My entire career has been built on the hours after the hours.
At my first job out of college, I worked at a market research firm during the day and spent my evenings at General Assembly learning Product Management. At my next company, I pulled late nights teaching myself to code, and by the time I was leaving, I’d added business school to the evening rotation. When I started at DoorDash, I was still finishing my second year of classes at night. When I graduated, I filled those hours teaching at a bootcamp. At AG1, I started building 500+, pouring evenings into a Discord community that didn’t yet know what it wanted to be.
I’ve always had two jobs. The one that pays me and the one I’m building toward.
Now things have ramped up again. I’m running an eBay store, writing on Substack, still showing up for my Discord community, and building a new team at Oats Overnight. I keep picking things up and trying things and starting things. I’m not burned out. I’m building and I’m motivated and I’m hungry.
But I am running hot. It is a lot. I’ve quietly removed TV nights with my wife from the routine and during the week I’m pulling hours at my computer long after Lettie’s gone to sleep. On weekends I do my best to turn off and be present with my family, and that’s where I find my rest along with the occasional vacation. But Monday through Friday I am going.
I never quite feel like I’ve done enough.
That’s the part I’ve been thinking about. Every project I’m working on needs more work. None of them are where I want them to be. I have dreams for my family, real dreams, and they’re big enough that everything I’m doing right now feels small by comparison. I can see at every step that there’s more in front of me than behind me. So I keep going.
But here’s what I’ve started to notice. All of it is compounding.
I have a portfolio now and it is expanding. Not a resume, a portfolio. Each thing feeds into the next. Through the Discord, I learned how to meet new people, how to embarrass myself and start something from nothing. I learned to keep going even when you get nothing in return, because along the way you help people more than you realize. That community gave me a playground to build things, to experiment without asking permission.
Because of the Discord, I found Substack, which gave me a place to clarify my thinking and discover a real love for storytelling. That opened a door to a community of writers and thinkers I admire. It’s also what led me to take action after watching King of Collectibles, starting a Pokemon collecting side hustle that reconnected me with something I loved as a kid and sharpened my skills in e-commerce, data modeling, and building with AI.
Each thing made the next thing possible and each thing made me better at the last thing. It all connects to the work I do professionally, building retention systems at high-growth brands. The side projects aren’t side projects. They’re the same muscle trained from a different angle.
What I’ve learned about myself through all of this is something simple. I’m someone who doesn’t wait. I build systems and I follow through. I start small and I iterate. I look forward to the start of the week and to getting things done and to building. It energizes me in a way I don’t think I could explain to someone who doesn’t feel it.
But there’s a deeper thing underneath all of that energy, and I’m still learning how to talk about it. My dreams are so big that the work in front of me always feels insufficient. I can feel the distance between where I am and where I’m going, and it’s that gap, not the accomplishments, that keeps me moving.
I don’t think that gap ever closes and I don’t think it’s supposed to. I think the people who build things, who really build things, carry it with them everywhere. It’s the thing that wakes you up early and keeps you at your desk late. It’s not ambition exactly. It’s closer to a kind of faith that if you keep going and keep compounding and keep showing up for the work even when no one’s watching, something takes shape that you couldn’t have predicted from the beginning.
You are a true hustler. Respect.