There are birthdays, and then there are moments of reckoning—moments that invite you to pause, breathe, and step into something unfamiliar. For my 60th birthday, I did just that. I went underwater.
In the clear blue waters off Maui, Hawaii, I earned my PADI Open Water Diver certification with Maui Diving, guided by PADI Master Instructor Steven Pickering—a patient professional whose calm presence made it possible to trust the process, and more importantly, myself. What I didn’t know at the time was that my very first open-water dive, at the iconic Mala Pier, would include an unscripted encounter with sharks.
No warning. No buildup. Just breath, buoyancy, and the quiet realization that I was no longer at the top of the food chain.
And that was the point.
Mala Pier is a place of history and contrast—a collapsed structure now reborn as a thriving underwater ecosystem. Coral grows where concrete once stood. Turtles rest where pylons fell. Reef sharks glide effortlessly through the shadows, uninterested in dominance, entirely at home in their world. Dropping beneath the surface there felt symbolic: decay giving way to renewal, fear dissolving into awe.
I’ll be honest—when you see a shark underwater for the first time, your body reacts before your intellect does. Heart rate rises. Instincts flare. But then something remarkable happens if you stay present: the fear passes. Calm comes in its place. You realize the shark is not hunting you. It is simply being. Moving with purpose. Balanced. Calm. If you stay cool, it does.
That calm is contagious.
At 60, I’ve spent a lifetime moving fast—building institutions, fighting inequity, challenging broken systems, pushing capitalism to work for more people instead of fewer. Above water, the world is loud. Urgent. Relentless. Underwater, everything slows down. Breathing becomes deliberate. Motion becomes efficient. Ego becomes a liability.
Diving forces humility. It teaches respect—for limits, for training, for nature, for the unseen systems that keep everything alive. You learn quickly that preparation matters. That panic is dangerous. That progress happens one controlled breath at a time.
Those lessons felt familiar.
At Bryant Group Ventures, as a practicing entrepreneur, one has to constantly ‘get a hold of oneself,’ actively, and calmly managing and balance and dual pressures of opportunity and risk. And moving forward with quiet confidence.
At Operation HOPE, we’ve spent more than three decades teaching people how to navigate systems that can feel just as intimidating as the open ocean—money, credit, homeownership, entrepreneurship. Financial literacy, like scuba diving, is not about bravado. It’s about understanding your environment, managing risk, and staying calm when pressure increases.
And now, as we prepare to expand that mission into AI literacy, the parallels deepen. Artificial intelligence is the new deep water. Powerful. Transformative. Potentially dangerous if misunderstood. Life-changing if approached with the right training, ethics, and respect. Just as you wouldn’t drop someone into shark-filled waters without preparation, we cannot throw communities into the AI economy without the tools to survive and thrive.
What struck me most during that first dive wasn’t the sharks themselves—it was how wrong our stories about them are. Sharks are not mindless killers. They are essential to the balance of the ocean. Remove them, and the ecosystem collapses.
That too feels familiar.
Too often, we misunderstand people at the margins of our economy. We fear what we don’t understand. We label instead of learning. But strength, resilience, and untapped potential are often hiding right beneath the surface—quiet, misunderstood, essential.
As I hovered weightless above the ocean floor, watching a reef shark pass by with effortless grace, I felt something rare: stillness. Gratitude. Perspective.
Turning 60 isn’t about slowing down. It’s about going deeper. Faster. Calmer. With more purpose, less fear, and more meaning.
Deeper into purpose. Deeper into wisdom. Deeper into the belief that growth—real growth—requires courage, humility, and the willingness to enter unfamiliar waters with an open mind and a steady breath.
Sometimes, the best way to understand the world above is to spend a little time beneath the surface. After all, 70% of our planet is water, the vast majority of which is fully unexplored by mankind. Now that’s — remarkable.
Let the journey begin.
— John Hope Bryant
