Hey Reader —

It’s been a while. If you’re reading this, it’s been almost three years since you last heard from me.

Over three years, a lot has changed—for you and me both. But I want to honor those who are still here—and share why I went dark, where I’ve been, and why now feels like the right moment to reconnect.

The last time I wrote, we were all reeling from the aftermath of COVID, a recession, and the general chaos that seemed to define those years. To be honest, I stepped away—not just from the inbox, but from the work, the community, the conversation. Like a lot of people, I had to do the practical thing: I took a job, paid the bills, and put the bigger questions on the back burner.

But life, as it does, found a way to pull me back in.

One day, I got a call from someone who had heard me on a podcast—and next thing I knew, I was building and running a full-scale LeaderQuest program for a global company. What followed was two years of running flat out: building teams, creating material on the fly, navigating politics and sponsorship and systems that never make it easy to change things for real.

I was back in the game—but the game itself had changed.

I had done this before, but not on my own. We built LeaderQuest 1.0 for a Fortune 500 company, and back then we had a lot of support from the inside (and, I’ll admit, fewer scars from going it alone). This time, I wanted control. I wanted to make sure what we were doing actually worked, not just for the system, but for the people in it. That meant doing it the hard way: less support, more risk, more responsibility.

It was exhilarating. It was exhausting. And it was transformational for the participants and for the small team I built.

But it also became clear—after two cycles—that something needed to change. No matter how strong the program, working inside a big system means fighting the gravitational pull of “the way things are.” At some point, I realized I didn’t want to spend my life wrestling with executives who were incentivized to keep things exactly as they are, despite their lofty statements. It was time to stop fighting for a seat at someone else’s table and start building something new—a way to reach the changemakers without going through the C-suite.

So we hit pause. We shut things down.

I took out a business loan to buy time—not to build another program, but to write. To capture a decade’s worth of hard-won learning about what it actually takes to create, grow, and liberate leaders. Not with tips and tricks, but with the way. Not just another leadership book—but a reckoning, a roadmap, and maybe a call to arms for those who feel the ache to lead but have never been given permission.

For the last seven months, I’ve been heads down, doing the work. Writing. Wrestling. Remembering. There’s still more to go (turns out, boiling down ten years of experience and discovery into something both true and useful is harder than it sounds). But I’m almost there.

And I think what’s coming might matter because the world needs leadership that actually works, and I want to put what we’ve found into the hands of those who are ready to do something real.

I think you’re one of them.

In my next email, I’ll share more about the book—what’s in it, why it’s different, and why you might want to be part of what’s next.

If you’re still here, thank you. If you’ve moved on, no hard feelings.

But for those who have been waiting for something real—a way forward and a community to belong to—I hope you’ll stick around.

Talk soon,

Dan

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