Or at least,
that is what I tell myself
when I need to remember
I am still standing.

And there is something powerful
about a woman who is still standing.

Even after the waiting.

Especially after the waiting.

Because Lord,
it was slow.

Slow enough to make me question
whether the life I dreamed of
had forgotten my address.

Slow enough to make me look
into other people’s windows
and wonder why their blessings
seemed to know the way home.

I saw wedding vows
and felt something ache.

I saw friendships
with years folded into them
and felt something ache.

I saw women building beautiful lives
beside someone who did not dim them,
did not shrink them,
did not ask them to become less
in order to be loved.

And I thought,

When will it be my turn?

When will love find me
without asking me to abandon myself?

When will I wake up
inside the life I keep imagining?

When will there be
a little house near the water,

work that feels like mine,

a table full of people
who know me by heart?

And sometimes my ego says,

You have suffered before.

Why are you still suffering now?

As if pain were a lesson
we were only supposed to learn once.

As if becoming
were a door you walked through
and never had to open again.

But I have never known
a person who prayed deeply
and somehow escaped the breaking.

We ask for depth
and then curse the weight.

We ask to grow
and then resent the rain.

We ask for wisdom
but forget
that wisdom rarely arrives
with clean hands.

So maybe the pain was not wasted.

Maybe one day
I will be a mother,

a friend,

a woman someone calls
when the night feels too heavy.

Maybe someone will sit across from me
with a heart I recognize.

And I will not rush them.

I will not tell them
to be grateful.

I will not decorate their grief
with pretty words.

I will know how to sit.

I will know how to stay.

Because I have been there.

I have known the wanting.

I have known the waiting.

I have known what it is
to ask the sky for an answer
and hear only my own voice
coming back.

And still—

I remained.

That is what the pain taught me.

Not that I would never break.

But that I could break
and still become.

That I could lose
and still love.

That I could wait
and still want.

That I could hurt
and still have something left
to give.

So now,
when someone stands
where I once stood,

I do not have to save them.

I can simply reach for their hand
and say,

I know this road.

I know this ache.

And you may not believe it yet,

but there is still life
on the other side of this.

Because I have walked through fire
and learned this much..

I can endure.

I’m talking about the version of myself that is not afraid to set a boundary in the moment because I’m completely comfortable with people who aren’t aligned leaving.

At the same time, self-development likes to oversell independence as solitude, but I don’t think that’s what real independence is.

I think it’s being so secure in your own company that you stop clinging to people who make you feel smaller. And, because of that, you start attracting people who make you feel more like yourself.

Don’t get me wrong. I still have that tiny voice inside my head when somebody talks negatively about me in a group setting and all I can think about is how everyone else perceived me.

Eventually, that voice can turn into:

That was deeply disrespectful, and my respect for that person has lowered.

Not in a way where you stop giving people grace. I still freeze up when I’m supposed to be explaining exactly how I am feeling, so of course there are going to be misunderstandings.

But if somebody shares something private about me in front of other people after I clearly asked them not to, that tells me something.

1. That I’m probably never gonna tell them something secretive again

2. Do they still like me? Starts to become Is this actually somebody I want close to me?

And I think life works the same way.

I’ve always told myself that I wanted to live a big interesting life.

In the same breath, an interesting life is built in the tiny moments of courage that come before them.

Going to the movie alone, sitting at the bar by yourself, showing up to the concert when nobody else could go.

Eventually, those tiny moments build into bigger ones, like taking a solo trip.

A solo trip can feel liberating and terrifying at the same time because suddenly you are confronted with your own desires.

What do you actually want to do when nobody else has an opinion? What time do you want to wake up? Where do you want to go? What are you curious about?

There is nobody there to question your first instinct.

I was on a flight to Korea on the way to Bali. It was the first time I was by myself in Asia and I felt a little anxious on the flight there.

But then I remembered: I used to spend my summers in middle school watching Korean dramas. I was pretty excited.

Oh man, I love romance, especially Korean romance.

There was always this pent-up innocence right before the two main characters realized they liked each other. And even after they knew, the intimacy was never rushed.

Sometimes the payoff after ten episodes of longing was literally just a corny little peck on the cheek.

But somehow, that made it feel more romantic.

The love was in the restraint. The lingering looks, the small acts of care. The morning making dosirak (도시락) (Korean packed meal boxes or lunchboxes, often with rice, egg, kimchi, and little side dishes), or a box of handmade chocolates.

Remembering what someone liked, walking them home, showing up for them like they are family on a sick day. There was something respectful, thoughtful, and intentional about the way people loved each other.

And it wasn’t only romantic love. It was woven into friendships and families too. There was this sense of respect, almost an air of honor, that seemed embedded in the culture and the way people related to one another.

When I was walking alone through the streets of Hongdae, I remember feeling both lost and strangely awake. The streets were full of people, but there was a quiet politeness underneath everything. Everyone was moving through their own story without colliding too hard with yours.

I stayed in a hostel that felt unusually considerate for a party area.

People would tiptoe at night, like everyone had silently agreed to protect each other’s rest.

Consideration felt like a breath of fresh air.

I had never really been out alone before. I had always been scared of something going wrong, scared of the kind of fear you inherit from movies like Taken. (Young girls get abducted, which is something my mom would warn me about a lot.)

At some point, I met two girls I couldn’t really communicate with properly because of the language barrier.

I wish I spoke more Korean and hadn’t felt so incompetent.

They were kind, but the language barrier made things a little awkward. For a moment, it felt like we were both trying to reach for a connection without quite having the language to get there.

Eventually, they drifted off in a way, pretending this guy was their friend, but I saw them literally run in the opposite direction.

They tried to ditch me, and that stung a little, but it also gave me space to just exist on my own in a place I didn’t fully understand yet.

I totally get it, though.

There was also a guy nearby who I became aware was following me for a few blocks.

My heart was pounding out of my chest and I could feel my cheeks get flushed. I made eye contact with him, and my mad dog face wasn’t really scaring him away.

I ended up at a bar with a long line outside, nervously grabbing onto my bag and looking around.

After what felt like the seventh time seeing him in my peripheral vision, he finally approached me and asked if I was Korean. He wasn’t Asian himself.

I didn’t have friends here.

A girl who was teaching English abroad noticed me and noticed that I clearly wasn’t comfortable, and invited me into her group.

I told her about the man, a bit nervously, and suddenly I found myself speaking louder than I normally would, acting like I had people coming to meet me, even though I didn’t. She acted like she had known me for years and she was so excited to see me.

I looked back and he was gone. Thankfully, I let out a sigh of relief. As she took me into her group, we instantly connected in a way that felt like she was a friend back home. We danced and talked about how we both ended up in Korea.

I told her it was my first time in Asia alone and the solo spirit in her inspired me.

She had moved from North Dakota on a whim and never looked back. I could only imagine the juxtaposition of such a vast change in lifestyle, and it inspired me to want more.

Eventually, as morning came, she started really talking to a guy, and before long they were making out in the corner of the bar. I left without saying goodbye because they clearly had a moment.

My flight was the next morning at 10:00 a.m., and I walked back alone through the streets at 4:00 a.m. to get as much sleep as I could squeeze out. I felt like I wasn’t as scared anymore.

And in moments like that, I started to think maybe that is why people say two people can be stronger together when they both understand who they are outside of the relationship.

To be loved is to be seen, but have you seen yourself?

Because when conflict happens, you are less focused on preventing the other person from leaving and more capable of asking, “Is this person willing to solve problems with me?”

Your relationship with other people becomes a reflection of the relationship you have with yourself.

Not during the honeymoon phase. I mean when your walls come down. When your room gets messy. You’re having a bad day. When you’re disappointed in yourself.

What does your inner voice sound like then?

There is a concept in psychology called metacognition: the ability to observe and think about your own thinking.

And I think so much of self-respect starts with that pesky little voice that can come off as a little sabotaging troll.

You have a voice inside your head, but you are also the person listening to it.

That’s something The Untethered Soul explores too: if there is a voice talking inside your mind, who is the one listening, and how does that listener respond?

Does she give you grace when you have a bad day? Does she let you be disappointed without turning disappointment into something you need to solve your way out of?

After giving you a reasonable amount of time to crash out, does she encourage you to try again?

Or does she bully you into submission by excessive comparison?

I think self-respect is practiced like a prayer.

It happens in the small rituals you keep with yourself.

Here are small ways I practice self-respect:

Drinking water, making your bed…

When you feel stuck, going on a short walk, moving your body.

Keeping promises you made to yourself.

Understanding the thoughts that come up when you are tired, jealous, insecure, or afraid instead of immediately judging yourself for having them.

It is also allowing yourself to be curious.

Seeing an old bookstore and walking inside for five minutes instead of rushing toward the next destination.

Eating sweets to have an answer when someone asks you what your favorite dessert is on your birthday.

Looking up from your phone. Talking to a stranger simply because you are interested in what they have to say.

Following an idea because it sounds fun and you couldn’t care less about being impressive.

Speaking up constructively when something bothers you and watching how the other person receives it.

Because you cannot build an interesting life if you are not interested in your own life.

And maybe that is what having a good relationship with yourself actually is.

I have a confession: I constantly try to optimize myself. The choices that I make in my business, the problems that are replaying in my mind just to make sure that I made the right decision.

But in this process of replay,

I started to trust myself long enough to walk away from what diminishes me, trusting myself enough to enjoy my own company, and trusting myself enough to let life surprise me.

You never know, crazier things could happen.

People have to see it.

So lately I’ve been thinking a lot about distribution and how to get Clem in front of more people.

I probably sent close to 200 cold DMs to different influencers, and today I have my very first call with one who was kind enough to say yes.

And now, naturally, I’m overplanning.

I’m reading about her story, what she cares about, where we might genuinely resonate, and what working together could actually look like beyond just, “Hey, can you post about my product?” But do you care about our mission

Clem helps people feel confident about what they eat by turning confusing food information into personalized, actionable guidance.

because that will come through the camera.

Something I care about a lot as I build this is the kind of people I build it with.

I don’t want relationships that feel purely transactional.

I want the people we work with to feel like there’s an open flow of ideas, honest feedback, mutual respect, and a feeling that we’re both actually excited about what we’re creating. That is the soul of the product. Whoever suggest the product I want people to admire them in someway that I do too.

Maybe that’s idealistic, but I think the people attached to a company eventually become part of the company’s story too.

So yes, technically this is my first influencer call.

But it also feels like my first tiny experiment in figuring out what kind of ecosystem I want to build around this company.

For a second I could find myself devoid of anxieties when I imagined the version of myself, matured and beautifully woven into the person I told myself I was going to be at 22. She had a few more wrinkles. Her lips were less cushioned. But she could walk into any room not giving a shit about anything else but having fun.

She was magnetic, soft spoken, but when she spoke, people would listen to her.

So I sat down and I wrote a letter pretending to be my future self with everything I had. The love that I wanted. My community. My barista who knew my order. My neighbors who did the movie thing where they asked for sugar.

Everything felt better when I had my people.

I thought about the life I would have, intertwined with a partner. Someone impressive enough to admire, but grounded enough in their intrinsic motivation to trust. Not the guy that would flaunt his Ferrari, but the one that would notice my change in mood, and we would know exactly how to make each other feel better.

Someone who ignited a fire in my ambition because they had their own.

Someone I can build an interesting life with. They have their own flaws and I have mine, but we both valued building something long term. Devotion that showed through small ways, like morning affection built in like a ritual, a yearning kiss, an acknowledgment at the grocery store for a snack, flowers, or their favorite beverage.

They make me feel like the lulls in our conversations felt steady, and even when we knew every part of each other, we would choose to love anyway.

I found myself wanting adventure, growth, and independence.
But once I consider something mine, I want it so bad to be real.

So the younger version of myself, with less money, confused, kind of lost, with a naive heart and a hunger for more, found the future version of me at 2am because she felt close by, but I was confused on what vehicle to take to get there.

My friend said they admired my tenacity to do so many things. But deep down, I do so many things because I want it all. Maybe it wasn’t how I got there, but it was in the moments when I was no longer waiting for the courage I needed to stay consistent at anything and try.

Consistency was a ritual that felt like it was breathing life into me but when I stopped I felt that anxiety come again. Imagining the future me made it clear that I didn’t need to wait for some version of myself to show up and start living. I just needed to start living consistently, working on anything that will stick.

The party girl is exciting. She is fun to show off. She makes every night feel like a snadelous movie. But as we know, every movie has an ending. And when the credits roll, what is left is a hangover and the realization that the thrill was never going to get better than that moment.

That is the thing about what we think we want. It feels so real in the moment. But wanting something and needing something are two very different things.

When we are drawn to chaos -what the party girl represents- we are not actually drawn to the person. We are drawn to the invitation it gives us to be free and careless. The highs are higher. The lows feel familiar. And familiar, even when it hurts, feels like home.

That reminded me of what Dr. Bessel van der Kolk wrote in The Body Keeps the Score that trauma rewires the brain’s alarm system.
It causes us to unconsciously recreate the same painful dynamics we grew up around, because our brain mistakes familiar for safe.

Dr. Marc Schuckit found that daughters of alcoholics are more than twice as likely to marry an alcoholic partner. Their nervous system has been trained over the years to be drawn to what it has always known.

And what was known becomes what feels like home, even when home was chaos.

This is what Brené Brown means when she says that “true belonging does not require you to change who you are. It requires you to be who you are.”

When we have not learned to belong to ourselves first, we hand that job to people and places that feel comfortable and familiar.

We mistake the ache of familiar pain for the feeling of love. When someone feels comfortable and supportive, it can come off as repulsive when I was unhealed.

And we keep choosing it. In our partners. In our friends. In our roommates and our chosen family. Until the pattern gets so loud we cannot ignore it anymore.

The people you surround yourself with are often a reflection of what you allow and even more importantly, they are a reflection of what you believe you deserve.

The party girl is the symptom we chose to be drawn to. The real question is why did chaos ever felt like love in the first place?
Are we willing to sit with the discomfort of something steady long enough for our nervous system to catch up to what we actually deserve?

We live in a world that optimizes not just for time but for people and connections, and it usually begins with how appealing, charismatic, and playful you are.

First impressions were engineered to be built with “how to” videos, past experiences, and rehearsed lines. Sometimes we are not even trying to be a different version of ourselves.. it is just in our best interest to be on our best behavior because it is fun.

But performance always contaminates, and it’s risky. The mask tends to unveil itself after three months, sometimes longer if your rose-colored glasses are still resting on your face. That is where most connections dissolve and even blow up in unexpected ways.

Call me wishful thinking, but I’ve seen what God does for others. My therapist has the best partnership but waited ten dates to even have her first kiss.

There is something deeply and undeniably attractive about a person who makes you desire their presence because their life is full. They make you sharper, and somehow teach you to take life a little less seriously in all the wrong ways and at the same time dream a little bigger.

That is why intellectual playfulness and shared understanding is a rare kind of safety. Because it’s earned by investing your vulnerability and time. The kind we crave, especially after running into people who are parables.. they are there to allow you to really cherish the right ones.

The tug of war of deep interest through active listening and active practicing. One person witnessing, the other accepting to be seen and held when you need it the most.

Something intertwined and risky becomes undoubtedly magnetic. Like you can understand what they are thinking from across the room.. as if you were on the same radio frequency, like innocent notes passing in a classroom.

And the best part is, it doesn’t have to be objectifying. It is like a scene where your friend saves you from an awkward conversation with just a look and the urge to check in. In that small interaction someone in the room has your back.

The bar is not chemistry or physical desire if you’re playing the long game. It is a deep desire to know someone so well that there is a constant, playful back and forth. A friendly competition with a shared goal of deep attunement.

Because when you accept anyone in your life, you are not only accepting all the good parts about them. You are choosing to accept all the bad parts too. We all have hidden rooms where parts are tucked away, because the wrong people never truly made you feel accepted completely.

The right person sees the whole room and stays anyway.

I think about this the same way I think about the rooms we build together.

Because community, at its best, works the same way. The most meaningful relationships in your life were probably not the ones that happened by accident.

That is what I want to build at every community event I run. that is why I brief my team on culture before every event, if they are not willing to partake in the inviting community we are building then they cannot join. I have learned that logistics matter less, but because a room full of good logistics and no genuine human warmth is just a an room people want to leave.

The rooms I build are not accidents. They are the result of people who showed up with intention. There is intentional rules that are built by people who are intentional about making everyone feel seen, welcomed, and like they belong in the room. No one standing alone in the corner allowed.

So before we open the doors, here is what I ask of every person who is on any of my teams:

1. Introduce yourself to at least three people you don’t know.

2. Connect two people who should meet before the night is over.

3. Check in on anyone who looks like they’re standing alone.

4. Bring your full, genuine self.

5. Leave this event having made someone’s night better just by being here.

The same way the right relationship doesn’t happen because two people were simply in proximity. The same is true for a room full of strangers. Proximity is just the starting condition and intention is what turns it into a feeling that lasts.

The right community, like the right person, sees the whole room and stays anyway. These are the rooms I was made to build.

@er1cc00Always- Daniel Caesar // Set her free… But I still miss her..// #fyp #danielcaesar #always #danielcaesaredit #song

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You can still see someone you love, they’re right in front of your face, but they are no longer yours.

And he said the most mature thing he could do “was write something that didn’t make her feel sad. Something that made her feel free.”

Relationships are connections that highlight where we are outside of ourselves and quite a few of them end because the only thing you can guarantee in life is change.

That begs the question, who am I when I am not in a relationship and who would that attract? I got to work on that for the past 2 years, de-centering the focus from dating and keeping it on me. Maybe a little bit out of fear, but more importantly it was something I needed to gift myself given the urge to want to be connected and loved.

I started to understand why I shrink to make other people feel comfortable, my deeper values from my annoyances, and my circle shrank but I started magnetizing more people who were encouraging this growth. I finally felt like I was coming home to myself.

Always got me thinking about all the versions of myself I had a deep connection to but knew I was outgrowing. It starts with having the same problems with a partner until it paints a bigger picture that pushes you two over the edge of calling it quits. It’s kind to accept who they are and who you become when you are with them, but you also have to accept who you are becoming with them. Your choice is a depiction of where you are. Who you are and what you want to be is reflected in the partner you choose.

There is something so haunting and romantic about leaving a piece of you with the people you encounter with such vulnerability. I’ve had to leave a version of myself behind, and to know that someone only knows a past version of who I am. That is all they will ever know until they simply become a story to me too.

Leaving a relationship and leaving yourself are the same grief. You’re not mourning a person or a place. You’re mourning the version of you who needed it in the first place.
The gym you went to. The go-to restaurant orders. The friends you would go to your favorite restaurants with. The you that existed inside all of it.

People think heartbreak only lives in love. But it lives in every exit you decide on taking.

I feel the same way about the places I have lived. San Diego, up the street to Los Angeles, and what it feels like throwing a dart on the US map to Dallas, Texas. I become different people in different places and hopefully a lot more confident and independent.

Leaving California started with the streets feeling emptier. With a spark I couldn’t find anymore. The routine started to feel like I had outgrown it. That’s how it always starts, those same problems resurge and you feel uninspired.

Sometimes leaving a version of yourself for a new one reminds you of all the nice things about your past life. The gestation period of growth pains into your new home, and how hard it was to really meet the people you can now call your close friends, is why people often move back to the last place. It makes you grateful for what you had.

I am starting to feel that way with my time in Dallas. The similar feeling I had when I left San Diego and LA. It feels like the more you see the world, the less you know but the hungrier you become to want more exploration. I daydream about being full time in Spain, eating a Pastel de Nata on the coast with a book in my hand and the weather of San Diego.

But I also dream about diving deep into the startup culture in San Francisco, intoxicating and alluring to my hunger to grow fast.

I have played both scenarios in my head. The more I sit with them the more I arrive at the same place: not knowing which version of myself to bet on.

All I have control over is planting the seeds. Right now that looks like cold DMing 100 people who inspire me and seeing where life favors my presence.

Follow along to see how that turns out.

He said, “Increasing your risk appetite is a skill.”

As I said that to myself it was equivalent to walking into the gym, looking at a 10-pound weight, and deciding I couldn’t lift it before I have even tried.

It’s a skill that quietly gets untrained the moment you have a clear grade to chase or an ideal end-of-year review to hit.

The more I realize the conventional version of success was never built for me, the more I think uncertainty is the thing worth strengthening.

I’m not the type to resell candy or run a lemonade stand when I was a child. I’ve never been the loudest in the room. But nobody hands you a leaping gene at birth.

All the risk takers I had the privilege of talking to got brave the way you get strong: one painful rep at a time, when no one is watching. (Frustratingly.. ) Courage is a muscle. Muscles are built, torn, rebuilt, built again.

These are the three things they all share:

#1 They treat being wrong as information even though it can feel like a threat. Challenging your own beliefs is the highest form of intelligence.

So when you feel that drop in your stomach….the “what if I’m wrong.” But you are able to act even with the belief that this maybe evidence you’re not cut out for this, and do it anyways. Thats soo admirable. They earned it because they are imperfectly resistant.

The ones who leap feel the exact same things you do.

They’ve just trained themselves to read redirection differently, as a pulse, or proof they’re standing close to something that matters to them and it has to work somehow.

#2 They move on intuition before the data is in.

Not combing spreadsheets for the best possible answer but they are bullish with their actions. They’ve practiced not knowing everything. They only learn how to de-risk their moves by taking high leverage bets. Reading and over preparing create a false sense of certainty and that creates overwhelm which breeds anxiety.
(Trusttt. I keep learning that one over and over again)

The reason why most of us wait for the full map to arrive is because our brains are wired to fear uncertainty. When we were hunting, we wanted to close the gap of being certain when our next meal was. Our information rich tools makes it easy to over intellectualize searching for our “why” before it was even earned.
Accepting that it never comes allows us to be responsible over the future we will have.

The ones who leap drilled the opposite muscle… they move way before certainty, again and again, until acting in the dark stopped feeling like impostor syndrome and perfectionism and started feeling like lifting that 10 pound weight until they could lift more.

#3 They know how to lose like a winner.

I admire this the most because out of the three it creates character that can relate to others. They take the hit (to their ego), sit in the wreckage, looking at all the “what ifs, should haves, and could haves,” then they pick themselves up still believing their hands can shape what comes next.

Even better now, because they are wiser.

You may have heard them say “everything happens for a reason” or “I needed to learn that lesson.”

They may even lean on their friends to remind them who the fuck they are

and/or pray to God that he meant to do this to you.
He is allowing you to be capable of holding the blessings you WILL receive.

The three traits they have allude to being the type of person that CAN without much preparation.. but instead pure self belief that morphs into grit and confidence.

The 10 pound weight you are staring at, the one you’ve talked yourself out of three times already never started with being the type of person who starts fearless.

It was always about the first step.

For me, that’s reaching out to 100 strangers who might want to try Clem: a food-scanning nutrition app I’ve held close to my heart for the past two months. (I linked the beta)

I am scared. So scared. But as the shy girl who is pretty risk averse, if I can, you can too

- Celine

I have been a bit sporadic in my posting because Clem is launching end of June and I am really getting in my head. So I appreciate you sticking around!

I locked eyes with her and saw all the shame life had dealt her. She felt like she started way behind everyone else. It was discouraging to even continue the race she never had navigation to follow. So naturally she didn’t believe it was possible.

I started in community college and I was embarrassed that I couldn’t get into a prestigious four-year institution. My parents never started out in a four-year institution. My mom didn’t finish college. I was told community college was the way to go because I didn’t have a college fund. And I wasn’t the sharpest test-taker.

But I got A’s because I brute forced myself through studying for hours.

The shame made me feel dumb and incapable for the longest time. That faded when I realized this wasn’t about me being unable to catch up. It was about access.

Around that same time, I was sitting in the library for 4 hours after class, trying to finish my homework. I slowly became friends with the people that were trying harder than me even. I remember meeting this guy that changed the trajectory of my life.

I could sense shame when I told him I was 19 and he was 28.

I didn’t know why he started at that age, but he mentioned that he felt like it was late. He opened up and said: “My mom got cancer. While she was in the hospital, my dad cheated on her and left. So I was living with my grandma. But 2 years after my mom passed, my only family member died too.”

So at 14 he had to deal drugs just to earn money for food. He had to dig himself out of a path that nearly consumed him whole. He hung out with the wrong crowd that made him feel like he had agency and power. But when I watched my friend move through that grief and that anger and that injustice, I watched him navigate a system that wasn’t designed to help him when he needed it most.

And quite frankly, I stopped feeling bad for myself.

I had no right to complain. I had gotten a starting place a little bit ahead of him. I had gotten space to be loved by a family that believed in me. To figure out what I wanted to do. I had gotten time. I had gotten a mom who could support me and a dad with a soft heart. Even if we didn’t have much monetarily.

And I realized I would be wasting the conviction his story had given me if I didn’t do something with it. But I still had no clue what I wanted to do with my life.

I just knew I had to do something about it.

I spent three years at the Prison Education Project teaching financial literacy and college prep to incarcerated youth. Most had never seen a FAFSA form. Credit was a foreign word to them. I was responsible for making visible what the system had deliberately hidden. What knowing someone would get you access to.

That work taught me something I keep circling around: access should be foundational. But unfortunately we treat it like an afterthought.

So I took up a leadership role in SEATED at UCLA during COVID-19. I led 15 student leaders. We created infrastructure so 580+ students could access the information and support that keeps people in school. 96% satisfaction rate and $25,000 in funding. Students stayed enrolled because someone made the path legible to them.

I was so shy before. But I proved to myself that I could build something with my own hands. I could really do this. Right now. At 20 years old. With limited resources, super scrappy, with no permission.

But I kept searching for where change actually happens.

I started lobbying on Pell Grants. Calling assembly members telling that story about my friend I met at community college. Trying to shift policy from the inside with other students. I realized quickly that I was getting so annoyed. Policy moves like a ship turning in the ocean. By the time a bill passes, the people you wrote it for have already moved on or given up.

So I moved to nonprofit work. Asian American media during the Asian hate crimes during COVID-19. I understood that media controls the narrative. Narrative controls what people believe is possible. I loved writing and getting people together on a mission. I thought if I can shift the story, I can shift what people think is possible.

But nonprofits move slowly too. They’re built to sustain, and they were quite unorganized. I watched good intentions get buried in bureaucracy. I watched impact reports that showed nothing changed. I felt the rigidity.

Then I moved to corporate to understand why institutions move so slowly. I was making a hard pivot. I knew I wanted to start something of my own someday, so sales got me past “no.”

I improved retention by 10-15%. Created 340+ client-facing materials. Engineered process improvements that cut inefficiencies by 20%. Brought in $277,200 in net contract value.

But it got me closer to working with federal government clients on technology strategy. Watching from inside, I saw something that unsettled me. I watched government offices struggle to understand AI while markets had already priced it in. I watched people locked out of opportunity make decisions in a vacuum of information because the system couldn’t move fast enough to help them.

I started noticing the gap widening. And I noticed I was inside the slow machine. If I wanted to close the gap, I couldn’t wait for institutions to move.

I had to build. But I was quite insecure and filled with “what ifs.”

In 2026, I organized an 85+ person event in Dallas. Professors, technologists, community leaders, business owners. Change starts simple, with intentional conversations. People from academia, business owners, content creators, ambitious people sat together and challenged each other.

By the end, people understood that the people most affected by AI couldn’t be left out of design. They had to be in the room.

I did that with a 5-person volunteer team and no money. I just had prayed for the courage again to have conviction that the conversation needed to happen.

I’m telling you this because the people most affected by a system have to be part of designing it. Not invited in at the end like a pity invite. They should be in the room from the very beginning.

And you don’t have to wait for permission to make that happen. When you force your way in people will accommodate your good intentions.

I organized 28+ community events while working full-time. I co-founded a company without a trust fund or a network or a degree in the right thing. I’m building a personal brand from the ground up. The anxiety never leaves me.

I’m 26. I am not more experienced yet and I am definitely not more qualified yet.

But I’m doing it anyway.

You can build something that didn’t exist yesterday. You can stand up for someone who can’t stand up for themselves. You can bring people together who weren’t talking before. We need you to.

Maybe you’re thinking: “But what if I fail? What if I’m not ready?”

I think about my friend. I think about the young woman asking about the FAFSA form. They weren’t waiting to be ready. They were just trying to survive.

What if you stopped waiting?

But by creating the space you want to be in. Build the thing you believe should exist because you want it.

Someone is sitting in a room right now, feeling the shame of not knowing. Feeling like they started too far behind. Believing it’s not possible for them too. They feel voiceless and unheard.

That person needs you to build something that makes the path visible.

You don’t need to be older or tenured. You don’t need to be more prepared. and you will never feel ready.

Being ready is overrated, you just need to be willing to be the person who makes things legible for someone else.

I’m willing. And I think you might be too. :)

That shift came from killing a belief I’d been protecting for years. I began asking myself, “Was I really risk averse?” Or was it the system of certainty, accomplishing for others, getting decent grades, or a good end of year review?

Ninety percent of people who sign up for a gym in January quit by March. They quit because they identified with the version of themselves that wanted to stay the same and expected different results. Or they work on a project that doesn’t align with their identity, and burnout becomes a side effect that pushes them into a spiral of questioning who they are. The blessing is that now we know that the identity changed before the work, so the behavior could follow to the ideal life we all have.

Money works the same way. It is a direct indication of alignment and having clear goals. I have seen the success of radical alignment with my own eyes, and it is profound how you can sense when someone actually enjoys their life versus the ones that wake up and dread their work.

Somehow the in-between phase is described as stuck in the researching, waiting for the opportunity, and craving it all at once.

When you see that it’s possible online, it can be yours too. :)

But if your self-image doesn’t include being someone who feels worthy of earning it, nothing will stay.

This workbook and prompt bundle are what I wish I’d had when I was still operating from that old version of myself. It only takes ninety days to become the version of yourself that is on the path to buying the house you want, the trip you want, the gifts you want to give your friends, and to help your family retire.

This visualization practice is rooted in neuroscience, if you promise me that you will be really clear and specific. Write about yourself in present tense, as if you already exist as this version and see how life will change in the next week.

Take out a pen and paper and answer these questions messily; just keep writing and don’t think about it too much.

Question 1: What belief about yourself have you been protecting?

I organized my entire identity around being risk averse. It felt true. It also kept me stalled for years.

Question 2: Who do you have to become in the next ninety days?

Write down what she does on a regular day during the week. How does she talk about money? What does she say about herself? What does she believe about her own worth? What is the minimum she charges for her time on her projects?

Question 3: What are your actual motivations?

For me it’s independence, building something that matters, and having a voice people actually listen to. The revenue target is merely the side effect of aiming for the version of myself that I have described previously. My “Why” is what’s driving the work.

Write yours down. If no outside noise, sit with this for three days if it doesn’t come to you immediately. You are not anchored to one, so don’t think about it too hard either. What would you actually sacrifice other things for?

Question 4: What does your next ninety days look like, specifically?

How much is your time worth? Do you have a revenue target by a certain month to live your life abroad? (Me too). What does your ideal lifestyle look like? What’s different about your day from what you are living now?

Where are you working from? Who are you talking to that inspires you to keep going? Get it out of your head and onto paper or a voice memo. Make it really messy.

Vague goals stay confusing because you are leaving it up to chance.

Question 5: What have you been undervaluing about yourself?

You have a growing skill that you can’t stop coming back to. What is the perspective or a body of work that you keep thinking about? Jot it down with no parameters.

Then write what someone would actually pay for it in the market. Even if you don’t know the full extent, allow yourself to go down a rabbit hole here.

The gap between those is the space where you will find the ability to grow your skills.

The best part about this is that we often want to start when we are ready, we can’t afford the time, or there are parts of the process that don’t feel fun.

And there are answers for each of these roadblocks.

If you are a content creator and you want to get paid but you’re not the most skilled, you can apply to be UGC creators, and it is continuously growing because every business does this if they want to adequately grow with organic growth.

Have some wine, a candle, and choose some photos that add context to your mind about the life you can have. For example, this is my dream house.

Given you are the type to talk to your LLM here are some prompt that can give you an idea

Prompts that you can have Claude spar with you like a coach.

Take what resonates, leave what doesn’t (ifykyk).

Prompt 1: The belief you’ve been protecting

From what I have been saying, what is a belief that is holding me back? Be really honest. Now rewrite it as a specific identity statement. A concrete sentence that flips it into an identity of who I am.

For example: “I am risk averse” to

Mine was: “I’m someone who moves toward what matters, even when it’s unclear.”

Prompt 2: The ninety-day version of you

Describe me like you’re introducing her to a friend.

What do I do on a Tuesday morning? What is my perfect day like? Be as clear as possible.

What’s my revenue target for the next three months?

What does she believe about her own worth?

Prompt 3: Your motivations

Visualize the exact moment I usually self-abandon. The moment you procrastinate, downplay yourself, avoid the ask, check for validation, or shrink. Now visualize the ninety-day version of you interrupting that pattern. What does she do instead? Write the new response as an identity statement: “I am someone who…”

List everything I want in the next ninety days. What is my revenue, lifestyle, freedom, and impact?

Now rank them by honesty. Which one comes up in conversations for me more often, and what would I actually sacrifice other things for?

That’s the one driving my internal motivation.

Prompt 4: Your worth audit

Tell me what I have built or contributed that you’ve undervalued. Write down the compliments that you receive and ask: with everything you know about me, what would my strengths be?

Product-market fit my skills by location, industry, and jobs that are on the market.

Then write what someone would pay for it. What would that range be?

That’s an inkling of what your next three months of work will look like.

Prompt 5: The first move

What’s one thing I can do this week that current me wouldn’t do, but ninety-day-you would?

For me it was telling people I was building something before I had it figured out.

Write yours down. Then challenge yourself to a small thing that scares you.

Leave a comment

Tell me what your outputs were, and if you have accepted the challenge.

Link if you’re interested in learning more about the implications of present tense visualization on our brains.

I am exhausted by having a to-do list, looking at it, and feeling so overwhelmed that I don’t do anything about it. It feels like you’re doing everything … but not being able to tell if any of it mattered.

I left my event that I had thrown for 120+ people earlier than expected. Well, I was still there physically, until the last person could hug me goodbye. But I had actually left mentally halfway through and started drafting in my head all the things I could’ve done better and would do better next time.

The turnout was good, but not great by my standards. I drove home picking it apart like I was being watched by an overly demanding boss who could see my potential but was never truly satisfied. That moment felt like a tax on my joy.

A year later, I was having coffee with a girl who had been at that event. She told me she used to keep every anxious and bad thought to herself. Until she convinced herself she was a burden on everyone else. She excluded herself until it felt like no one really knew her.

I could hear it in her voice. That pit in her stomach she was struggling to name. but I knew that feeling because I'd been there myself.

Slowly when that solitude caged her it turned into depression, anxiety attacks, a slow disappearing act.

Then she found my Instagram page and came to my very first event because her therapist forced her to. She said it took everything in her to keep that promise.

She had the courage to take a bet on herself and go to the event alone.

She met a whole group of girls. And when she finally started telling them about all the parts of herself that felt wrong and unlovable… something changed in her when they accepted her anyway.

She calls them her best friends now.

Tears started filling my eyes, because I could’ve never expected this outcome.

When I was stuck wondering how I could ever satiate the hunger of external outcomes, I was completely blinded by what actually mattered.

The impact you’re most proud of one day? You probably won’t see it coming. It’ll show up in a coffee conversation a year late, or a DM from someone in passing, or a person who became someone, because you took the chance to build and be seen.

Keep building anyway.
Preferably without beating yourself up for the details no one can see anyways.

(Still working on that last part myself.)

Sometimes I forget that my dad was once a little boy who almost died twice. And if he hadn’t held out just a little longer, I wouldn’t be here today.

The biggest thing he taught me was that hardships are blessings in disguise — each one a chance to practice for the opportunities and the people and the life that’s coming your way. And when you start to see them that way, you stop asking why did that happen to me and start asking, what happened to me and who am I becoming?

Training for my first marathon taught me something that applies to all of it. You cannot sprint every hill just because someone beside you is. You will blow up your race. You will have nothing left when the miles that matter arrive.

The discipline is knowing when to exert yourself, when to practice pushing yourself a little harder, when to rest (this part is important) ..
just so you can be ready for the moment you actually want to excel in.

We treat life the opposite way for some reason.

Someone launches an app that looks like yours (this happened to me and made me pretty sad), and suddenly you’re throwing money at the problem, pivoting strategy, losing sleep and all that precious time.

Someone leaves, and suddenly you’re questioning everything you thought you knew about yourself.

A door closes and instead of asking “what am I being prepared for?” We ask “what is wrong with me?”

Nothing is wrong with you.

You’re being fucking pressure cooked until you’re ready for that blessing.

When my dad was fourteen, he had nothing and no parents to lean on.

He did have his 4 year old sister.

He had the kind of nothing that required him to bum smokes off a homeless man so he could trade it for a job cleaning up a Texas steakhouse. The kind that makes a boy reach his hand out and put his ego aside to ask strangers for what his family needs to survive. The kind that teaches you, at a cellular level, what it means to be responsible for someone you love.

That same man went on to build something remarkable.
He made a lot of money from it but then unpredictable things happened in the market.

And then he lost everything.
Again.

But this time… he had two kids, a wife, and sick parents who'd given up everything for him to make a name for himself.

A loss that hollows a person out, that makes them question whether the version of themselves they’d fought so hard to become was ever really real.

But his misfortune taught me something else too. When we were trying to survive, he had to put his ego aside again. When I had to share a room with my cousin so we could afford house payments and food.

That people reach out their hand for spirituality because they are trying… really, genuinely trying. Looking for an ounce of grace from whatever they believe in, but for the part of themselves that feels burdensome and imperfect.


And in a world full of chaos, starvation, destruction — now more than ever — we are taught to grow calluses. It is easy not to give each other grace. In America we idealized surviving individually, as if that were the same as being alive.

The boy who had nothing made the man who could survive losing everything.

You cannot have one without the other.

In May, we will celebrate his completion of his PhD, the comeback, the glow-up — those are clean stories. But the man — the actual weight and dimension of him — lives in the gap between who he was at fourteen and who he became.

You cannot separate those.

That boy didn’t hold him back. That boy built him.

I grew up shaped by his story. And honestly, I was shaped by his failures as much as his wins.

It would have been easier not to be. I won’t pretend otherwise.

I was the little girl who watched things fall apart. He made her the one who isn’t afraid to build something without a guarantee.

To give grace to other people, to be open to learning messily. He is the one who created scaffolding for her courage that she will need for this entrepreneurship journey.

I watched in practice that loss is not the end of the sentence.

I wouldn’t trade that little girl version of me. Even on the heavy days I wish I could.

The biggest character arcs come out of loss.

The people who hurt you are preparation.

The relationship that broke you wide open making you feel unrecognizable and unseen, the friend who showed you which parts of yourself you haven’t healed yet, the version of yourself you didn’t like when you saw her under pressure — those aren’t just wounds.

You are the protagonist and your game would be pretty boring without them. They are the obstacles that prepare you for the final boss.

Because you don’t get to feel genuinely loved — seen all the way through, nothing hidden — until you’ve stood bare in front of someone who didn’t see you, and survived it. Until you know the difference in your body, not just your head or in the books you read about love.

The contrast is what makes you able to receive it.

The pain that lives in your chest right now that feels like forever— fused to the inside of your ribs, following you into your quiet moments driving home like a shadow, etched into your mind as good memories set against the contrast of what’s no longer there — that feeling isn’t permanent. But it makes you more of something.

You will be more empathetic, cherish what you have, and become a better partner and friend.

Dare I say a better artist and leader.

I know it doesn’t feel that way right now.

I know it feels like a dark tunnel that never seems to end.

But you have been here before, inching your way through, hoping for some light. And you came out on the other side of those, too. With evidence of strength and perseverance you didn’t have before.

We spend so much of our lives trying to skip the practice — strategizing our way around failure, hiding ourselves to avoid the humiliation, convincing ourselves that if we never say the cringe thing or take the embarrassing swing, we’ll come out looking cooler on the other side. Like silence is a force field — because we’ve been taught, over and over again, that when we reach for our higher selves, failure comes with it. And failure is a cost we’ve decided we can’t afford.

You’re not behind because you looked to your left and your neighbor seems to have better blessings than you. You’re not being punished because you feel unloved in your streak of singleness.

You’re being molded into the person that can handle future blessings.

And somewhere ahead of you — maybe not too much further — there’s a blessing that has your name on it that you have been practicing for.

You just have to hold out a little bit longer.

Because that’s exactly what’s preparing you to be ready to hold the blessings you will receive.

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If this landed :) share it with someone who needs it today. And if you’re building something from scratch, carrying something heavy, or just trying to figure out who you’re becoming

Here is a quote I have been loving:

“I will persist until I succeed.
I was not delivered unto this world in defeat, nor does failure course in my veins. I am not a sheep waiting to be prodded by my shepherd. I am a lion and I refuse to talk, to walk, to sleep with the sheep. I will hear not those who weep and complain, for their disease is contagious. Let them join the sheep. The slaughterhouse of failure is not my destiny.

I will persist until I succeed.

The prizes of life are at the end of each journey, not near the beginning; and it is not given to me to know how many steps are necessary in order to reach my goal.

Failure I may still encounter at the thousandth step, yet success hides behind the next bend in the road. Never will I know how close it lies unless I turn the corner.
Always will I take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult.

I will persist until I succeed.

Henceforth, I will consider each day’s effort as but one blow of my blade against a mighty oak.

The first blow may cause not a tremor in the wood, nor the second, nor the third.

Each blow, of itself, may be trifling, and seem of no consequence. Yet from childish swipes the oak will eventually tumble. So it will be with my efforts of today.
I will be liken to the rain drop which washes away the mountain; the ant who devours a tiger; the star which brightens the earth; the slave who builds a pyramid. I will build my castle one brick at a time for I know that small attempts, repeated, will complete any undertaking.

I will persist until I succeed.

I will never consider defeat and I will remove from my vocabulary such words and phrases as quit, cannot, unable, impossible, out of the question, improbable, failure, unworkable, hopeless, and retreat; for they are words of fools. I will avoid despair but if this disease of the mind should infect me then I will work on in despair. I will toil and I will endure.

I will ignore the obstacles at my feet and keep mine eyes on the goals above my head, for I know that where dry desert ends, green grass grows.
I will persist until I succeed.

The Greatest Salesman in the World
Og Mandino”

―Og Mandino

It felt unsettling and I’ve been sitting with that for weeks.

It’s not just him. People in the business space say that it is better to not dwell on the past, which makes sense when the goal is ambitious. It’s everywhere once you start listening for it.

The man who built CAA and became the most powerful dealmaker in Hollywood, Michael Ovitz, wrote a memoir that reads like a shark explaining why it keeps swimming.
He calls it a persona, the relentless forward motion. But the book makes the case that it was the architecture of his success.

But the book suggests his entire architecture—his relationships, his instincts, his ability to negotiate, his capacity to predict what people wanted before they knew—was built on never stopping. On the assumption that vulnerability or stillness was a liability. Ovitz admits that to build what he built, you might have to become that architecture, not just perform it.

David Foster Wallace wrote about this from a different angle. He discusses great athletes and their curious incapability when it comes to explaining their own psychology. It was interesting to see that their autobiographies make terrible reading. They have very little to say for themselves. Perhaps it is because excellence requires a total subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small.

I sat with this question because I am very introspective and empathetic and as I became a founder I questioned where my place was in this sea of sharks that keep moving.

Everything has a trade off but not all tradeoffs are seen at the moment of the decision.

We live inside a machine that was not designed around us to make our lives better. Where people at the top make decisions about the future and it leaves us believing if you agree with it then the leader is instrumental, innovative, and intelligent.

However, if you don’t agree with the leader’s point of view then they are manipulative, chaotic, and destructive.

Leaving us divisive and inconclusive about the future as a democracy. In public discourse at scale, nuance becomes liability. Sound arguments dissolve into noise. Only positions polarized enough to consolidate a tribe can move anything. At some point, we will see that technological feudalism wins. Consensus governance and signal dilution—the cost of democratized decisions—slow everything down. Innovation requires someone to ignore the noise and move forward like a shark.

Capitalism……….and I say this not as someone who wants to burn it down, but as someone trying to build something real inside it, has its eye on profit like the girl in the red dress.

She is enticing but when you catch her, it’s never enough because it is not out of love, it is out of status.

Even at the cost of dignity and consent, what happens when we ask what kind of person I am becoming while I build this?

I felt like the system taxes introspection and implications on the broader community. Every moment you spend asking why is a moment someone with zero introspection is moving.

And the system doesn’t care about the difference. And I was bothered deeply because that is not who I am.

I had dinner recently with a founder who has walked through more fires than I’ve even approached. At one point I brought up my dilemma about what it means to be a good founder, and as an introspective empathetic person… would I be minted into a leader I’d one day like to celebrate?

He gave me hope and changed my perspective.

“Empathetic people have a hard time making startups,” he said.
“But we need more empathetic people making innovations. Your empathy is a super power because you can learn from other people’s mistakes.

My Dad encouraged me to look past myself and he said it would be a superpower because “you can build a strong foundation and a richer culture. You will take more calculated risks and fear moving slowly because the game is naturally long.”

They acknowledged it like men who had watched the other kind of builder up close and came away unsettled by what they saw. That was something I admired about their intentions as a fair leader. Now more than ever, I feel like we need more of those.

So, did the Andreessens of the world move fast because they’ve amputated the part of themselves that asks why?

And maybe that amputation is load-bearing for a certain kind of success.

But that success has a body count. Not always immediate or visible to see from their perspective. Sometimes it’s in the culture they leave behind. Sometimes in the people they moved through on the way up. Sometimes in what they built and who it actually served.

The system will not save you from yourself.
It was never designed to. It will reward your momentum and punish your stillness and stay completely indifferent to whether you become someone worth being in the process.

Which means the introspection — the asking of why, the metabolizing of the fire, the choosing of different incentives than the ones handed to you… it has to come from somewhere inside you.

It will not be subsidized. It will not trend to appeal to easy cash. It will frequently feel like a competitive disadvantage until you find something that that market needs and iterate as you go.

It isn’t. It is the only thing that separates the builder who leaves something real behind from the one who just leaves chaos? We for sure don’t need more of that.

I have wanted things for the wrong reasons. I have come to realize, there is a point where another zero on the end of my paycheck is simply not worth going to hell for.

And the system will never tell you where that point is.
You have to find it yourself, before the momentum makes the question feel irrelevant.

That is the breakout I am building toward.

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The Breakout Build. The map I’m making in real time, for the ones who aren’t out yet but are building their way there.

If you like this read then you should check these out:

The kind that reminds you your body had more capacity than you were using, and something just reached in and used it without asking permission.

A friend named Shivam let me try his studio-grade EMS suit — 20 electro-pulse pads for full-body activation. A three-hour workout compressed into 25 minutes. I run four times a week. I thought I was someone!!

OHM Fitness introduced me to humility on a Monday morning when I tried to get out of bed.

There is a certain kind of person you meet only a few times in your life.

The pilgrim who has already walked the road you’re still squinting at from the trailhead. You recognize them not by what they say first — but by what they don’t say. They don’t announce themselves. They don’t hand you a booklet. They just sit across from you and see you, and something in your chest goes quiet in a way it doesn’t often get to.

Shivam is that person.

He took me to HG Supply Co in Dallas — a restaurant he’d invested in because the founder cared about what he was putting into the world. The founder had gotten cancer. So everything on the menu was clean. Every ingredient chosen like it mattered — because to him, it did.

I ordered and didn’t say anything for a moment.

There’s a version of that story that lives in a pitch deck. The founder faced adversity, pivoted, built something meaningful. Clean narrative, twelve slides, ask for funding at the end.

But sitting in that restaurant, eating food made by a man who’d looked at his own mortality and responded by making something good — that’s not a pitch deck. That’s a man deciding that even when the system doesn’t require it, he would act with dignity anyway.

That’s rarer than people admit. And Shivam showed me that by taking care of where his money goes.

I have grown to admire intentional founders.

Shivam started working at fifteen. His father handed him burning businesses — Subway locations bleeding customers, Massage Envy franchises in an industry quietly dying. A curriculum where he was quite literally thrown into the fire. Most kids get a car for their birthday. He got a lesson in entropy and a choice: keep going, or disappoint his father.

He told me this the way good travelers tell stories about cities that broke them open — without performance. The suffering had been mostly metabolized. What remained was just the clean, stripped truth of it.

“You deal with people in business whose character you don’t respect. You take strategic, self-interested moves.”

He said it as a fact he’d already made peace with because now he could pursue something that he believed would help his community be healthier.

He also said something that I have been spinning my mind around. “People ten-x who they are when they get wealth and power. The ones who preach loudest about faith and loyalty are quietly on their third wife, their second betrayal, their seventh rebranding of who they claim to be.”
The ones who talk about legacy mean status. The ones who say impact mean leverage — and a genuine desire to better the world with what they build.

We need more of the second kind.

We bonded over Naval Ravikant — someone who frames wealth as fulfillment rather than accumulation. Because there is a real tension in a system built on profit where dignity is never a variable. It takes intention to opt into a different scorecard. It takes something most people quietly abandon somewhere between their first success and their second.

I’ll be honest with you. I am not the most righteous person writing on the internet right now. I have wanted things for the wrong reasons — to escape from myself, to prove myself through accolades. I know how empty that made me feel.

But I know there is a number where another zero on my paycheck is simply not worth going to hell for. I have been quietly asking whether that kind of integrity could coexist with actually winning. Whether you could build something real without selling the part of yourself that made you want to build in the first place.

And then I met someone who already had.

It was relieving.

What I admired most wasn’t his journey as a founder. It was how he showed up in conversation. He wasn’t the type who needed to flash material things to prove his value. He came to meet me exactly where I was — and trusted me to close the distance myself.

That is a rare form of generosity.

At some point I told him about the first time I led people. A volunteer team. I thought belief in the mission would carry us. I couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Clarity is the first form of respect you can offer someone who agreed to follow you somewhere.

He nodded. Said something. Left it there.

I didn’t push further. I wasn’t ready to receive whatever came next.

Some blessings arrive before you have the hands to hold them — and the wisest thing you can do is acknowledge that, and save it for when you’re in the thick of it.

Some truths are doorways. You have to walk through them yourself.

This is the kind of founder I am trying to become. Not perfect. Not even close. But intentional. Building something that adds value rather than builds against people — because now I have proof that it’s possible.

I just watched someone do it.

Shivam — I hope it’s alright that I wrote this down. Some lunches are too important to keep to yourself.

Go get humbled at OHM Fitness. You won’t regret it.

The scary part is when you’re out in the middle of the ocean and this vessel isn’t going where you need to go.

I have had nightmares about that and they say it’s a control thing. But you loved that boat. God, you loved it so much because it was steady and it took care of you.

The way it moved through the water and everyone watched. The way the light hit the hull in the morning and it was so simple. You memorized every creak and groan of it as you spent more time with it.

You knew that boat and you had grown to love it.

But a boat that’s beautiful isn’t the same as a boat that’s seaworthy for the long trip. Some vessels — no matter how stunning and strong, no matter how much you polished that fking deck — were never built for the distance you needed to travel.

Neither of you didn’t want to acknowledge it because it felt good going somewhere without much self reflection.

But you hung on to the idea of the boat, when the course was going too far from the route you were called to, it felt like your mind was being pulled apart.

You decide to swim to shore. That was terrifying, because you know that you probably would never know the boat as much as you did when you spent time with it.

It was the best boat you have experienced so far and believed it was hard to come by boats like this.

Either way, you’re standing on the dock now, watching it sail toward someone else’s harbor. And you feel jealous like a Taylor swift song.

Of course, it’s kind of embarrassing because it’s going the wrong direction so the more logical decision is to leave it on its route.

Sure, she looks good on that boat.

So what. (tough to think about for sure)

That boat was beautiful. It absolutely was the best couple months of your life. Like any traveler, you come back new and with the best stories.

Maybe you think about it from time to time because your brain has a way of sticking to the last voyage.

But now you’re on your new journey and a little more cautious about taking the next boat out.

Without it wouldn’t have made you a discerning captain.

Now you’re left with so much time, you get to ask who have you become since you swam to shore?

no. I wasn’t talking about boats.

(Creative writing sprint! 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️)

I asked him whether I should make a new Instagram account and he asked me “why I needed to start over?” And I admitted that its ruining my creativity because I cared too much about what others thought. It almost felt like I was swimming upstream when the easier way out would be to start again.

He told me about the day he walked into the barbershop with a tripod, a ring light, and a mic to film his clients. The old school barbers made remarks and laughed.

But since he filmed anyway those videos built him a line of clients while the same barbers spent their slow days trying to find theirs. He’s at 25K followers now.
It was no surprise when the laughing stopped.

Hearing that from someone who’d actually been through it made my fear feel stupid – because he’d already done the scary part and I could see what was waiting on the other side of it. That’s why we trust people with skin in the game more than people just telling us what to do. He didn’t talk his way through fear. He walked through it and let the results speak.

Near the end of the conversation I told him — if you see me spam posting next week, just know you inspired me.

He said, “You mean when?”

That hit differently than anything else he said. It snowballed into every time I’d said “if” and quietly handed myself an easy way to exit. Every version of a dream I held with a loose grip on purpose — so I’d have somewhere to hide if it didn’t work out.

So I went into an ADHD deep dive on why the words successful people use with themselves seem to matter so much — and what I found kept showing up across fields that proves why its detrimental we are intentional with our words.

The brain runs on predictive coding. It’s constantly building a model of what’s going to happen next, which means the way you talk to yourself is an input into a system that’s already deciding how hard to try. I have been guilty of living too much in the sweet past that shapes my perception of today. That annoying “If” makes something optional, a built-in insurance policy that you might not follow through built from the fears of your past. “When” makes something inevitable, just a matter of time and reps.

The bet isn’t if I finish the marathon in two hours, I’ll win. The better bet is if I keep my legs moving long enough, I’ll eventually cross the finish line.

I had to learn that the hard way because I felt like I had wasted my time caring too much about what other people thought, letting them dictate my actions.

This was magnified after college when every decision felt like a heavy burden— like one wrong move on a chess board and I’d waste another year justifying the time wasted with more time wasted. I was staring at my laptop with twenty tabs open. Job boards. Apartments in cities I half-wanted to live in. A half-finished application for a job I didn’t care about. congratulatory LinkedIn posts that felt like a dirty stinky cloth being rubbed in my face. The worst part was that underneath all of it was this quiet feeling that I didn’t actually want any of it…

It felt like everyone else had gotten clearer “how to” instructions. Like there was some club on campus people competed for internships at huge companies and spent four years building the perfect LinkedIn post. Some people speed ran their twenties knowing exactly what they wanted. I kept feeling this strange pull toward things that didn’t fit neatly into a job description like building events, business books and late nights in the MBA school library, designing things, writing things, recording things.

For a long time I treated that pull like a flaw. Something to do on the side while I figured out what I was really supposed to do.

The question that started changing things wasn’t what if this doesn’t work. It was — what would I try if I assumed it eventually would?

When you think something might work, you hedge. You only take the opportunities that feel safe and kill the rest with your own hesitation.

When you operate like success is inevitable — like you’re in training and competition day is coming — setbacks become data to pivot to something more aligned and more likely to workout.

Rosenthal and Jacobson ran an experiment in 1968 where teachers were told certain students were about to have a big surge in performance. The students were picked randomly giving no meaning to the label. But those students performed better anyway, because the expectation changed how the teachers treated them, which changed how the students saw themselves, which changed what they did. The whole loop shifted because someone decided to say when instead of if.

When you see the same idea show up across completely different fields, the smarter bet is to stop calling it a coincidence.

Economists call it animal spirits — Keynes argued that when entrepreneurs expect growth, they invest, hire, and build, and that collective confidence manufactures the outcome. Political scientists track expectation cascades — the moment people believe a candidate will win, donors fund them, media covers them, voters follow. Neuroscientists point to predictive coding — the brain doesn’t wait for results to decide how hard to try, it performs toward whatever future it believes is coming.

Kevin did the same thing for me in a parking lot without even knowing it.

I started messaging people I wouldn’t normally reach out to. Launching things before they were ready.

Sometimes you have to learn lessons over and over again, like each experience from you or others feels like hitting a piñata until the fruits of getting past your mental obstacles really feels like a pay off.

And it’s worth
every
single
swing.

Read this if you're hooked

I am looking forward to reading these books soon so if anyone knows anything about these, let me know what you think:

1. How Innovation Works
2. The Rational Optimist
3. Incerto
4. The Beginning of Infinity

I saw this post that said loving someone is wanting to see the world through their eyes.

the post I am referencing

I’m replaying every relationship I’ve been in and wondering why I kept choosing people who never really met me in my mind.

Not the kind of “meet me” where you know my favorite color or that I’m an acts of service is my love language.

The kind where you wander around inside my thoughts with me expanding my curiosity.

I used to send people the things I wrote.

Long messages, screenshots of notes, links to articles with paragraphs highlighted because something in them had snagged at me for days. I’d hit send with my heart a little open.

When I got a heart. “That’s cool.”

Sometimes just a quick nod in person before the subject changed.

Technically, they responded.

Sure.

But it felt like a little kid who wanted to play tag but they were scrolling on their phone, mentally somewhere else even though I was right next to them.

Every time, there was this quiet, sinking feeling afterward. I wasn’t hurt but I also wasn’t satisfied. I never knew how to name it until I saw that post.

For a long time, I convinced myself that was normal. That expecting more was asking for a lot, when they already had plenty of great qualities about them.

but now that I am writing this right after my thought, I had already been blessed to know what “more” felt like.

When I was younger, my dad used to pull me into whatever he was pondering on — a question about how something works usually triggered by

How I built this with Guy Raz when it was on the NPR radio station (Amazon bought it somehow that makes me sad).

We’d sit in the car with the world sliding past the windows, and he’d talk it through.

I would ask question after question, my thoughts branching off in ten directions at once. “But what if…….?”

“Why does that happen?”

“Have you tried this?”

He just kept answering, pausing to think, not in a “mansplainy” or I am better than you way.. but he would loop back when I got lost.

He let my curiosity fill the room until sometimes it made him blue in the face with how many questions I’d ask.

Looking back, I think that was our version of playing catch with the football in the backyard: someone staying with your thoughts long enough for them to unravel and reweave into something new.

It made me tear up a little because I felt bad for myself and more for them because maybe intellectual intimacy was met with distant parents. Because a healthy relationship can still be imperfect but complex.

Someone acting like the inside of your mind was an interesting place to be was a blessing and I just wanted to share that space with them.

For me to try to step into their world just for a moment to poke and prod. To try and see their world the best I could.

I didn’t realize how deeply I craved that until a moment with a friend a few years ago.

I had just told a friend something that had bothered me at work and two days later… She said, “you know, I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day.”

And then she told me how she’d been turning it over in her head—on her drive home, in her busy workday.

She had held onto this small thing I’d said and rotated it, looked at it from her angle, imagined what she’d do if she were me.

I remember this warm, almost relieved feeling spreading in my chest.

Like someone had placed a hand on my shoulder from the inside.

I existed in her mind beyond the relationship. That felt like emotional intimacy to me.

My friendships have always held that. Long voice notes, arguments that came together at the end.

But somehow, I kept choosing romantic relationships where I wanted that but I never knew how to explain.

It floated above us, unused.

How was I to express what I wanted if I didn’t know what it was?

And if I asked it wouldn’t feel like genuine play. It’s similar to the feeling of someone asking you to explain your joke after they didn’t find it remotely funny.

Disconnected in and a little bit embarrassing.

Maybe I told myself men just weren’t really into that kind of connection. That I should be grateful for what I did have and stop wanting so much.

Then, slowly, I started noticing my guy friends.

The friend who sends a random philosophy article at 11:37 p.m. with, “This reminded me of what you said last week.” The one who texts, “Okay, but I’ve been thinking about how you’ve been talking to yourself pretty harshly.” “I challenge you to belive you are already her.”

It was served on a platter without this underlying uncomfortable transaction for needing sexual tension.

Lately I’ve been feeling that I’ve become a lot pickier, But I have come to think that maybe loving someone is wanting to see the world through their eyes—and being willing to let that change you a little.

Thinking together is its own kind of closeness. It’s like having a friend visit you and you giving them a house tour after you’ve spent months decorating to make it feel like your own.

Then picking up pieces you carefully curated, and you being excited about telling them how you got it. Like journaling with them, but out loud.

And now that I’ve felt that—I can’t pretend I don’t need it.

So until I find that kind of connection in a romantic relationship, I think I’m okay waiting.

[wrote this at 2:00 am- edited 3:30 am, is there use in going to bed at this point?]

I first came across the idea in The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. Naval describes leverage as a multiplier for your judgment. It is the ability for one well-placed action to produce outsized results over time. The more I sat with that, the more it stopped feeling like business advice and started feeling like I can apply this everywhere in my life.

Because leverage is about attention. Where do I place mine? What am I feeding……….fear, or courage? Comfort, or momentum?

I had been feeling a lot of comfort and I wanted to expand my perception of possibilities, I just didn’t know how.

For a while, I hid behind “learning.”

Watching hours of youtube videos, taking notes, asking people for advice but really, I was afraid of wasting time on the wrong thing.

Then I realized: indecision is the ultimate waste. It gives the illusion of safety but quietly erodes your life and self trust away. I started to hear the trends of what people regretted the most and it boiled down to, “I wish I started sooner.”

When I studied why most startups fail, the answer wasn’t lack of brilliance/ the idea was not unique enough. it was lack of validation and discovering what matters takes the discomfort of putting yourself out there - gosh darn it!!!

I often hear people fall in love with an idea instead of something needing to be unique and cool but that is a passion project. If you want to make the highest leverage decision on your time in your 20s I was convinced it was product market fitting yourself. [Writing an article on this soon]

I remembered the story of Zappos, the founder walked into local shoe stores, took photos of shoes, and built a fake online storefront just to see if anyone would actually buy.

The best founders aren’t those who know everything. They’re the ones willing to test, to risk, to be wrong fast… to master to art of closing the gap between falling down and getting up with conviction and maybe even a little self dissatisfaction.

In Paulo Coelho’s words, “When you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” Leverage begins in that decision and the moment you stop waiting for certainty and start walking towards clarity.

That is just the truth and the people I started appreciating were the ones who broke out of “certainty jail.” Certainty is just another way of being complacent and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wanted more.

She gave me courage

A few weeks ago, my college friend reached out for a coffee chat. I thought she wanted to talk about my 9-to-5. But instead, she asked about my content.

I froze for a second. Because deep down, creating content started from a place of defiance.

People close to me once said I just wanted attention. Maybe they were right… but not in the way they meant.

I saw a version of myself in her when she asked me how to start and the answer was clear to me now only after started posting. She asked me, “how do I show up authentically online?” and I told her it was posting everyday and realizing what worked for me like a self study.

It turned into my highest leverage bet I could take on my career because people send me messages saying that my perspective had reshaped how they viewed theirs.
But the truth is, I never had courage, I had fear that I was wasting my time.

Naval believes the people who build wealth usually do three things:

1. Build specific knowledge
2. Use leverage
3. Own what they create

I saw a TikTok that said, making content is like the lottery, you never know what is going to come out of it. That conversation reminded me how far I’ve come. A tangible example of what I have gotten out of making content is:

1. Freelance modeling gigs

2. Brand partnerships

3. Mentors

4. Event attendees

5. 3 life long friends

6. A team of people for my first paid event

I saw that 90% of startups fail because they don’t validate the market first, but only with 4K followers on instagram 37 people responded to my poll saying they would willingly try my app and I hadn’t even told them about it yet.

Communication on a 1:1 is good but compared to 1 to many is immense leverage.

Showing up online was allowing me to pitch myself as a shy girl who used to feel so uncomfortable about taking up space. Every piece of content was a small bet on my capacity to connect, to increase what a founder once called my luck surface area.

I am convinced lucky people are far from certain about everything. Naval describes four types of luck, but thankfully we can control the most powerful one. You can manufacture by becoming the type of person opportunities are drawn to. That means when your skills, reputation, and interests align in a way that makes you uniquely positioned for the moment.

The people who seem lucky simply stayed in the process long enough for probability to work in their favor.

This is how I am betting on myself

My dad used to say, “Business isn’t about freedom; it’s about stamina.” You sacrifice certainty for the chance to build something that can’t be taken away. Skills, courage, resilience…… those stay with you and one day you will really need them.

In my 9-5 I work with top leaders in the space reshaping their organizations and it is no secret that AI is redefining jobs faster than universities can name new majors. The roles built for stability are now the ones being automated. So the only sustainable leverage is personal. That is the ability to think independently, learn deeply, and adapt quickly.

So yes, I’m still figuring out my own “startup” while me and my CTO are building but I know the equation now: find what compounds, test before you theorize, and always bet on the skill that makes you irreplaceable.

Because when the ladders of certainty are collapsing, the highest leverage bet isn’t a job or a product.
It’s you!!!!

The moment your courage becomes action, your curiosity becomes creation, and your voice becomes the asset no one else can replicate.

That’s when your life starts compounding.

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If this resonated, you might enjoy these next:

Free access to the Audiobook for The Almanack of Naval Ravikant because I talk about it so much.

The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant I Audiobook I Tim Ferris I ...

www.youtube.com › watch

People are starting to ask, is the unemployment rate for white collar fields, in thinking jobs that are being placed by AI, or is it a mix of perfect storms?

This is a similar prophecy when innovation is outpacing education, policy, and labor wages. It is about what happens when the world changes faster than our identities that are shaped by our culture of certainty. It is going up the corporate ladder no longer applicable to the same roadmap that our parents used to earn stability.

But the main headline is AI. Looking at the data, the headlines argue that it’s hastening the pace of job displacement.

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If it was really COVID or inflation rates alone, then we would’ve seen a decline in both the senior and junior roles. Companies are locking the front door on hiring in an attrition model. That means, they are freezing headcount and lead us to an “expectation shock” when juniors are looking for jobs again but the competition on applications on Linkedin says 1000+ applicants for one job.

So what do we do when the path forward disappears? We optimize for what is left.

There’s a moment in every transformation when those closest to the storm can describe their view to warn us.

A recently laid-off senior quality-assurance designer admitted that AI could handle his core function and it blew up on social media because it challenges what kept us safe.

He was reviewing hundreds of playtest summaries, and it matters that he was in a senior role because he highlights that AI is compressing the progress cycle from decades to years to months. What used to take him years now takes him a monday full of work.

AI is not only compressing the progress cycle at work, but with thought, creativity, emotional resolution.

When long-term stability feels unreachable, people optimize what they can control.

The storm has outcomes, and you can trace them through spending. Beauty is the brain’s attempt to reclaim control when larger systems feel unstable. (Compensatory Control Theory)

Meet Lana, a 33-year-old Chicagoan with $612 in savings, $56,000 in student loans, and a sister she owes $4,000 for rent help. She’s boarding a plane to Mexico for a friend’s wedding—a $1,500 trip she can’t really afford. Her savings are nonexistent. Her career path is uncertain.

So every year, her New Year’s resolution is to get hotter. And she never fails.

She spends $100 every six weeks on long nails, $1,000 a year on fine-line tattoos. $1,200 a year on gym memberships. Several thousand at Sephora.

“I don’t have enough money for these bigger investments,” she says, “so why don’t I just be gorgeous?”

Chelsea, a San Francisco attorney making $200,000, knows the math doesn’t work: “If I stopped doing Botox quarterly, I’d be able to put another $1,400 in my home savings account every year.” In San Francisco, the average home costs $1.4 million. A 20% down payment would be $280,000. “That wouldn’t make a significant enough dent,” she admits.

Now I am curious, when the adjustment of wages, education, and policy is slower than the rate of innovation, what happens to our definition of success and what people strive for? The ladder is restructuring and the meaning we attached is redefining.

Effort used to mean that after you worked hard you could move up. You could become someone after working in the same role or industry after a decade.

However, if AI compresses apprenticeship and institutions stall mobility, then effort alone no longer guarantees advancement. And when effort stops compounding predictably, ambition redirects.

We are now asking: If effort is no longer the currency, what replaces it?

What are you driven by when effort stops being the currency?

They were so consumed with surviving for us that emotions went unspoken, and I grew up walking into rooms trying to absorb everyone else's discomfort before they could feel it.

Down the line, avoidant partners felt oddly like home.
Thankfully, I woke up last year.

It’s such a punch the gut when someone says “I love you” but what they actually mean is they hate your ambition, they don’t support the parts of you that are hungry and reaching and becoming, they need you smaller than you are.

I’m a day out from turning 26, and I’m finally detaching from this desperate need to prove myself just to make a room feel comfortable, to perform so that other people don’t have to sit with their own discomfort, when the truth is no one actually sees me in those moments anyway.

If you know anything about attachment theory, you know that growing up the way I did is basically the recipe for becoming the person who walks into every room already taking everyone’s emotional temperature before you even take off your coat.

Someone who’s burdened by this highly attuned ability to read body language and micro-expressions and shifts in tone, someone who’s constantly carrying how everyone else is feeling because somewhere along the way you learned that’s what keeps you safe, loved, and from being abandoned.

Is everyone having fun?
Is that person mad at me? Should I fix this? Do they love me anymore? Did I say the wrong thing?

Am I too much?

It bleeds into absolutely everything you touch…in a degrading way. Your work…where you overextend yourself to prove your value. Even your friendships where you’re always the one reaching out and planning and making sure everyone’s okay.

Almost every anxious attached person I know has had a relationship, where they feel themselves change into someone unrecognizable, especially at the end when you’re with an avoidant partner.

You can feel them pulling away even before they do, but you just keep trying harder, giving more, shrinking yourself down to fit into the smaller and smaller space they’re offering you.

Even in the smallest moments that shouldn’t matter but somehow do, like that text you sent three hours ago about a boundary that still doesn’t have a response and you’re sitting there spiraling about what it means, whether they’re mad, whether you should have just stayed quiet.

The way you swallow your annoyance when someone does something that bothers you because their comfort feels more important than your honesty.

I got so tired of feeling caged behind my own imagination, building entire narratives about what other people thought of me, what they were feeling, what they needed from me, hypothesizing and catastrophizing and never actually knowing because I was too scared to ask, too scared to be seen as difficult or demanding or too much.

So out of spite, I started hosting events in Dallas after I had just moved here and needed a project to get me out of this cage I build around myself.
I needed something that felt like mine, needed to feel like I was building toward something instead of just existing in this half-life of unfulfillment. All I knew is that I wanted to start something of my own.

I only knew how to host events from college clubs and those nonprofit organizations I interned for during summers, but I did it anyway because what did I have to lose at that point.

I ended up hosting 28 events over the course of months, events where I invited anyone I found interesting. Where we could have actual long-form conversations that went somewhere instead of whatever TikTok-ified, soundbite version of discourse we’re all supposed to accept now as we collectively fry our brains slowly but surely, trading depth for dopamine hits.

And somewhere between event 1 and event 26, something fundamental shifted inside me in a way I didn’t even notice until I looked back and realized I had become someone different.

The Question No One Is Answering

For the past few events accumulating 400 people. I’ve been asking people one question whenever I meet them, whenever the conversation goes deeper than surface pleasantries: “What’s your dream life?”

And here’s what I’ve found, almost everyone has an answer ready, sometimes immediately, sometimes after a pause where they let themselves actually think about it for the first time in months, but they have an answer.

The problem is that almost every is stuck in their own cages. They want to but something always seems to hold them back from taking the steps that would close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. So I started to get curious.

We’re all living in an environment that’s been meticulously optimized for distraction, for ease, for endless comparison where you’re always measuring yourself against someone else’s highlight reel, and the result is that we’re overstimulated to the point of numbness, over-informed to the point of paralysis, and quietly, devastatingly disconnected from our own agency, from the belief that we can actually shape our lives instead of just letting them happen to us.

Office Hours After Dark is my physical response to this problem. It is a space where people can reclaim their attention from the algorithms and the notifications and the constant noise, where they can think deeply together about things that actually matter, where learning and growing and becoming isn’t something you do alone in your apartment at 2 am but something you do in community with other people who care about the same things.

Kora, the app we’re building, is the digital response. It is a system that helps individuals move from reflection to action in a world that’s constantly thinking for us, deciding for us, feeding us pre-digested opinions and manufactured desires, a tool that helps you remember what you actually want and then helps you build toward it in small, sustainable ways.

Together, they’re both about the same thing at their core:

helping people take back control of their attention and their direction so they can create an intentional life instead of just stumbling through a default one that someone else designed for them.

We are planning the biggest event yet, and it’s designed to stretch my people-pleasing tendencies to their absolute limits because it’s the first time I’ve had a 5-person team helping me, the first time we’re charging actual ticket prices instead of just letting people show up for free, the first time we have professors coming.

And somewhere in all of this, I’ve realized something that would have terrified the version of me from a year ago:

I’ve become callous or indifferent because I finally feel like I’ve grown into my purpose, like I’ve found the thing I’m supposed to be doing.

Not in an “I’m so evolved” way, or that I’ve figured it all out, because I haven’t.

I just can’t control how people feel at my events, can’t control whether they love what we’re creating or hate it, I’m obsessed with is brilliant or derivative or completely missing the point.

Do I never walk into a room and immediately start people-pleasing, reading the room, adjusting myself to fit?

Monday, just a few days ago, I sat in my car for 30 minutes after I was already late to an MBA interest event, sitting there in complete dread thinking about how I was going to have to perform, how I was going to have to be “on,” how exhausting it was going to be to manage everyone’s perception of me for the next two hours.

I’m still very much a work in progress, still figuring this out as I go, still backsliding into old patterns when I’m tired or stressed or feeling particularly vulnerable.

It’s not just okay to create spaces that see you for who you are, spaces where you don’t have to edit yourself or shrink down or perform.

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Expectations vs. Boundaries (Thanks, Brother)

My brother told me something a few months ago that completely cracked my brain open, one of those things that seems obvious once you hear it but fundamentally reorganizes how you see everything: there’s a difference between having an expectation and having a boundary, and most of us spend our entire lives confusing the two.

An expectation is what happens when you think someone can read your mind, when you’re uncomfortable or hurt or upset about something but you don’t say anything because you think they should just know, and then you feel betrayed and abandoned when they don’t magically intuit what you needed from them.

A boundary is what happens when you actually say the thing out loud, when you use your words to communicate clearly: “Hey, this makes me uncomfortable” or “I need this to change” or “I can’t accept being treated this way,” and then you give the other person the chance to actually respond to what you’ve said instead of what you haven’t.

When you’re a lifelong people-pleaser, someone who learned early that your job was to manage other people’s emotions and make yourself easy. You edit yourself constantly without even realizing you’re doing it anymore because it’s become so automatic. You shape-shift to be more palatable to whoever you’re with in any given moment. Since, you’re never going to be everyone’s flavor the burden of worry is a waste of energy. No matter how much you adjust yourself, no matter how accommodating you become it is impossible to make everyone happy.

it creates this unbearable distance between you and everyone you actually want to be close to, this gap where intimacy should be but instead there’s just this carefully maintained cage.

Now to break out of the cage, I try to close the gap between how I feel and what I say. Trying to communicate outside of my ego and my fear of rejection and my desperate need to be liked.

I tell people my boundaries clearly and directly, I give them one real chance to understand my perspective and adjust their behavior accordingly, and then I collect data about how they respond because their response tells me everything I need to know about whether this is my crowd or not.

They will show me, do they care about what I’ve said? Do they make an effort to adjust and respect what I’ve communicated?
Or are they showing me through their actions that they’re not willing or able to meet me where I am, that this relationship or friendship or whatever it is isn’t actually serving either of us?

It’s a form of love, actually, this practice of setting boundaries and collecting data. Love for yourself because you’re finally treating your own needs as valid and important, and love for the people who genuinely want to accept you because you’re giving them the information they need to actually know you.

What Happens When You Actually Ask for Help

For the first time in all my months of hosting events, I have an actual team of people helping me make this thing happen, and it feels both terrifying and thrilling in ways I didn’t anticipate.

People started offering to help because after 26 events I had built up enough of a track record that I kind of knew what I was doing, or at least knew enough to fake it convincingly, and they were genuinely excited about the mission we’re building.

But here’s what they don’t tell you about leadership, what I’m learning in real-time as I fumble through relinquishing control more than you’ve ever had to let go of anything in your life, you have to trust other people to handle things differently than you would handle them, and the risk of not communicating your boundaries clearly is absolutely detrimental to your authority because if you can’t tell people what you need and what’s not okay, they can’t possibly give you what you’re looking for.

You can be nice, you can be kind and generous and supportive, but you absolutely cannot be a doormat because that doesn’t serve anyone.

My dad told me you have to accept that things will be 80% perfect, not 100%, that there will always be some delta between the pristine vision in your head and the messy reality of execution.

That’s just what it means to work with other humans who have their own perspectives and approaches and ways of doing things.

If you’re scared of asking for help or being rejected, I absolutely was, it’s because the feeling is overwhelming in a way that makes you want to just do everything yourself.

To carry the weight alone because at least then you know it will get done right.
But that feeling only gets quieter when you actually practice asking, when you stop martyring yourself and start trusting other people to care about the things you care about, even if they care differently than you do.

I don’t know what I’m doing, honestly, but I’m trying to model myself after the leaders who impacted me in ways I’m still discovering years later:

• My track and field coach who ran the hard races right alongside us instead of just watching from the sidelines. Who wasn’t afraid to tell us exactly what we needed to improve but did it in a way that made you want to work harder instead of feeling defeated, because it’s not just about what you say to people, it’s about how you say it, the tone and the care you bring to the difficult conversations with athletes who give it their all. Pushing them .1 second away from their next personal record and meeting them where they are at.

• My boss at the UCLA MBA accelerator program. She was the dean who somehow knew every single detail about everyone on the team and everyone she met. From their third cousin to their personal achievements so when the time came to introduce people and connect them, she had a eloquent way of expressing an elevator pitch on their behalf making them seem like the coolest person in the room. She led with grace in a way that made people feel genuinely included and seen while still pushing them to grow beyond what they thought they were capable of, who never let kindness be an excuse for lowered standards.

• My current manager who’s just deeply, genuinely personable in a way that feels rare, who asks about your life like he actually cares about the answer. He vouches for you and has a “Vegas policy” where we can tell him anything and he cares about us more the the business making the best moves. He explains his strategy and the reasoning behind decisions before change or disruption so you understand the why and not just the what. He makes you feel hopeful even when work is kind of a drag.

I’m taking pieces from all of them and trying to figure out my own version of leadership, trying to build something that feels authentic to who I am.

The Day Before 26

You’re in charge of building a village of people who actually see you, who know the real version of you and choose you anyway, and you can only earn that kind of respect if you show it to yourself first, if you treat your own needs and boundaries and dreams as worthy of protection.

Lead with generosity and openness and genuine care, and then pay attention to see who gives it back graciously, who meets your effort with their own, because those people, the ones who show up and stay and choose you consistently, those are the ones you cherish and protect and build your life around.

Some people won’t get it, won’t understand what you’re building or why it matters or why you’re willing to be so vulnerable in public, thats okay.

It’s actually the whole point, because if everyone got it, if everyone wanted in, you wouldn’t be building something specific and meaningful, you’d be building something generic and watered down, something designed to offend no one and therefore delight no one either.

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