The Synergies of Intensity

“It doesn't matter what you do, as long as you do it well.”

That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you're good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

— Peter Thiel, Zero to One

If Thiel is right, then I have done everything wrong. My life has been a series of long, intense, physically and mentally challenging stretches followed by brief stints of recovery, almost accidentally finding what's next:

From 12 to 16 I had a DJ business, and I worked basically every Friday and Saturday night on top of going to school and other hobbies.
From 16 to 20 I worked as a busboy, a food runner, an operations lead, and a graphic and web designer while serving as student council president and editor-in-chief of the yearbook, then finished high school and began college where I became a Peer Adviser and tutor for first-year students.
From 20 to 25 I was a digital and performance marketer, and through some weird series of events ended up starting and scaling a SaaS training platform. I also lost 65 pounds during this time and maintained a pretty rigid gym schedule for a few years.
From 25-30 I co-founded and became CEO of Gamma.io, a creator platform and marketplace for digital assets on Bitcoin. I also gained a bunch of weight back after COVID broke my gym habit, and I was too focused on other things to prioritize it.

Looking back, while I am proud of everything I have done and I don't regret any of it, I can't say I really planned to do any of these things. I started a DJ business because a couple of friends and I thought it would be fun, and I worked while going to school simply because I wanted money to buy things and invest in the market. I got into graphic and web design because it was stimulating and gave me a creative outlet, and I became a Peer Adviser just to make friends.

My professional and personal milestones were just as spontaneous. I made it into marketing because my initial plan of becoming a lawyer no longer interested me (even the pre-law classes were boring), and I started a SaaS training platform simply because my internship boss thought I'd be good at it, which led to a full-time job. I even co-founded Gamma by total accident after a random series of events led me to offer marketing assistance to my co-founder. Then I eventually became CEO through a series of unfortunate and debilitating events that still somehow worked out in the end. Even my health followed this pattern: I lost a bunch of weight, quickly, because I thought intermittent fasting was cool, and I regained some of it, slow and steady, mostly due to procrastination plus some laziness. The all-or-nothing approach can clearly backfire too.

Earlier this year I transitioned Gamma to an early investor, and for the first time since I was 12, I had nothing that I needed to do. I remember the first weekend trip I took without bringing my laptop with me. It was surreal. And I really wasn't sure what was next.

It led to months of experimentation:

I started taking really long walks while listening to Pimsleur Spanish lessons, sometimes for three or four hours a day.
I almost found my way back to the legal field, building another startup with two friends I met through Gamma. After a few months we made the decision not to continue.
I finished Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, which is probably the first video game I've ever played from start-to-finish. Let's not discuss the 100+ hours that went into that.
I traveled a good bit: Washington D.C., Miami, Chicago, Cancun (I beg you not to drink the water, even accidentally; I beg you to wear sunscreen, even if it's cloudy), Orlando, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Oslo, Houston, Richmond, and some stopovers in Cleveland, Frankfurt, Denver, and maybe somewhere else I can't recall.
I applied to a lot of roles I thought might blend my amalgamation of expertise, but didn't end up finding one that fit.
I became a Fora Travel Agent (reach out if you need to book some travel!).
I built a bunch of tools and apps, including Enneagram.now, based on one of my past-decade passions, and Elevenly, just for fun.

It is possible I got lucky in picking the things that I did, because I definitely didn't follow Peter's advice intentionally. I did things I was good at and that interested me, but I didn't start doing them because I thought they'd be especially valuable in the future.

What I did do is lean into things that seemed like they were the combination of something I enjoyed, was good at, and could make money doing. In retrospect, it's astonishing how many things "just work" when you combine those three things with an optimistic view of the world and your path within it.

The bigger insight here, I'm realizing, has more to do with my approach towards any one thing rather than carefully selecting the best thing.

I generally do not do things halfway. I am flexible but perfectionistic at the same time. I have fun, but the fun often is downstream of intensity for me. I often only later realize that the intensity I bring to a given interest turns it into something that benefits me down the line.

For instance, I didn't realize that becoming a DJ would prepare me for producing Gamma events and conferences that kept thousands of attendees entertained, or that working as a busboy and a food runner would prepare me for serving guests at those events (head chef and bottle washer). Similarly, I had no idea that orchestrating a remote team of ten and managing related conferences would make me so adept at travel and group bookings that I'd later make a great travel agent.

I didn't realize that becoming great at SEO, paid marketing, product messaging, and customer testing, plus a tour in enterprise sales and the creation of a 7-figure ARR business unit, would eventually help me grow my startup and raise money for it. Nor did I know that accepting a project to create an enterprise IT automation training platform would give me expertise in cloud infrastructure and process automation that I’d use at Gamma and beyond. Ultimately, I couldn't have planned that the combination of all these distinct phases would make me the ideal candidate (as I used to say: "the most technical non-technical person in the room") to benefit from AI. It was an unexpected shift that abstracts humans away from the code, focusing us instead on processes, systems, security, and architecture—the exact things I had accidentally become really good at.

All that I did was apply a consistent level of intensity to everything I committed myself to, and I did not give up. To be clear, I do not think that this makes me somehow special or better than anyone. Objectively, I am only moderately successful. But I am really happy, and I have benefitted tremendously from the synergies that come from committing yourself like that. You become great at these weird things that can be applied to later-down-the-line things you don't even know are coming your way.

And new things feel less overwhelming when you approach life this way too. I already lost a bunch of weight once, and I already know I have the stamina to work out intensely and eat restrictively when I want to. So I have started strength training again for the first time in a long time, and I aim to keep it in the "all" bucket for as long as possible. I've even started writing these daily posts.

Doing all of these things at once (and some more, below) could be overwhelming, but the intensity from one thing bleeds into the intensity of another, and it somehow makes both easier. Walking for four hours is physically tiring, and listening to four hours of Spanish instruction is mentally exhausting. But together, the time passes more quickly and the material sticks better when your body is in motion. Then you are really tired at the end of the day and sleep better, making things cement even more. You just need to pick a few things and give it your all. [More on that here]

On that note, I'm excited to share that after the bulk of a year figuring out what comes next, I have found it. And I have found it in an unexpected but somehow perfectly expected place. I'll share more in a future post, but the short version is, a founder friend of mine has brought me on to help productize many of the custom consulting and software solutions his company produces. This is a person who I admire deeply, and someone who brings the same kind of intensity that I bring to my work to his own work.

Working together these past few months has been amazing. And it has made me realize that the synergies from this intensity can bloom and create a virtuous cycle of productivity and adventure across a whole team of people.

I am truly lucky to be able to do this kind of work, with such like-minded people. And I am deeply grateful to all of the people, past and present, who have helped me find my unplanned path.