Before the ending is written

How I got here, and what I'm paying attention to

The decisions being made today, by governments, by companies, by ordinary people working out what to do with their lives, are going to shape what comes next in ways we won’t fully see for years. Institutions are changing. Economies are shifting. AI is rewriting work. The rules many of us learned to navigate are being rewritten while we live inside them.

I want to write about this moment as it’s happening, before outcomes are known and hindsight rewrites what felt true at the time.

Let me explain. But first, let me introduce myself.

Hi, I’m Regina Johnson. I work inside a Fortune 5 tech company, advise organizations, and am pursuing a doctorate (Ed.D.) in Adult Learning and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University, where I research how entrepreneurs build the capacity to make decisions under uncertainty. Most of all, I care about how business owners and the communities around them shape, and are shaped by, this moment in history.

I’ve been asking questions since I was a child. I mean, incessant questions. Nothing made sense to me, and at the same time I was fascinated by the uncertainty of everything around me. Decades later, that’s truer now more than ever.

Since January 2025, I’ve been quietly documenting news articles in an electronic folder I dubbed “News of the Times.” I started saving them without a clear plan, sensing that something was shifting in how many of us viewed the world. Recently I reviewed the titles of all of the headlines, over 140 articles saved, and noticed several threads running through them: change in institutions, economic, business, and societal disruption, and the relationship between power and media.

The common thread underneath all of them was uncertainty.

Change and uncertainty fascinated me as a child. As I got older this fascination spread into genuine curiosity about the fact that one decision can change the whole trajectory of your life. I studied that. Many questions stood out. What does it mean to make “good” decisions? Who gets to make those decisions? How do people and communities navigate them, or create their own version of success?

Helping people find, and have access, to a version of success that helps them thrive has shaped every role I’ve held.

My journey

I started in workforce development, helping women who had been unemployed or underemployed for years. I focused on the training side of the work and on helping these women restore how they saw their value. I collaborated with corporations and business owners after laying out reasoning to CEOs on why they should give these women a job. Seeing the light return to someone’s eyes when they were given a chance to thrive are moments that I will never forget.

From there I helped a union prepare employees for retirement and supported the organization in imagining its future through digital transformation. This experience was sobering as I worked with employees at the end of their career and shared the benefits they would be receiving in retirement. Seeing them looking at decades of their life on paper and what that amounted to made me think about how to support employees earlier in their career journey’s.

I worked in a woman-owned federal contracting business as it grew, making sure the employees working on federal contracts felt seen and heard. Then I went looking for more, searched “how to get into workforce development policy,” and quit my job for a senior executive fellowship that I was awarded. This gamble on myself took me into city government working on workforce policy as well as economic and business development, where my experiences reinforced something simple. If businesses aren’t thriving, jobs and workforce opportunities are impacted anyway.

I would say that this is where my heart for entrepreneurship started. Though if I’m honest, my grandmother, mother, father, and all three of my siblings are entrepreneurs, so I was destined to care about entrepreneurship.

The Now

Over the past several years I’ve worked inside tech in the partner ecosystem with entrepreneurs and companies looking to grow and create their own version of success.

I’ve led tech initiatives that funded hundreds of companies, built training to help entrepreneurs navigate technology change, and created accelerators to help them attract and retain customers. What stayed with me most from all of it was the community that formed around these entrepreneurs. Connection is what keeps us anchored through change.

Now in this moment, the uncertainty I saw as a child has compounded in ways I never imagined. Yes, AI is shifting a lot of things. But what I am really finding is that there is an overarching paradigm shift in many things we once knew. Economics. Business. Work. Capital. Societal norms.

For many people, this has created fear in the uncertainty as they question everything, including their standing and identity at this moment.

I feel some of that too. I’m watching entrepreneurs I respect lose ground they spent years building. I’m watching institutions I trusted shift in ways I didn’t predict. I don’t know what the next two years look like.

Documenting the present, preparing for the future

The beautiful thing though is none of us know what is going to happen. So, we get to create what the future looks like.

I believe part of that starts by sharing your story and really pausing to reflect in the moment before the ending is written.

When Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the mathematical statistician and author of The Black Swan, was asked about his favorite author, he pointed to journalist William Shirer’s Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934 to 1941. What stood out to Taleb was that Shirer wrote as events were taking place, without yet knowing how any of it would end, before subsequent outcomes could reshape what felt true at the time.

The decisions being made today will change the trajectory of our lives, our communities, and the world. With that kind of change, more of us need to document this experience.

Joan Didion wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

That’s why I’m here.

I believe fear can be overcome by doing. Doing starts by reflecting on the moment we are in. This means staying focused in the present and going headfirst day by day into the future, choosing hope anyway.

If you’re an entrepreneur, an advisor, an organizational leader, or someone watching this period closely and trying to make sense of it, I hope you’ll read along and reflect with me.

Comments are open and replies welcome. I’d love to hear what you’re noticing too.