Sean Pieri’s numbers were good. Great, actually.
High performance reviews. A bonus he’d just received. A pipeline of wins still coming down the runway. He was vice president of advancement (fundraising and alumni relations) at a liberal arts college, thirty-plus years into a career built almost entirely on national institutions: the United States Air Force Academy, the College of William & Mary, Colorado College, a stretch as managing director at the United States Olympic Committee. Most years were record fundraising years. He’d been recognized nationally for it.
Then, on August 14, 2018, he walked into a normally scheduled meeting with his boss. Seconds in, she told him it wasn’t working out and slid a manila folder across the table. A severance agreement.
He didn’t see it coming. Not because he was naive, but because every metric he’d ever used to measure himself said the opposite was true.
He walked back to his car and asked himself one question: is this going to be the best day of my life or the worst? He vowed to make it the best. What he didn’t know yet was that the answer would take five years to arrive, and that it would come from fifty-two phone calls he hadn’t planned on making.
This is Sean Pieri’s story, but the real value isn’t the severance, or even the comeback. It’s what he uncovered about where a definition of success actually comes from — and what happens to a person when that definition gets handed to them by a job title instead of built by their own hand.
When Your Identity Is a Job Description
Ask Pieri what broke that day and he doesn’t point to the loss of income or the loss of a title. He points to something underneath both.
“I had always equated success with performance. Job titles were associated with worth. Metrics and being successful was my identity.”
That’s a precise sentence and the wiring behind it is common. Thirty years of mostly-record fundraising numbers had become the load-bearing wall of his sense of self. Not a wall behind the house; the wall holding the roof up. When the wall came out, the roof didn’t just sag. It fell.
It took him two and a half years to find another job. That in itself is a data point most executives underestimate: the search after a senior-level exit is rarely fast, and the identity work has to happen without the reassurance of a new title to hide behind. When the offer finally came, it wasn’t the step up he’d spent three decades assuming was owed to him. It was a step back, both in scale and, in his mind at the time, in stature.
He took it anyway. It just didn’t fix anything.
The Step Backward That Kept Score Anyway
The new job was real and it was good: vice president of development and marketing at Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, caring for kids across South Texas. Under his leadership the program put together four consecutive record years and drew national recognition for how it had changed the way the community thought about philanthropy. Professionally, it worked.
Personally, it didn’t stop gnawing at him.
“It was just a gnawing thing that I sort of had fallen off this career, the climbing of the corporate ladder, and taking this step backward to a basically remote outpost.” Corpus Christi sits near the end of the map; keep driving and you’re in the Gulf. Far from the Midwest, far from an aging mother, far from the friends and professional community that had made up his identity for decades. The isolation wasn’t geographic first. It was the loss of the circle that had reflected his old definition of success back at him.
Two years into the new role, five years removed from the severance, he was still asking himself whether he’d succeeded or failed. “I felt like a failure. Despite success, despite being nationally recognized, despite serving on national boards, despite working for some of the most prestigious institutions in this country, I felt like a failure.”
That is the whole problem. External validation kept arriving. It didn’t matter, because the definition he was measuring himself against wasn’t his. It belonged to a career ladder he’d stopped climbing, and no amount of evidence could satisfy a scoreboard built by someone else. It’s the same trap explored in Identity Is a Strategic Liability: when the self is outsourced to a role, losing the role costs more than the paycheck. It costs the person.
Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted
Somewhere in that fifth year, a line he’d heard attributed to Einstein started running on a loop in his head: the things that count often can’t be counted, and the things that can be counted often don’t count.
“It was sort of just resonating like a scratched record in my head, just going over and over and over. And so I really wanted to figure out what counted.”
Pieri is, by his own description, a New Year’s resolutions guy. Read more books. Work out more days. Hit an ideal weight he never quite hit. This year was different. For the first time, he wasn’t chasing a goal. He was chasing a definition.
What he landed on: call somebody different from his past, every single week, for an entire year. Fifty-two calls, one for every Thursday on the calendar. He circled the day on his calendar and made it non-negotiable, regardless of how the rest of his schedule looked.
The choice of method matters as much as the discipline behind it. “Maybe the answers I’m looking for aren’t in TED Talks or in books or from advice from famous people,” he said. “Maybe it’s in the words and the stories of those who’ve known me throughout my life and who have been important to me.” He wasn’t looking for a framework handed down by a stranger with a stage and a slide deck. He was looking for the people who had actually watched him become who he was, at different points along the way, and were still around to say what they’d seen.
What Fifty-Two Phone Calls Actually Surface
The calls started easy: former colleagues, classmates, old neighbors. Then the list stopped being a plan and started being triggered by the world around him.
When Willie Mays died, Pieri thought of a mentor who’d once told him, “You never want to be Willie Mays with the Mets,” a reference to one of the game’s greatest players finishing his career unable to chase down a fly ball anymore. Willie Mays died on a Tuesday. Pieri called that mentor on Thursday.
When he learned his high school was closing, forty years to the day since his own graduation, he called his favorite teacher. “Miss Mary, it’s Sean Pieri. I’ve got this New Year’s resolution.” Without missing a beat, she said, “I still have your ladder,” referring to a wooden stepladder he’d borrowed from his grandparents’ garage forty years earlier and never returned. It had been sitting in her garage ever since.
The conversation kept going the way twenty-year gaps rarely do; easily, like no time had passed. He thanked her for keeping him out of trouble and pushing him to be a better person. She stopped him. She said she needed to thank him instead, and told him something she’d never told anyone: she’d been struggling with mental health challenges during those years, and staying close to her students had helped her cope.
“Here she is telling me something, a secret that I had never imagined, somebody I hadn’t talked to in twenty years. And it just made me realize: what other things did I miss during my climbing of the career ladder, that my friends were struggling with, the challenges that they had? What was I too busy, too preoccupied with?”
That single call reframes the entire premise of the fifty-two. The people around Pieri had been carrying things he never had time to notice, because noticing wasn’t on the scoreboard he was climbing. Reconnection didn’t just repair old relationships. It exposed how much a career-first definition of success had cost him in attention he could never get back.
Not every call landed cleanly. A handful, maybe five or six, went nowhere; a freshman roommate who didn’t respond for years and only reconnected recently, after seeing Pieri’s book online, with a simple admission: “I dropped the ball on that one.” Pieri doesn’t count those as failures. They’re just proof that reconnection runs on the other person’s timeline too, and the attempt still counts.
The Ruby Slippers Were Already Theirs
The calls didn’t happen in isolation. Pieri’s wife, Karen, was not happy in Corpus Christi, and the two of them both knew, well before the calling year began, that it was a stopping station rather than a destination.
In their kitchen hung a sign: “There’s no place like home,” a nod to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. About three-quarters of the way through the year of calls, before Pieri had even finished them or decided to write a book about the experience, a second line appeared taped beneath it: “Dorothy, can I borrow your Ruby slippers?”
That was Karen’s signal that something had shifted from feeling to action. “We got to clip some ruby slippers together,” as Pieri puts it. “That’s when I said, okay, we’ve got to start taking some action and taking some agency on our own behalf to get out of this funk and move on in our lives.”
The metaphor holds up because it’s accurate, not because it’s tidy. In the film, Dorothy travels a long, difficult road, leans on friends, and confronts real danger, only to be told at the very end by Glinda the Good Witch that she’d had the power to go home the whole time. She just had to realize it for herself. Pieri’s year of Thursdays was the long road. The realization at the end wasn’t that a new job or a new title would fix the funk. It was that he and Karen had the standing, the whole time, to simply decide differently.
Three Things That Actually Changed
By the end of the year, Pieri had distilled the experience into three shifts in his thinking, and they’re transferable well past his own story.
The first is the power of reconnection itself. “It is easier today to communicate than it’s ever been before in history. You can do a thumbs-up emoji on a post. You can put something up on LinkedIn. But none of that is connection.” A reaction is not a relationship. A real conversation, the kind that goes past a status update into what someone is actually carrying, is scarce precisely because it’s easy to substitute the thin version for the real one.
The second came from a former colleague named Gary, who was dying of Parkinson’s disease, bedridden, never having imagined his retirement would look like that or that he’d become dependent on his wife. Pieri spoke with him multiple times, including less than a day before Gary passed away. Gary’s message, delivered through a heavy, weighted voice: “Live while you can, Sean.” Nothing about that is guaranteed for tomorrow, and the calling year kept putting that fact directly in front of him, week after week.
The third is agency: the understanding that a person doesn’t have to wait for permission, a new title, or the next rung on a ladder to define success on their own terms. “That’s what the symbol is there. And this journey for me, it became my Ruby slippers. It made me understand that I had the agency.”
Choosing Life Over Career for the First Time in Four Decades
Once Karen said she wanted to go home, Pieri told her to pick the place. It’s the same advice a mentor had once given him when that mentor’s own wife said it was time. Karen chose her hometown near Milwaukee, close to her family.
“For the first time in four decades, we picked life ahead of career. We’d always moved for career first, and life just followed.” Pieri still commutes between Wisconsin and Texas for the hospital job while the family settles, with the next professional chapter still unresolved. He’s at peace leaving it unresolved for now, which is itself a change from the man who couldn’t tolerate two and a half years between jobs without feeling like a failure.
What he measures instead: he’s seen his kids more in the last year than in the four years before it. He’s seen his mother more than in the many years before that. The week before his daughter’s wedding, the family had moved into the new house just in time, and Karen started crying because she’d always wanted her daughter’s wedding-day hair, makeup, and pictures taken in their own backyard. That’s the new scoreboard. “The career thing, we’ll figure that out. But that, to me, is my new definition of success.”
None of this erases the professional uncertainty. Pieri is candid that he doesn’t know exactly what comes next for his career, and he’s chosen not to fixate on it. What’s different is that the unresolved career question no longer functions as a verdict on his worth. It’s a project he’s working on, not a referendum on who he is.
What to Do If You’re the One Losing Your Footing
Across the fifty-two calls, eleven people had lost their jobs. Roughly a third had gone through an illness or a medical setback. Several were recovering from severed relationships or life plans that hadn’t gone the way they’d drawn them up. Pieri didn’t talk to them in sequence, but hearing the pattern across an entire year told him something he hadn’t known when he started: he wasn’t in it alone, even though at the time of his own severance, it had felt like the loneliest thing in the world.
“My advice to somebody is: you’re not the only one. Whatever your issue is or challenge is, reach out to others and don’t be afraid to be vulnerable and to tell the story.”
His book, Fifty-Two Thursdays: One Year, Fifty-Two Calls, and the Power of Reconnection, opens and closes with a letter to his younger self, and the lesson he’d most want someone mid-crisis to hear sits near the front of it: the adversity is going to feel bottomless while you’re inside it. There will be an urge to cry, to shout, to pray, and it will feel like there’s no end in sight.
“There is an end in sight. It just takes some time to get through it.” Whether that’s through therapy, through conversation, or simply through time, the useful information isn’t that the pain is avoidable. It’s that it’s temporary, which is different from painless, and different again from permanent. Sitting with unresolved regret costs more than most people expect it to, and Pieri’s fifty-two calls were, in part, a system for making sure he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life wondering what he’d missed while he was busy climbing.
He didn’t stop at fifty-two, either. He’s well into what he jokingly calls his “fifty-thirds” now, and keeps a running blog under that name for the stories that come out of continuing the practice. His challenge to anyone listening is specific and small enough to actually attempt: pick ten people. Call them before worrying about getting to fifty-two. Ask what you’d learn about yourself, what you’d learn about them, and what would change if you did it with intention. Then ask the harder question: what’s actually preventing you from doing that?
Stay unstoppable.
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Key Takeaways
Job titles make poor foundations for identity. Thirty years of strong performance reviews didn’t prevent a severance, and no amount of continued external recognition afterward could satisfy a definition of success that belonged to a career ladder instead of to Pieri himself.
A step backward professionally doesn’t require a step backward personally, but it will feel that way until you replace the old scoreboard. Real wins at the new job (four record fundraising years, national recognition) didn’t touch the feeling of failure, because the metric being used to judge success hadn’t changed yet.
Reconnection surfaces what busyness hides. A single call to a teacher he hadn’t spoken with in twenty years revealed a secret she’d never told anyone; it reframed what Pieri had missed in every relationship while he was focused on climbing.
Agency doesn’t arrive with permission. The realization that mattered most (echoed in the Ruby slippers on his kitchen wall) wasn’t that a new job would fix things. It was that he and his wife already had the standing to decide differently, and had the whole time.
Adversity feels endless from inside it, but it isn’t. The discipline is holding onto the distinction between temporary and permanent while you’re still in the part that hurts.
You are very likely not the only one. Of the fifty-two people Pieri called, eleven had lost jobs and a third had faced a serious illness or setback. Naming a struggle out loud, and hearing someone else’s, is often what breaks the isolation that makes the struggle feel unsurvivable.
About Our Guest
Sean Pieri is an author, speaker, and seasoned professional fundraiser with nearly four decades of leadership spanning higher education, healthcare, and athletics. He has held senior executive roles at prestigious institutions, including the United States Air Force Academy, the College of William & Mary, and the United States Olympic Committee, and today serves as vice president of development and marketing at Driscoll Children’s Hospital. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Sean also holds an MBA from DePaul University’s Kellstadt Graduate School of Business. After an unexpected severance in 2018, he spent five years redefining what success meant to him, culminating in a year-long practice of calling one person from his past every week. That project became his book, Fifty-Two Thursdays: One Year, Fifty-Two Calls, and the Power of Reconnection, and the ongoing 52 Thursdays movement encouraging others to reconnect with intention. While his career has been built on institutional prestige, Sean now prioritizes the difference he makes in the lives of those closest to him over professional accolades.
Connect with Sean: SeanPieri.com · LinkedIn · 52Thursdays.net
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Sean Pieri? Sean Pieri is a veteran nonprofit and higher education executive with nearly four decades in institutional advancement, fundraising, and marketing, including vice president roles at national institutions and a stint as managing director at the United States Olympic Committee. After being let go from a vice president role in 2018, he spent five years rebuilding his sense of identity and eventually wrote Fifty-Two Thursdays, a book about calling one person from his past every week for a year.
How do you rebuild your identity after losing your job? Pieri’s experience points to separating your worth from your job title before you can fully recover. He spent years chasing the next promotion to fix the feeling of failure, and it didn’t work, because the metrics he was measuring against belonged to a career ladder, not to himself. What eventually helped was structured reconnection: reaching out to people from across his life, hearing their stories, and using those conversations to build a definition of success he controlled rather than one assigned by a title or a salary.
What is the 52 Thursdays project? 52 Thursdays is a practice Sean Pieri started as a New Year’s resolution: calling a different person from his past every single Thursday for an entire year, fifty-two calls total. Rather than reading books or seeking advice from public figures, he sought out people who had known him at different points in his life. The calls surfaced reconnections, hidden struggles, and reflections that helped him define success on his own terms; the practice became the basis of his book and an ongoing movement.
Why do people feel like failures even when they’re objectively successful? This happens when a person’s definition of success is externally assigned (by a job title, a metric, or a career trajectory) rather than self-defined. Pieri continued to receive national recognition and strong results at his new job and still felt like a failure for years, because the scoreboard he was using belonged to the career path he’d fallen off, not to the life he was actually living. Redefining success requires consciously replacing that scoreboard rather than waiting for enough achievement to satisfy it.
How do you decide between prioritizing career and prioritizing family? Pieri and his wife made this decision after nearly four decades of always moving for career first. The turning point wasn’t a single dramatic conversation; it was a year of reflection that built enough clarity and agency to let his wife choose where “home” would be, with his career adjusting around that choice for the first time. The practical marker of the shift: measuring success by time with family (seeing his kids and mother more than in prior years) rather than by title or income alone.
