In my younger years I was never financially responsible. I had bank accounts open with no money in them. I had crypto wallets scattered here and there, seed phrases stuffed wherever, investments here and there, retirement savings here and there. I had convinced myself I had net worth but in reality I was just scattering and diluting myself. My businesses were the same way, scattered and unfocused. I was always rushing to build something, but I had no real grasp of strategy or intuition. I was just always building, hoping something would stick.
I lived inside the mentality of fake it till you make it. I could act confident, I could talk like I knew what I was doing, but inside I was desperately trying to make something happen. I had debts. I had student loans, credit card debt, bills I could not keep up with. Many of my startups I funded myself by charging as much debt as the banks would give me, only to lose it all and still be paying it back while I was already chasing the next idea.
It all collapsed. I had several businesses at once and I was constantly shifting money between them, using funds from one to prop up the others. When the coronavirus hit, I had a factory in Wuhan. That single blow took me out, and when that went under, the rest of the businesses all failed. I had built a house of cards and I watched it tumble down.
I disappeared for a few years. Slowly I found stable income. Slowly I paid off every single debt. Slowly I learned the power of accountability. I created a spreadsheet that tracked every account, every bill, every budget, every piece of savings, every retirement account, every investment. I lived and died by that spreadsheet. For the first time in my life I was not pretending, I was not hiding, I was not hoping that some miracle check would come in and make all my troubles disappear. I faced it.
I used to think money would just show up one day. I believed that if I was scattered enough, if I was desperate enough, if I wanted it badly enough, somehow million dollar checks would come to me. But the truth is that even if they had, I would have diluted and squandered them as quickly as they came. I had no discipline. I had no accountability. I had no honesty with myself. More money would have only accelerated the chaos.
It took those quiet years to change me. It took a steady job, a stable paycheck, the humility of being a employee when my younger self had dreamed I would be so much more by now. I had to swallow my ego. I had to accept responsibility for everything. I did not blame the economy. I did not blame the government. I did not blame the president. I blamed myself, and I took ownership of every problem I had created. I chipped away at it excruciatingly day by day.
Through that process I learned accountability. I learned financial accountability, health accountability, wellness accountability, and accountability to others. I had to create a financial spreadsheet and share it with my wife. Every single detail had to be on it. I had to create a financial spreadsheet and share it with my business partner. Every single detail had to be on it. I had to live transparently in every way, to be held accountable for every single dollar spent, every single decision made.
It was through that accountability that I found stability. I built a foundation. I lost my ego, I lost my illusions, and I learned how to live with honesty and transparency. I looked like an idiot many times. I cried man tears many times. I had hard conversations I continue to have daily. I went through growth so painfully slow that I thought I would lose my mind. But through all of that I became reliable. I became someone who could be trusted. Someone whose word became unbreakable. I became someone who could shape and build my life into something bigger, because I now had a foundation that was unshakable.
And it was only then that the responsibility of Excelsa came to me. Excelsa is not just a business. It is a responsibility. It is a movement. It is something that will change lives and impact the world. It will help farmers, it will impact climate change, it will do something real for our health, it will create jobs and new economic models all around the world. That is not something that can be built on scatterbrain chaos. That is not something that can be entrusted to someone who is not profoundly accountable to themselves and to others.
For Excelsa to succeed I have to be one hundred percent self accountable, honest, transparent, and open. If I fall back into old patterns, if I dilute, if I act without discipline, this movement will fail or be taken from me. That is why I am so thankful for the lessons I learned the hard way. Every painful mistake, every collapse, every humiliating moment, every slow year of climbing out of holes I had dug for myself was worth it. Those years made me ready.
Now I know what responsibility means. Now I know how to live in accountability. Now I know how to receive capital and not squander it. Now I know how to build something that will last. The truth is that if I had been handed millions of dollars back then it would have evaporated. But now I am ready to receive it, to deploy it, to turn it into a global movement that cannot be diluted or deployed inefficiently.
That is why the years of hard lessons are worth it. They gave me the foundation to carry the responsibility of Excelsa, and to make sure this time I will not squander the chance.
PS. In my darker days, when it felt impossible to crawl out of the holes I had created for myself, I leaned on a meditation from Saint Francis of Assisi. It says, “Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible” Every time I wanted to quit I came back to that line. I would just do what was necessary (like pay off debts not chase a new idea), hundreds of days of just painfully doing what was necessary and it felt like forever. Now I get to live in what is possible, and soon I know I will be living the impossible. I am thankful for that meditation because it carried me here.