For fourteen years, Jay Golden had navigated a world that was reshaping itself. Online learning flickering to life on slow connections. The first music videos when broadband was a baby. Animations passed person to person to influence millions. Ideas spreading in new ways, faster than anyone expected.

But standing in his garden that afternoon, his newborn daughter asleep against his chest, it wasn't the transformation on screens that filled his heart—it was the dusty roads and departure gates, from the journeys long before he had landed in San Francisco at the dawn of the Internet.

The night bus from Cusco, bouncing until his guts were sore. Sharing a gourd of yerba mate with a teacher while hitchhiking in Argentina. The café in Kathmandu sharing stories of harrowing treks. The vast and ancient square in Marrakesh, trying snails, just because.  

On every journey, the same ritual: strangers becoming friends through the ancient alchemy of stories.

Stories of wrong turns that led somewhere right. Of maps to hidden waterfalls. Warnings about bus companies. Of the moment that everything changed. Of a traveler’s currency.

As the goldenberries rustled in the breeze, a realization stopped him cold:

We leave these most precious treasures by the side of the road.

Because they don't fit the template. Because you're a CEO, not a biographer. Because leadership doesn't sound like that.

So we leave them there. Stories that could change everything.

What if we brought ourselves back to those moments as we are now? What would happen then?

Jay put up a website. Sent an email to his network: "I'm helping leaders find and tell the stories that matter."

The phone rang within hours. But strangely, it wasn’t a client. It was an introduction, to someone that would change his life.

The person he would meet was Joel ben Izzy—a storyteller with a glimmer in his eyes who lived in the hills and had spent decades learning what makes a story work. Joel taught Jay about the intricacies of story, the frameworks that existed, and how to gather a collection of stories that can transform a person’s life—and their leadership.

In time, word spread, person to person, story to story.

First in the Silicon Valley. Then to boardrooms in Amsterdam, conference stages in Adelaide, team offsites in the mountains. Leaders came to Retellable not to polish their pitch decks, but to rediscover the moments that made them who they are. To turn insight into story. Story into change.

Some of those stories led to funded startups. Others transformed visionaries into unforgettable storytellers. To new jobs. Some to entire departments restructured around a new way of seeing.

That journey led to a book, to keynote speeches around the world, and to storytelling experiences that would change lives. It also led to hundreds of world-changing visionaries adopting the Retellable approach themselves.

And right now, somewhere in the world, someone who learned this approach is standing in front of a room, or a camera, or one person who needs to hear it.

Sharing that gem that was sitting there by the side of the road.