The Empty Center: Permission, Connection, and What We Build When the Future is Uncertain

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Samantha Borcy

What does a person do when the future they’d built their life around goes suddenly, undeniably quiet? For Hayes Drumwright, the answer, written days after his third cancer surgery at fifty-three, was to pick up a pen and start figuring it out on the page. The result is The Empty Center, a book that is equal parts memoir, leadership meditation, and honest reckoning with what matters when certainty runs out.

Drumwright is a serial entrepreneur, Napa Valley winery co-founder, and early investor with a life shaped by ambition and action. He’s also a man who has now faced mortality three times over. That particular combination, the builder’s instinct meeting the patient’s reality, gives this book its unusual texture. He isn’t writing from a place of arrival or hard-won peace. He’s writing from the center of the uncertainty, which is precisely what makes it feel true.

The book’s animating argument is simple but not easy: connection matters more than outcome, and what we leave in the lives of others outlasts anything we accumulate. Drumwright writes about permission, the kind you have to give yourself to slow down, change course, or admit that the map you’ve been following no longer matches the terrain. He treats hope not as optimism but as a decision made before you know how things turn out. That reframing alone is worth the read.

There’s also an unusual structural element here worth noting. Drumwright wrote the book in open collaboration with an AI, and he doesn’t hide it. Instead, he makes the collaboration part of the book’s argument, exploring what people and technology can build together when the goal is meaning rather than productivity.

Readers who have loved Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air or Viktor Frankl’s writing on purpose will find themselves at home here. The Empty Center is candid, thoughtful, and written by someone with genuine skin in the game.

About the Author

Hayes Drumwright

Hayes Drumwright has spent thirty years building companies, raising children, and trying to figure out what to do with a life that keeps reshaping itself. He sold his first company in his forties. He has had three cancers. He co-founded three Napa wineries — Memento Mori, Vida Valiente, and the recently acquired Edge Hill, the oldest gravity-fed winery in the valley. He chairs the board of Neurotrack.

He and his wife Susana lead the Vida Valiente Foundation, which provides last-dollar scholarships to first-generation, low-income Stanford undergraduates. They have five children. multiple ventures, and a working theory that the things worth building are the things that lift others.

He writes about leadership, connection, purpose, and the quiet work of becoming the person the next phase of your life is asking you to be.