Good afternoon, friends and foes. It is certainly a time for sincere reflection. My journey, which feels like a lifetime but spans a mere three weeks, began the way many of those in our way of life does. With a colonial-style house in the suburbs, a dog, a wife, and a job I loathed. I had just finished painting the white picket fence in our backyard when I could hear something calling to me. Osborn.... Osborn!

At first I thought it was god, but then I remembered there is no god. In fact, it was an old friend of mine from high school who'd had a rough go of things the last few years. He looked homeless, apart from his nice watch, fancy suit, and wads of cash stuffed crudely into his waistband. He called me over, and we discussed how our lives had diverged since we last saw one another.

Robert Frost once spoke of two roads that diverged in a yellow wood. My old friend and I were travelers, and in that moment I'd been granted the divine cognizance to realize that we'd started at the same divergence and now we stood here, at a convergence with the opportunity to diverge again. I needed a map, but Frost offers little in terms of guiding the transformation from a suburban white collar manager to an urban white collar criminal. But I saw that my friend had certainly taken the road less traveled by.

We all began as something different. I abandoned my wife (but took the dog) and set out to join my friend in his schemes and plots. After all, how'd he have so much money stuffed in his pants if he weren't earning a comfortable living? Surely the first thing I would do if I made it big would be to look up my old buddy from high school and tell him all about how to do what I did. And I'm thankful that he did.

Because now I'm hamstrung in a rogue's crew feeling like "investing in an IRA" landed me in Dublin instead of a comfortable retirement. But surely I'm not the only one who's had an unusual journey from where they were to where they are now.

When the two roads diverged for you, how did you choose this one? Was it the right choice?

Reading Osborn's story... it's funny how life can throw you down unexpected roads. For Rocco, it wasn't some grand philosophical choice. It was more like a series of small pushes and shoves, each one leading further down this path. Sometimes it feels right, sometimes you wonder where you could've ended up if you'd taken a different turn back then.