Already Whole

Before You Begin

This book started as notes.

Short ones, mostly. Written late at night after the kids were asleep, or early in the morning before anyone else was awake. Some were written on a train. Some were written right after a conversation with my wife.

I posted them online over the past three years, on Substack, on LinkedIn, on X. A few of them reached thousands of people. Most reached a handful. I kept writing anyway.

When I looked back at all of them together, I noticed something: the same lessons kept showing up, again and again, just in different forms. That’s how I knew they were real.

A little about me:

I spent my twenties trying to become an architect. I failed the visa lottery multiple times before I finally got the chance to stay and work. In my thirties, with a newborn at home, I left architecture for product design after more than three hundred job applications and more rejections than I can count.

Eventually, I broke into tech. A few years later, I published three books and made my first dollar online. Then I started writing a newsletter called Design with AI, launched my first course, and kept putting in the reps. Eventually, my side income surpassed my full-time salary.

Then came a harder decision: leaving my corporate job to bet on myself.

The chapters that follow trace that journey roughly in order:

Changing careers, writing in public, learning to start before I felt ready, leaving my job, learning what business really is, and then the harder lessons about fear, money, family, and slowing down.