The Dark Is Where I Learned to See

The dark journey is the only one worth going through.

I can only speak about it as an entrepreneur, because that is the path I have chosen since the age of 24. But it was not because I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I’m not even sure I had heard of the word yet.

I became a subcontractor, a real estate agent, simply because I did not want someone else controlling my time or my income.

I went to St. John’s University, and I decided I would be a math major because it was the only subject I never really had to study for and I would still get As. Then, when I took the first few classes, I got smacked in the face.

I did not know it then, but I was really far behind academically.

Although I always found school easy, I had spent most of my childhood at the park or on the soccer field and never spent any decent amount of time with books, only what school required.

I went to school in Utah for the sixth grade, and my aunt tells me she remembers me getting home from school, dropping off my backpack, and going out with my friends to play soccer. She said she never saw me do homework or study, but I still managed to get straight As.

But back to the smack in the face.

I realized during that first year at St. John’s that I had never seen some of these math subjects before in my life. I had never even taken calculus, and there is a reason for that.

I went to high school at Newtown High School in Elmhurst, Queens, for all four years. That was the first time I managed to stay at one school for longer than one year.

Not because I would get kicked out, but because my parents were never stable, and I was always going back and forth between my parents, who were always fighting although they were separated.

Newtown High School was one of those dropout factories, with around a 50 percent graduation rate. There were fights every day. Students would have sex in secret spots. Teachers would get themselves put in headlocks by some of the bigger kids who might have been held back two or three years.

I saw someone grab snow from the window ledge and throw a snowball at the teacher while he was writing on the blackboard.

I saw a lot of crazy shit.

So I didn’t really learn anything.

I think I was more concerned with survival than I was with learning, excelling, or planning for the future. The only plan I had was: make it out of here without getting into any scraps with someone.

There were no entrepreneurial societies, incubators of any sort, or anything like that that you might hear about, or that might be normal at better, more privileged schools.

Newtown High School felt like a pre-juvenile-delinquent center. Even the building and lunchroom were designed almost exactly like one.

The system is designed that way, and most people never really make it out to tell the tale. But when the few who do make it out share their story, people don’t really care. They can’t relate. It does not concern them anyway.

So I got into real estate because I did not want anyone controlling my future.

But I was stepping into entrepreneurship and did not even know it.

And here is the thing about entrepreneurship that I did not know and only found out much later:

Entrepreneurship is the culmination of your mental, spiritual, and emotional health and perspective.

Looking back at it, I realize now that I never took a salaried job because entrepreneurship was the only real way I could develop the most of my potential and abilities, even if it was like walking through hell, walking on hot coals barefoot.

I had no choice.

I was dealt the cards I was dealt, and I played my hand.

I never folded, no matter how shitty I thought the hand was that I was dealt.

But through the darkness is where I learned how to see.

The dark is where I came to see the light for the first time.

If I had an easy life, let’s say I was born into a married family in the suburbs with all of the privileges, I think I still would have felt empty inside.

I believe we come to Earth as spirits with a spiritual purpose that involves our consciousness.

I had always been conscious enough to know that my current situation was only for the moment, even if most of the time I was flooded with anxiety about being stuck forever, like I had seen some of my relatives get stuck at jobs for decades, being average and mediocre.

I know I can come off judgmental sometimes, and I have been told that, but that is not my intention.

I am not talking about people’s character when I say someone is mediocre. I am referring to potential and realized output in the marketplace.

And that is not everyone’s path either. It does not make you greater or lesser.

But I mention this only because I feel that my path is entrepreneurship. So if I refer to someone as being mediocre, it is in reference to entrepreneurship.

World athletes, doctors, mothers, priests—they are not entrepreneurs in that sense, and they are equally as powerful and necessary in the world.

I am not coming from judgment at all. I just want to be understood.

If anything, I am only judging myself, my progress, and my shortcomings.

I don’t expect most people to understand me either, and validation is not what I am seeking.

I sought it out for most of my life from others and only achieved validation when I validated myself.

In other words, I surrendered to the person I was and the person I am every day in my current state. And every day, I have the gift of another day to improve at my craft and as a person.

To gain more wisdom and patience.

To be more expressive and less reactive.

Entrepreneurship has exposed me.

I have had days where the anxiety was so bad that all I could do was pray.

I remember being at the park with my 18-month-old son, watching him play, laugh, and smile while the anxiety ate me from the inside.

And the decision is always there for us:

Get a job, or keep fighting.

Keep dreaming.

Keep working for yourself.

This is where my faith comes from. I have to be faithful by default because the polar opposite is fear.

I was thrown into entrepreneurship out of survival, and through cleaning apartments with Margoth in Manhattan, I saw that other people did not struggle the way I did with money.

Then I decided I wanted some of it too.

But that was too shallow.

And that is not what entrepreneurship is really about for me.

So I do not consider myself an entrepreneur back then.

Only now do I consider myself one, because I am consciously building products to solve major problems that can bring new jobs to the masses in existing and fragmented industries.

I only got here by the grace of God.

People have always told me I could have gone down so many wrong paths, being an abandoned child at the age of 10, growing up in the streets of New York in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

I’ve been guided and protected this whole time.

I was born into a system I was never supposed to make it out from.

But now the darkness has made me understand the world in ways that many privileged people never have the opportunity to.

I want to tell my story, and the story of the world and how it operates through systems and capitalism.

But I am not going to tell my story with words.

I am going to tell it with the products and companies I build.

My companies are for the forgotten people.

The people left for dead.

The ones who were thrown into the system to die a slow death.

This one is for the ones they forgot.