“Maybe success is what you pass on.”

For a long time, success meant what I had built. The yachts, the races, the moments when everything finally came together after years of effort. I measured my worth in what I could point to and say: “I made that.”

I do not measure it that way anymore, and I am not entirely sure when that changed.

I have made plenty of mistakes along the way. Some I understood immediately. Others took much longer, and a few I had to make more than once before I really saw them. There were difficult moments too. When you are tired, it is so easy to choose what makes today lighter instead of what you know is right for you in the long run. I know that feeling. I think most of us do. But somehow I kept finding my way back, and slowly, success began to look different.

It stopped being about what I kept for myself, and became about what I could hand to someone else.

Not just the wins. Those are easy to be proud of. The things that went wrong matter just as much, perhaps more, because nobody hands you those lessons for free. You have to live through them, make sense of them, and one day decide what to do with what they gave you.

I cannot give anyone the finish line, or the trophy waiting there. They have to get there themselves, and that is how it should be. What I can give is something that makes the course a little easier to find. A tool. A piece of knowledge. A lesson I learned the hard way. Or simply a chart that brings them close enough to try.

Maybe that is why I find it so hard to throw anything away. A material, a skill, a classic yacht: if there is still life left in it, letting it disappear feels wrong.

I have come to think that what lasts is not what we hold on to, but what we pass on. A material kept alive instead of thrown away. A skill that would have vanished, still in someone’s hands because they chose to carry it forward.

If something I have done, or made, or said, ever does that, even once, even for one person, I think that would be enough.

Sometimes, passing something on means giving young people the opportunity to find their own way.