Before I tell you about the race, you need to know that I have never done anything for a single reason.
The Army wasn't just service. It was the first classroom where I found out what I was actually made of — and discovered there was still more to build. The Coast Guard wasn't just a career. It was where I learned that responsibility has a different weight when people are depending on you in open water, far from shore, with no room for approximation. Coaching wasn't a weekend commitment. It was where I first understood that the most valuable thing you can do with what you have earned is transfer it.
None of this is prologue. All of it is still happening.
You don't become anything once. You become things one hard thing at a time, and most of it is invisible until you look back.
I commissioned as an Army officer in my early twenties believing I knew what discipline meant. I didn't. I learned it in the spaces between the things I thought I was doing — in the small decisions no one was watching, in the moments where the right choice was slower and harder than the expedient one. What the Army gave me wasn't a title. It was a way of measuring myself that has not left me since.
The Coast Guard was a different uniform, the same organizing principle. At sea, you are accountable in a way that is difficult to explain to someone who hasn't stood a watch. The ocean does not grade on a curve. You earn the trust of your crew slowly, in quiet increments, and you can lose it faster than that. Commanding a vessel taught me that leadership is a practice, not a position — and that the credential you accumulate through difficult service is real in a way that credentials from easier paths simply are not.
Coaching rugby changed something. Watching young men try and fail and get back up — watching them absorb what discipline actually feels like through their own muscle and bone — I began to understand what the earned thing was for. It was never for me. The capacity you build through hard service was always meant to move. Every person who has taken something difficult and survived it intact has an obligation to the people behind them. That understanding did not arrive all at once. It arrived the way most important things do: slowly, and then suddenly.
And through all of it, there is the family. My wife. My children. The work that carries no rank, operates on no schedule, and matters more than any of the rest of it. Being a husband and a father is the thing I am most accountable for — which is precisely why the rest of the life has to be honest about what it is teaching. A man who preaches discipline and lives otherwise is not a man worth following anywhere.
The credential you earn through difficulty doesn't expire. It compounds.
Most people wait for permission to do the hard thing. I stopped waiting.
There is a question that follows a certain kind of person around. Not a nagging question, not an anxious one, but a persistent one that refuses to stop being interesting: What else? Not "what's next" in the way a résumé thinks about it — something more specific. What are you still capable of? What would require everything you have built so far and still ask for more?
The circumnavigation answered that question specifically and honestly. Forty thousand miles. Solo. The full circuit of the globe by water. It would require the seamanship I have spent years earning, the physical and mental discipline built across two branches of service, and the capacity to lead myself — which is the hardest kind of leadership — across months of isolation, mechanical failure, weather systems that do not care about my plans, and uncertainty I cannot prepare for in advance. It is exactly hard enough to be worth doing. That is not an accident. That is the requirement.
Theodore Roosevelt wrote about the strenuous life — the conviction that ease and comfort are not what a person of good character is actually after. Marcus Aurelius spent years writing to himself about the ongoing work of becoming, not as aspiration but as daily discipline: waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be; be one. Shackleton once remarked that difficulties are just things to overcome. I did not choose this to be remembered for it. I chose it because choosing it is what the accumulation of three decades of service has prepared me to do — and because not choosing it would have been a waste of all that preparation.
The decision was not made in a single moment. It was made the way most real decisions are: over years of smaller choices, each one making the next one slightly more possible, until the day the question stopped being should I and became when.
I am not sailing around the world to prove who I am. I am sailing around the world to discover who I can become.
The ocean doesn't care who you were. It only responds to who you are.
I have spent enough time on the water to know that the sea is not interested in your résumé. It does not know your rank or respect your years of service. What the ocean responds to is the person in front of it, right now, making decisions in real time with incomplete information and no guarantee of outcome. That is clarifying in a way that nothing else in my experience has been. Forty thousand miles will not let me coast on what I have already built. It will demand something I have not yet produced.
The fundraising component of this campaign is not peripheral to the expedition. It is the reason the expedition has a purpose beyond personal. The military charity at the center of this campaign exists to serve veterans and military families who made the hardest sacrifices and too often returned to a civilian world that did not know what to do with them. Every mile sailed and every dollar raised is an act of service from one generation of servicemembers to another. This is not giving back. This is paying forward — one hard thing done publicly, so that the people who did the hardest things quietly might be seen and supported.
What I am building here — the content, the corporate partnerships, the speaking, the community — is what The Hard Things Project is for. The lessons you earn by doing the hardest version of something are real. They transfer. A man who has commanded in two branches of the military, coached young men, raised a family, and sailed alone around the world has things to say about discipline, decision-making under pressure, and leadership through uncertainty that are useful to executives, to coaches, to anyone who is trying to lead something that matters. The doing is the qualification. The sharing is the responsibility.
Growth, service, and leadership do not have an expiration date.
I am in my prime. I have a full life already behind me. I am still choosing the harder path — not because it is the only path, but because it is the one that continues to ask something real of me. That is not a personal eccentricity. It is an argument about what a life can be, and how long it can keep becoming something.
Whatever you are considering doing that seems too late, too hard, or too far from where you are now — I am doing this for you too.