What actually shapes you into who you are today? Is it where you grow up? The choices you make? The people you meet? Or the moments that seem insignificant at the time—but quietly change the direction of your life?

For Clifford Brown, the path was anything but predictable. In this conversation, Michael sits down with Clifford Brown, a former Beverly Hills attorney who walked away from a successful legal career in 1987, giving up two-thirds of his income to join the U.S. Agency for International Development. What followed was nearly three decades working across Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia—including leadership roles in Guinea and Sierra Leone, Kyrgyzstan, and Colombia.

But the story begins much earlier.

Growing up along Washington State’s Columbia River, Clifford worked farms, canneries, tugboats, and railroads before joining an oceanographic research vessel that took him to Tahiti and Latin America. That journey planted an idea that would eventually change the course of his life: the world was bigger than the one he knew.

A Thomas Watson Fellowship took him back to Latin America. Learning Spanish, as Clifford describes it, was “like growing another soul.” And years later, when an unexpected opportunity appeared, he followed that curiosity into a completely different life.

Michael and Clifford explore the choices, encounters, risks, and unexpected turns that shaped that journey—and what happens when you stop trying to design your life and start paying attention to where it is leading you.

At the heart of the conversation are three ideas:

PRESENCE • CURIOSITY • STORY

The three pillars of The Herst Method™—and a reminder that sometimes the most important chapters of our lives begin long before we realize we're writing them.

Because the life that shapes us isn't always the life we planned. Sometimes, it begins with a road we didn't expect to take.

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