Significance in the Age of AI

Why this talk matters now

The greatest tragedy in life is to be successful at things that do not matter. Tim Tebow said that on a stage I happened to be in the audience for, and it has been the question I keep coming back to ever since.

The high performers in your audience have been running a treadmill for fifteen or twenty years. They hit numbers. They got promoted. They earned the title. And many of them are quietly wondering whether the next milestone is going to feel any different than the last one.

This talk is for them.

I got the question early and I did not volunteer for it. I was diagnosed with malignant melanoma while teaching at West Point and the Army medically retired me younger than I planned to go. Nothing clarifies what actually matters like having the calendar you assumed you had taken off the table. What came after was worse: I moved my family to Florida the same week COVID shut the country down, and then I collected 383 straight job rejections.

What’s in the talk

A working definition of significance that holds up on a Monday morning, not just inside a moment of inspiration. The questions I had to answer when a cancer diagnosis ended my Army career and handed me a decision I had not asked for. The framework I use now for deciding what work to take on, what to decline, and how to choose the next decade.

I open with the story of how the decision actually happened, and it is not a highlight reel. I did not walk away from my Army career; malignant melanoma took it. I moved to South Florida on March 5, 2020, the same week the country shut down. I went to work in a Chick-fil-A restaurant to stay competitive for an operator selection, which meant going from West Point instructor to working a shift in about a year. Then COVID stopped new restaurants from being built, so I started applying for jobs and got 383 straight rejections. That was the lowest point of my life. Then one yes, a remote project management job I could do from my kitchen table. I left that safe landing to operate a high-volume restaurant in Miami. I take the audience through how I chose, the pushback from people who could not understand, and the clarity that came after.

The middle of the talk is the framework: three filters for distinguishing significance from success, and a practical test you can run on any opportunity to know which one it is.

The last third is the playbook for actually living it. Not theoretical. Not vague. Five concrete moves any senior leader can make this quarter to start choosing significance over success without quitting their job or abandoning their team.

How I customize for your audience

For a corporate sales kickoff or award ceremony, I tailor the framework to the specific industry and to the demographic of who is in the room. I draw on the operator texture of running a real business with real people whose lives the work touches.

For a faith-aligned audience, I lean into the personal narrative more openly: the diagnosis, the role faith and family played in what I chose next, and the practices that keep the significance-versus-success question alive on a daily basis.

For a leadership summit or executive offsite, I extend the talk into a workshop where each leader maps their current work against the three filters and builds a personal significance audit they can run quarterly.