Who Am I?

Who am I? Simple question. Three words. But the older I get, the less simple it becomes.

For most of my life, I answered that question by telling people what I did. I'm a businessman. I'm in real estate. I'm an investor. I'm a husband, a father. I'm a guy who has built things, managed things, taken risks, made mistakes, had successes. All of that is true. But I'm beginning to realize that what I do is not necessarily who I am.

That's a hard thing to sit with. When you spend decades building a life around responsibilities, accomplishments, expectations, and roles, you get very good at answering "What do you do?" But not necessarily "Who are you?"

I have to be honest. I'm not sure I know the answer. At 54, that's a strange thing to admit, especially publicly. We're taught that by now we're supposed to have it figured out.

Life has a way of stripping away the things you think define you. I've experienced success and failure. I've built businesses and started over. I've gone through six cancer surgeries. When you face the possibility that your time may be shorter than you imagined, you start asking questions you were too busy, or maybe too afraid, to ask. Who am I when no one is watching? Who am I without the title, the business, the money?

I think I've spent a lot of my life becoming the person I thought I needed to be, instead of discovering the person I actually am. Maybe you've done that too.

I don't know where this question will take me. Maybe I'll discover things I like and things I don't. Maybe some things I thought I'd lost were never really gone. For once, I'm okay with not knowing.

That's my first question. Not just for this video, but for this journey. Who am I? Maybe we can figure some of it out together.

Watch the full story:

https://youtu.be/A9IIYtv1vQE

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