How long will it take you to climb out of the hole you dug for yourself?

That is the question I have been asking myself for days, for weeks, for months. And it is the question we all have to keep asking, because it is normal to fall and to fail. There is something in your life right now that you have been avoiding. You know this is true. I do not have to tell you, because you already know it.

And the good news is that it is never too late.

Two days ago I watched the Germany world cup game. What I saw was a team celebrating a comeback. How long did it take them to come back to world-class football? Twelve years. I remember it vividly, because I was in Brazil for the 7-1, the year we won the World Cup. Then those same world-class players lost two World Cups in a row. They did not even get out of the group stage. They let themselves down.

It does not matter why. What matters is that a comeback is a decision, and it starts with a question. How long will you continue to avoid yours?

At the start of 2024 I started a podcast and interviewed 50 founders. The topic was always the same. The topic was always the same: how to recover from a blow. How to become a man who stands up again despite the scars and the failures. I did it for a year, and it was not particularly successful.

Then this February, my father passed away.

It took me completely off guard. I was heads-down building my company, trying to do everything at once, and then my mom called. He was in the hospital. Three days later he was dead. I flew to Germany for the funeral. It was too much.

This is not an excuse. It is just what happened. I made a decision to abandon a part of myself. I told myself I did not have the bandwidth, so I would just work. Grind. Dig into the build. And I did. I built a new app. But I abandoned the thing I actually cherished: reaching out to other men who have been through hard things and having real conversations with them.

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You have to forgive yourself for letting yourself down. There is resentment in all of us, and you have to let it go. Isolation, loss, and grief change you from the inside. But if you can endure them and let go of the sting, you come back a different man, a better one, because now you have integrated all of it.

I used to think starting something new meant starting from zero. So every time, I abandoned the last thing to chase the next.

But you cannot abandon yourself. Your life is one story, not a stack of fresh starts.

The new Nomad CEO is a newsletter that finally holds all of it. The business side of things I have spent my adult life building. The conversations with founders who walked away and rebuilt themselves somewhere else, often in another country. And travel, the life I actually live. I might even bring photography back, because there is an artist in me with a gallery I stopped talking about when everything fell apart.

This week's first edition is about business, because that is what I have done with my adult life.

First, though, I owe you an apology. Forgive me for abandoning you all this time.

We are back. We will have more videos, more conversations, and more connections.

So tell me one thing. When is your comeback? Hit reply and tell me.

Talk soon,

Roman