Funding the habits

The money came back. That was the problem.

Across 2016 and 2017 I was pulling $20K to $30K a month from random things online. No company, no team, no plan. Just a guy who knew how to find a moment and sell into it, doing it often enough to keep the lights on and then some.

Most of it went into drugs, alcohol, gambling and strip clubs. I could tell you I was numbing something, and that would be true, but it would also be generous. A lot of it was simply what I did with money when there was nobody in the room I respected enough to be embarrassed in front of.

The habits are the part people notice. They are not the part that cost me the next seven years.

What formed in those two years was a pattern I ran for a decade without ever naming it. I had already built one empire and watched it go dark. So everything I built after it got measured against that — and if an idea wasn't epic enough to erase the entire record in one move, I killed it before it had a chance to work.

That is not laziness. Laziness would have been cheaper. That was a standard set so high only a miracle could clear it, then applied to every ordinary good idea that walked through the door.

I turned down work that would have paid. I abandoned builds at eighty percent. I called it having taste. It was fear in a better jacket, and it left a body count made entirely of my own ideas.

You don't get destroyed by the comeback you fail. You get destroyed by the hundred small ones you refuse to start.