It started early. Watching my father build a new house with his own two hands. And watching my grandfather fix typewriters at the dinner table every day after school.

Then, one night my family's own dinner table was flipped upside down — and suddenly everything changed. A childhood fractured by a divorce of Shakespearean proportions left me struggling in my adolescence, barely finishing high school with a GED, floating around with no real direction or aim on the horizon.

My first job at 17 was in a restaurant. Five years later I was working in the busiest Applebee's in the world in Bradenton, Florida. A year later I was back in Michigan. What would follow were years of feeling directionless, hopeless, and undervalued at every single job I had. I fell into a pattern of depression, drink, drugs and juvenile debauchery, the kind of lifestyle that, unbeknownst to me, is often accompanied and embodied in the employees and clientele of the service industry.

But then, something happened that would ultimately change the course of my life. A conversation one night with a family friend led to an unusual offer, an offer that a guy with no money and no job and on his last five cigarettes couldn't refuse. Stated clear as a bell that night were the words, "I'll pay you $100 bucks a day, to sit there, watch and get high."

What I was watching for were people stealing. And what they were stealing was money. And that money was derived from the sale of illegal marijuana, from a newly formed marijuana consignment shop. The two owners were mutual friends. In the beginning they hired three guys to run the store. But soon, and despite an overwhelming amount of business, the two owners began to notice that they were losing money each month. Now to the tune of around $4,000. On my third day sitting and watching and getting high for free, I watched one of the guys take the money bag home. It contained roughly $1,150. When we all returned to work the next day, he had the bag, but the money was gone. Out of this turmoil and deceit, I quickly rose up and became the brains of the whole operation. Within the next year we made somewhere close to $1 million.

I thought I was looking at a successful career in cannabis.

Then, in 2013, a raid on my house and a federal indictment stripped me of everything — my identity, my hard work, my possessions, my plans, but most importantly my freedom. The next three years were difficult, to say the least. And not because I had to all of a sudden get sober and follow the law, but because I had to learn to change my behavior, and how I perceived the value in myself.

But that change didn't happen overnight. And it didn't happen at the end of three years on parole. And it didn't happen when I achieved things later that I never thought I would.

It happened in my darkest hour. In January of 2024, I fell off my dad's back porch while pulling snow off his roof. I crushed my S-1 vertebra, leaving me later in unimaginable pain, pain that I never thought existed. Two months later, I learned that someone I loved very much had died of alcoholism. A month later, on my last day of community college, I learned that a close childhood friend of mine had accidentally overdosed on fentanyl the night before. He was supposed to be getting his life back on track, and I had been helping him to do so for months.

Five days later I quit drinking, and while still lying in bed in unmanageable pain, facing eviction, and completely out of money, I sat down to do one of the most painful things I have ever done, and that was to write a letter of resignation to my Professor, giving up my TA position at Western Michigan University, and subsequently dropping all of my classes. The last two years of my life have felt like a slow crawl back up a mountain. Over the last year I managed to fix my back, oddly enough, working for FedEx as a delivery driver.

But I paid for that too. Life, by its very nature, is a paradox, and so with every great gain, there is a loss, and with every great loss, there's a gain. I lost, at the age of 42, the opportunity to be a father, by no fault of my own. And in that void, something grew in me, a relentless, instinctual drive to fix what's cruel and broken and inefficient in the world. A man of focus...