About the author
Not a parenting guru. A father who did the homework.
I've spent my career on both sides of the hiring desk — and my fatherhood questioning everything the world told me my kids were supposed to do.
The launch
The people behind it
Launch day, the book finally in hand — with my wife Donna, our daughter Brooke, and her husband Sean, beside me.
Everything in these pages was lived in our house first — the conversations, the long game, the proof that it works.
From the hiring chair
I rewarded the opposite of what they chase.
I've spent my career in the chair that decides who gets hired and who doesn't — hundreds of interviews. Somewhere along the way, I realized the thing I rewarded least was the thing everyone told my kids to chase hardest.
I'm not a child psychologist or a life coach. I'm a businessman, a dad, and a husband. Rotary past-president, hard-core Carolina Panthers and Charlotte Hornets fan, mediocre tennis player, and daily reader of nonfiction. Most importantly, I'm a father who refused to put my daughters on autopilot, because I paid attention to the changing world and saw the old map led somewhere I didn't want them to go.
Seven summers, hundreds of teenagers
The high-achievers were miserable
For seven years I facilitated leadership training for eighty to a hundred high school juniors and seniors every summer. These weren't struggling kids. These were the ones doing everything right — top grades, packed résumés, the works.
And they were coming to me in tears.
— the same themes, summer after summer, from the kids the system calls successful
Why I wrote it
So we started having different conversations
Once convinced that the world our daughters would enter as young adults wouldn't look anything like the one the system was preparing them for, Donna and I helped them learn to direct their own lives.
We played the long game: no pressure on grades, no demand they decide at eighteen who they'd "be" — freedom, traded for honest, ongoing conversation. That alignment — two parents on the same page — is critical, and Pathbreaker Parenting is the book I wish we had when we started.
The short version
Start the book free, or bring me to your stage.
The first four chapters on the house — or a talk your parents and leaders won't stop quoting afterward.
