Giving Up

Marcus had everything he ever wanted but lost everything he ever needed - and then realized what he was missing.

Marcus Ellison has spent thirty years turning a single truck and a borrowed contract into one of the most respected logistics companies in the Southeast. Eight hundred employees. Three crystal awards on the shelf. A wife who photographs well beside him, a home that looks like a museum, and a life that everyone around him calls enviable. But when a young entrepreneur asks him a simple question, "What's next for you?" Marcus opens his mouth and nothing comes out.

That same night, his estranged daughter Simone leaves an eleven-second voicemail that unravels something no award or achievement has ever been able to reach. She works in philanthropy, giving away other people's resources with a conviction Marcus cannot quantify, and the distance between them holds a truth he has spent decades avoiding: he has given everything to build his life, but he has never given anything away that actually came from his heart. As a series of encounters pulls Marcus toward a reckoning with his past, his fractured relationships, and the name he has never spoken aloud in thirty years, he begins to discover that the life he constructed so carefully was never the life that mattered. 

Giving Up: A Surprising Secret to Life that Matters is a powerful business parable about the moment when success stops being enough and the only way forward is to release everything you thought you needed. The question is whether Marcus Ellison is brave enough to let go.