I guess I never wanted it.
By January 2024, I’d put eight and a half years into a marketing agency. Bootstrapped it to Top 1000 in the world. Six-figure take-home. On the path to $5M a year with a team of eight. I’d finally achieved the semi-dream of removing myself from day-to-day operations, spending all that extra time grabbing coffee with hundreds of cool people.
I’d taken 13 years to run the plan as it’s prescribed. I was winning.
Eight months later, I didn’t have any of them.
I didn’t lose them. I let them go.
You’re supposed to fake it til you make it. But what happens if you make it, then start faking it?
I’d created a dirty habit of performance without belief.
By January 2024, I knew I no longer wanted to participate. But I was scared. So I stayed eight more months, on calls pretending to give a shit about marketing, the deliverables, the complaints my clients would give me about other team members because they trusted me implicitly. I was motivating people to do a job I wasn’t motivated in.
You do these things, you say, because you’re not a quitter. You have something to prove. You do these things… well, you don’t really know why, because you never asked yourself a deeper question.
You asked, “What do I need?” and then you stopped.
It’s funny how when we set a goal, we don’t meditate much on what it’ll mean to possess it. We don’t calculate the trade-offs.
And you’re terrified of the other side. The desire for stillness, peace, to make a guilt-free decision. Silence feels like failure. Stillness feels like selfishness. You must look up to be something.
But noise felt like success. The full calendar. The client calls. From the outside, it all looked like winning. And it was all noise that protected me from the question I couldn’t ask yet.
The question started bubbling up. Involuntary. Suppressed in the name of the goal.
“Can you reach your full potential here?”
The answer was no. Immediately. But I disguised my fear as practicality. We had 4-month-old twins. I’d put in so much work. We were on pace to hit $5M in the next 2-3 years. I was only working 8 hours a week.
I couldn’t leave.
So I ignored the question. But it kept bubbling up. A couple of times a week. Then a couple of times per day. By May, it was behind every task, every action. Transitioning from “Can you reach your full potential here?” to “If you know the answer, what are you still doing here?”
My body had been telling me for a long time.
I’d had my first kid in 2020 and worked so hard I can’t remember the first 18 months of his life.
April 2022, my heart stopped beating on an airplane. Obviously, it came back to life.
In December 2022, lying in bed after sending a 93-minute voice note to my business partner, I looked up at the ceiling and said, “I don’t think I’ll wake up tomorrow.”
It was a paradox. I didn’t play it safe. I’d made a series of strategic, risky moves throughout my career. I’d gone for it. The results were there. With every move I made, I convinced myself I was doing it for me, that I was the master architect of my vision.
Big risks feel like that in the moment.
But zoom out a ways, and soon you’ll realize you didn’t make these moves based on your vision. You found someone else’s. I’d signed up for someone else’s race. A race I’d never win.
This is where “I guess I never wanted it” deepens. I was courageous—repeatedly in the wrong direction.
I often joke with people that twins are the most amazing thing in the world, and I wouldn’t wish them on anybody.
Economically, having twins is a nightmare. I say that because what I did between May and August of 2024 was, on paper, objectively stupid.
With a mortgage, student loans, and a bit of credit card debt, I calculated my run-rate. If I made zero money, maxed every credit card, and pulled every single dollar from investments, how long could we last before we went full nuclear?
22.5 months.
I remembered something my mom told me when I was thinking of proposing to my then girlfriend: “You’re never fully ready.”
So when I saw the 22.5 months, with no plan at all for how I was going to make even $1, I gave my notice and walked away on August 30, 2024.
As I write this, I’ve survived 25 months and moved to a new state. Sold the house. Sold the car. Credit Karma sent me a notification yesterday telling me we’d paid off 83% of our debt in the last six months.
It wasn’t the result that told me the risk was worth it. 25 months ago, August 31, my first day unemployed, I felt peace.
Building the agency, fighting tooth and nail to do it the right way, it never felt like enough. The moment I left, no financial backing, some debt, zero plan for how to make cash, just a 22.5-month runway to mushroom cloud death… it felt like more than enough.
Before any of the cash came in, with a single decision, I’d lost:
Being tied to normal working hours
Motivating people to do the basics
Client frustrations about colleagues
Looking at a dashboard full of tasks and meetings
Pretending I cared about the work
I’d gained:
Silence
An empty calendar
A task list that only ever had one item on it, chosen by me
Messaging people who were happy to hear from me
The beauty of discovering joy in the work again
One decision.
Soon, I started shaping what I call A Bangin’ Life—the life you choose, with a day you want to repeat.
I could write and have coffee in the morning. Help a dope person and read in the afternoon. Coffee, write, read, help—the cardinal four of a great day for me.
And a great life is just stacking a bunch of great days.
For the first time, with $0 in earnings, I’d figured out what enough meant to me. It was true freedom.
Imprisonment was having all the right moves in my locker, looking around, and still needing more.
Freedom was realizing I was given everything I needed: air in my lungs, a discerning mind, movement.
Life started feeling blissfully simple.
I’d spent months journaling, recording rants while driving in my shitty Dodge Caravan with the squeaky brakes. Voice notes. Endless pages. No solution in sight. Just getting it out.
And then, after months and months, a calm came over me. A lightning-bolt moment struck my toes and shot up through my legs and torso, to the tips of my eyebrows, and nestled like a halo on my head.
From that moment forward, I made this statement my life’s mantra:
Never look back on a decision you make and ask, “Where was your courage?”
Death is what makes that mantra operational. If you’re going to die, the faces around you don’t matter. The external judgment doesn’t matter. Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s waiting for you to trip. The voices in your head don’t exist in the real world.
You stop asking whether the move looks right from the outside. You stop caring about perception. You just go.
I’m the only person I spend every second of my life with. I wanted to look at that person, with no other faces in the room, and say, “Damn! That person is cool as hell. I’d buy them a coffee. I’d spend a week in a tiny cabin with them just to be nourished by their presence.”
You do that, and I can tell you, you’ve won. There is no other feeling like it.
There’s a reason I say, “You have the answer inside of you; it’s just behind a locked door buried under two inches of dirt” about 30 times a week.
I grabbed coffee with someone who resonated with one of my posts. Within seconds, he was trusting me with deep, vulnerable information, which I’m amazed and honored to hold every time.
He’d told himself he had to do it the “right” way. I asked why he thought it was right. Then I asked why again. And again.
He was days away from investing $50K+ in something he didn’t believe in. 45 minutes later, he saved the cash and did it his way.
I guess he never wanted it.
You’re sitting there making a lot of the right moves. Right for whom?
I’m not telling you to jump ship. I walked away from 9 years, with twins, with debt, with no plan. On paper, stupid. But I had to make it.
And I’d make it again.
This question helped me. I hope it helps you.
Which of the milestones you’re chasing did you actually choose?
Or differently.
If there were no faces or external judgments, what would you choose with your whole mind, body, and soul?
I’m guessing something comes up pretty quickly.
So then it gets really simple.
Why not now?