By: James Mitchell
Daniel Isenberg says he is a better person than he was two and a half years ago. That is an extraordinary statement, given what happened during those years. Isenberg lost his wife, Carla, after a devastating battle with cancer, an experience he chronicles with uncommon candor in his memoir, This Book Is Not for You: My Loss, My Grief, My Healing. He would never have chosen what happened, nor does he romanticize it or suggest that profound loss is justified by whatever personal growth might eventually follow. Yet looking at himself today, Isenberg recognizes a man who is different from the one who entered that experience.
“To be really honest, I think I’m a better person,” he says. “I think I’m more tolerant, more understanding, more empathic, and just overall a nicer person, at least a person that I like better.” Then he adds something more unexpected: “I think I have more grace, and I think for the first time in my life I understand what grace even is.”
For someone who has spent decades in academia, including 11 years as a Harvard Business School professor, entrepreneurship and investment are a strikingly different way to measure growth. Not simply what he knows or what he has accomplished, but who he has become.
Professional life gives us countless ways to measure progress. Revenue grows, companies scale, careers advance, ideas gain influence, goals are reached, and new ones take their place. Isenberg has spent decades in that world, and achievement has been tangible.
Grace isn’t.
Neither is empathy. No performance metric measures becoming more tolerant, no award recognizes greater compassion, and no balance sheet can capture the changes. Yet these are among the changes he now considers most significant. “It’s taken a lot of the edges off of my personality,” he says.
That raises a larger question: How do we measure growth when some of the most important changes in a person cannot be quantified? Growth is often associated with gaining more: knowledge, responsibility, influence, success. But it can also mean less judgment, less anger, and greater empathy for what others may be carrying.
For Isenberg, recognizing that change does not give meaning to Carla’s death or make the loss somehow worthwhile. It simply acknowledges that the experience changed him in ways he never expected.
The two truths can exist simultaneously.
He can wish the experience had never happened while recognizing that it fundamentally changed him for the better. That distinction matters because Isenberg resists turning his experience into instructions for anyone else. “I really believe that each grief process is unique, just as each loss is unique,” he says. That belief sits at the heart of This Book Is Not for You. The memoir does not tell readers how to grieve, what to discover, or who to become. Isenberg documents his own experience and leaves other people free to have theirs. What Isenberg discovered about grace is deeply personal, not a prescription for how anyone else should experience loss.
One of the most profound changes in Isenberg’s thinking came not during the most painful period after Carla’s death, but much later, when happiness began to return. After roughly a year and a half of what he describes as profound grief, the intensity began to shift. The pain became less acute and more diffuse, and slowly moments of joy returned. What surprised him was that joy did not push grief aside.
Instead, the two began to intertwine.
“What became apparent to me was how much this joy and this grief were intertwined,” Isenberg says. Both could be emotionally overwhelming, and both could bring tears. Sometimes he could not clearly identify which one he was experiencing. “I can’t tell you in an unambiguous way that I’m feeling pain or joy,” he explains. The easiest description might be bittersweet, but Isenberg believes that fails to capture it. “It’s something completely different.”
Perhaps there is another expression of grace in allowing contradictory experiences to occupy the same space without demanding that one defeat the other. Joy does not prove that grief has ended, and grief does not mean joy has disappeared.
A person can carry both.
For Isenberg, that realization has become part of a transformation that continued long after the final pages of his book were written. Business culture is particularly fond of reinvention. We reinvent companies, careers, brands, strategies, and sometimes ourselves. The word suggests agency: identify what needs to change, make a plan, and become something new.
What Isenberg describes is different. He did not set out to become more empathetic or to understand grace. He became different while trying to survive something he never wanted to experience.
That may be one of the most interesting ideas to emerge from This Book Is Not for You. We spend enormous energy measuring professional growth, yet some of the most consequential growth may be visible only in how we encounter other people: more patience, less certainty, a greater willingness to listen, and more empathy for experiences we cannot fully understand.
Achievement matters, but it is only one measure of a life.
More than two years after losing Carla, Isenberg can look at himself and recognize profound change. Grief remains part of his life, but so does joy, and he has come to understand that the two can exist together.
Perhaps most importantly, he likes better the person he has become.
After a lifetime in which success could be measured in so many conventional ways, that may be one of Daniel Isenberg’s most consequential measures yet.
Not simply what have I achieved, but who have I become?
To learn more about Daniel Isenberg and his deeply personal exploration of loss, grief, and healing, visit his website.
This Book Is Not for You: My Loss, My Grief, My Healing is available on Amazon and at other major bookstores.
