My first cell phone was a Nokia. 1999. One of those thick, one-piece units with the greenish-yellow backlit screen, a game called Snake, and a customizable home screen that felt, at the time, like a small act of personal sovereignty. Everyone else had their name on it. Their initials. Their girlfriend's. I changed mine to read: Inspire Others.

That was sometime in late 2000, shortly after I got sober. I was twenty-something, figuring out who I was supposed to be on the other side of a hard chapter, and somehow I landed on those two words. Not as a slogan. More like a compass heading. Something to walk toward when I wasn't sure which way was forward.

Twenty-six years later, it's still there.

Today my phone is named Inspire Others. So is my hotspot. Every time I open it up in a coffee shop or a gate area at the airport, it broadcasts that name into the air — and somewhere nearby, someone scrolls past it while looking for a signal. Most people ignore it. But every now and then someone pauses. Wonders. And that's enough for me. It's a small seed pressed into the dirt without stopping to watch it grow.

The Thing That Gets Me Out of Bed

I've been a leader my entire working life. With one exception — the role I'm in right now, which skews heavily toward consulting and sales — everything I've ever done has involved leading teams. It is, without qualification, the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning.

That might sound like something you'd read on a LinkedIn banner. But I mean it structurally. When I'm not responsible for other people's growth, something goes quiet in me. Not absent — just quieter. The way a room sounds different when it's empty.

There's a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from watching someone do something they didn't think they could do. From being the person who created the conditions for that to happen. It's different from personal achievement, which is fine, which matters — but it's more like a mirror than a window. Leading is a window. You get to look out into someone else's becoming.

I came across that line recently and recognized something in it immediately. Not the resignation in the "if I have to work" part — though I understand it — but the precision of the preference. Like this. Meaning: not just tolerable. Not just purposeful. But specifically, irreducibly this. The thing that earns the hours you spend on it.

What Sobriety Taught Me About Potential

I think most people who love leading teams would struggle to fully explain why. It's not the authority. It's not the title. It's something harder to name — the sense that you're operating inside a living system, that the inputs you give actually change the outputs, that people are not fixed. That they are, in fact, remarkably movable. In the best direction. Toward their own best version, when someone decides to care about that for them.

Sobriety taught me this, or at least sharpened it. When your life cracks open at twenty-something and you have to rebuild it from the inside out, you come away knowing something about potential. About how far a person can travel from where they started. You also come away with a kind of debt — not a burden, but a pull. The desire to turn back and extend a hand to whoever is still on the road behind you.

That's what leading feels like to me. Not management. Not hierarchy. More like orientation. Standing at a fork in the road long enough that you can tell someone which way you went, what you found, and let them decide what to do with that information.

The Hotspot in the Coffee Shop

The hotspot thing is a little bit silly, I know. Two words floating in a coffee shop Wi-Fi menu, sandwiched between xfinitywifi and someone's router named FBI Surveillance Van. It doesn't change anything. Nobody connects to it and suddenly rethinks their week.

But that's not really the point. The point is that it keeps me honest. Every time I open my phone, every time I fire up that hotspot, I'm reminded of what I said I was about. It's a small accountability loop I've been running for a quarter century without even meaning to.

If I have to name a purpose — and I think we all do, eventually — mine is two words long. I've been carrying it since I was barely old enough to understand it. I'm still growing into it.

That's the thing about a compass heading. You don't arrive. You just keep walking toward it, and the walking is the point.