By: Fabiana Barbery
Someday is one of the most expensive words in an entrepreneur’s vocabulary. Someday I’ll take the trip. Someday I’ll make it to the games. Someday when the business is more stable, when the team is more capable, when the timing is finally right, I’ll live the life I’ve been building toward. The word sounds like a plan. It functions like a deferral with no deadline and no accountability mechanism. And it has a way of lasting much longer than anyone intends when they first start using it.
Christopher Brown said someday for thirty years. He was running multiple successful companies, training for triathlons, coaching his son’s soccer team, measuring his own worth by how full his calendar was and how many hours he worked. He wore busyness as a badge of honor, the way entrepreneurial culture teaches people to do, and he was genuinely proud of what he was building. From the outside, it looked like a life being fully lived. From the inside, it was a life being perpetually deferred in favor of one more quarter, one more milestone, one more reason why this wasn’t quite the right moment to step back.
Then his family took a month-long cruise across the South Pacific. For the first time in his career, Christopher fully unplugged from the businesses. He expected to return to chaos, to the accumulated consequences of a month of absence from a system that required his daily presence. Instead, he returned to find everything running without him. His teams had handled what needed handling. The operational machinery had continued turning without him at the center of it.
Thirty days later, he had a heart attack and flatlined in front of his wife.
The Question That Couldn’t Be Avoided
Lying in the hospital, Christopher asked himself the question that had not seriously occurred to him before the trip and the heart attack forced it into focus. What if they had never taken the cruise? Not just the business question of whether the companies would have been fine. The life question underneath it. What was he waiting for? How long had he been waiting? And what exactly was the someday he kept referencing supposed to look like when it finally arrived?
The trip had already answered one part of the question. The businesses could function without his constant presence. That discovery removed the most convenient justification for continued deferral. The heart attack removed the comfortable assumption that there was unlimited time to figure the rest out.
The Illusion of Indispensability
One of the most comfortable and most costly fictions an entrepreneur can construct is the belief that everything depends on them. It feels like responsibility. It gets mistaken for commitment and dedication. It justifies every long hour, every missed moment, every conversation that gets postponed in favor of something urgent. And in most cases, when it is genuinely tested, it turns out to be untrue.
The month-long cruise shattered that fiction for Christopher before the heart attack made the stakes impossible to continue ignoring. His systems held. His people handled what arose. The business that supposedly required his daily involvement functioned fine in his absence, which meant the entire structure of justification he had built around staying perpetually plugged in was based on a premise that wasn’t accurate.
What Permission Actually Means
Christopher frames the book explicitly as permission, and the word is chosen carefully. Not a theory or a philosophy but a practical roadmap for building the kind of business that supports the life you started it for, combined with the explicit statement that you are allowed to build that business now rather than someday.
The central message is simple enough to fit in a sentence. Your business should support your life, not consume it. The entrepreneur who builds systems, delegates effectively, and steps away strategically doesn’t become a weaker leader. They become a better one, returning with creativity and clarity that constant presence cannot produce. Someday is a choice. Christopher Brown made it into a business model and a book. The only question is how long you are willing to wait before making it yours.
Life isn’t waiting for someday. Permission to Unplug by Christopher Brown is available now on Amazon.
