Weslie Ricks is a single mom to three kids with disabilities, leads accessibility at a Fortune 500 company, and runs an impactful consulting and advocacy agency in Utah - and her path to these impactful roles were all but straight forward!

In this episode, Weslie talks about the cultural expectations she had to navigate, a mentor who taught her to translate her mission into a business case, the first client who said yes, and the thought she returns to every time she trains someone new: maybe this is the person who hires my daughter, or my son.

Weslie played every hand she was played with careful attention to her core values, every time guided by her North star: building a better world for her children.

I've spent much of my career wondering how to pull together the threads of my interests into one package, and wondering if I had picked "the right thing". Career or creative life. Stability or meaning. The serious path or the interesting one.

This podcast is a journey of discovery, talking to people who have taken their own unique approaches to this problem. Maybe I learn something. Maybe you do too!

For the first episode, I wanted to talk to someone whose story resists tidy summary, and Brian Thomas was the perfect place to start. He's a former investment banker with a background in political economy, a brief stint as a silk merchant, a chapter in data center infrastructure where he also built a sustainability program, and a most recent life as a lecturer at Santa Clara University. None of it was planned, and most of it began with a phone call or a relationship rather than a five-year strategy.

What I loved about this conversation is that Brian doesn't pretend he figured it out. He talks honestly about selling out, burning out, and slowly — almost accidentally — discovering the three things he'd do for free. He also offers some advice one might not expect: don't follow your passion. Save yourself first. Be good at something, then find ways to apply it.

It's a generous, slightly contrarian, deeply human conversation. I hope you'll listen.

(Small apologies for a few of the sound bumps. We attempted our conversation in a busy coffee shop. Sound programs had shenanigans trying to smooth things out. We let them).