Grasping the Wheel

For years I’ve thought about what was lost when industry left the household.

Henry Ford did not just create a better way to build cars. He helped cement a model of production that pulled work away from family, community, and place. It gave us scale, speed, and efficiency, but it also helped normalize a way of living in which our time, attention, and energy were handed over to systems far larger than ourselves.

But what if that model is not the final form of industry?

What if modern tools now give us the opportunity to build something smaller, healthier, and more human?

One of the most shocking things about leaving my life as a CEO and becoming a small business owner again was my perception of time. I did not realize how deeply it had been shaping our days, weeks, and months. I did not realize how thoroughly it orchestrated life, or how the constant tether to the company had held me at a distance from nearly everything I cared for.

From the foundations of human society, there were rhythms. Hours, days, weeks, and months all carried a connection to something larger than ourselves. They created communal living because people shared the same cadence. There was a rhythm to life that was not arbitrary. It tied people to one another, to seasons, to work, to worship, to place, and to responsibility.

And that rhythm mattered.

The answer, of course, is not to untether ourselves from everything and drift into ambiguity and confusion. That is its own form of bondage, and it is something I have had to wrestle with myself in this season of asking, What do I do now? The goal is not detachment. The goal is intentional tethering. Tethering yourself to your family, your neighbors, the seasons, and God.

After stepping away, I realized I had unknowingly tethered myself to a schedule I did not choose. To a constant urgency I had never really agreed to. Every morning felt like another exercise in carving out slivers of time for personal responsibilities while the rest of my day was consumed by the demands of managing an enterprise. There was always more to do, always more waiting, always another issue pulling at the edges of my attention.

Now, do not misunderstand me. I am not suddenly un-busy.

But it is quieter.

My heart is freer to imagine and decide. I can more accurately assess my family’s needs because I am simply present more often. Present for the little moments that so often get missed. Present for the interruptions that are not really interruptions at all, but invitations into a more human way of living.

My wife can grab me in a moment of need, or even in a moment of creativity. Visiting me becomes an exciting destination for my littlest ones. The rhythm I did choose begins to beat and come into focus. It feels human. It feels complete. It does not feel like a one-sided battle for scraps of accomplishment between my wife and me. It feels like a quieter, more glorious balance of back and forth. A shared life.

My heartbeat is calmer. My responses to friends are more paced. I am simply not in a race to get back to a mountain of demands from which I feel I am being bothered.

Doesn’t that sound better?

Shouldn’t life be shaped by a cadence set by the captain of your own ship?

That is a far greater question than, Should I start my own business?

The deeper question is this:

Should I grasp the wheel of my life?

That question reaches beyond entrepreneurship. It reaches into responsibility, stewardship, and design. Who is setting the rhythm of your home? Who determines the shape of your attention? Who decides what matters, and when? Who has the right to command your best hours, your clearest mind, your strongest years?

A creative business rooted in faith and servanthood — to your customers, your family, and your community — is unlike anything else in the world. Not because it is easy. Not because it is romantic. But because it offers the possibility of aligning your work with the deeper structures of life. It makes room for responsibility to become personal again. It allows service to have a face. It gives shape to labor that is not detached from the people it is meant to bless.

Recently, my new friend Jason Lonon and I were talking, and I asked him a question that had been weighing on me heavily. I said, “Why does this matter so much? I feel the intensity of the decision, but with the world in the state it’s in, shouldn’t there be something greater than God asking me to quit my job?”

His response landed hard.

He said, “I believe God is calling His people out of Egypt. Out of slavery to a master we were not intended to serve.”

I felt the impact of that statement deeply.

Because culture had lulled me into sleep, even while I thought I was living differently than most. I was running a smaller company. I was employing friends. I was living creatively. On paper, it already looked alternative. But deep down I could not deny that it was not a full expression of who I was made to be. And when a man knows that, it affects everything. It affects his decisions. It affects his courage. It affects his peace. It affects how freely he can move, build, and obey.

There is a kind of slavery that does not look like chains.

It looks like constant urgency, borrowed priorities, a life paced by demands you did not choose.
It looks like being useful to a system while becoming less present to the people you love most.
It looks like waking up one day and realizing you have been very busy, very productive, and very successful at carrying a rhythm that is not truly yours.

And that is why I think this conversation matters so much.

Because the future of human-sized industry is not merely about decentralizing production. It is not just about bringing back small shops, or handmade goods. The deeper opportunity is the restoration of a human life ordered rightly. A life in which work supports the household instead of competing with it, in which enterprise strengthens family, place, and community instead of hollowing them out. A life in which time belongs first to God, then to the responsibilities He has actually given you.

What if the next step of industry is not simply smaller factories?

What if it is households, shops, farms, and workshops reclaiming the ability to set their own rhythm again?

What if the tools of the modern world — communication, commerce, manufacturing, media — could be used not to further centralize life, but to restore human scale to it?

What if the next great business model is not one that asks families to organize themselves around the needs of enterprise, but one that asks enterprise to serve the life of the family?

That is a future worth imagining.

Not because it promises ease, but because it places hardship in its proper setting. It makes struggle meaningful again. It lets labor belong somewhere. It restores a man’s ability to look at his work and see not just income, but coherence. 

That is what I want.

That is what I believe many people are aching for, even if they do not yet have language for it.

A better yoke, a rightful Master, human rhythm and life that can actually be inhabited.

Maybe that is, in part, what it means to come out of Egypt. To leave behind the systems that trained us to hand over our best energy to masters we were not intended to serve. To step back into the responsibility of choosing a life ordered by faith, service, family, and place. To stop drifting inside the rhythms handed to us and begin, with fear and trembling, to grasp the wheel.

That is not just a business decision.

It is a decision about how a human life should be lived.