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FIELD & FATHOM | No. 039

Daily Letter · Mindset Operating System · 8:42 PM

FATHOM THIS

Most of the time when something falls apart — a job, a relationship, a project you believed in — the brain immediately begins building a story about what it means. You are behind. You made the wrong choice. You are not good enough for the room you were trying to be in.

The brain is fast and confident and almost always wrong about this specific thing.

What feels like rejection in the moment is almost never the full story. It is usually just the part of the story you can see from where you are standing. The rest of it has not happened yet.

FIELD REPORT | Cohan Field, 2026

This morning I stood on the sidelines of Cohan Field at Duke University helping lead Day One of Mad Dog Lacrosse's Rising Stars Camp.

The funny thing is — this story did not start this morning.

It started in 2022.

I was working on a development project on Duke's campus. During a lunch break I wandered toward the athletic facilities the way I have done my entire life — gravitating toward the people who are trying to get better before anyone asks them to, before anyone is watching, before the scoreboard has anything to say about it.

The lacrosse fields drew me in. The soccer fields drew me in. The athletes running extra sprints drew me in. The coaches setting up drills in the afternoon heat drew me in.

I stood there watching individual workouts and small groups train and I noticed something. Nobody was celebrating. Nobody was posting. Nobody was giving a speech about excellence or performing their commitment for an audience.

They were just doing the work.

One rep. One sprint. One drill. One day at a time.

We throw the word excellence around so freely now that it has almost lost its weight. What I watched that afternoon was something quieter and more durable. It was consistency. The specific, unglamorous commitment of people trying to be slightly better today than they were yesterday. No announcement. No audience. Just the work and the field and the slow accumulation of something that would not show up until it needed to.

I stood there longer than a lunch break warranted.

A year later, in 2023, I found myself back on Duke's campus on another project — this one connected directly to the men's lacrosse and soccer facilities. I thought it was alignment. I thought it was the universe pointing at something.

It was not what I thought it was.

Communication broke down. Trust broke down. Alignment broke down at every level it could break down at. Eventually I was reassigned to a different project in Durham. And the version of me that sat down at that new desk was not okay — and did not know how to say so.

I went quiet. Barely talked in meetings. Pulled back in conversations where I would normally have leaned in. Because somewhere in the wreckage of the previous role I had convinced myself that inserting myself had been the problem. That who I was in that room was not helping the team. That the best thing I could do was take up less space and make less noise and hope that a smaller version of myself would fit somewhere that the full version had not.

That is what being in the wrong seat for too long does to a person if you are not careful. It does not break you loudly. It shrinks you quietly.

Then one afternoon a teammate asked me to walk the site with him. We ended up on the upper level of the development — one of those unremarkable moments that turns out to be the one you remember. We started talking through the Variable Air Volume system overhead. How the VAV boxes regulate airflow based on demand. How each zone responds independently but feeds back to a central air handling unit. How the whole system is designed to balance itself — no single component doing more than its share, every piece communicating with every other piece, the building breathing because the systems underneath it are coordinated rather than competing.

And somewhere in that conversation about ductwork and airflow and pressure differentials, he started talking about the project team. About how the same principles applied. How the breakdown we had both witnessed was not a people problem — it was a systems problem. Disconnected effort creating friction. The same lesson from the lacrosse field, from the symphony, from every team I had ever been part of that either worked or did not.

I thanked him. I did not tell him exactly why. The relief was internal — quiet and private and enormous. Because in that moment I understood that I had not made a catastrophic mistake. I had been in the wrong seat in the wrong system. And the system had not been designed to make that visible until it was already broken.

I also understood something harder. I had moved my family to North Carolina from San Diego — a place that was paradise to us — and I had carried the weight of that decision through every difficult month of 2023 like it was my fault the chapter had not gone the way I planned. I had questioned whether I had cost us something we would not get back.

What I know now is that I had not made a wrong move. I had made the move that led to the right one.

A few months after that chapter ended I stepped into the uncertainty of building something of my own. At the time I was not running toward lacrosse. I was running toward alignment. Toward ownership. Toward a life that felt more authentic than the one I had been trying to fit myself into.

And yet this morning I was standing at Cohan Field.

Not as a construction professional. Not as a visitor. Not as someone wondering what comes next. But as a coach. Running a lacrosse camp at the exact facility that first stopped me in my tracks in 2022 when I was on a lunch break trying to remember who I was.

The redirection did not feel like a gift when it was happening. It felt like loss. Like embarrassment. Like a question I could not stop asking myself at 2 AM.

But that reassignment — that quiet, difficult, shrinking period in Durham — propelled me into being the best husband, father, son, owner, leader, mentor, coach, and life learner I have ever been.

I did not know that then. I know it now. And I am grateful for every single piece of it.

Life knew where I was headed before I did.

MINDSET OS | Find The Right Seat

When you are in the wrong seat — you know.

Not always immediately. Not always loudly. But there is a signal. A persistent friction that does not resolve no matter how much effort you apply. A version of yourself that keeps getting smaller rather than larger inside the environment. A gut feeling that precedes every logical argument you construct to talk yourself out of it.

Do not ignore that signal.

Start talking to people. Not venting — talking. Ask questions of people who are further along the path you are trying to walk. Seek mentors who have sat in multiple seats and can tell you the difference between a hard seat that is building you and a wrong seat that is diminishing you. Build relationships before you need them — because the person who helps you find the right seat almost never shows up exactly when you are looking for them. They show up earlier, in a different context, and you only recognize it later.

The goal is not to compare your path to anyone else's. The goal is to become relentlessly focused on your own lane — on the specific combination of skills, experiences, values, and energy that only you bring — and to keep moving toward environments where that combination is an asset rather than a friction.

When that focus arrives — really arrives, not as a motivational statement but as a daily operating reality — something shifts.

The noise gets quieter. The anxiety gets smaller. The vision gets clearer. And eventually, often years later and through a door you did not expect, you find yourself standing in a place that once represented disappointment and realizing it was quietly pointing you toward exactly where you needed to be.

The redirection was not a failure. It was the route.

ON ROTATION | What's Playing

Some songs find you at exactly the right time. This was one of them.

This week's listen: Still Out There Running — Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, Tearing at the Seams (2018)

It took four months to decompress from the 2023 reassignment — mentally, physically, in ways I am still accounting for — and this song was on during most of that stretch. Rateliff wrote it in the specific emotional territory of longing and introspection and the fear of losing touch with who you are, and somehow it was exactly right for a person sitting quietly at a desk in Durham trying to remember what they were made of.

Put it on tonight. Let it work the way honest music works — from the inside out.

Still Out There Running - Live at Red Rocks / September 20, 2020

Nathaniel Rateliff · Red Rocks 2020 (Live) · Song · 2021

Spotify

About the Author

Kyle Smedley is the founder of Harbor Lane Holdings, building at the intersection of sport, people, and capital.

Career stops include Events.com, Tourmaline Builders, Lombardi Contracting Corporation, and DPR Construction. Today he leads Atticus Lacrosse Company, working alongside Mad Dog Lacrosse and Ravenscroft School, and Harbor Lane Company, operating across real estate, private equity, and talent placement.

Field & Fathom goes out every night at 8:42 PM.

Reach out directly: [email protected]

Until tomorrow,

Kyle

Founder · Harbor Lane Holdings · Atticus Lacrosse Company