Chapter 1 — A Personal Religion

I found out I was almost certainly the father of five-year-old twin boys while standing on the cold marble floor of Terminal 2 at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, thirty-five minutes after cursing a flight delay I was certain would ruin my career.

I was forty-four years old, and I had spent most of those years turning punctuality into a personal religion.

I owned a chain of luxury resorts — properties in Miami, in Key West, in Nashville, in Salt Lake City — and I had built the whole enterprise on the conviction that a man who is never late is a man who can never be caught unprepared.

That morning I was flying to Baltimore to close the acquisition of a historic waterfront estate, the largest deal of my entire career, the kind of transaction that gets written up and remembered.

I had arrived at the airport two full hours early, because two hours early was simply who I was.

And then the departure monitor above the gate flashed red.

A mechanical delay.

I stood there and felt something close to genuine outrage, the specific fury of a man who has arranged his entire life so that this exact thing cannot happen to him, watching it happen to him anyway.

I took a breath and did what I always did, which was manage it.

I dialed my executive team.

“Start the board meeting without me if you have to,” I told them.

“I’ll be on the ground in Maryland the moment they clear this aircraft.” Then I went looking for a quiet place to work, because if I could not fly, I could at least not waste the time — I had never in my life simply sat still and let a delay be a delay.

I did not yet know that this one was not a delay at all.

It was the single most important thing that had ever happened to me, wearing the disguise of the thing I hated most in the world.

I have thought a great deal, since, about my religion of punctuality, and about what it was a religion of.

I had always told myself it was about respect — that a man who is never late respects other people’s time, and that this made me, in some small daily way, a good man.

But that was not the whole truth, and I know it now.