Identity after the title
What happens to your sense of self when the role that organized your identity is no longer the center of your life?
The project
What does a remarkable next chapter actually look like?
Original research, real conversations, and the ideas shaping Brett’s forthcoming book, Beyond Autopilot.
What Brett is studying
Not decline. Flourishing.
In 2024, Brett began a series of private conversations with accomplished people who are approaching or actively living through what most people call retirement.
The question driving the research is not “how do people cope with getting older?” It is something more specific and more interesting: what does it look like when an accomplished person uses this season well? What do the people who come alive in this chapter have in common? What do the people who quietly drift have in common? And what, if anything, can be deliberately cultivated?
These conversations are wide-ranging and confidential. Brett speaks with executives, entrepreneurs, founders, and senior leaders from a variety of industries. Some are mid-career and thinking ahead. Others are fully in the season they did not quite prepare for. All of them are thoughtful, and all of them have things worth saying.
The research is shaping Brett’s coaching, his writing, and his forthcoming book, Beyond Autopilot — a book about emergence, deliberate living, and what becomes possible when accomplished people stop operating on momentum and start choosing what comes next.
The questions
What the conversations explore.
Contribution without a structure
What does meaningful work look like when you are no longer accountable to an organization, a board, or a quarterly result?
Vitality and purpose
What keeps accomplished people genuinely engaged, curious, and alive — rather than simply comfortable?
Relationships and belonging
How do the connections that once organized your life need to evolve, and how do you build the ones that will carry you forward?
Freedom and its complications
What do accomplished people discover about themselves when the structure that shaped their days is suddenly removed?
What makes it worth it
At the end of the day, what makes this chapter feel like something you chose — rather than something that simply happened to you?
Volunteer for a conversation
Your experience is part of the research.
If you are an accomplished person navigating or approaching this season — in any field, at any stage — Brett would value a private conversation with you.
This is not an interview, a survey, or a sales call. It is a genuine conversation, conducted privately and confidentially. Participants are not identified in any published work without explicit written permission. Nothing you share will be used in a way you would not recognize or approve.
Conversations run approximately 60 minutes and take place by video call. Brett is grateful to the people who have made time for this work.
Express Your InterestThe forthcoming book
Beyond Autopilot.
Brett is writing a book about what becomes possible when accomplished people stop operating on momentum and start choosing deliberately. It draws on the research conversations, his coaching work, and his own experience of building a new life after the one he expected was no longer available.
The book is not about retirement in any conventional sense. It is about emergence — about the specific kind of freedom and clarity that becomes available when a successful person turns their full attention to what they actually want to build next.
Beyond Autopilot is in progress. Publication date to be announced.