Thank you for believing in me without expectation.
Dad sat on his boat every day. Not to sail: to sit.
He kept the boat on the Schelde, in one of the widest bends of the river, where commercial ships passed and tidal streams pulled the water back and forth in a slow, constant motion. The banks were green. You could not hear a single car. Classical music carried further across the water than you would ever expect.
He would go there in the evening, after dinner, with a book from his own self-curated collection and something classical playing quietly, and he would stay for hours. On weekends he could not wait. He went twice, once in the morning and once at the end of the day. Neighbors from the village would walk down the path, see him there, and stop for a chat. He would look up, listen, respond, and then return to his book. Still as water. Profound as the deepest lake.
He did this every day. All his life. He was at peace with his surroundings and his habits, in a way I did not understand as a child and did not fully understand as an adult until he passed four years ago.
Christmas 2001. Beijing.
Mom stepped off a plane alone. She had already travelled to Burma and to India. She was always the adventurer. But she had not yet come to China, and she was not going to wait to see the country I was starting to build my life in. She traveled twelve time zones to come find me because I was just starting to discover the world, and she wanted to join the discovery.
The day after she landed, I took her into the center of Beijing to show her the real China. She had come expecting the cultural point of gravity of communist Asia. What we walked into was tens of thousands of Chinese people on bicycles wearing red Santa Claus hats with green and red flashing bulbs at the tip. Bing Crosby was playing on loop in the shopping centers. Everything was Christmas kitsch cranked to eleven, playing at high volume, everywhere at once. It was like we had wandered into a bad Hollywood commercial. Mom was a little in shock. Or a little disappointed. Or both: just in the right quantities, like a perfect cocktail.
The next day I took her on the subway to Tiananmen Square. My office was inside a refurbished building in the Forbidden City. I was there for Barco, helping develop the digital cinema market with the Chinese state-run film industry and Boeing’s satellite division, streaming movies and the World Cup over satellite. As we walked under the giant portrait of Mao Zedong at the entrance to the square, I explained the project to her. Another small shock, though a quieter one this time.
She listened to all of it. Every word. She was fully present for the surreal Christmas circus, for the political weight of the square, for what I was actually building at twenty-something in the middle of a country neither of us fully understood. She did not try to interpret it. She did not steer. She just walked next to me and listened.
Mom is a force of nature. A poetic optimist, running on something that has never been quite rational, and never had to be. Her emotions travel on an amplified sinusoid. But underneath all of it lives one of her rarest gifts: she really listens. She is fully present. A mountain stream: pure, crystalline, incapable of standing still.
Two parents. One still as a lake. The other in motion like a river. And somewhere between the two of them I learned how to build things.
They never told me what to do with my life.
Not with my career. Not with my education. Not with money. Not with the shape of the days ahead of me. What they did instead, over and over, through my childhood and well into my adulthood, was ask me deep questions without judgment.
Not to guide me to a conclusion. Not to steer me toward the answer they wanted. They asked so that I would think it through myself. They asked so that I would take critical thinking seriously and combine it with being the owner of my own destiny.
I did not recognize this method as a method at the time. I only understood, gradually. Some of my close friends had been given clear direction. I had been given clear questions. Those were two different starting points.
They had also given me a name.
My father wanted to name me after one of his historic heroes: Willem de Zwijger, William the Silent, the sixteenth-century Dutch prince famous for strategic silence, suspended judgment, and refusing to react to information until he had understood the full picture. My mother settled on the shorter form: Wim. But the historical dimension came up more than once during my childhood, especially the elements of critical thinking and suspended judgment.
I carried the name for a reason. It was up to me whether I lived up to it, without pressure, but with a clear example somewhere behind me.
The name and the method were the same lesson, delivered in different registers.
Everything I have built since started there.
If I try to name what my parents actually gave me, three things stand out, and I know if I keep going deeper there would be more.
The first: the freedom to carve my own path. They set me on my way, but they never pointed at where to go. They never hinted at how to live. That silence gave space for dreams, doubts, and a lot of zigzagging. And I did a lot of that. In my twenties alone I earned three masters degrees in three unrelated fields, business and engineering, international politics and conflict resolution, and anthropology. I started a skiing company with two friends during my studies, watched it become wildly successful, and bailed at the peak because I was bored. I worked on a merger at a multinational oil company, and bailed because I was bored. I applied for the Prince Albert Fund grant and got it. I signed to go to Brazil to run a mine and an adjacent battery factory, then changed my mind three weeks later and went to Beijing instead. That is a taste of the zigzagging. Because that is what I chose, and my parents always supported my choices. Slowly, over years and continents and mistakes, I found my path. Myself. Not the version anyone else drew for me.
The second: the primacy of how you live your life. Not fame. Not money. Not what other people can see. What matters is who you see when you look in the mirror at the end of the day. My parents did not preach this: they modeled it. They developed their own moral compass through critical thinking and observation and trial and error. No blind belief. No sheepish copying. And they gave me permission to develop mine the same way.
Only now, decades later, do I recognize the frame they were quietly handing me: Gandhi’s “make your life your message.” My parents never quoted the line. I did not name it until this project. But the whole title of this newsletter, Make My Mess My Message, is a variant of that same wisdom, evolved through my own path.
This is the compass I have carried into every business I have built.
The third came from watching what I did not want to become. My father worked in a business he did not choose, for reasons that belonged to a previous generation, until he was in his late fifties. Then he closed it. He started a new career. And he was very happy. That closing was one of the quietest lessons of my life. I decided early that I would never do work I did not love or was not good at. I also grew up under the constant, unspoken cloud of financial anxiety: my parents had never learned the language of money, while working extremely hard, and the tension of not-quite-enough lived in the walls of the house. I decided early that I would never build a business that would put my family in that place. Cash flow discipline was not something I read about later. It was in the walls.
I have zigged and zagged more than most. I did not follow a career path anyone would have designed on paper. I moved countries. I changed industries. I closed things. I started things. I ran into walls and had to rebuild.
Through all of it, my parents believed in me. Really believed. Without expectation. Not in the outcome, not in the destination, not in the shape of the success, just in the fact that I would carve my own path and develop my own compass and eventually find my way. That belief was not conditional on results. It was the ground I was allowed to stand on.
That belief is the gift.
That is the thing I now understand, four years after Dad passed and with Mom still sailing with me when she comes over to Spain, was the beginning of everything.
If I could stand in front of both of them right now, both alive, both listening, and thank them for one thing about how they shaped me as a builder, I would say this:
Thank you for believing in me without expectation.
That is the gift. And I hope to pass it on to the people around me who matter: the team members finding their own compass, the builders who show up in this community with their own questions and their own zigzags, the young people I am fortunate to be friends with as they carve their own paths. This is what the whole OSBB philosophy is trying to name: the wealth that begins when someone believes in you before you have anything to show for it.
The Four Currencies of Wealth, Capital, Wisdom, Opportunity, Network, start with the Network you were born into. But the deeper currency underneath all four is the one my parents handed me quietly across decades: being believed in without expectation.
If you were given this as a child, honor it by extending it to someone. If you were not, extend it anyway. That is where OSBB begins, not in the wealth you received, but in the belief you offer to someone whose path is still uncertain.
That is where wealth begins.
Be water, my friend. 🌊
Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time. This issue first appeared on LinkedIn. Every issue lives here.
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