Um...your timeline is showing.

At the start of 2025, I realized I was 25 years into my career. (Graduating in 2000 makes for easy math.) 

I spent some time reflecting. Years at a coffee cooperative in Nicaragua, a college in western China, and a microfinance pilot project in South Africa. An MBA. Helping lead a $130M organization. Two kids entering adulthood and thriving. A marriage that undergirds everything. A successful business launch.

So what about my next 25 years?

I decided to focus on nonprofit CEOs across the sector, building a peer intelligence network and advising them directly on their most substantive decisions. That’s the highest and best use of my time and skills for the outcomes I want to see in the world.

That’s plenty for the next 25 years. 

But I am also thinking a lot about how to build more philanthropy throughout the U.S. I read Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger as I finished college. So we have always given away a lot of money, and that's continuing to increase. I am on the lookout for others who are looking beyond traditional fundraising with existing givers to those thinking hard about actually increasing the number of philanthropists. I am cultivating deeper thinking about how we upper middle-class folks use what we’ve been entrusted with, for the flourishing of others. 

With the pace of change today, from a chaotic politic to new frontiers through AI, it’s hard to think in decades.

On The Nonprofit CEO Podcast this week, Michael Wear, President and CEO of The Center for Christianity and Public Life, shares about his long-term perspective:

"I was in a season of life in which a 30 year mission was plausible. I had seen and experienced enough and had developed a view of the world and a sense of what was needed that the audacity to even talk about a 30 year mission was within the realm of possibility." 

Audacity.

Michael had to navigate pressure from some significant potential donors to take shortcuts, to go for short-term wins that weren’t really heading toward the bigger vision.