Hi, I’m Justin.

I write one essay every Saturday for ambitious people living and working on their own terms.

For more than a decade, I lived the kind of life ambitious people are told to want. I helped build two companies past $1B in valuation and raise more than $300M in venture capital. By 33, I was Chief Revenue Officer at a venture-backed company, making more money than I’d ever imagined.

And quietly falling apart.

I was burned out, anxious, drinking too much, and increasingly convinced that if I kept going, I might not see fifty.

Then one afternoon, in our house in Los Angeles, I had a panic attack so severe I ended up on the kitchen floor. My wife, Jennifer, called 911. The paramedics came. And by the time they were standing in our home, it was impossible to keep pretending this was just stress.

When it passed, I knew that the life I was building wasn’t the one I wanted to live.

So Jennifer and I quit our high-paying jobs with almost no plan. We bought a house in the mountains of Upstate New York, drove across the country, and started our lives over.

In the years since, I’ve built a $15M one-person business with no employees and no investors, and an audience of 1.5M+ people has followed along. But that’s not the real story.

The real story is that I got my life back, slowly, unglamorously, one difficult choice at a time.

Today, I spend that life writing.

Every Saturday, I publish one essay about the choices that made it possible: leaving the obvious path, redefining ambition, using money for freedom instead of performance, and building something of your own without letting it consume you.

These are the choices that can look wrong from the outside and still be right for the life you actually want.

If that’s the kind of conversation you’ve been wanting to have with yourself, I’d love to have you with us.