Some days, the data doesn’t matter. The date does.
Yesterday was June 3rd, 2025. Officially part of Data Month on the blog. Unofficially? Something else entirely. It became reunion day.
Not just any gathering, but the book launch of Anita—our former CEO at Winvision. She brought several “Winvisionairs” back together. I was one of them. CTO back then. Still a believer in good tech, and perhaps, better questions.
She co-wrote the book with Louise, our longtime coach. Not about goals, but questions. Big, hairy, necessary questions. The mood wasn’t just nostalgic—it was real. Honest. Human.
Funny thing: data rarely feels emotional. But it can be. When paired with a story, or a silence. And that day was full of both.
I didn’t see dashboards. I saw someone whose silhouette had changed just enough to suggest something deeper—something unspoken, quietly growing back. Two colleagues now a couple. Familiar eyes, older smiles. And Anita and Louise, still making meaning of things.
I saw a former version of myself too. The tag-team days with my business counterpart. We ran on momentum and intuition. It wasn’t always perfect. But it mattered.
The Leadership Mask
One keynote stuck with me. Sony Music Entertainment director, who got promoted at 32. He said he wore the role like a suit two sizes too big—until it cracked, and something honest stepped through.
That hit me. I’ve been there. Sitting at the leadership table, speaking a different dialect. The only tech mind in a room full of polished managers. I once called it corporate loneliness.
But in the competence center I led, I found belonging. Tech thinkers. Dev builders. Business brains. People who didn’t need costumes. That was leadership, too. No mask required.
Work Isn’t Family
I once said Winvision felt like family. I meant it. For a while.
But time tests ideas. And unless a place shares your last name or lives at your kitchen table, it’s not family. It can be warm, sure. Supportive, even. But it has offboarding policies.
I still give work my care, my clarity, my creativity. But not my whole heart. That belongs to my wife. My kids. My family. My friends. The pieces of me that exist beyond performance reviews.
Devotion isn’t something I outsource anymore.
And maybe that’s why June 3rd hit me like it did. Because it wasn’t just a workday, or a flashback, or a political headline. It was all of them, at once.
When Three Lives Collide
They say we live three lives. Public, private, secret.
And on June 3rd, they braided together. The public smile. The private nod. The secret ache behind it all. That day didn’t split them cleanly. It tangled them gently. And for once, I let them.
Later that evening, the Dutch government official fell. The news dropped like punctuation. Another mask off.
Funny how things align. A reunion. A keynote. A collapse. It reminded me: we often mistake noise for strength. But empathy is the real architecture.
And that brings me back to dates. Not the ones you swipe for, not even just the date you mark on a calendar but the kind that mark you. That land. That whisper something permanent.
In Dutch, the word for date is datum, and the plural—dates—is data. A linguistic breadcrumb hiding in plain sight.
So here’s to June 3rd. Not just another date. A datapoint that didn’t need a dashboard. A day that reminded me that my three lives don’t just coexist—they conspire.
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