One Year From Today.

One year ago today, I was having a heart attack and didn't know it.

I was standing in a field in Upstate New York with my 21-year-old son, Jake, spreading his grandfather's ashes over the grave of Philip Roth — the author my father loved most, the one who spent his whole career writing about the despair of men. It was one day before the first anniversary of my father's death from — you guessed it — a heart attack. Three generations in that field: one of us was dust, one was immortal in the way only a 21-year-old can be, and one was having a cardiac event but didn't know it yet. Roth would have approved.

I'd been uncomfortable since the night before. Aching from my jaw down to my chest. I figured I'd slept wrong. Four hours later, I collapsed carrying a bag of groceries from the car to the kitchen.

First, the important stuff: I'm ok and so is my son. The past nine months of recovery have been tough, trying to fine tune a new medicine regimen that I'm told I'll be on for the rest of my life. Plus, I've been doing a lot of "processing" as I contemplate my father's final gift to me—his lousy heart. And long talks with Jake.

Life Imitates Art and Then Art Saves a Life

But here's the strange part. After the cardiac event came the mania.

My doctor says it's not unusual for someone to experience extreme creativity after a life-altering event. Mine presented, not surprisingly, as writing. Mostly, I wrote about an entrepreneur I made up named Clayton, who would eventually build a great company and become a hero — to his family, his employees and eventually, his father. But only after going through some choppy water.

The story begins with these words from Clayton's wise mentor, Mr. Gi:

"Who needs swimming lessons more than anybody?"

Clayton thinks, then answers: "Someone who's drowning."

"And who has the least time for swimming lessons," Gi continued.

Someone who's drowning.

What started as a trickle of an idea turned into a tidal wave of a story that came flooding through me. A year later, with the help of my editor, my story now flows with purpose.

Swimming Lessons for Clayton arrives this fall and somewhere inside it, I found the question my heart attack had pushed to the surface. It had nothing to do with business, not really. It was simpler, and lonelier than anything I'd written before:

Who is actually in this with me?

We Got Pulled Apart Without Noticing

Because here's what I've been circling for two years, in every one of my columns on Forbes, a few white papers and now in a novel: we got pulled apart, and most of us didn't notice it happening.

There used to be a place where entrepreneurs met. Not literally — but we read the same magazines, argued over the same cover stories, absorbed almost by osmosis a shared sense of what good business looked like. That town square had a memory. It held people accountable. Today that conscience has been atomized by the very technology that promised to connect us. There is only your feed and mine, and they are not the same.

Is it any wonder that entrepreneurs are making the biggest decisions of their lives — what to build, when to sell, whom to trust across the table — more alone than they've ever been?

The hard stop my own body forced on me was what it took for me to finally see it. I had spent decades moving fast and calling it progress. It took a heart attack to notice how lonely the journey had become.

One Year From Today, Here's Where I've Landed.

The town square isn't coming back. Nostalgia won't rebuild it. But the need it served hasn't gone anywhere — and that is the heart of the matter.

The antidote to being pulled apart is to deliberately find each other again. Not to perform success at one another, but to compare notes honestly, surface the mistakes, and think out loud together. Silicon Valley has even coined a term for this, "together tech," technology that makes people interact in the same room with one another.

Over the next year, I look forward to spending time with other business owners, face to face, working through our real business growth challenges but, more importantly, sharing the journey. That reciprocity — that willingness to walk alongside someone through the hard parts — is how wisdom moves now. Whatever you call it, it's the only real protection against being pulled down by the undertow.

One year later, I see it clearly: I conjured up Clayton, Mr. Gi, and the gang at OptiGuard in Cloverdale, Indiana to save me just when I was drowning.

Lewis Schiff

Chairman, Birthing of Giants  ·  [email protected]