Edward David Gil never pursued money. He pursued adventure.

That pursuit carried him from a working-class Philadelphia upbringing into international shipping, where deals crossed oceans, markets never closed and a person’s word was their bond. Along the way, Ed traveled the world, negotiated across cultures and collected stories involving a mysteriously missing ship, the Bohemian Club and more than a few famous names.

At a crossroads, Ed found himself facing two questions: Who are you, and what do you want?

The answers led him to walk away from shipping, move to Los Angeles and talk his way onto the Paramount lot. He went on to work with Ted Danson’s production company and at Paramount, Sony and Disney before eventually reinventing himself once again in data and analytics.

It’s a conversation about adventure, improvisation and knowing when it’s time to jump to the next lily pad—even when you don’t know exactly where you’ll land.

Dik Shicotte grew up on Chicago’s North Side in a third-floor apartment filled with strong women. With his father largely absent, Dik’s mother raised three children while taking on whatever work was necessary to keep the family moving forward. Her example was simple: never give up.

Left largely to their own devices, Dik and his friends explored the city, swam in Lake Michigan, collected bottles for candy money and grabbed the bumpers of moving cars to “skitch” through snowy streets. He watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, witnessed the unrest of 1960s Chicago outside his window and celebrated the moon landing from a Chicago beach in the summer of 1969.

After a little teenage arrogance led his mother to make him pay for his final year of private high school, an unfinished paper produced another lesson. Dik casually told his teacher not to worry because he would finish it. The response stopped him in the hallway:

“I’m not worried, Shicotte—but you ought to be.”

The words landed. His teacher had done his part; what happened next belonged to Dik.

That lesson followed him through college, football, an international internship in Finland and months traveling across Europe. It gave him the confidence to sit across from business leaders, present an idea and accept opportunities that carried him through AT&T, NCR and eventually Teradata.

Dik shares a story about personal responsibility, persistence and the people who help shape our lives. His mother taught him never to give up. His wife reminded him that when one opportunity failed, the next one would work. His colleagues and friends helped open doors—but Dik understood that walking through them was ultimately up to him.

Jane Theodore’s first lesson about work came in a soybean field in rural Iowa. She started working in sixth grade, walking fields and detasseling corn in brutal summer heat—and quickly learned that effort and reward were not always distributed fairly.

Years later, a communications degree and an internship carried her to Chicago with dreams of writing and international travel. When the company failed, Jane was left alone in the city, living paycheck to paycheck and trying to determine what came next.

An MBA opened an unexpected door at Arthur Andersen, where a liberal arts graduate who knew almost nothing about computers was trained in COBOL and sent to clients as an expert. That unlikely beginning eventually placed Jane inside the Smart Store, a research center exploring self-checkout, electronic shelf labels, RFID and smart shopping carts decades before many became commonplace.

There, Jane recognized what she was built to do: bring together technology, marketing, data and the story a business needs to understand what comes next.

Jane shares a story about critical thinking, calculated reinvention and the relationships that shape a career—and why helping the next person matters when you remember what it felt like to have no one to call.