A reflection on how a simple Dad’s Advice slide deck became the seed of this blog — a place to store wisdom, life lessons, and love for my kids to return to someday.
I’ve always carried this sense that I left home unprepared for the real world. No playbook. No practical wisdom. Just a quiet feeling of, “I guess I’m supposed to figure this out now.”
I don’t necessarily blame my parents. I know now they were doing their best. It was the prevailing parenting style at the time — and I’m sure I wasn’t great at asking for what I needed, either. That was a skill that came later, as I matured.
When I began to live more intentionally in my 40s (Book That Rewired the Way I Live →), I started to realize: I want my kids to have something practical to take with them when they leave the house.
I’ve always coached them, and I see no reason to stop when they leave home — that season is coming fast. I don’t see my role as ending when they become adults. I want to be in this with them for as long as I’m here.
It began as a simple PowerPoint called Dad’s Advice — a living document I plan to send to my kids when they’re ready to leave the house.
The very first slide is titled “If you read only one slide, remember this.” It says:
I LOVE YOU MORE THAN ANYTHING.
YOU ARE KIND, SMART, AND IMPORTANT.
YOU WILL DO GREAT THINGS IN THIS LIFE.
YOU MUST HAVE POWERFUL DREAMS.
This is the Dad voice I want my kids to hear in their heads long after I’m gone.
Then the deck goes on to cover the stuff I wish someone had told me — philosophy, finances, mindset, learning, relationships, productivity, courage, leadership. The practical and the soulful.
I always loved Ethan Hawke’s vibe as a dad in Parenthood — the kind of guy who’d say “Look three cars ahead and two cars behind” when teaching his kid to drive, or who’d make a homemade Black Album of Beatles solo songs for a birthday. That’s the spirit I want in my advice: useful, loving, human.
And today it hit me: that Dad’s Advice deck was really the seed of this blog.
I wanted a place to capture this stuff. A public storage locker for random life lessons, thoughts, recipes, philosophies — things that might outlive me. Things my kids can come back to someday. Things that might help someone else along the way.
The Air Force told me I was going to learn Korean. I never imagined it would change the trajectory of my life. From the warmth of shared meals to the depth of words like han, language became more than communication — it became a new way of seeing the world.
One night of umpiring, vinyl, and baseball videos reminded me that even as Gio grows more independent, music and small moments still stitch us together.
On the morning of September 11th, I stepped off my bus into the sunshine, thinking it was a good day to be alive. Hours later, I was fleeing Manhattan as the world seemed to collapse around me. This is my story from 59 Maiden Lane — what I saw, what I felt, and how that day ultimately led me to enlist in the U.S. Air Force.
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