
Today on Thanksgiving 2017, I head to Costa Rica for a 10 day vacation.
And I’m feeling grateful for all the blessings in my life.
In 2009, I remember this particular peak moment laying in the spa, after attending a 2 month immersion program in Berlin for 30 digital natives under 30 called Palomar 5.
I was on my gap year just after graduating high school 5 months earlier, and I’d been pushing hard for a few years to break free of the guardrails of the conventional life path and trail blaze my own entrepreneurial one.
While I was laying on my back immersed in the warm salt water, I remember a voice coming into my head that whispered, ‘your life is now exactly where it should be’. And a sense of inner peace, calmness and settledness washed over my soul.
Through hard work, courage and good fortune, I largely stayed on top of that wave for the next year and half, through the successful launch and emergence of the Startup Genome Project in 2011.
I had my physical and mental health. I had my purpose. I was growing and developing the organizational structure to share my gifts and vision with the world.
Then at the end of 2011, as I was galloping along like a white knight on his horse, an ambushing barrage of arrows blindsided me in the form of a soured former business partner, lawsuits, delayed fundraising timelines, going broke, getting burned out, losing physical and mental health in the burnout, diverging visions with my co-founders, multi-factor autoimmune illnesses, being forced out of my company, more lawsuits, autoimmune relapses that cut even deeper into my physical and mental health and fortitude.
The ensuing 5-6 years brought many ups and downs, many growth experiences, many multi-dimensional personal and inter-personal deepening.
But there was still this nagging feeling that my life wasn’t exactly where it should be, like it had been before. I felt like I was chasing my destiny, to catch back up with it.
It was like my Destiny was my horse from the time of the ambush, still running wild and free down a different timeline, continuing to trail blaze the path my self in this timeline could sense and one day catch up to.
Today, I’m grateful to say, I have caught up to my Destiny’s Horse, jumped back in the saddle and we’ve now been stably galloping through new lands for enough time that it now feels like the new norm.
Back in 2009, at Palomar 5, as I was getting to know my ‘campmates’ my friend Kosta Grammatis poignantly noted when I was still at the tender age of 19, ‘what’s interesting about you is that you’re so young but you feel like you should have already succeeded yesterday’.
This was more true than he knew.
I carried my ambition around in my life like giant jet pack of potential energy.
If I could unlock and master the gift on my back I could fly. I could soar.
But when I was weak, lost or confused, I felt crushed by the weight of it.
Kosmocentric Burden I called it.
My ambition wasn’t for self-validation.
I was born sitting on top of a metaphorical mountain, where I could see humanity’s vast potential for creation and for destruction. A world with both heavenly and hellish timelines.
And I could see what needed to be built to magnetize humanity towards the magnificently beautiful ones.
I could feel the capacity burning within inside me to bring this world into existence.
This was my hero’s journey.
It still is.
In a Campellian sense for these last 5-6 years, I felt stuck in my Road of Trials for what felt like an Inescapable Eternity. Even more so in the fog of multiple depressions.
Now I am through.
My younger self wanted to be here much quicker.
That it took much longer, was it because of failed tests or Destiny?
I’m not sure, but I now lean more towards the latter.
There are many paths up the mountain. And there pros and cons to any path.
I wanted to by farther along in my career and work goals by 27, but I have learned virtue of patience.
I have been molded by the stillness.
I have learned to love life out of the public spotlight before I’m thrust into it.
I wanted my training periods to be over sooner. To enter the field of battle and showcase the fruits of my training to myself and to the world.
But I was too eager.
“More training,” Spirit said.
“More Trials and Tribulations.”
And now my training has molded me now into an unbeatable warrior.
I have been afforded the time to to train longer, train harder, train deeper, train wider. Endure more pain and struggle. Plumb more depths of my shadow.
My struggles gave me more empathy for others struggling. More resilience to call on for the inevitable future slowdowns or down turns.
Now I look at the world’s best in so many fields: technology entrepreneurship, finance, academia, coaching, spirituality — sizing them up like a fighter.
Like Conor McGregor sizes up Jose Aldo, Eddie Alvarez and Tyrone Woodley and I know that I am better than them. That I have the potential to be the best of my generation.
So Today as I sit in LAX on my way to Costa Rica, I’m feeling grateful for so much:
I’m grateful for the opportunity to recharge in a beautiful, luxurious setting after busting my ass working 12-16 hour days for almost 6 months, founding multiple new projects and companies.
I’m grateful for finding the path to apply my understanding of technology trends, complex systems, informational synthesis and behavioral psychology, to expeditiously earn my financial freedom by crushing the stock market with ridiculous returns, with all signs pointing to me only getting better.
I’m grateful for having such magnificent to dreams chase.
I’m grateful for how strong my kosmocentric purpose has made me.
I’m grateful that hard work, engaged in full heartedly day after day, lifetime after lifetime, really does pay off.
I’m grateful for my connection to higher beings with sublime power far beyond my human capacity.
I’m grateful for my 2 year relationship with Tara — our depth, connection, mutual support and healing of my long lived wound of loneliness.
I’m grateful to have such amazing business partners who I share such a deep personal connection with. A mutual knowing that stretches across lifetimes set on a backdrop of unbreakable spiritual involution.
I’m grateful for the unconditional support and love from my family.
I’m grateful for being unburdened by childhood trauma.
I’m grateful for learning the skills early to enable my young adult self to process my young adult trauma and be fully free to offer my gifts to the world.
I’m grateful for all the opportunities I am being given to serve as vessel for radical individual and collective transformation.
I’m grateful for existence itself.
I’m grateful for all the beauty in the world.
The ecstasy and the suffering.
It is all perfect.
For one cannot know light without the dark.
One cannot know bliss without despair.
The journey is perfect.
The user experience is elegant.
And having the opportunity to live as self-transcending emergent oneness is so incredibly sexy.
I’m grateful for my spiritual teachers.
Tapping me into the timeless streams of wisdom in the deepest esoteric parts of Buddhism and Hindu Vedanta lineages.
I’m grateful the One is simultaneously the Many.
I’m grateful I get reconnect with so many souls I’ve shared so many lifetimes of karma with.
I’m grateful we get to be here.
To know each other.
To love each other.
To remember who we really are.
To paint novel evolutionary masterpieces together, sourced from the Groundless Ground of that Bottomless Depth.
PURA VIDA!
