Julian traces his turning point to the 1997 financial crisis. “The pivotal moment for me was realizing that when your back’s against the wall and your thought is all you’ve got, that thought can become your journey — and that journey can become the story of your life,” he has said. Learning to self-evaluate and mitigate risk is what allowed him to move past his own limitations — a process he later put into words as becoming “a student of my own history.”