Every industry has its quiet disruptors: people who look at a system everyone else has accepted as fixed and decide it doesn’t have to stay that way. The five people featured here come from entirely different worlds. One is rebuilding trust in home healthcare after years at the bedside. Another is teaching people over 50 that their best chapter hasn’t been written yet. A third has turned an unconventional, self-taught education into a framework for personal mastery. A fourth is building the infrastructure for trust in an AI-driven insurance market. A fifth is doing the unglamorous, essential work of keeping local government honest in a small New Mexico city. None of them are following someone else’s playbook. Each one built their own, often because no one else was going to.
1. Dawn Mattera Corsi
It’s Never Too Late: How Dawn Mattera Corsi Is Redefining the Second Act
Dawn Mattera Corsi spent the first part of her career as an engineer, but for the past 25 years she’s built something different: a body of work dedicated to helping people over 50 design lives of purpose, confidence, and connection. A best-selling author, TEDx speaker, and certified coach, Corsi has co-authored books alongside names like Jack Canfield and Lisa Nichols, and has spoken for organizations including the American Cancer Society, Hallmark, the March of Dimes, and WeightWatchers.
Her work centers on a belief she states plainly: “It’s never too late.” Too many women, she says, start to feel irrelevant or apprehensive as they approach 50 and beyond. Corsi built her practice specifically to counter that narrative. “My passion is to show them that it’s never too late, and the rest of our lives can be the best of our lives,” she says. “I did it; so can they.”
Her framework has three parts. LEAD focuses on moving from career burnout to breakthrough. LIVE centers on her signature DOLCE Vita Effect: Design your best life, stay Open to opportunities, Live, love, and laugh, prioritize Connection, and bring Enthusiasm to each day. LEGACY, her personal passion project, helps people reconnect with their heritage.
Corsi draws her philosophy from what she calls The Italian Art of Living, building a personal version of dolce vita rooted in happiness, beauty, and presence. But it isn’t passive. “We don’t just float into that dolce vita,” she says, focusing her coaching on concrete steps for moving from unsure to confident.
Her accolades include five best-selling books, multiple Quilly and PR Star awards, an EXPY Award for career excellence, and regular appearances on CBS and Fox News. As she puts it, quoting one of her favorite Italian proverbs: “As long as there is life, there is hope.”
2. Shahryar Sadree
From Junkyards to the Inner Mind: Shahryar Sadree’s Unconventional Path to Self-Mastery
Shahryar Sadree never finished college, but he’s spent his life building one of the more unusual educations around. Born in Iran and raised navigating a new language and culture from kindergarten, Sadree developed an early fascination with how things work, mechanically and psychologically. As a kid, he’d take apart engine parts in junkyards just to understand them. That instinct, applied later to questions about mind and behavior, became the foundation for his work as an author and self-described “solution specialist.”
Sadree has written three nonfiction books exploring the relationship between mind and spirit. His most recent, Down in a Hole, examines what he calls the subconscious “control panel” inside every person, and how easily it can be hijacked. The book drew positive reviews from independent psychology professionals holding PhDs, along with a favorable review from the US Review of Books.
“Once I learned what I was and how to access my own control panel, winning became easy,” Sadree says. His approach distills into a sequence: recognize yourself as more than your circumstances, understand the energy you’re operating within, define what you actually want, and apply the tools you gather with intention. “Knowledge only becomes power when it is applied,” he says, “and applied with purpose.”
Outside his writing, Sadree has worked as a stone and landscape artist, a musician, and a real estate consultant. He notes that European students have traveled to apprentice under his landscape design methods, and recalls lecturing a college journalism class so effectively that his father, a retired physician, told him before he passed that Sadree’s self-taught education had surpassed his own, a moment Sadree calls the highest recognition he expects to receive.
Looking ahead, Sadree plans to expand into retreats, lecture tours, and coaching programs, while continuing to perform music. “Tuning and timing make music,” he says. “Everything else is just noise.”
3. Farida Abjani
From ICU Nurse to CEO: How Farida Abjani Is Redefining Home Healthcare
Farida Abjani spent years working in cardiac intensive care before becoming a healthcare entrepreneur, and that bedside experience still shapes everything she’s built since. A registered nurse with an MBA, Abjani co-founded Aging Gracefully, a Texas-licensed home health agency focused on helping seniors age with dignity and independence in their own homes.
The idea came directly from what she saw on the front lines. “My nursing career allowed me to witness firsthand the gaps that exist in post-acute and home-based care,” Abjani says. She watched families struggle to navigate complicated healthcare systems and decided to build something combining clinical rigor with genuine compassion.
Building a healthcare company has come with real obstacles: regulatory requirements, staffing shortages, and the pressure of scaling quickly. “I learned to embrace challenges as opportunities, focus on solutions, and build strong teams that share a common mission,” she says.
What sets her apart, she believes, is fluency in both clinical and business worlds. Having worked directly with critically ill patients, she says she understands healthcare “at its most personal level,” pairing that with leadership training to build solutions that are both patient-centered and sustainable.
She has also extended her mission beyond the agency, founding the Aging Gracefully Foundation as an important extension of her work serving seniors and caregivers.
Abjani’s recognitions include Houston Business Journal’s Most Admired CEO in 2020, a spot on Forbes’ Top Women in Business in 2021, and inclusion in Women We Admire’s Top 50 Women Leaders in Healthcare for 2025 and 2026. She also serves on the Executive Board of the Greater Houston Women’s Chamber of Commerce.
For Abjani, the throughline is dignity. “Healthcare is not just about treating illness, it is about preserving dignity,” she says. “My goal is to help redefine how people experience aging by making compassionate, high-quality care accessible to every family.” Her goal for Aging Gracefully is to become one of the most respected home healthcare organizations in the country while she continues mentoring future healthcare leaders.
4. Jonas C. Roeser
Jonas Roeser Is Building the Infrastructure for Trust in the Age of AI Search
Jonas C. Roeser has spent more than two decades working at the intersection of insurance, technology, and media, an industry that doesn’t change quickly. Roeser has made a career out of pushing it forward anyway.
He co-founded LTC Financial Partners, later ACSIA Partners, helping scale it into one of the largest long-term care insurance agencies in the country and running national campaigns for USAA, Highmark Blue Cross, and the National Education Association, work that helped land the company on the Inc. 5000 list. One early campaign, “3in4 Need More,” included a flash mob in Times Square, an unconventional approach for a conservative industry.
That instinct now drives his current venture. Roeser is Co-Founder and CEO of Agent Review, an AI-powered platform redefining how insurance agents get discovered and trusted. Named Insurance Industry Product of the Year, it has grown from a directory concept into a full SaaS ecosystem built for an environment where AI increasingly mediates how consumers find professionals.
Roeser describes that environment as the “decision layer,” where reputation signals and verified credentials shape a consumer’s choice before they ever pick up the phone. “Most people in insurance understand distribution. Most people in tech understand platforms,” he says. “I understand both, and I understand what happens at the moment they collide.”
Roeser also brings an unusual creative background to the work, having served as Executive Producer on three feature films and a television pilot. “He is not building for where the industry is,” as he puts it. “He is building for where it is going. And he is already there.”
5. Chris Edwards
The Watchdog Who Stayed: Chris Edwards Is Rebuilding Local Journalism From the Ground Up in Alamogordo
When Alamogordo’s daily newspaper shrank to a weekly publication, Chris Edwards didn’t wait for someone else to fill the gap. He built 2nd Life Media Alamogordo Town News and took over KALH Radio to make sure the high-desert New Mexico community still had a watchdog press. “A community without a watchdog press isn’t really a self-governing community at all,” he says.
Edwards’s approach is rooted in proximity. He sits in commission chambers, reads ordinances, and tracks votes over time, institutional memory he says can’t be manufactured. “I live here. I’m not parachuting in to cover Alamogordo from a regional bureau three hours away,” he explains.
That commitment has led him into court. Edwards has an active, self-filed lawsuit against the Alamogordo City Commission over alleged Open Meetings Act violations and has advanced an ethics complaint against a sitting state legislator to probable-cause review before the New Mexico Ethics Commission. Conducted pro se, both required him to act as his own reporter, editor, and legal filer at once. “Every dollar has to be justified, and the margin for error is thin,” he says.
Edwards measures success differently than industry awards. “It’s the phone calls and messages from residents who say they finally feel like someone is telling them the truth about their own community,” he says. “That’s the credential that matters most to me.”
His long-term goal is sustainability: building something with institutional footing that outlasts any single journalist, including himself. “Somebody has to watch,” he says. “In Alamogordo, that somebody is me, and I’m building something so that it doesn’t have to depend on anybody forever.”