When you spend twenty-five years inside companies – building them, scaling them, selling them – pieces of your identity get farmed out to titles, urgency, metrics, and other people’s expectations. When the exit papers were signed, I expected liberation. What I got instead was a strange emptiness: a man with freedom and resources, but no operating system. No purpose, no reason to get up in the morning and put on pants.

2025 became the year I confronted that.

It didn’t start with lofty intentions. It started with discomfort – the realization that without a business to run, the engine of my life sputtered. So I rebuilt it the old-fashioned way: one brick at a time.

The Physical Rebuild

It sounds cliché to say I got in shape – except this wasn’t a fitness trend.
It was therapy without a therapist.

30 pounds lost. 135 hard workouts. Strength returning in ways I hadn’t seen since my mid-30s.
VO2 up. 12% body fat. Biological age is 8 years less than my chronological age.

I wasn’t chasing aesthetics nearly as much as I was rebuilding my foundation.
When the inner world feels unstructured, the body becomes the most accessible place to create order.

And the best answer to just about any question is: Go to the gym.

Learning How to Live Without a Company as My Identity

This was harder than any workout.

I had to learn how to live like a civilian. No fires to put out. No board calls. No ambitious calendar.

Instead, this year was:

• long walks through London
• slow coffees
• art galleries
• cooking
• wellness retreats
• absurdly enjoyable lunches

In addition: 103 travel days – 14 trips – across Nice, Hamburg, Berlin, Amsterdam, Minneapolis, Wisconsin, Geneva, Lyon, Dijon, Dubai, Crete, Munich, South Tyrol, and Paris.
I wasn’t escaping anything. I was expanding, trying on new settings, calibrating who I was outside the boardroom.

London became the first real city in my life where I wasn’t visiting, hustling, or escaping.
I was living.

Taste Became a Practice, Not a Purchase

This one surprised me a bit.

Art collecting wasn’t just about collecting objects – it became a way of understanding myself.
Vintage Louis Vuitton luggage, old vinyl, and contemporary fine art appealed because they promised continuity with a soul.
Learning to bake bread and croissants in Paris and to cook more intentionally was a reclaiming of creation over consumption. Even drumming – which began as a hobby – turned out to be something deeper: expression without utility. As a founder, that’s foreign terrain.

The Emotional Homework Was the Real Work

No one talks about this.

Company exits break your identity far more quietly than failure ever does.

I felt ego-loss, professional loneliness, the awkward abundance of time without urgency, the sudden realization that I had mastered performing but not being.

Most people distract themselves at this stage.
I sat in it.

It was uncomfortable. But it was also clarifying.

Because the longer I sat there, the clearer it became that my life had been optimized for achievement, not meaning.

The Rebuild

The good news: I didn’t stay there.

Travel helped.
Structure helped.
Fitness and health became the anchor.
Truth telling – especially to myself – became a habit.

And slowly, life took shape again. Not because I chased more, but because I intentionally did less.

I started worshipping quality over quantity – in experiences, relationships, routines, purchases, conversations, even meals.

The Family Legacy Project Changed Me

If there was a theme of “purpose rediscovered,” this was it.

Interviewing my mother and uncle about their escape from East Germany, their loss in the Hamburg flood, the rebuilding – and weaving it into a book – became something profound.

For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t creating assets for my balance sheet; I was creating meaning for my life.

Legacy isn’t net worth, it’s narrative.
That truth landed hard this year.

The Shift That Defined 2025

If I had to distill the year into a single before/after:

Achievement → Aliveness

I went from chasing momentum to cultivating presence.
From optimization to enjoyment.
From more to less but better.

This wasn’t retreat. It was refinement.

2025 was the year my ambition found a pace that didn’t destroy the person carrying it.

What I Carry into 2026

Health and fitness lead. Not negotiable. Top priority.
Depth beats breadth.
Subtraction precedes addition.

2026 is for building on top of that – intentionally, beautifully, and without pretending that the old playbook still applies. But that’s food for another blog soon.

The most valuable thing I learned this year?

Success is not the peak.
Identity is.

I spent 2025 recovering mine.

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