This is what I heard at Roots back in January, and what has only sharpened in the months since. Some of it you said over breakfast. Some of it sat behind what you said. Medallion has ended. The house has sold. The plan has names for itself now. None of it is new — you've been living all of it. I'm just naming it back to you. — Mike
Christopher is a change-management specialist wired for truth in environments engineered to avoid it. He calls himself a Zen Mormon. He calls his career a non-virtuous cycle. He is sixty, autistic, disabled, twice demoted and finally severed — and he was the only person in the room who saw the transition coming, named it out loud, and stayed long enough to keep the wheels on the bus. He has stopped optimizing for more. He is optimizing for something that lasts. The fall is happening on purpose this time. He is finally choosing who he plays with on the way down — and what he builds for them when he gets there.
"There's this sense about truth, and you just can't go against it — sometimes it's even a perceived truth, not an absolute one." Those were your words. You named it on the call as autism. Most companies would call it inconvenient. The Arbinger Institute is where you found the language for it — love thy neighbor as thyself, not your neighbor more and yourself less. Equal. The whole frame of leadership, for you, comes from refusing the small lie that gets the meeting moving.
The discomfort that has followed you into every job is not a defect. It's the byproduct of a sensor that won't switch off. It got you the SEC-aware editorial relationship at RV News. It got you crossways with the CFO. It is the same instrument in both rooms — and you have spent forty years apologizing for it instead of charging for it.
Seven marriages between your parents. Thirteen siblings. A new town every five months on average. You named it to me without flinching — squid parents, ejecting the young into the ocean and hoping a few survive. A childhood built for someone else's logistics.
And then the gymnastics class. Two months long, in a place you knew you were leaving. You decided, at nine, I'm gonna be the best in the world at something. Whatever it is. You told me on the call that you knew exactly what it was — the drug-or-alcohol fork is one road; perfectionism and high performance are the other. You took the second one. You turned the wound into a methodology. Forty years later you don't need to be the best in the world anymore. You just need to be the truest one in the room — and you already are, in most rooms you walk into.
Eighth grade. You got off the baseball field and onto the tennis ladder at the lowest rung and stayed happy there. The reason was a single sentence: I could choose who I played with. That principle has organized your entire working life. As an employee, you are on a team sport. In your own business, the people who were drawn to you became your clients. The work has always been downstream of the company you keep.
It's why Medallion hurt the way it did. You didn't get to choose the people, and the people didn't really choose you. You are not allergic to work. You are not allergic to marketing — though you'd argue that one. You are allergic to the wrong company. Once I heard you say it about tennis, the whole shape of the last three years made sense.
You told me about the study — randomly split colony, smart-mouse and dumb-mouse labels stuck onto identical animals, and then the lab techs treated them differently in tiny ways without realizing they were doing it. The dumb ones underperformed. The labels dictated the outcome.
You said it cleanly: I cannot do it because they don't believe I can. The CFO decided in the first three months you weren't his guy, and from that moment the resources thinned, the scope narrowed, the opportunities went elsewhere. You're not paranoid. You read the room correctly. The mice are real, and the genius of how you survived this last stretch is that you stopped trying to perform out of the cage and instead narrated the experiment back to the people running it — until they had no choice but to watch themselves running it.
Months before the reorganization that would cut your scope, you asked your leadership a single question: If you could reset marketing completely, what would that look like? It took them two months to answer. When they did, they hired a new SVP with the exact HubSpot fluency you didn't have — fluency his last employer had paid to build into him.
You set the table for your own replacement. On purpose. You saved Medallion the cost of an internal learning curve, kept the wheels on the bus through the transition, and they almost cut your pay for the favor. The story you told them — quietly, without the chip on your shoulder you'd earned the right to wear: I made this transition possible. They couldn't keep you. But they couldn't bill you for it, either. Six weeks of severance. A clean exit by mutual agreement. The door closed without slamming. They will not catch up to your foresight in real time. They never do. But the record will.
The house has sold. Medallion is behind you — six weeks of severance, a clean exit. Expenses are dropping under two thousand a month. The medical lab is still raising; the EVP seat is still warm if it closes. But you are no longer waiting on any of it. The plan has shape now: short term, freelance marketing, design, and consulting — for the people who actually want what you do. Long term — and this is the part I am most excited to watch — a constellation of tiny product-oriented websites aimed at super-niche audiences. Things you build once that go and find their own people. No more selling your hours by the slice.
You quoted the Tao to me at the end: the wheel is valuable because of the hole where the axle inserts. The vessel is valuable because of the empty space inside of it. You have spent your whole life filling vessels for other people — banks, labs, holding companies, kids, marriages. The empty one is finally yours. You don't have to know what goes in it. You just have to stop letting other people fill it for you. That is the work of sixty. From the few years I've known you, it is plainly the most dignified choice I've watched you make.
Choose your collaborators.
"All I really want
is to work with good people."
The next chapter has begun.