What We Do With Not Knowing
Sit in the unknown instead of rushing past it.
There’s a specific kind of lost that only shows up after you’ve already proven yourself.
Not the lost of not knowing what you’re capable of. The lost of having already done the hard thing, and having no idea what to do next.
I recognized it the second Abiola Wabara described it to me on this week’s episode of Journey to June.
Abiola played professional basketball for ten years. Before that, she won a national championship at Baylor. She grew up in Italy, the daughter of Nigerian parents, fluent in a language she had to translate in her own head just to take notes in an American classroom. By every measure, she had already built a life that required enormous will.
And then she retired. And she had no idea who she was.
She told me she spent that first year Googling her own master’s degree — international business management — trying to figure out what you’re even supposed to do with it. She took the LSAT as a backup plan. Got into law school. Deferred a year. Drove Uber with her resume in the passenger seat, hoping to strike up a conversation with the right stranger. Sold her oil paintings. Trained clients at Equinox.
None of that sounds like someone who lacked drive. It sounds like someone whose drive had outlived the structure that used to hold it.
That’s the part I don’t think we talk about enough. When an athlete, or an entrepreneur, or a mother whose kids just left for college, loses the role that organized her life, the ambition doesn’t go anywhere. The coach is gone. The teammates are gone. The season, the scoreboard, the daily proof that you’re still good at something — gone. But the person underneath all of it is still standing there, still capable, still hungry, with nowhere to point it.
I built my career the same way Abiola built her ten years overseas — one system at a time. Golf gave me a structure I didn’t have to invent: show up, compete, get better, repeat. When I left that world, I didn’t just lose a sport. I lost the architecture that had been quietly organizing my identity for me.
Abiola’s way back in wasn’t a plan. It was a string of jobs that didn’t fit, until one did. A chance conversation in the back of her own Uber, with a Baylor alum who happened to notice the decal on her car. A phone call. A recruiter. Nine years later, she’s still there — and she built GloBall Life alongside it, a platform for athletes navigating the exact transition she almost didn’t survive.
Here’s the piece of advice she gave me that I haven’t stopped turning over since we recorded: don’t let your ego stop you. Not from driving strangers around the city with your resume on the passenger seat. Not from painting portraits to pay rent. Not from taking the job that doesn’t match the title you used to hold. No one is too good for anything, and you never know where it’s going to land you.
I think about the version of myself who left professional golf and had to relearn who I was without a scorecard. I think about the version of myself who became a mother and had to figure out an identity that wasn’t handed to her by a schedule someone else made.
Maybe the point was never to protect the identity. Maybe it’s to keep building new structure around whatever’s left standing once the old one falls away.
So here’s what I’m asking myself, and what I’d ask you: when the structure that used to hold your drive disappears, what are you building to hold it now?
🎧 Listen to my full conversation with Abiola on Journey to June.
🤝 Connect with Abiola, Visit Her Website, or Check Out Her Art
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