Three Months of Killing Everything

I should probably feel behind.

It's been three months since I killed the majority of my businesses. Three months of working 20 hours a week.

I don't feel behind. I feel like I can see for the first time in years.

The calendar

My calendar went from six to eight meetings a day down to one. Sometimes zero.

The meetings I do have aren't scheduled three weeks in advance — if I need to talk to my engineering team or my ops team, I just call them and we jump on.

No calendar theater. No "let's find 30 minutes next week."

I go to the office every day. Not to impress anyone. For clarity.

When you work for yourself, the boundaries dissolve.

Work bleeds into home, home bleeds into work, and eventually you're living inside one grey zone where nothing has edges.

The office gives me a wall between the two. I need that wall.

The subway is empty on Fridays. People have clearly made their choice.

But for someone who works for himself, showing up somewhere specific helps me think more clearly.

Work is work. Home is home. They don't need to be the same place.

Speed

This is the part that surprised me most.

I used to need permissions for everything.

Warm intros to investors in Los Altos. Getting past executive assistants and receptionists. Coordinating across time zones with people who had three layers of gatekeepers.

Now? Something comes up at 11 am. By noon, the whole team is briefed and it's either executing or already done.

Something we no longer need — a project, a direction, a commitment — tossed in minutes.

No committee. No process document. No "let's revisit this at the next all-hands."

I always thought speed came from grinding harder. Working longer. Being more intense.

It doesn't. Speed comes from having less. Less to coordinate. Less to maintain. Less to pretend matters.

People

This is harder to talk about, but it's true.

For years I was optimizing for status and money. Those were the filters. Certain people felt important because they had one or both. Certain people didn't. It changed how I saw everyone and everything.

Once I stepped out of that game — actually stepped out, not just took a vacation — something shifted.

Some of the people I'd admired were just loud. People who happened to have status or money but were losing at the things that actually matter. I'd been too deep in the game to notice.

That clarity — seeing people for who they actually are, not what they represent in your status calculation — you don't get that by stepping back for a weekend.

You get it from removing the thing that was distorting your vision in the first place.

The question I keep coming back to

Without my employees, my team, and my work people — how many real people do I actually have in my life?

It's not an easy question.

Years of startups, of working with different people, of seeing deals go sideways and partnerships dissolve — I trust fewer people than I used to. I've built a wall. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it's there.

I don't know if this is a 27-year-old-turning-28 thing, or if it's just the natural result of the last few years. But I think it matters more than any business decision I'll make this year.

What's left

When the noise stops, you hear what's actually there. And sometimes what's actually there is quieter than you expected.

But that's the point. The nutrition changed. It's not hustle anymore.

It's not meetings or MRR or the feeling of being in demand.

It's time.

Time to think. Time to see clearly. Time to act on what you see.

Most people's calendars are full and their thinking is empty. That's not productivity. That's avoidance with a schedule.

Three months in, I'm not going back.