Three decades on Wall Street taught me a lot about career and business. Burning out in my early thirties taught me far more—starting with myself.

My job was simple: get deals done. But no deal ever went perfectly, and through wins and setbacks, I learned more about character and human nature than any book could teach. Success revealed common traits—discipline, integrity, grit. Failure exposed something else: greed, ego, and a quiet disregard for the things that matter most—health, relationships, meaning.

What I didn't expect was to learn about myself. In my first decade, I traded my health for status—then walked away from a period that, in hindsight, represented just a few percentage points of my lifetime earnings. A terrible trade. I burned out, battled depression, and eventually found my way back through endurance sports. Over time, fitness evolved from a coping mechanism into an identity—and eventually into a foundation for how I live and work.

I returned to Wall Street on my own terms. I built an M&A practice, led teams through hundreds of transactions, and invested in private companies. But my most valuable education didn't come from the deals that worked. It came from watching brilliant people make entirely preventable mistakes—squandering wealth, wrecking their health, or building empires that left them emptier than when they started. Those patterns repeated often enough that I started studying why. I pursued graduate work in psychology and earned fitness certifications—not to change careers, but to understand what actually makes high performers thrive or fall apart.