Sam Goodwin spoke in a keynote address at SAP Connect Day Chicago on April 2, 2026.

Sam Goodwin would like to invite you into his prison cell.

It is 8 feet by 8 feet, buried deep beneath the city of Damascus, with no window and no sense of time. The air is stale. The floor is concrete. In one corner sits what passes for a toilet. In the other, only darkness. Nothing to read. Nothing to watch. Nothing to do but think.

“I’d like you to do your best to smell the stench of that imaginary small hole,” Goodwin told a ballroom audience in Chicago earlier this month, pausing long enough to let the visual settle. “I’d like you to imagine being stuck for months, 7,000 miles away from the good life.”

It was an arresting way to address a room full of business leaders. But Goodwin, speaking at SAP Connect Day Chicago on April 4, was not interested in easing into his subject. The bestselling author and founder of SGI Ventures used his story to pull the conversation out of abstraction and anchor it in something real.

The Uncertainty of the Situation 

On the surface, Goodwin’s path to that moment had been unlikely. A seasoned traveler with a goal of visiting every country in the world, he had spent years moving through places often described as off-limits, finding that the reality on the ground was often warmer than it was portrayed.

Visiting Syria in the spring of 2019, that pattern changed. Shortly after landing, Goodwin was taken off the street, blindfolded, moved through a series of locations, and eventually placed in a military prison after being accused of being a spy. He would remain in isolation for 27 days.

The days passed without markers. He could hear other prisoners in nearby cells, at times being tortured, but he remained completely alone. He had no reliable information about his situation or whether it would change. His life had never been more uncertain.

What followed, as Goodwin described it, was not a sudden shift so much as a gradual recalibration. Stripped of movement, information, and control, he began to test what remained within reach.

Goodwin began with something simple enough to feel almost insufficient. Gratitude, in its most basic form, became a way of interrupting the instinct to spiral. There was air to breathe. There was food, however minimal. There were moments when the situation did not get worse.

“These things may sound elementary or insignificant,” Goodwin said, “but I found that each one of these small expressions of gratitude became this silent rebellion against the uncertainty of the situation.”

The exercise was about creating distance from the instinct to catastrophize. Over time, those small acknowledgments accumulated into something steadier—a way of orienting himself when nothing else could.

From there, his attention narrowed to control, or the small portion of it that still existed. Goodwin could not influence his release or change how he was perceived. He could not alter the conditions of the cell. But he could decide how to respond to the thoughts that surfaced in that environment.

“My goal wasn’t to get rid of negative thoughts and feelings,” Goodwin said. “That would be unrealistic. My goal was to change the way I responded to them.”

"Not Only Something To Survive, But Something That Might Shape Him In A Useful Way"

That distinction, between eliminating uncertainty and managing a response to it, introduced a form of structure into a situation that offered none. Movement, even in the form of pacing a few steps at a time, became intentional. So did the effort to notice when his thinking drifted and to redirect it. These were small acts, but they created momentum, a sense that not everything had been ceded.

Over time, something else began to shift. The conditions did not improve, but his relationship to them did. The repetition of those days, the absence of distraction, created space for a different perspective to take hold. Goodwin began to see a gap between what uncertainty felt like and what was actually happening. The feeling was expansive, overwhelming. The reality, while still severe, was more contained.

That distinction became a turning point. If the feeling could be separated from the facts, then it could also be managed. It was in that space that the experience began to take on a different meaning.

“Being taken hostage was as insane of a situation as I could have ever imagined being in,” Goodwin said. “But I began to realize and believe that if I could maintain hope, persevere through this, and survive, I would then be better equipped to take on more challenges in my life going forward.”

It was around then that he began to consider the experience not only as something to survive, but as something that might shape him in a useful way. If he could endure it, Goodwin reasoned, he might come out of it better equipped to handle whatever followed. The idea did not reduce the difficulty of the moment, but reframed it. The cell became, in a limited sense, a place where something was being built.

Goodwin was eventually moved out of solitary confinement to another prison in Adra, where he spent additional time with other detainees, forming relationships and sharing language. His release came through an unlikely chain of connections that reached from his family to intermediaries in the region. When he was driven across the Lebanese border and reunited with his parents in Beirut, the experience that had defined those weeks began to recede into something he could examine at a distance.

Later that year, despite his family’s objections, he boarded a flight to Brazil, completing his goal of visiting all 193 countries.

Acting with Confidence Today to Lead with Vision Tomorrow

Telling his story in Chicago, the story functioned less as a narrative endpoint than as a framework for thinking about a different kind of uncertainty—the kind that defines much of modern work. The conference’s throughline of acting with confidence today to lead with vision tomorrow depends on the ability to operate without complete information, to make decisions in conditions that do not settle into clarity.

Goodwin’s argument is that the skills required to do that are not abstract. Rather, they are practiced, often in small, repeatable ways. Perspective, established through something like gratitude, creates a baseline. Control, even when limited, creates movement. And uncertainty, when reframed, becomes a space where something useful can take shape.

“We can’t always choose the exact path that we take in life,” Goodwin said. “But we can always choose the manner in which we walk it.”

The phrasing is familiar, but in the context he described, it lands differently. Four steps forward, four steps back, pacing in a room with no exits. The conditions remain fixed. The response does not.

For an audience of business leaders and practitioners, the translation was direct. Uncertainty is not episodic. It is constant, built into markets, technologies, and the pace of change itself. The question is not how to eliminate it, but how to function within it without being defined by it.

As Goodwin closed his remarks, he turned to a concept that has shaped how he understands his own experience: post-traumatic growth, or PTG. If post-traumatic stress captures the lasting weight of hardship, PTG suggests another possibility, that those same experiences can also produce strength, clarity, and a deeper sense of purpose.

The idea is not that adversity is desirable or that it should be minimized. It is that it can be used.

“We could be held hostage by anything: alcohol, drugs, illness, relationships, finances, injuries,” he said. “But the way that we embrace and manage those challenges, the actions we take, I think that defines who we become—and from where we begin again.”