The workonly Ican do

I was good at it, especially the maths. I even landed an internship at a software company. Just before Christmas I sat in the canteen with a few colleagues and someone asked what we were doing over the holidays. One of them said she would play PlayStation when she got bored. The developer to my right said that when he got bored, he preferred to analyse crash dumps. Then they looked at me. I had nothing to say. What I wanted to say was gym, friends, maybe dancing. That was the moment I knew I did not belong there.

I already had a different dream. I wanted to become a psychotherapist, but that meant another five years of studying, so I buried the idea and did a Master’s in computer science instead. By the end of it I knew I was on the wrong path. Admitting it would have meant calling six years a waste, so I kept quiet.

A few weeks later ten giant boxes of massage balls arrived at my apartment. The delivery guy had not expected to haul ten big boxes into a residential building. His face said so. I had a fresh Master’s degree, a product on Amazon and a one-way ticket to Thailand. It was not the career my professors had in mind.

In Thailand I sat in silence at a meditation retreat and waited for enlightenment. It did not show up. Six months in Southeast Asia and India later, I still had no answers. The money was running out. So I flew to Los Angeles and spent what was left on an online fitness coaching course that promised seven figures. In 2018 I moved back in with my parents, with exactly zero dollars in my bank account.

I told myself the e-commerce business was only a stepping stone. I would scale it to a few million in two years, sell it and finally do the thing I actually wanted to do. (I can see the delusional thinking now, because I had no idea what that thing was.) Four years later I had three brands, a business that made seven figures and a warehouse with hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in it. That much stock makes changing direction look pretty stupid.

The part I loved was somewhere else. My products needed good photography and good brand design. So did a lot of other sellers, so I started a studio on the side. I argued with my clients all the time, because I knew the work had to convert and I still wanted it to be beautiful. During the pandemic I read eight books a month and listened to eight more. Somewhere in those months I saw what I had been doing. I was running a script that somebody else had written. It took me another two years to find my own.

Our guru sat at the front in complete silence. He had recently grown a thick beard and rebranded himself as some kind of spiritual sage, while his team worked the room and pitched us backend services. Everyone was taking notes. I had a blank page in front of me. After a while that started to feel weird, but there was nothing to write down. I had sold my company months earlier. I had never really cared about e-commerce in the first place.

So why was I there? Because I needed the whole thing to be real. Otherwise I would have had to explain what I had done with the last four years.

I lifted heavy, danced hard and learned fast. I ran marathons, listened to audiobooks at three times the speed and once did a thousand pull-ups in under an hour, just for fun. A normal day felt like a ten out of ten. Whenever something got in my way, I pushed harder. Anyone who did not looked weak to me.