Hitting Reset on Life

I realized I was trying to live a lot of lives that weren't mine. Now it's time to focus on the one that really matters.

When I kicked off this stage of my journey in 2020, I had a lot of ambition, very little experience, and just enough insight to be exactly wrong about 90% of things. But with drive, determination, and plenty of stupidity to keep me going, I learned everything I needed to know. And I did so without any of the success that I thought I needed along the way in order to get me there.

I set my initial goals during a pandemic. A pandemic in which I realized I’ve only got one life to live, and the life I was living wasn’t the one I had hoped for. So I got an insight and tried to ride it to the changes that I wanted. And five years in, the only thing that has truly changed so far is me.

I thought I knew what I wanted. But all I really knew was that my current life wasn’t living up to the standards I wanted it to and I tried desperately to escape it. That led me to using the internet more and more, trying to find the secret to making everything work. I jumped on every new platform, explored new algorithms, and even fed my brain to the AI to see what happened.

The biggest problem I faced was that I tried to rush everything. I had the insight, but I had the insight through flattened time, and I couldn’t see how long things would take to play out. So I kept pushing and pushing and pushing harder, because the story I was telling myself was that I just needed to find the one thing that would work. Now I realize that this is the delusion of a technology addiction rearing its ugly head at me.

I’m 100% addicted to information. I’m constantly pulling out my phone to scroll twitter, substack, and the rest. I might get that one bit of insight that triggers a cascade of breakthroughs for me. It’s happened a number of times, so it’s definitely something that could again. Nobody realizes how far ahead I am right now, and I’ve realized that telling people constantly is a great way to look like I’m consumed by ChatGPT Psychosis and avoid me.

Which is kind of a superpower now that I understand how to wield illegibility effectively.

But more importantly, I realized that I’ve got a crew now. A group of friends I can call on. A network I can build on. And a knowledge base that is incredibly valuable to a lot of people, even if those people aren’t the ones I’ve spent the past five years trying to impress. As an engineer, there was a story in my head related to the status of the startup founder. The one who pushed against all odds and made his impact on the world. I internalized that, I lived that, and I suffered for it. Because it’s not my story.

I realized something: I was trying to be the whole team. And I wanted to be a superstar at all of it. Sales, marketing, product, engineering, leadership, R&D, all of it.

Now, I realized that I don’t need to be the whole team. I’m much better off as a coach. Maybe a player/coach at times, because I can fill into a lot of roles really well.

After giving up on the dream that I had been holding on to for so long, I’m reflecting on what I actually want out of life. I’d planned on something that gave me perfect optionality in a short time frame and then spent five long years working on an instant solution. Turns out, I can actually take my time in developing optionality and trying things a little bit along the way. I wasn’t happy with where I was in life, so I tried like hell to change it. And then I realized along the way that I wasn’t ENTIRELY unhappy with where my life was.

But spending an entire year online during the pandemic made me feel like my life was the worst it could possibly be and I needed to change it. Now.

And, in the most Leo way possible, I took that feeling and ran with it five years past the pandemic, until I realized that I took way too much baggage along for the ride. It’s hard to know what you are feeling when you aren’t used to feeling.

Especially when you start feeling things during a global pandemic. That’s why I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to write, how to express my internal state online, how to share ideas, how to find collaborators, how to make friends. And yet, all I could focus on was what I didn’t have.

That’s the biggest problem with the internet right now. It’s designed to make us feel incomplete, because we definitely need to fill that hole with whatever garbage product is being shilled at us. And me, being an astute tech bro who avoids ads, managed to get completely wrapped up in the shilling of the product that shills the products online: Silicon Valley. Where hopes go to be born and legends rise. And I bought into all of it, hook, line, and sinker.

I built myself up to be a legend in my own head, knowing that it was up to me and me alone to save the world. That’s the SV way, right? Let’s go “Founder Mode”!

So I threw myself fully into the internet. I ate up the idea of the creator economy. I was going to create a business around getting eyeballs! But also be a world class researcher! And startup founder! And educator! I mainlined Twitter and made Claude my best friend. The amount of information I consumed over the past five years is absolutely absurd. For most of the time, I had podcasts in my ears while reading or working on something completely different. I learned how to absorb information at scales that sane humans wouldn’t dream of.

And now I’m an addict. I crave information feeds. I need the infinite scroll because there might be something valuable in there that I might miss. I might have an opportunity at a connection that will go wanting if I don’t see it.

Which is a great way to miss all the connection opportunities around me IRL.

After spending 5 years on a plan the internet drafted for me on how to achieve my goals, I finally understand how to draft a plan of my own. And I’m going to do so now that I’ve got a much better understanding of reality, vs what I believed reality should be. In a lot of cases, reality will be the way I believe it should be. But I don’t know when, and I can’t count on it.

This is the first step of the personal hackathon practice that I developed. I wanted to map out the uncertainty of the situation by writing out what I understood to be true that I now see as false. Had I done this earlier, I could have quit earlier and started down the right path. But of course, it wasn’t the right path then. I had to learn what I had to learn, and now I have.

Part two of the practice is focus. As someone who has been very outspoken about having ADHD and the challenges and abilities it gives me, I tend to push against focus as something that is overrated if you know how to split attention properly.

This is technically true from an information flow perspective, but is completely wrong for human brains.

Because our brains always have a focus, even if we aren’t actively thinking about it. And it’s typically the last open question you have. Our brains love closing loops with answers. So if you aren’t giving it any more questions, it will move up the stack and answer one that you asked earlier.

The internet gives us infinite questions to ask and answer, allowing us to hide from the bigger, open questions that we have to contend with as humans. Foster helped me understand the power of holding questions that don’t have answers, and not having to answer them. But my research unlocked something bigger for me: questions can act as cognitive security. Because when you ask questions, your brain will eventually find you an answer. The key is to ask questions that don’t have an answer yet. That’s where the exploration truly comes into play.

And here’s the cool thing about goals: they are actually questions in disguise. A goal with a deadline becomes a question of “Can I accomplish that by then?” And there’s always an answer, because time moves forward.

I made a mistake with the question I asked. I timeboxed it to be as quickly as possible, because that’s always my default speed. So I set 6 month goals that were absolutely ridiculous.

I did this intentionally though: I wanted to expand my ambitions, because until we were hit with a pandemic, I was slogging along as a nameless engineer in a huge company, being exploited for my love of learning. When I realized that I had to set my own goals, and not rely on the goals of whatever company I was working at, I knew I didn’t have any idea how anything worked. So I set ridiculous goals because that wouldn’t give me a chance to look up and doubt myself.

But it occurred to me recently that I’d never actually reset those goals to match what I actually wanted out of life. They were still hanging over me, pushing me to think about moving faster and faster constantly, looking for all the shortcuts that would allow me to succeed quickly.

And I never did because I was always in a rush to get out of the place I was in.

Now I’m happy in exactly the place I’m in. The funny part is that I haven’t gone anywhere, and almost nothing has actually changed about my circumstances, except they got way worse because the complexity I created around what I wanted out of life and what I needed made it extremely difficult for me to monetize my work or my time. There’s so much stress around bills piling up, and no regular income. And I’m pushing myself to try to perform at a startup pace and try to compete with people who have all sorts of advantages that I don’t in the current market. That’s not what I wanted this life to be. I wanted a life of freedom and sovereignty. And I simply created a prison for myself because of the expectations I’d built up over time.

I’d resisted coaching for a long time, because I’ve had the privilege of benefiting from a few incredible coaches who helped me see things in myself that I didn’t think possible. And I didn’t feel like I lived up to the title of “coach” that I saw in the people I respected for their work.

Then I saw the transformation I had helped people achieve in their lives, and I saw it happen in a repeatable way. This is huge for me, because my definition of a business is a system that creates value in a repeatable and predictable way.

Now I’ve seen a transformation (the value) happen twice (repeatable). I simply need to build a system that enables that transformation to scale as much as I want. And now I know exactly how much I want it to scale.

See, I learned the secret to success along the way: friendship.

Five years ago, I was in a world where I’d been fighting depression and anxiety for a decade, medicating myself to get through the day. I was 100lbs heavier, depending on my wife for my entire social support structure while also trying to deal with the fact that, even though I made a ton more money than the average person in my area, I’d been stuck in the same shitty rental house I moved into after I graduated college. So sure, I was making $120K/year, but the costs of everything and two kids kept everything out of reach. I had no real growth, I was just forced into a system that took everything from me and told me to be happy with the scraps I was given, while I saw a bunch of people in Silicon Valley making way more money for way worse work than I did.

I was pissed, because I could do what they did. Hell, I’d been learning and working that fast my entire career, and I’d have no trouble working at the speed needed.

For the past five years, there’s been a common refrain in my head: “if those idiots could X, so could I”. From raising money to being a published author to having a huge audience, it didn’t matter. I could do it.

And five years of learning I could not, in fact, do all of it has given me the clarity I lacked in the beginning.

Because now I know what I WANT to do. It’s not about what I CAN do, it’s just about what I do.

Doesn’t matter what idiots can do what. Only matters what this idiot does.

And what I don’t worry about being the best at. I’ve forced myself to learn and understand and dissect everything I was doing. I wanted to move as quickly as possible, so I had to understand every single aspect. I was doing so much I wasn’t actually doing anything. Except learning. Mostly learning how to be happy with who I am and where I’m at, because it’s the one thing that I got REALLY good at.

Great, even.

There’s a lot of story left to write. But starting now, it’s my story that I’m writing. Because I know the life I want to have lived, and I’m making it the reality that I experience.

It’s a life of friendship, love, and family. When I had my first insight, and I got excited and tried to share it, it fell flat because I’d gotten sucked into my own head so much that nobody knew the real me.

I didn’t even know the real me.

But over the last five years, I’ve had the opportunity to find out. And honestly? I’m pretty fucking cool. I’m also a hell of a problem solver, system architect, and thinker.

But most importantly, I’m a great friend. Because, like with everything else, when it came to the things I wanted to learn, I found the best person in the world to learn it from. And it just so happens, the first real friend I made along my journey, all the way back in 2021, is the absolute best person in the world at friendship. And I know that because I saw how his friends treat him, how long they’ve been friends, and how they treat friends of his that they’ve never met.

When I saw that, I knew that’s what I wanted out of life.

So he’s been helping me become a really good friend, because the world needs more friends in it.

But I can’t really be a good friend until I take full responsibility for myself, and that means dropping all of the people I’m not.

So here’s the new plan:

Step 1: Find 10 coaching/consulting clients

I’ve started having discovery calls for these clients this week, and that’s when I knew I was in the right place. Those conversations were exactly the ones I wanted to be having on a regular basis. So far, I’m at a 0% conversion rate with 2 calls, but I also identified a couple areas for improvement for the next ones, so I’m not worried. I also need to do more outreach. I started on Reddit, and have found some success there. My current target audience is vibecoders who are working toward financial freedom, because I can see them being ideal consulting clients (I can use my system design and engineering skills to help them harden their vibecoded systems) or coaching clients, because it can be really easy to lose yourself in the process of trying to find freedom. Ask me how I know…

Step 2: Hire 1st friend

I realized that there’s a ton of complicated issues when it comes to starting your own business and figuring it out. I want to help my friends get started building their own and supporting them while they do so. I don’t want my friends to have to deal with the bullshit anymore. So there’s a friend I plan on bringing on full time ASAP to help me in the larger effort: 2026. I have a plan for a new World Record Hackathon, and it’s going to last all year long. Once we get this pulled together enough, we can reach out to sponsors and start building those relationships.

Step 3: Hire More Friends

There’s a limit of about 10 people I want working for me at any given point in time, because I want to be able to coach them effectively on what they should know. Any more than that, and I can’t give them enough time. Once they graduate from working with me, they can start getting resources to build out their own teams. (why would I want them starting a company externally when I can get early access to it internally?)

What I’m attempting to do is prove my research by showing how specific types of networks can create value at a faster rate than others. (In case you are curious, I’m optimizing for trust harmonics and building recursive businesses)

The plan is the focus.

Part 3 is the build.

In order to create the outcome I need for step 1, I need to create “top of funnel dealflow”. That’s fancy business speak for “finding people and seeing if they are possible clients that might pay me money for my services”. A funnel is a repeatable process for identifying the best fit clients and giving them the information they need in order to make an informed purchase decision.

That requires a funnel, which I’ve created a basic version of based on the one my friend Jessyka built for me around my consulting offerings. There’s a qualification quiz to see if people are where I think they are, then that leads them to a discovery call, and then I coach them for an hour and offer them a package if they seem like a good fit.

I realized after my first two discovery calls that I need to add a little more structure to them so I avoid my tendency to ramble on about things I like instead of directly helping the people I’m coaching. But I got great feedback and I’ve started cataloguing problems that I’m able to help with so I can create a detailed dataset about who specifically I can help and how. This will also give me what I need in order to start creating content that speaks to the problems I’m helping solve, because this feeds back into the funnel, creating a flywheel, which, over time, will make it easier and easier to attract clients, because I’ll have a larger and larger number of posts that will lead to the funnel and grow my online footprint.

So the first part of the build is actually this blog post. It’s a version of my story that actually showcases the structure I’m talking about.

And the fourth part and final part of the process is the reflection. This happens first internally, which is what this blog post is for me. It’s my internal reflection about my own hackathon. And then there’s the sharing, which is what pushing publish is for me. And when sharing, you should have an intended outcome. In this case, my intended outcome is at least 5 discovery calls and 2 clients.

2 clients a month is all I need to sustain myself, because I’ve managed to get rid of pretty much everything I didn’t really care about, but was picked up over time due to lifestyle creep. I’m excited to start building again, because now I know who I am and what I want. And now I’m doing so without the weight of the baggage I’d accumulated from other people’s dreams of the future I should want.

Now I’m going to focus on healing my brain and learning how to slow down. Even this post was an experiment with that. Instead of doing a brain dump and hitting publish, even though I felt like it was ready, I took a night to sleep on it and run through with an edit.

It’s probably not a great edit, but it’s an edit.

It’s time for me to slow down and learn how to live again. I was rushing around, trying to compete for grants and funding with people who are much better positioned than I am, who have much clearer visions of the specific future they are creating. Mine have always been a bit scattered and I tended to shift them around as I as looking for the right one that fit me. It’s such a weight off to realize that I don’t need to worry about that anymore. I can simply survive based on my ability to help the people around me.

And if that’s not true sovereignty, I don’t know what is.

If that’s something I can help you with too, please reach out. Or you can check out my site that outlines the personal hackathon. It has the assessment and call booking link (or the payment link if you don’t need a discovery call)

I’ll end with a picture that I had taken at a local Star Trek exhibit. I love Star Trek, and had such a cool time sharing this experience with my family. But I initially recoiled at posting this picture because I realized I’ve still got a lot more weight to lose, and I felt embarrassed about it. That made me realize I’ve got to post it now, and take away that power from my brain. So beam me up, Scotty.