"Somewhere between Saigon and Wall Street, the poet within me went into exile. It is time to find him again," writes Lam Nguyen-Phuong.

A refugee from Vietnam, he climbed to the summit of global finance — co-founding Capital Group's private equity arm and leading over $6 billion of investments — then spent twenty years climbing inward. A first Vipassana retreat cracked open "a direct experience of my True Self," and to this day he hasn't missed a day of meditation.

That turn inverted everything, including his giving. In 2018 he left finance for "radical philanthropy," founding the Nguyễn-Phương Family Foundation to back changemakers across Vietnam and Southeast Asia — scaling in depth, not breadth, convinced that love is the greatest force for sustainable change in the world. Today, he sees a world in crisis, yet moves from sorrow to hope — "not because the world improved, but because I did."