REINVENTION
Face in your hands, pain in your chest, fear in your heart, you are left with nothing once again.
Pouring your soul into a project only for it to break away at the seams.
Giving your all to a relationship only to be left cold and alone.
Grinding for years to build a business, a brand, only to have it come crashing down via outside manipulation or sporadic market conditions.
If you’re me, all of the above, paired with the constant reminder that you are different. You think differently. You move in crowds differently. You evaluate risk differently. You are neurodiverse.
Yesterday I woke up to my X account being suspended. It was compromised by a bad actor and a bunch of bots took over. This created a flag and an automatic suspension. I’m still working on getting that lifted but for now, it looks like one of my valuable brand assets has disappeared overnight.
I have been left with a feeling inside. Is everything i’ve built this fragile? Clients, relationships, projects, social accounts, companies I work with, people i’ve known. Is it all just for now and could it come crashing down just the same?
The answer is most certainly yes.
We see it with the LA fires. What a tragic and terrible thing to occur for so many brilliant, creative, and passionate people. A brutal thriller playing out in real life before our eyes.
We saw it with the pandemic. Lives shattered by an illness that we will never forget. Businesses crumbled.
And we see it all the time in start-up land. Venture-backed moonshots sent to dust. Products we loved, sometimes lived-in, evaporated. Here no more.
If someone told me that you would have to reinvent yourself 5x over in order to make it as an owner, I may have thought twice about leaving my cushy job in fintech 7 years ago.
But I don’t think there was any other path I was meant to go down.
Because when you really evaluate the process of building anything, everything.. something becomes really obvious:
The reinvention is the point.
The reinvention is actually the entire point. When you exert energy and time into something, you’ve invested a piece of yourself. You’ve put a piece of yourself into the project in order to let it die and birth a new version of yourself. Even if it sometimes feels wasted. It’s the diamonds that you forge in the aftermath of the chaos that you carry with you, cash in, and use to travel the world.
Because reinvention is just reiteration. Letting the old you die to create an even better version of yourself. Carry the lessons with you, let the dated piece of you crumble. If you’re looking at it right, your soul gets a lot of nourishment in the process.
You realize that the skills you built after the collapse are the skills that carry you towards the most rewarding career you could imagine.
The calluses you built when your heart was on fire, that’s what allows you to be a rock for others when they need a shoulder to lean on.
And after a certain friction point, you see that being in the game, failing, or being criticized for being cringe puts you 100x ahead of someone that never tried in the first place.
You come out of the ashes a more refined and grounded version of an already great person.
You reiterate upon the great person you were to become the leader that others need in crisis.
And even if there are more pieces of yourself that need to die off, you know those pieces will be replaced by cleaner, more functional components that connect even deeper with the people you aim to serve.
That’s where i’m at now.
As I work on the rollout of my software parentco, Cracked Culture, I know it’s everything that has happened to me in life up until now that led to the incubation of this concept, and the entire portfolio in general.
- It’s my past experience with addiction & ADHD that led me to lose my shirt in sports betting. In the aftermath, I learned the craft on a deeply technical level and had to develop psychological, physiological & spiritual frameworks for approaching the day in, day out toils of emotional management & bias control. I’ve distilled this framework in an AI-powered coaching app called Bet Bodhi.
- It’s my journey building a web agency and freelance career around design, creative strategy, operations & webflow, while adapting to the proliferation of AI, that led to the concept for Webflow Kingdom, a social network that connects webflow developers & designers of all levels with each other, and their ideal client or company profile, while gamifying the process of starting, learning, mentoring, or hiring for webflow projects.
- It’s my time overseas, and the life-altering illness that I experienced, which caused me to reinvent my perspective on a range of spiritual / health processes. This eventually birthed the concept for Nomadclass, an app that helps digital nomads, new and old, map out their nomadic journey based on personal interests and the verified experiences of travel influencers.
- And it’s the underlying fact that someone has been targeting me for a long time, sending fake traffic at my projects in an attempt to skew analytics data, consistently trying to hack into my accounts, steal personal information, and impersonate me with fake profiles, that drives me to lean even further into my purpose and overall vision for this portfolio.
If my account does not get reinstated for whatever unfortunate reason, I am going to really miss my interactions within the platform.
But when it’s all said and done, it’s not about any one platform. It’s about the human platform; stretching beyond any one channel. It’s the platform we give to our soul to speak and act authentically; and how we do it in tribes, groups, communities.. how we do it when our back is against the wall and we’re trying to be better for ourselves and the people around us.
That’s what i’m committed too. X account or no X account. I’m committed to my mission with every single ounce of the blood, sweat & tears that make up my being.
The future of work belongs to the cracked culture. I’m cracked. Chances are if you’re reading this you are too.
Let’s create the future together.
#GOALLIN
PS: Thanks to the X community, many people that I look up too, for engaging with me over the last few years. It really meant a lot to me.
If you were following me on X, please find me across other platforms as well.
Check out my agency too. I’m currently taking on new contracts and still have a few freelance hours available in the coming months:
