It’s 6AM, I Must Be Lonely

What I learned about life and leadership in the driveway at my exes house this morning.

6:00 a.m. — taillights fading, future getting closer.

Matchbox Twenty sang, “It’s 3AM, I must be lonely.”

It’s 6 a.m., and I know I am.

He’s leaving from his mom’s, so I’m sitting in my car just outside her driveway in the early morning darkness, the first light barely creeping over the horizon. I’m waiting for him to come say goodbye, running through my head how to fit eighteen years into thirty seconds. The car’s already packed. He’s driving the first leg — his car, the one I leased for him when he first got his license. Back then I was freshly divorced, had just been fired, and standing in the middle of a life I didn’t fully recognize yet. Everything felt like freefall, and I was just trying to find a foothold.

Now I’m here watching my firstborn pull away, and it’s the same freefall all over again, just with a different sky above me.

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Since the divorce, I’ve gotten used to the shared custody rhythm, but your kids are still your kids. No paperwork changes that fact. With divorce you’re not a percentage, but boy does it feel like your identity on occasion. The second that child is born you’re a parent. That’s it. No judge’s signature can erase it.

His younger brother has three more years before it’s his turn. He’ll have to figure out life without big bro nearby, and I’ll have to figure out mine without the two of them under one roof. My girlfriend moves here in a few weeks — a first for both of us, even in our late 30s and 40s — and we were talking a couple nights ago about how life has this way of shaking you up in the best possible ways until you finally find yourself.

From my brush to the canvas — my son, frozen in his little league days in Cooper City. Feels like I blinked and he’s driving away to college.

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Today I had my own little breakdown. It all went so damn fast. A blink, now full of tears. Eighteen years, condensed into what feels like hundreds of thousands of images, all collapsing into a single frame. And in that frame, I’m not just seeing him. I’m seeing the whole reel of my own life, realizing how much of it has been shot in wide angle — close enough to guide, tight enough to protect, but always keeping him in frame..

Now? I’ve got to lead and love him with a long lens. That’s a new kind of parenting for me. In photography, when you’re shooting with a long lens, you’re physically far away from your subject. You’re not in their space. You’re not rearranging anything. You’re trusting your setup, and their skillset, waiting for the right moment, letting the scene play out naturally.

That’s what the next four years — and probably the rest of our lives — will look like. My job isn’t to run into the scrum to get the shot anymore. My job is to stay back, keep him in focus, and let him move freely.

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We don’t text much. But when we do, it’s usually about the things that matter to both of us — photography, video, editing, motion graphics, and the occasional F1 conversation I try to keep up with — the skills he picked up from me without me ever sitting him down to teach them. That’s my leadership style in a nutshell, at work and at home: give them the tools, give them the space, and watch them figure it out their own way.

It’s exactly what I wrote in the chapter of the book that I’ve loosely titled Your Team Is Not Your Family. The job isn’t to keep them close. It’s to prepare them to leave and still succeed. And that’s not just a work thing — it’s a life thing.

So maybe, in a few weeks, the texts and FaceTimes — when we actually get on them — will be about the new gear he’s shooting on down at UCF, the projects he’s working on, and the experiences that will become core memories for the rest of his life. Memories that will stay with him long after UCF, just like the ones I carry from my core-memory years with the Diamondbacks, long after I left the team.

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When he came out this morning, I handed him a few things he’d left at my house. And then we hugged. We aren’t huge huggers, I’m not really sure why, but this one meant something. The type of hug where you feel them grip tighter as it continues. The type where you immediately know it’s going to be okay.

I couldn’t quite get the words out the way I wanted in that moment, I’ve always done better in writing, so I said something close. Then I sat in my car, watched him drive off toward his new life, and sent him the words I really wanted him to have, written down so he could see them and take them in on his own time.

So, wanna know what I told him? It was insanely simple.

“I love you, buddy. I know you’re going to absolutely crush it. Go find yourself, who YOU want to be, not who anyone else wants you to be, knowing that ‘you’ may change many times along the way. Go have some fucking fun, dude. I love you.”

That’s the formula. For life. For leadership. The one I’ve found that works for me:

• Be vulnerable. (“I love you.”)

• Encourage quickly and assume brilliance. (“You’re gonna crush it.”)

• Challenge them. (“Go find yourself.”)

• Give them permission to explore. (“Go have some fun.”)

• Reiterate the vulnerability as emotional connection. (“I love you.”)

He hearted it. Not a thumbs-up — which is normal for teenagers — but a heart.

Part of my heart was leaving that driveway, but it’s always with me.

Somewhere between here and Orlando, the sun came up. By the time it did, he was closer to his future than to this driveway. That’s the point. That’s the job. Whether it’s your kid, your teammate, or anyone you’ve led — you keep them in focus, even when they’re far away.

And if you’re lucky, maybe they’ll carry what you taught them into someone else’s life.

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What about you — have you had a goodbye that etched itself into your memory?

What’s the one line someone gave you that you’ve carried ever since?

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More soon,
-Jon