It's raining today. Not a drizzle. The kind of rain that makes you stop what you're doing and just watch it fall. I'm a cozy rainy day kind of person. Sun is fine. Rain is mine. And it feels right that on the morning I'm writing this, the sky gave me exactly that.
Because today I need to think. And today I need to be honest. And today, more than any other day in a long time, I need to ask why.
There's a woman out on the Pacific Ocean right now. Her name is Kelsey Pfendler. She's 31 years old, a Grand Canyon river guide, and she's been alone in a 24-foot boat for over a month. Rowing. Every day. Toward Hawaii. 2,400 miles from where she started in Monterey, California.
No crew. No support vessel. Just her, a boat named Lily, a Jetboil, some Cheerios, and a reason.
Someone asked her why. Why rowing? Why thousands of miles alone across the Pacific? Her answer was about as simple as an answer gets.
"I love rowing. I love hard things."
She's been out there rowing eighteen hours some days. Sleeping in one-hour intervals. Blistered hands. Relentless sun she can't shade herself from because a shade cover counts as a sail. She crossed the halfway point faster than any woman ever has. She's on pace to break records that have stood for years. And when she crossed that mark, closer to Hawaii than California for the first time, she posted about it. Shared it. Let people in.
She sometimes smiles on camera. Sometimes she cries. And that right there is why four hundred thousand people are following her every stroke.
Because it's real. Because she's not pretending. Because there's no gap between who she is on land and who she is alone in the middle of the ocean.
I've been thinking about her all week. Because tomorrow is my first row day. Crazy for a Prairie boy.
Why do we do what we do? Not the industry answer. Not the version that sounds good in a room full of people who are also in the industry. The real one. The one that lives somewhere underneath everything else, that you don't talk about at conferences or post about on LinkedIn, that you maybe haven't said out loud to anyone, including yourself, in a very long time.
Does a career define us? Really define us? Or is it just a chapter, one part of a much longer journey that we sometimes mistake for the whole story? Does your location define you? Does the restaurant you opened, the address on the sign, the neighbourhood you planted yourself in, does that tell people who you are? Or does it just tell them where you are right now?
Why do we let those things carry so much of our identity? Why does losing a title feel like losing a self? Why does a slow month feel like a verdict on who we are as a person?
I've been in and around foodservice and hospitality for the better part of my adult life. I've had more than sixteen hundred conversations with owners and operators across fifteen countries. And the thing I keep coming back to, the thing that stays with me long after the recording stops, is that the people who last in this industry aren't the ones who figured out the numbers. They're the ones who never forgot why they started. Not where they started. Not what they were called when they started. Why.
That's a harder thing to hold onto than it sounds.
Because life has a way of burying the why. Slowly, quietly, without warning. The pressure builds and the months pile up and one day you realize the why has gotten very quiet. And all you can hear is the noise. The weight of it all.
Kelsey Pfendler knows about weight. Her boat loaded with supplies sits at twelve hundred pounds. She rows it alone, against currents that push her backward, against winds she can't predict, through squalls that come without warning. She said the first week was the hardest because she had no one to lean on emotionally. No one. Just the ocean and herself and the question of whether she had the right answer to why.
She did. She keeps rowing.
I want to talk about something personal. Because I think it's relevant, and because the things we're most reluctant to say out loud are usually the things most worth saying.
About five years ago, my body started failing me.
The stress of what was happening in my life showed up physically in a way I couldn't ignore. My motor skills were affected. Badly. I couldn't walk right. A guy who had spent his entire career moving, always moving, who worked out, who showed up every single day no matter what, couldn't walk the way he used to. Couldn't run. Some days still can't, not fully. That leg still has its own agenda some mornings. Doctors weren't sure what it was. There were conversations about whether it had been a stroke.
Why me.
Not long after that, I lost someone I loved to mental health. They didn't pass, but who they were did. Someone I shared my life with. Someone whose struggle I watched from the closest possible distance and couldn't fix, even though I had spent years talking openly about mental health, about vulnerability, about showing up for each other. I thought I understood it. I didn't understand it well enough when it mattered most.
Why me. Why them. Why.
Then came my heart. Blood pressure that became a real problem. The organ responsible for keeping you in motion, betraying you. The irony of spending your life showing up for other people and then discovering that your own heart, literally, needs help. That one sits with you differently when the doctors won't let you go home because it's an emergency.
And then just over a month ago, I got a text. My sister was gone. During the exact window of time when I was making the biggest professional decision of my life. The universe didn't ask if the timing was convenient. It never does.
Why now. Why ever. But why now.
Kelsey Pfendler said something about the river that I keep coming back to. She said the most important lesson it ever taught her wasn't technical. It was humility. "You learn very quickly that you're not in control. You can prepare, make thoughtful inputs, and work with the river, but in the end, the river has the final say."
The ocean, she found out, works the same way.
So does life. So does this industry. So does grief. So does the body when it decides it's carrying too much.
You can prepare. You can work with it. But some of it will go the way it goes, and your only real choice is whether you keep rowing.
I'm not writing this for sympathy. I genuinely mean that. I'm good. I'm here. I'm still moving.
I'm writing it because I think most people in this industry carry a version of this. Different details. Same weight. And we've built a culture where you're not supposed to talk about it. Where the answer to why me is keep going, the shift doesn't stop, the guests don't know what's happening in your life and they shouldn't have to.
That's true.
But I've started to believe that the why only survives if you're honest about it. If you let it be complicated. If you admit that some days the why is not a motivational idea. Some days the why is just the next stroke. The next morning. One more sleep.
My kids watched their mother go through mental health struggles serious enough to put her in hospital twice. They grew up watching their father try to build something when everything else was falling apart. And they came out the other side as the strongest people I know. All of them. Graduated. Launched. Standing on their own feet. Still finding their own why, but on the path.
Tomorrow, the same morning I return my phone and computer after twenty-two years and say goodbye to the career that shaped most of my adult life, one of my sons starts his first career job.
Same day. His beginning. My row. Same morning.
Why does that happen? Why does life line things up like that? I don't know. But I think it's saying something. That the things we carry, the weight, the grief, the hard years, they don't disappear. They just eventually become the foundation for something else. Something you couldn't have built any other way.
When Kelsey Pfendler finished her first team crossing of the Pacific in 2024, she had been at sea for forty days. Sleep deprived, physically wrecked, ready for a shower. And they asked her on the dock: would you do it again?
She didn't hesitate. "In a heartbeat."
That's the answer that comes from a real why. Not from strategy. Not from calculation. From somewhere deeper than both.
Now think about your restaurant.
Not the revenue. Not the reviews. Not the staffing problems this week or the cost of goods that went up again. Think about why you opened it. Why you signed that lease. Why you. Why this. Why now.
Does your restaurant define you? Does the corner it sits on, the concept you chose, the city you're in, does any of that tell the real story of who you are? Or have you started to confuse the place with the person? The address with the identity?
Because I've watched owners hold onto a location that stopped working years ago because they couldn't separate who they are from where they are. I've watched people stay in the wrong city, the wrong concept, the wrong version of their career, not because it made sense but because changing it felt like admitting something they weren't ready to admit. That maybe the thing didn't define them. That maybe they were bigger than the thing.
You are. You always were.
Ego is real. The attachment to who we've been is real. It keeps us from the very things that would move us forward. Kelsey Pfendler knew the ocean could capsize her. She knew people had tried this and not made it. She went anyway. Not because she ignored the risk. Because the why was bigger than the fear. The risk always is.
A few years ago I was moved from a national role to a regional one. I didn't choose it. And at the time I had to sit with a very uncomfortable why. Why after everything. Why now. Why this direction. What I couldn't see was that the regional role is where I built something that genuinely changed things. The discomfort was the point. Being redirected wasn't the end of something. It was the condition for something better.
That was the start. This is the start. Now we're going.
I've spent six years building something in public. A podcast. A newsletter. Events. A media company genuinely trying to give this industry a real voice. Not a polished one. A real one. Built around the people actually doing the work.
And now it's time. Ashton Media.
People keep telling me I'll do great on my own. And I believe they mean it. But great isn't the point. Great is a result. The point is having something worth doing. The point is getting up in the morning and knowing the work in front of you is honest and that it matters to people who deserve to have someone in their corner.
That's the why I've been building toward without always knowing it. Through the health problems and the grief and the career shifts and the years that were harder than I let on. All of it was pointing here.
Kelsey Pfendler is somewhere in the middle of the Pacific right now. Rowing. One stroke at a time. No guarantee of what the ocean will do next. But she knows why she's out there. And that's the only thing that makes the distance possible.
Tomorrow I push off from shore.
So I'll ask you what I asked myself this morning with the rain still falling and one more sleep before everything changes.
Why do you do what you do?
And then the harder one. Why are you making the choices you're making right now? In your restaurant, in your career, in your life. Why that direction and not the one you think about at two in the morning when everything is quiet and it's just you and the thing you haven't done yet.
That why is the most important thing about you. More important than any number on any report. More important than the reviews. More important than who recognizes you and who doesn't. It's the thing that either carries you through the hard years or runs out on you when you need it most.
Find it. Say it out loud. Write it down if you have to. And then keep going toward it, even when the path doesn't explain itself to you while you're on it.
The rain is still coming down.
One more sleep.
I know why I'm going. That's enough.
Stand with me. Why is where it starts. Not where it finishes. And that's exactly where we're headed. That's why.
Let's row.
