding you whether you’re ready or not.
People ask me all the time — why don’t you just hang it up and enjoy life?
The honest answer is that I am enjoying life. More than ever.
I love giving the corporate keynotes and workshops. I love helping the small wineries and boutique hotels find their story and tell it. I love waking up knowing that what I do today actually matters to someone. That’s not work. That’s the most joyful I’ve been since I was a National Park Service ranger — and the most honest I’ve been with myself in longer than I can remember.
Yes, I take Social Security. That comes along with 65. But so does clarity. And purpose. And the freedom to do work that actually means something.
The Zoom call that ended my last chapter — twelve hours after landing in Reno from Madrid, jet-lagged and already miserable in a job I had outgrown — turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to my career.
Here’s what I learned when someone else made the decision first.
What I Already Knew
The truth is my purpose had been shifting for a long time before that Zoom call.
I could feel it the way you feel a season changing — not in one dramatic moment but in the accumulation of small signals you keep almost noticing and then don’t.
I had spent thirty years leading organizations through the hardest moments imaginable. 9/11. Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Sandy. Crisis events across four continents. I had been in the rooms where it mattered most and I had given everything those rooms required.
But somewhere in those final years I kept noticing something that had nothing to do with crisis management.
The senior leaders around me were struggling in ways nobody was talking about. Not with the technical challenges — they had those handled. With the human ones. The soft skills that sound like buzzwords until you watch a brilliant executive fall apart because nobody ever taught them how to manage sustained pressure. The coping strategies that never made it into any leadership curriculum. The burnout that everyone could see and nobody would name.
Leadership burnout isn’t a weakness. It’s a system failure. And most organizations don’t know how to fix it until it’s too late.
I kept thinking: someone should be talking about this.
It took getting let go to realize that someone was me.
The Other Thing That Was Happening
At the same time — quietly, joyfully, completely separately from my professional identity — something else was developing.
Wine. Story. The places worth remembering.
My friends Ron and Lesley Layendecker had introduced Lori and me to the world of California wine country — Dry Creek Valley, the Wilson Family of Wines, Wine Road weekends meticulously planned on Ron’s Google spreadsheet with the care of someone who understands that a great weekend is an act of craft. Amista Vineyards. The friends we made around the pool with a rosé and nowhere else to be.
I didn’t know yet that this was the other half of what I was building. I just knew it made me feel more alive than almost anything else in my professional life had in years.
It took a few more months for it all to jell. For the book to take shape. For Vianarra to find its name. For the speaking platform to become real.
The Thing About the Book
Stop Leading on Empty came out April 1, 2026.
I still read it.
I know that sounds strange — I wrote it, after all. But there’s something about seeing your own hard-won thinking organized on a page that reminds you why you did the work in the first place. I read it the way you read an old letter from yourself — recognizing the person who wrote it and being surprised by what they knew.
The book is about what happens when leaders run on fumes and call it strength. It’s about the cost of that — to the leader, to the people around them, to the organizations they’re supposed to be serving.
I wrote it because I had lived it. I had watched others live it. And I had finally found the words.
Leadership Purpose Burnout Resilience — What Makes This Different
There are thousands of people saying the same things I say about leadership — about resilience, about burnout, about showing up under pressure.
But not with the passion and care of someone who actually lived through it. Who was in the room when it mattered. Who made the calls nobody else wanted to make and carried the weight of them afterward.
That’s what keynote speakers on leadership resilience are supposed to do — not perform inspiration, but tell the truth about what sustained high performance actually costs and what it takes to sustain it.
That’s the difference.
And it’s the same in hospitality. I’m not a lifelong hospitality professional — my wife Lori has spent thirty years in that world and she would tell you immediately that I’m not. I’m something else.
I’m someone who loves a great story.
That’s what draws me to a tasting room in Dry Creek Valley and a keynote stage in San Diego and a boutique hotel lobby in Connecticut. Not the industry. The story underneath the industry. The true one — not the version the PR firm wrote, not the spin, not the talking points.
The honest one. The one with integrity. The one that happened to real people in real rooms and left a mark worth talking about.
Whether that’s a corporate playbook, a business continuity plan, a winery founding story, or a hotel that Lucille Ball built in the desert — the question I always ask is the same:
What’s the true story here? And are you telling it?
That’s what I do. In both rooms.
So Why Didn’t I Hang It All Up at 65?
Because hanging it up would have meant walking away from the clearest sense of purpose I had ever felt.
The forced retirement didn’t end my career. It clarified it. It took the noise away and left only what mattered — the leaders who needed what I had spent thirty years learning, and the places worth remembering that deserved to have their stories told.
Today I do both. I still walk onto stages and into conference rooms — keynotes and workshops for associations, healthcare systems, and corporate leadership teams who need someone who has actually held the line under pressure. And alongside that I run Vianarra — the hospitality storytelling practice built for wineries, boutique hotels, and restaurants who know their place has a story worth telling but haven’t found the words yet.
Leadership development and hospitality storytelling. Two worlds that turn out to be asking the same question.
Two lanes. One purpose. Both more alive than anything I did in those final years before that Zoom call.
Sixty-five turned out to be exactly the right age to start.
Not because I had less to lose. Because I finally knew exactly what I had to give.
Stop Leading on Empty is available on Amazon at the link below. If you know a leader who is running on fumes — or if you are one — it was written for you.
And if you haven’t found Vianarra yet — the hospitality storytelling practice and newsletter built around the places worth remembering — come find us at vianarra.kit.com.
Wow, I now have to get this to read it… Thanks so much for the refreshing writeup… True to the core… What you found in storytelling is what I find in making music… Someday maybe I will write a book too about how life can feel like a melodious symphony once you actually start living it… Thanks again and Best wishes…
Gautam — thank you, that means a lot coming from you.
And you’re right about the music. Songs and stories have always felt like the same work to me — the folklorist I studied under collected folk songs his whole life for that exact reason. The tune was how the story survived. You’d feel that more than most.
So write the book. I mean it. That symphony line tells me you’ve got it in you — I’d read it.
Thanks again, Gautam.