I choose tofucking create myamazing shit.

I studied at Cornell and Stanford and spent fifteen years building planet-scale data products in Silicon Valley and Seattle. I led product and helped companies make money from data. At Oracle Data Cloud, I solved a billion-dollar identity resolution problem in adtech. At Pokémon GO, I helped monetize a player base of 150 million. I cared about the work, and I was excellent at it.

I chased shit. I built my own startups, raised money, and helped people find better-paying jobs. I was a high achiever, like so many people around me at Cornell and Stanford. I was running so fast, alongside all the other mice in the lab.

Then one day, I couldn’t run anymore. Inside, I was crying, and I didn’t know why. I fell. I beat myself up for falling. Then I fell again.

I spent ten years healing and discovering myself. I began to see my own trauma and the pain passed down through generations, reaching back a century. I came close to the edge between life and death.

In Seattle, I tried different ways of living. I ventured into the wild, among bears. I studied astrology at Kepler College. I learned from friends and nature, and began working through my pain. I founded Seattle Club Awakenings and helped other people work through theirs. Those experiences changed what I wanted to do with my life.

This is a chaotic, soulless time. AI, layoffs, the chase for money and fame. Social media keeps pulling our attention away from ourselves. Everyone seems to be following someone who doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing either, except how to sell the next method for making money.

Growing up, I was close to government officials, entrepreneurs, and public figures who were considered successful. I saw how much of their lives went into chasing money and fame. I saw what it did to their children: how they hurt each other and got caught in anger and sorrow. Thirty years later, I feel the world moving toward that same fucking place. I’ve seen enough to know that money and fame won’t answer that longing. You want yourself.

It took me years of healing to understand what that meant for me. I began to see where power and love meet—sun and moon. I still wanted to work hard, but I needed to know what I was giving my life to. What I had learned at Stanford d.school a decade earlier began to make sense: through creation, we could enrich the world, even create a world of our own.

And you have so much of your own to bring to that world: wisdom, ideas, direction, power. Your creative potential needs space. Space to hear yourself and discover what you believe in enough to create. For me, creating from that place is when I feel most powerful and most loving.

Great taste grows from that relationship with yourself. Great artists steal; they don’t borrow. They make what they take their own. When they create, they invent a new game and discover a new kind of power. They feel fulfilled, enriched, enlightened. And people follow.

Think of the amazing motherfuckers who have changed the world through their work: Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Leonardo da Vinci, Gandhi, Warren Buffett, Newton. Some of that work has stayed with us for centuries. What draws me to these people is their conviction—the willingness to put their own ideas to work and see how far they can take them.

What would it feel like to understand something you believe in better than anyone else? To give it your time, develop your own taste, and create something that could only come from you?

I want to build amazing shit. I want to put my effort into something I believe in and have a life that feels like mine. I’m learning to trust what moves me enough to act on it. That’s what Fuck it. I create. means to me.

I’m sure you want that for yourself too. So let’s do it. Let’s see what we can create on this new journey.

Get the shit going.