September 13, 2026

Listen Before You Speak

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.

Palmer wrote this after years of chasing roles and titles that looked right on paper but left him hollow, including a painful stretch of clinical depression he describes candidly in this book. He came to see vocation not as something we construct through willpower but as something we uncover by paying attention. That uncovering takes silence, the kind that lets you hear what is already true instead of what you wish were true. It is a quiet corrective for anyone who plans a life louder than they listen to it.