The weight of history and what we do with it
Sidebar isn’t just for growth. It’s for moments like this.
Hi everyone,
It’s been a minute. I just got back from two weeks of recharging and wandering with my family through Amsterdam, Berlin, and Vienna. I thought I’d come back with highlights from museums, markets, or cobblestone strolls. But those aren’t the moments that have stayed with me.
What I can’t stop thinking about are the places that left me gutted and humbled.
I visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. And Sachsenhausen, a former concentration camp just outside the city. Places where the air feels heavier. Where silence speaks volumes.
I thought I understood the Holocaust. But standing in plazas that once pulsed with Jewish life, pausing at the Stolpersteine (small brass “stumbling stones” placed outside homes to honor Jews who were taken and murdered), and walking the same paths where unspeakable acts unfolded made it heartbreakingly real.
What haunted me wasn’t just the cruelty. It was the quiet. The slow unraveling of humanity that happened because so many looked away.
It reminded me that the unthinkable doesn’t begin through a single, cataclysmic event. It begins with excuses. With silence. With small moral compromises made by ordinary people.
And it left me asking some hard questions:
Where in my life am I choosing comfort over courage?
What kind of leader do I want to be?
How am I using my influence not just to succeed, but to stand for something?
These aren’t separate from our work. They are our work.
Leadership, true leadership, is a daily practice. A thousand quiet decisions to show up with empathy. To act with integrity. To speak up, even when it’s easier not to.
That’s why I keep coming back to and why I’m so grateful for this community. Because in Sidebar, we get to wrestle with these questions together. We get to practice becoming the kind of leaders the world needs more of – courageous, principled, human.
So this week, I’m asking myself:
What’s one small act of courage I can take today?
Where can I lead with heart when it would be easier to look away?
Maybe you’ll ask yourself the same.
The lessons of the past ask us all to be builders of a better future. And that future is shaped by the choices we make every day. Let’s choose well.
With gratitude,
Ha Nguyen
Head of Community, Sidebar
Our Sidebar Berlin community gathering reminded me why community matters. Thank you to Sidebar member Nitisha Agrawal for creating space to process, reflect, and just be human together.