What I’m Keeping

I love learning. I love figuring something out, turning it over in my mind, and then passing it along to someone else. Maybe that’s why the start of school always gets to me.

My oldest starts second grade this week. She’d been nervous, but after meeting her teacher and seeing the classroom, something changed. She walked in unsure and came out excited. 

I came out wondering how I already have a second grader.

That’s the strange part of parenting. You spend years helping them become capable, then feel surprised when they actually do. I’ve been feeling a version of that at JHD too.

Someone asked this week what was working well in the business. My answer was simply, “less of me.” The team is capable. Large projects are moving through daily checks where I am now an optional attendee. Problems are getting solved without me being in every room.

After nearly 25 years of running a company, that is both encouraging and a little uncomfortable. I’m used to being needed. But being needed forever was never supposed to be the goal.

The same thing came up in a conversation about the entrepreneur programming I’ve helped lead for years. I have spearheaded for a long time, and it has mattered deeply to me. 

But I said something out loud that I had probably known for a while: if an AI program audited my calendar and told me what to cut, it would likely be at the top of the list—because it’s already positioned to carry that work, and some of the other rooms I’m building feel like they need me right now.

So we started talking about renaming the series, redirecting the website, and moving years of content into a better home. There was some sadness in that. It’s been part of my life for a long time. That said, when I got honest about what I loved about it the most, it was never the name or the website.

It was the teaching.

I love learning something useful and handing it to somebody else. I don’t have to own a brand to keep doing that. That felt like relief.

I think that sometimes we hold onto the container because we’re afraid the purpose will disappear with it, but they’re not the same thing.

A program can move to a better home. A team can run a meeting without me. A daughter can walk into second grade carrying her own backpack. 

None of that means I’m walking away.

It means something has grown.

We also spent some time at Lake Lanier recently, and my nephew coached me from behind the wheel of a boat. I was trying to get up on a board and had failed three times.

Then he gave me one small tip: move the rope to the side of the boat. On the fourth try, I got up.

For a few seconds, I felt young, athletic, and far more impressive than I probably looked. I also thought about how I was being coached by a kid I’d watched grow up.

There was something beautifully backward about it. The roles had shifted, and that seems to be happening everywhere lately.

The teacher becomes the student. The child becomes capable. The founder becomes optional. The thing you built finds a life beyond your grip. 

That’s what building capacity was supposed to look like all along.

Letting go of the right thing doesn’t mean abandoning what you loved about it.

Sometimes it means trusting that the lesson, the work, and the people are ready to keep moving, even when you’re no longer holding the rope from the center.