The Second Half · Book One
He won everything he set out to win. He felt nothing.
When Winning Stops Working is a short parable about the passage nobody warns you about — the one where the tools that built your first half stop working, and more of what you’re good at won’t fix it.
Paperback $14.99 · Kindle $6.99 · also on Kindle Unlimited
The story
A year with an old operator-turned-coach.
Mark Ellison has done it. Twenty-six years, one truck to a hundred and twenty people, and now his industry’s highest award in his hands. He stands in the light, waiting for the feeling he was promised his whole life. Nothing. Not disappointment — nothing at all.
And when a man who has spent his life out-building every problem finally meets one he cannot out-build, he does the only thing he knows how to do: he starts another branch, and waits for the fire to come back. It doesn’t.
The two halves
A life has two halves, and they aren’t the young years and the old years — they’re two different tasks. The first builds the container. The second asks what it was for.
The loyal soldier
The part of you that won the war, decades ago, and was never told it could come home. You don’t shoot him. You thank him.
The way down
The fall isn’t the lesson — it’s a door, and it closes. Plenty of men fall and just get up and build again, better defended and more alone.
Free
Read chapter one.
“The Banner Year” — the night Mark wins the award and feels nothing. Tell me where to send it and it’s in your inbox in a minute. No pitch, and you can unsubscribe from the first email.
Prefer to just buy it? It’s on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
If it’s your summit that’s gone quiet
The book is the map. The work is the walking.
Everything in these pages is what I do with founders one-to-one — six hours across, at your pace.
Coaching is not psychotherapy, counselling, or mental-health treatment, and no therapist–client relationship is created. Scott Johannson is a Registered Psychotherapist in Manitoba, Canada; he does not practice psychotherapy in the United States. If you are in crisis, call or text 988 (US) or 9-8-8 (Canada).