Over the past year, my family has been transitioning my mother into dementia care. Like so many families who go through this, we've been sorting through a lifetime of photographs, artwork, keepsakes, and boxes that hadn't been opened in years. Every object seems to carry a story, and every story somehow leads to another.
Then I came across these three battered Stormtrooper helmets.
Christmas morning in 1977 is one of those memories that has never really faded. Star Wars had only been in theaters for a few months, and there wasn't much merchandise yet. Somehow, my parents managed to find three Stormtrooper helmets and three toy lightsabers for my brothers and me. Looking back, the lightsabers were really just flashlights with colored plastic cones attached to the end, but to us they were absolutely real.
We wore those helmets constantly. They appeared in home movies, birthday parties, backyard battles, and just about every afternoon that required a little imagination. Years later, my brother turned them into an art project, and eventually they found a home on a shelf in my parents' house, where they quietly sat for decades.
A few weeks ago, I was looking through the estate auction listings when I came across the helmets.
They had already been sold.
I wasn't expecting the reaction I had. Those helmets had quietly sat on a shelf for years, but seeing them belong to someone else suddenly made me realize they were never just three pieces of plastic.
Thankfully, the collector who had purchased them was incredibly gracious and agreed to let them come back home. When I picked them up again, I expected to feel nostalgic. Instead, I found myself thinking about something entirely different.
Long before I had a career, a title, or any idea what I was going to do with my life, there were already parts of me that were unmistakably there. I was curious. I loved stories. I loved building imaginary worlds and disappearing into them for hours at a time. Looking at those helmets reminded me that none of those things had ever really gone away. They had simply become buried beneath decades of work, responsibility, and the pace of everyday life.
One of the unexpected things about the work I've been doing with founders and leadership teams is that I've started noticing the same pattern in businesses that I noticed in those helmets. The companies that make the biggest leaps rarely become something entirely different. More often, they uncover something that was already true about them but had become obscured over time. The strongest positioning, the clearest opportunities, and the greatest momentum usually come from rediscovering an authentic strength rather than inventing a new one.
Standing there with those helmets in my hands, I realized the same thing might be true for us. Maybe momentum doesn't simply move us toward someone new. Maybe it uncovers someone we've been carrying with us all along.
“Your 50” is a 50-week reflection series about realigning, activating, and expressing what comes next.