Letters from Sunday Morning

One letter every Sunday about how founders lead, decide, and sometimes get in their own way. Something worth noticing. Usually something worth trying.

“Victor's Sunday Morning letters overflow with courage and the love.”
Robbie Swale — Executive Coach, Author— The Power to Choose

Four questions keep showing up in what I write. Every letter answers at least one of them.

The Toll

What success quietly asks us to pay.

The Origin

What home taught us that no boardroom could.

The Autopilot

What we keep doing after it stops serving us.

The Inheritance

What we were given, and what we pass on.

Imaginary Castles

I could see it coming. My friend Victor (yes, another Victor, not me) and I were walking toward the entrance of the oldest governor’s house in the Americas, now converted into a luxury hotel. I was visiting from New York. We wanted a cigar. That was the entire plan. Victor was behind me in a suit...

Oct 18, 2026

What English Took.

For decades, I did a lot of work with Korean businesspeople. Their names read like a Hollywood cast of the time. Harrison Ford, Kevin Costner, Bruce Willis were the megastars. I met a handful of Harrys, Bruces, and Kevins. They chose those names to acclimate to American ears. At Ellis Island, it ...

Oct 18, 2026 the toll

Arturito

Before he was a droid. Before the beeps, before the galaxy far away, before the fight over who got to be Luke. That was his name. Ours. New York, 1999. A seat near the back, alone. Episode One, in English this time. Someone on screen says two letters and a number. R2-D2. I said it back to myself,...

Oct 07, 2026 the inheritance

Dead man's float.

That's what they call it in swim lessons. Face down, arms loose, the body doing nothing at all. You don't fight the water, you let it hold you. I learned it at the Vanderbilt Y in New York, sometime in the nineties. First swimming lesson. It's still all I know. At a wedding last weekend, someone ...

Sep 27, 2026 the inheritance

Novocain

The halls smelled of pine oil. The small room where Dad stayed had a window facing a shaft, and the sounds of maintenance workers traveled all the way up to the third floor. The second bed was undone, stripped to its bare brown mattress. Dad smiled when he saw me. We hugged and kissed like we alw...

Sep 22, 2026 the inheritance

A passport wihtout stamps

"El que ma' ve. El que ma' sabe." He who sees more, knows more. Words of wisdom from my father. His favorite expression. He had a passport, out of habit I suppose. But the guy never went anywhere. He left the frontier town where he grew up for the city and never left again. So whatever he meant b...

Sep 13, 2026 the inheritance

Wednesday Mornings

Before Maya Angelou spoke to the world, Mrs. Flowers spoke to her. As a child, Maya Angelou stopped speaking. After she told of the abuse she had suffered, the man responsible was killed. Maya came to believe that her words had caused his death. So for years, she withdrew into silence. Then came ...

by Victor Rivera — Sep 02, 2026 the inheritance

Little I Desire

Thee sunlight could only be seen above the roof lines. Like a Magritte painting. We were standing in the street — my mother, my father, my brother Robert and me — because the house was too small for what I was about to say. The neighbors were close enough to hear. The street was the only private ...

by Victor Rivera — Sep 02, 2026 the toll

Morir Soñando

I always knew I could be a good father. I wasn't certain, but I knew the possibility was in me. I knew because of what I'd been given. And I knew it had been given in two completely different ways. My mother was barely in her twenties. It's the middle of the afternoon at the backyard school. She ...

by Victor Rivera — Sep 02, 2026 the inheritance

Demetrio Oviedo

The stage was a precarious amphitheater. Flying feathers. Sweat. Rum. And a man on the floor, gasping for the air to pronounce a name. His name was Chechen. Or rather, that's what everyone called him, because his real name was the kind that couldn't quite contain him. He was the sort of man who f...

by Victor Rivera — Sep 02, 2026 the origin

The Golden Seam (Epilogue)

I didn't plan to write for a year. I planned to stop hiding. For decades, I kept quiet. In meetings, I stayed silent, because speaking felt like exposing things I wasn't ready to name. My accent, my origins, the feeling that I didn't quite belong in rooms where everyone else seemed to speak effor...

by Victor Rivera — Sep 02, 2026 the inheritance

The Glass

We all heard it. A shriek so loud everyone near me turned. "Papiii!!!" What I saw first was a blob of humanity. A mass of bodies standing, arms wrapped around each other so tightly there seemed no space for breathing. A little boy (maybe a grandson) hanging on to a leg. Slowly the mass came apart...

by Victor Rivera — Sep 02, 2026 the origin

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