The Story

For years, I built my life around settling. Not anymore.

This is the honest version — written from the middle, not the finish line.

Where I was

For a long time, my career was built on settling. I aligned everything around my band's gig schedule and a lifestyle that, by every statistical measure, topped out at lead blue collar over a few other blue collars.

Blue collars built this economy. I respect that to my bones. But the entrepreneurs, investors, computer scientists, analysts, lawyers, thinkers, and innovators — the white collar types — created the wealth. The infrastructure. And somewhere along the way I realized I'd been sitting on the sidelines of the thing I was most curious about.

My work boots have been good to me. But it's time for nerd glasses and full immersion.

The gift

My career went from 70 hours a week to four days on, three days off — a natural swing in trades that rise and fall with the political climate. Most people would see lost hours. I saw three days to invest in what I actually want. I can put 16-hour days into deep learning and application.

What a gift.

Why not me?

I've asked myself one question these past few months: why not me? The honest answer was fear. Doubt. What if I fail. What if they laugh. What if I lose my car. My subscriptions.

No more. They doubt and laugh no matter what.

So here's the new current: I will work inside a professional organization — a law firm, research and development, a nonprofit, a lab. I will take my abilities, as low-level as they are right now, and get them optimized. I'll use light pulses moving across the planet in milliseconds to attend the free school of science and technology — AI and research. I will not sit on the sidelines this time. Not in a world-changing innovation.

I bring what most of Silicon Valley can't: a blue collar background, a love of technology, and the drive to give humans their time back.

— Michael

Follow along.

The journal is where this keeps going — entry by entry, day by day. The good ones and the bad ones both.