I’ve spent my life solving challenging academic, technical, and business problems, but for most of that time it didn’t feel like enough. From childhood, people told me I was smart -- and that’s how I identified myself. My brains and resume-building got me into Stanford and then into MIT. It took me until I graduated with a PhD to recognize that I didn’t like what I was doing, so I left science and jumped into Silicon Valley tech. I got married in my early 30’s and had two amazing kids. Externally, I looked successful. I didn’t feel successful, though, and I sometimes wept to myself at night or when I was alone. I didn’t understand why I cried.

By my mid-40’s, I was climbing my way up the corporate ladder at great companies. I couldn’t find a job that felt right for more than a year or two and my marriage was on the rocks. A few months before my 50th birthday, I had a spectacular job failure. By then I could see a pattern of disappointment with my choices, and I wanted to change. I found a good therapist and began learning how to recognize my emotions and incorporate them into my decision-making -- which was a hard shift for me given half a century of approaching the world logic-first.

It took me another 3 years to tell my wife I wanted a divorce. That was like crawling out from under a rock and into the sunlight. I began to make other choices that came from integrating my thinking and my feeling. I trained as a coach and found that the combination of my life experiences, my coaching skills, and my work background enabled me to help other smart people feel more successful both at work and in their personal lives.

I still hold a full-time corporate job. I coach on the side because it gives me nourishment and allows me to give back to the world. I do sometimes feel deep, deep sadness and compassion for the version of me who was locked in his head and cried to himself at night. At the same time, I can appreciate that I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life, and it only took me 50 years to get here.