VARTECH 2026 attendees walked into the Mohegan Sun convention center expecting the usual updates on hardware roadmaps and channel strategies. Instead, keynote speaker Ben Nemtin opened with the story of a missed rugby kick. It turned out to be one of the most talked-about moments of the day, sparking conversations that went well beyond sports and left the room asking: what are we really building all of this for?
From a missed kick to a global project
Nemtin had just learned he’d made Canada’s under-19 World Cup rugby team, playing fly-half, the position that combines a football team’s quarterback and placekicker. It should have been the happiest moment of his life. Instead, a memory kept surfacing: missing the game-winning kick at his high school championship. As he trained for the World Cup in Paris, that old fear crept back, and the anxiety cost him sleep, then his practice sessions, then his spot on the team before the tournament even started.
What happened next was a difficult period where he felt overwhelmed and withdrew from college, losing his scholarship and becoming more isolated. What helped him start to feel better was not a structured plan or program, but the unexpected kindness of three friends who showed up at his door and took him out for lunch. That day marked a turning point, as it was the first time he felt comfortable enough to share what he was experiencing.
That lunch eventually became The Buried Life, a project built around a single question borrowed from a nineteenth-century poem: what do you want to do before you die? Nemtin and his friends wrote a joint bucket list, then set out to complete it, with one rule attached to every item they crossed off their own list. They had to help a stranger cross something off theirs. What started with two summer jobs and a secondhand RV grew into a movement that has intersected with people navigating terminal illness, disability, and their own versions of the shut-in years Nemtin once lived through.
The lesson for IT solutions providers
The part of the talk that seemed to land hardest with the VARTECH crowd was not any single story. It was Nemtin’s point about ripple effects. Helping one person, he argued, sets off a chain reaction that is usually invisible to the person who started it. That is a familiar situation for anyone running an IT practice. A client’s environment stays up, a transaction processes without a hitch, a security patch goes out before anything breaks, and the customer experiences none of it because everything simply worked. The impact is real. It is just rarely seen by the people who created it.
Nemtin backed this up with research regarding team performance: organizations anchored to their purpose (their why) are roughly seven times more likely to work through major challenges than those anchored only to process (their how). For solution providers competing on service quality as much as on technology, that is a direct argument for making the invisible ripple a little more visible, both to teams and to customers.
Two things to try this week
Nemtin’s full talk builds toward a five-step framework for turning a dream into something real, but two steps are worth trying on their own, no framework required.
The first is to actually write your list down, across more than just career or business goals, and to keep it somewhere visible rather than on a scrap of paper that gets lost. The second is to talk about it. Nemtin described sharing his own long-shot dream of going to space for eighteen years before finally signing an agreement to fly in 2027, and credited the accountability of saying it out loud, repeatedly, as much as any single action he took.
Neither step requires a keynote to attempt. Both are a reasonable test of whether purpose, not just process, has a place in how a services business talks about its own work.
