About William

I want to be upfront with you about something before I tell you who I am.

I didn't write this book because I figured something out. I wrote it because I spent a significant portion of my life getting things wrong — and I finally got tired of the story I was telling myself about why.

That's a more accurate beginning than most About pages offer. I thought you deserved it.

I've been in sales for more than forty years. Not in one industry, not behind one product, not defined by one category. I'm a professional salesperson in the truest sense of that word — which means the craft is what I care about, not the commodity. I've learned that the ability to understand people, build trust, and create genuine value translates across almost any context. That lesson took longer to learn than it should have. Most of the important ones did.

I live in Kentucky. I've built things and lost things and rebuilt them. I've been a caregiver for someone I loved at the end of his life. I've hit bottom in the ways that clarify everything and climbed back from it in the ways that change everything. I've reinvented myself more than once — not because I'm especially resilient, but because the alternatives ran out.

None of that makes me remarkable. It makes me someone who paid attention.

Be Worthwhile came out of a simple and uncomfortable question I couldn't stop asking myself.

Not whether I was successful. Not whether I was impressive or accomplished or moving in the right direction by the metrics other people use to measure a life. The question was simpler and harder than any of those.

Am I living a worthwhile life?

Worth the time. Worth the effort. Worth the investment of the one resource that doesn't replenish and can't be recovered.

I didn't love my honest answer. So I started writing.

What came out was everything I'd learned — about seeing yourself clearly, about the gap between the values you claim and the life you actually live, about accountability and presence and the particular freedom that comes from stopping the work of maintaining a version of yourself that isn't quite true.

It's not a book about sales. It's not a business book. It's not a self-help book in the way that category usually means. It's a book about trying to be someone you can trust. Starting with yourself.

I'm not finished becoming who I'm trying to be. I don't think that process ever stops. But I know the direction.

Live aligned. Act with purpose. Be worthwhile.

That's what I'm working toward. If it sounds like something you're working toward too, I'd be glad to have you along.

Subscribe to the Worthwhile newsletter — one piece a week on honesty, character, and the unglamorous work of trying to live better than you did yesterday.

Or reach out directly. I read everything.