The people who study human flourishing and the people who shape popular culture do not often share a stage. On Sept. 3, Trilith Foundation put them in the same room for 13 hours.
The 2026 Flourishing Summit ran from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. at Trilith LIVE, the entertainment complex across the street from the sound stages where three of the 10 highest-grossing films of all time were shot. The foundation produced the event in partnership with the Global Flourishing Study team, drawing researchers from Baylor University’s Institute for Global Human Flourishing and Gallup alongside athletes, filmmakers, musicians and executives. It is the summit’s second year.
The premise, as the foundation frames it, is that flourishing is a subject worth studying and a practice worth building. The day was structured to test that against lived experience.
Adversity as an engine
The morning’s second main-stage session, “More Than Physical: What Does It Mean to Be Fully Alive?,” was moderated by Scottie Parker, a former NBA and NFL athletic trainer who hosts the “Fully Alive” podcast. His panel put an orthopedic surgeon, a Paralympic gold medalist and a College Football Hall of Famer in conversation about injury, identity and what remains when a career ends.
Dr. Bert Mandelbaum, chief medical officer of the U.S. Soccer Federation, offered a formulation he returned to twice: adversity is the engine of unimagined opportunity. Healing is the first step, he said. The second is the dream that follows it, and the mission, vision and plan built to reach it.
Al Mead, a Paralympic gold medalist and board president of Trilith LIVE, lost his leg to a sports accident at 9-years-old. “Before I could learn to jump, I had to learn how to live,” he said. He described competing in Seoul in 1988 as the fastest above-knee amputee in the world, watching his prosthetic leg break mid-race, and taking gold in the long jump instead.
David Pollack, a former NFL linebacker whose career ended on a neck fracture in his second season, described the perspective that followed. An occupation makes a terrible god, he said, and a worse identity.
The town across the street
At 1:30 p.m., Alston Causey and Dan T. Cathy took the stage for an intermission conversation that turned toward creative work directly.
Cathy, founder and chief visionary of Trilith and chairman of Chick-fil-A, has played the trumpet since he was a child and gardens seriously. Neither is incidental, he said. A passion adds to the texture and tapestry of a life, and gives a person somewhere to set problems down.
Causey, a startup consultant with the foundation, said the observation reflects something Trilith identified working alongside researchers at Harvard and Baylor: art as a domain of flourishing that the data underweights. Art is in all of us, he said. We were created and designed to create.
Cathy used the segment to state Trilith’s purpose, slowing down and telling the room to get their pens ready.
“We set the stage and enrich the lives of the storymakers who inspire the world.”
He described the town at Trilith as built to serve that purpose, with a range of housing meant to put costume, set dressing, carpentry and metal fabrication workers within walking distance of the stages where they work.
Systems, and the people inside them
The afternoon session, “The Lives We Build: Brain, Arts, Entertainment, Purpose & Influence,” paired Cathy with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the neurosurgeon and CNN correspondent, moderated by Trilith Foundation Executive Director Tia Miller.
Miller opened by noting she has worked for both men. Gupta hired her out of college at CNN and called from the war zone in Afghanistan by satellite phone to check on her while she waited on the offer. Cathy welcomed her to Trilith while picking up trash on the property. Both, she said, poured into her so she could flourish.
Cathy talked about discipline, systems and processes as the way organizations absorb complexity as they grow. When something fails, he said, the response is to redesign the process rather than blame the person, and he traced most failed hires back to onboarding rather than to the person.
Gupta, asked how he knows he is flourishing, said he knows it when he is helping other people flourish, and made a case for gathering in person. “It’s hard to hate close up,” he said. Spend time with people and you will probably learn something from them.
The day closed with a music and storytelling session featuring Lecrae, Eric Thomas and Onsite chairman Miles Adcox. Breakout tracks ran through the afternoon on AI, education, business, creativity and mental health.
Editor’s Note: Join Trilith Foundation and Georgia Entertainment in Toronto for From Story to Scale on Sept. 12. Learn more and RSVP here.
