I Slept in the Studio

I. Where it starts

Puerto Rico, and a house full of music.

My grandmother raised me, lovingly, until I was eight. She was into the old Puerto Rican music — the classics, Julio Iglesias, that world. My mother and her sisters were into Maná and Ricky Martin. Everybody sang at church. Music was simply in the air of the house, the way it is in a lot of Caribbean families, and I never remember deciding to love it.

What arrived next was American pop, because that’s what commercially permeated the island. Fifth grade: Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, NSYNC. My first cassette was the first Backstreet Boys album. My first CD purchase was Bon Jovi’s Crush — which will matter later in ways I could not have predicted at ten years old.

Then the taste of an entire school shifted the way it does at that age, which is to say violently and all at once. Half the kids went to Blink-182, Limp Bizkit, Sum 41. The other half went to Eminem, OutKast, Missy Elliott. I fell hard into the rock half.

And there was a reason for that, which I’ll state once and not dwell on.

When I was eight my mother married a man who became my abusive stepfather. Until then I had been straight A’s, top of the class, honors — a kid who found school easy. After we moved into that house, life got a great deal more difficult and confusing, and I did not have anyone to talk to about any of it.

Music got louder. That’s what happened. The shift in my taste toward rock wasn’t aesthetic; it was where the feelings went when there was nowhere else to put them.

II. Becoming a singer by accident

Sixth grade, I performed “As Long As You Love Me” at a school talent show.

Not long after, I was performing “The Kids Aren’t Alright” with a full band of teenagers.

I became a singer because nobody else would do it. We were all guys, and none of us would dare. Then my drummer’s sister said: you have a good voice, maybe you should sing. I said okay. I was thirteen. I have loved it ever since.

What followed was years of confidence swinging between extremes — genuinely cocky one month, absolutely worthless and incapable the next, with very little in between. That eventually settled into something moderate and stable, but not until much later, and only through proper training. If you’re young and living on that seesaw right now, it isn’t a character flaw. It’s the normal shape of learning to perform in public.

III. The machine that changed everything

Around sixteen, my stepfather’s brother gave me a Roland VS-480 — a digital multitrack recorder.

That machine is the reason I have a career. I taught myself to record, mix, edit, and overdub on it. I recorded my own band. Then I started recording and producing other local artists and bands — and they loved it, which was the first evidence I’d ever had that this could be something.

I ended up singing background vocals and harmonies on their material, writing with them, doing the things I’d eventually do professionally. I had no idea that splits existed. No concept of publishing, ownership, or arrangements. I got whatever quick cash there was, if anything, and it never occurred to me to ask for more.

I don’t resent that. It was a fantastic education. But it is also exactly why I now write about this so insistently → — I did the work and I gave the ownership away because nobody told me there was any to give.

IV. Two schools, and what each one was actually worth

At seventeen, everyone in my class was preparing for college and the question arrived: what are you going to do?

First I went to Inter American University in San Germán, studying guitar performance. I lasted a semester.

The problem was strange and specific: my auditory memory was too good. By the time I had to perform a sight-reading test, I had already memorised the piece from hearing it once or twice, however complex it was. I wasn’t reading. I was recalling. The curriculum couldn’t reach me, and I could tell it wasn’t giving me anything.

Production was clearly the greater opportunity anyway, so I went to Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida to study recording arts. Their pitch was an accelerated eighteen-month program with a motto I still basically agree with: get you into the real world as fast as possible, with as much experience as possible. One class per month, straight through.

I bought all the books. I learned as much about mixing and production as I could absorb. Genuinely valuable, and I’d do that part again.

Some other things about it, honestly:

The gender ratio was shocking. In a class of about a hundred men, there were maybe one to three women — and some of them dropped out. I noticed it then and I notice it more now.

And then there was the Burger King moment. Second-to-last month, in the session recording class — the one where you’re supposed to be in a major studio experiencing the real thing. First day, the teacher stands up, holds something above his head so the whole class can see, and says: these are Burger King applications. Ninety-nine percent of you are going to need to apply the moment your student loans kick in.

I remember thinking: I wish you had told me that before you sold me on attending.

Around the same time we were told that if we wanted to succeed we’d need to move to Los Angeles, Miami, or New York — here are the specific places, here is where the studios are. The story going into the curriculum was very different from the story coming out of it.

Was it worth forty thousand dollars? No. I’d have valued it at maybe fifteen to twenty. Possibly ten. I know people who attended other schools at a third of the cost and reached exactly the same places I did, which is frustrating, and which is simply true.

If Full Sail’s marketing hadn’t been so aggressive and so well produced, I might never have come to the mainland at all. So even the part I’d criticise is part of why I’m here. Both things are true.

And one thing it genuinely gave me: the career development department got me an internship. Everything else was unresponsive; that department wasn’t. Whether that single connection was worth forty thousand dollars is a question I still turn over — but it happened, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

V. Three thousand miles, and then nowhere to sleep

I bought a used car with student loan money. Terrible idea. It worked.

I drove from Florida to Los Angeles in one shot. Three thousand miles across the country, alone, eighteen years old. I got to Hollywood, saw the sign, and celebrated with stars in my eyes.

And then thought: where am I staying?

I called my friend Jon from Puerto Rico, who was in LA staying with someone else — the first time I’d encountered that arrangement, because where I’m from, people had their own place. I’d assumed he had somewhere I could stay. He did, for four or five days.

After that, I had to figure it out. And figuring it out meant sleeping in my car.

It didn’t stop me. I sat in that car on my laptop applying to every place I could find, trying to get an internship, an anything.

One interview came through: Chalice Recording Studios in Hollywood.

I walked in with a level of excitement and positive attitude that I think is genuinely what stuck out to them, because it wasn’t skill — I didn’t have any yet. They asked if I could start the next day. I said absolutely, and showed up two hours early.

I was ready to do anything, with a smile, as long as I kept learning.

VI. What an internship actually is, and what it’s actually worth

Let me be exact about what “intern” meant there: sweeping leaves, cleaning toilets, picking up food, general assistance for everyone in the building.

And also: walking into one room and there’s Kanye West. Another room, Lady Gaga — this is 2008, 2009, before anyone knew her name. Another room, Trent Reznor, working on his next record.

That’s the trade. You do the least glamorous work available in exchange for proximity to the highest level of the craft, at an age where you couldn’t buy that access at any price.

I felt lucky. And I was where things were happening.

Eventually I asked the studio manager whether I could just sleep at the studio. There were showers, it was open nearly twenty-four hours. So I lived at the studio for a few months until I could afford a hostel — the Banana Bungalow in Hollywood, which turned out to be a wonderful international place where I met people from all over the world, got on the party bus, and finally experienced LA as something other than a parking spot.

The night someone opened the door

There’s a detail from those months that I still laugh about, and which I recently discovered has outlived me.

I was asleep in the Studio B lounge, sometime around one in the morning. The door opened. There was a figure standing in it — a short man, backlit, someone I couldn’t make out from where I was.

He looked at me, entirely unbothered, and said: “Oh, cool.”

Then the door closed.

It was Prince. Someone from the studio was giving him a late-night tour of the rooms, and he had opened the lounge door to find an intern asleep on the furniture. He rented the place for several weeks after that — so I suppose he took a sleeping intern as evidence that the studio was a serious operation.

I want to be accurate about my own experience of that moment: I didn’t know who it was at the time. I was asleep, he was backlit, and I registered a short man being completely unbothered by my existence. The identification came afterward, from the people giving the tour.

And here’s the part that got me. Recently Julie Huart posted an Instagram video from a visit to Chalice, in which a current employee tells this story — the one about the guy who woke up in the Studio B lounge. It’s now folklore in that building, passed down to people who weren’t there and don’t know whose story it is.

I left a comment. Yep. That was me.

And here’s the part I want to correct before anyone assumes it: I didn’t experience that period as a tragedy. I was genuinely stoked.

I was sleeping in a studio that felt like the Four Seasons compared to my car — free food, free drinks, in the building where the records I loved were being made. Green as it gets, still basically a kid at eighteen or nineteen — but focused entirely on the positives, in a kind of honeymoon phase where very little else mattered.

And I noticed something about how the people around me responded, which has stayed with me. They didn’t feel sorry for me. They had compassion, sure — but mostly what I saw on their faces was something closer to impressed. Like: damn, this guy actually wants it. If anything, it seemed to push other people around me to work harder and give more of themselves too.

So the honest version of the lesson isn’t “everyone’s legend was secretly a tragedy.” It’s this: what looks like hardship from the outside can be lived as pure excitement from the inside, if the thing you’re chasing is worth it to you. Those showers and the free food weren’t compensation for hardship. To eighteen-year-old me, they were the win.

That doesn’t mean every version of this story ends the same way, or that I’d recommend the car and the couch-surfing as a plan. It means the story is more interesting than “hard times, and then it got better” — because for me, in the moment, it already felt like it had gotten better.

The money: runner was minimum wage. Assistant engineer, when I got there, was twelve dollars and fifty cents an hour — nothing to brag about in Los Angeles. But at assistant engineer you’re in the room with the clients while they record and mix. No more food runs. Just the work.

VII. The thing that proves the degree isn’t the gate

Here’s the observation this whole essay is built around, and I want it stated plainly.

While I was rising through those ranks with a forty-thousand-dollar degree, other people were rising through the exact same ranks without one.

One in particular arrived at nineteen. No degree. Came in as an intern while I was already a hired runner. He went on to win a Grammy engineering on a Taylor Swift album, working with Ryan Tedder, and to work with a long list of superstars.

Same ladder. Same studio. No paper.

That is the proof, and I watched it happen from the next rung. If you have the other things — the attitude, the willingness, the ear, the ability to be someone people want in the room — the credential is not the gate. It was never the gate.

VIII. Getting fired, which I deserved

Chalice let me go.

I remember crying in front of the management staff, because I had put so much of myself into it. I think they were shocked to see that; I think there may even have been some regret around the decision. They stuck with it anyway.

And they were right to. I was nineteen, twenty years old, the whole experience was going over my head, and my attitude was not the kindest. I was egotistical. There was an enormous amount I hadn’t learned, and almost none of it was technical.

I spent months afterward depressed in a bedroom, applying for things that didn’t pan out, auditioning for singing and acting work through connections and getting nowhere — because I was still too shy, still too far inside my own shell.

If you take one thing from this section: the reason I lost that job had nothing to do with my skill and everything to do with how I was to be around. Nobody teaches that, and it is most of the job.

IX. Serenity, a band, and the second collapse

One of the Chalice managers moved to a studio called Serenity Sound, owned by Sully Erna of Godsmack. She called: you did such a great job — why don’t you be our chief engineer here?

So at twenty-something I was chief engineer at a studio hosting Justin Timberlake, Rita Ora before she was famous, Kid Cudi, Snoop Dogg, Godsmack themselves — with Korn as neighbours.

I also started a band there: Impact Karma, with genuinely exceptional musicians. We made a four-song EP that was half bedroom recording and half multimillion-dollar studio, got some press, and taught me something I’ve never forgotten: a band is a marriage. It’s dating. It’s managing a family. Nobody warns you.

Then the studio ran into financial trouble, the manager transitioned out of the industry, and it ended.

Which is the lesson of this section: at that age, in this business, stability is the scarce thing. Not talent, not opportunity — stability. Twice now the ground had moved for reasons that had nothing to do with my work.

X. The voicemail that changed my life

I got a voicemail from the Chalice manager: there’s a guy named Adam Anders looking for someone like you. I think you’d be a great candidate.

I called back immediately. Yes. Where, when, how. I’ll do it.

Then I did something I’d recommend to anyone. I researched him, found him on Facebook, and sent a message that was heartfelt but real — about what I actually saw as our potential together. Not flattery. An argument.

His assistant called the next day. I interviewed. I was hired on the spot.

And this was the structural change that mattered most in my career, though I didn’t understand it at the time: for the first time I was hired by a producer rather than by a studio. Adam had booked both Chalice buildings to work on Glee — hundreds of songs over the years, then films, then more.

I started as a digital editor, because they needed vocals out fast, demos turned around quickly, backgrounds cleaned and organised. You always start in the humble position. That’s true everywhere in this business, no matter what you’ve done before. Responsibility arrives as people get comfortable with you.

It arrived fast. Within months: raises, then engineering and producing the demos, then collaborating with Adam directly — including making sure Ricky Martin sounded right on the Spanish-language material, since Adam doesn’t speak Spanish.

XI. Twenty-two, and the high life

Glee is what it is. It was a major door.

I went from financial struggle to genuine thriving: company laptop, company phone, company car, new wardrobe, new apartment. Respect and admiration from people who hadn’t noticed me before. One of the Chalice managers said to me: you drive a better car than I do — and I’ve been doing this for decades.

I posted a photo from the balcony of the W Hotel in South Beach while we were working on Rock of Ages, looking straight out at the ocean, and everyone I knew said the same thing: that’s quite the rise.

Twenty-two years old. Picked up in a limo. Food budgets so absurd I never cooked or picked up a meal again — it arrived on a silver plate, whether that was steak and caviar or ice cream. More money than I knew what to do with.

And then the thing that doubled my income, which happened because I opened my mouth. On Rock of Ages I told Adam: I can probably help you with this — give me a chance. He did. He was surprised, because producers and engineers don’t usually arrive with that skill. From then on I sang on nearly everything we worked on.

He also brought me into SAG-AFTRA, which changed the economics of that work permanently — as I’ve written about elsewhere →.

XII. What the high life actually cost

Three things happened that year that I want on the record, because the highlight reel leaves them out.

The taxes. At the end of the year I actually did the math, and it discouraged me. Roughly three months of the year, I was effectively working for free — that’s what the total tax bill worked out to once I added it up. Nobody had explained that to me. First time I’d really encountered it.

And combined with the cost of living in LA, a six-figure salary didn’t feel like one. On paper I was making real money. In practice, a third of the year’s labor was gone before I ever felt it, and what was left had to survive one of the most expensive cities in the country. That gap between the number on the offer and the number in my account is a lesson nobody teaches anyone starting out, and it should be.

The hours. I was working sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, for eight to ten months at a stretch. People either refuse to believe that or find it completely normal — it’s always one of the two extremes.

I knew it wasn’t healthy. I didn’t feel like I had a life. I was starting to struggle with mental health and emotional stability, and that’s when I first started paying attention to what I actually needed to take care of myself.

So I asked not to work more than ten hours a day. That request was received as surprising — and I understand why. Entrepreneurs have a genuinely different internal sense of what’s normal about work, hours, and balance. I don’t hold it against anyone.

And then the thing that made me leave. I watched other people brought in above me, into roles I believed I was ready for and wasn’t being given.

Years later I understood exactly why: I didn’t have the communication and leadership skills. I developed those eventually. I didn’t have them then.

But impatience got the better of me, and I left the Glee project after contributing to several hundred songs across a number of albums.

XIII. Freelance, and everything I hadn’t learned

I came off at the peak, which was lucky — I was in high demand immediately, and the work came through personal recommendation: Giorgio Moroder, Richie Sambora, Niko Bolas, Humberto Gatica, Claudia Brant, plus agencies, jingle houses, and vocal contractors.

The whole world opened up.

And I discovered I had no idea how to run a business. Now I had to do the marketing. Build the website. Put myself out there. Negotiate the deals. Set the rates. Things I had never once looked at, all arriving simultaneously.

It was overwhelming. And at twenty-five, I was also in what I considered at the time the relationship of my life, trying to run a household and build a business at once.

Then medical complications in the family, and emotional and mental circumstances that got beyond me, and everything crashed.

XIV. Eighteen months in a car in Arizona

I ended up homeless, living in my car in Arizona, for over a year and a half.

I want that stated plainly and without drama, because I think a lot of people in this industry have a version of it and almost nobody says so. The rise in Section XI and the collapse in this one are the same career, four years apart.

But I want to be precise about what actually broke, because the loss of the relationship was the real wound. Everything else — the business pressure, the lack of credit, the cash-flow problems — piled on top of that and is what pushed me over the edge. The two things happened together, and together is what did it.

And the business pressure was self-inflicted in a specific way I couldn’t see at the time. I had never studied marketing or sales. None of it. Which meant I was entirely dependent on personal referrals for work — and referrals are a fine engine when they’re so abundant you can’t keep up with the traffic. They were, briefly, at the start. They never stayed that way. They never do.

Lead generation, cash flow, marketing — I had no framework for any of it, so when the referrals thinned out, I had nothing underneath them.

And here’s the part I have to own honestly. As things got worse, I got better at blaming the industry and worse at seeing my own responsibility in any of it. I’m done. I love music, I hate the music business, I never want to touch it again — that became the whole story I told myself. It wasn’t the industry’s fault that I’d never learned to run a business. That part was mine.

That combination — grief, plus a business I didn’t know how to run, plus a story that let me blame everyone but myself — is how I ended up homeless.

And digital marketing is what I found afterward, not a plan I had going in. It was an escape hatch, and I took it.

Online courses found me through social media ads and I actually took them. Chris Do’s videos on YouTube were genuinely excellent — and specifically because of what they taught me about pricing value instead of hours, and about choosing which clients to serve based on the problems I could actually solve for them.

I decided to start doing website and branding work, because it was in enormous demand during that period of social and web growth.

The thing I’d already been told, and hadn’t heard

Here’s what makes that lesson painful in hindsight: I’d already been given it, years earlier, in music.

Niko Bolas said something to me once that I didn’t understand at the time. He’d looked at what I’d charged someone for a piece of work and said: “one day I hope you get the balls to ask what you’re actually worth.”

I remember thinking — really?

And I got it half-right. I assumed he meant raise your hourly rate. So I did. And it worked: some clients complained and left, some celebrated and stayed, and I ended up making more money in less time. That’s a real improvement and most people never even get that far.

But it wasn’t the lesson. The lesson was that the hour is the wrong unit entirely.

When I finally understood value pricing, everything changed. I went from building two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar websites to three-thousand-dollar websites. Then five thousand. Eventually forty and fifty thousand dollars — and not for a website, but for entire branding and social media packages, with project management and video production built in.

Same person. Same hands. Nothing about my ability changed in that window. What changed was what I was selling and how I described it.

And that’s when I started thinking in systems rather than in single deliverables — which is the shift underneath all of it. A website is a thing you make. A brand system with content, campaigns, and video attached is a business outcome you’re responsible for, and those are priced completely differently because they’re worth completely different amounts to the person buying.

The whole economics reference on this masthead → exists because of this stretch of my life. I learned it in the wrong industry, expensively, years after someone had already told me.

Within a few months I was Airbnb-hopping while working from a laptop — branding, 360 campaigns, working with coaches, service providers, financial advisers, anyone.

Eventually I had my own apartment again: twenty-second floor in Dallas, panoramic view. Tennis meetups, dance classes, Tower Club events — visibility, a social life, and a much more aggressive push on building the client base, all at once.

And notice what that list actually represents, because it’s the exact opposite of Los Angeles. In LA I was working sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, for months at a stretch. In Dallas I had the work-life balance I’d been asking for and not getting — enough room to build friendships, to enjoy things, to actually live rather than only produce.

I’d gone from a car to a view. I mention it not as a victory lap but because it happened faster than I expected once I had a skill people would pay properly for — and because the thing that got me there wasn’t music, which is a fact I had to sit with for a long time.

And it was the education I should have had at the start. I learned sales and follow-up through Cardone University. I eventually took a marketing management course at Harvard Extension School, specifically to check whether what I’d learned online matched what traditional education taught.

It didn’t match. The online material was ahead — by my assessment roughly ten to fifteen years, even with an excellent teacher in the room.

That work became a digital marketing agency running thirteen independent contractors across photography, design, copywriting, web design and development, video production, scripting, paid ads, and programmatic buying — while I learned to do each of those things myself as well as I could.

Multi-six figures, multiple years. Considerably more money than music had ever paid me, which is its own kind of addictive.

XV. Why I left music, honestly

I wasn’t making music during those years, and it wasn’t only circumstance. I had become bitter about the industry.

The specifics matter, because they’re the reason this publication exists:

I wasn’t getting credited. Vocal production, songwriting, translations — work I did that didn’t appear anywhere with my name on it.

I wasn’t given the green light to build my own relationships. I had proximity to executives at major labels and was gatekept from them by the producers who had hired me.

And the question that follows from both: am I supposed to simply wait my turn — while not being credited for what I actually do, and while the family I want to build gets further away?

It felt like an indignifying injustice. That, plus everything else happening in my life, was too much.

Digital marketing offered autonomy, authority over my own direction, and ease. So I took it.

XVI. Coming back

Eventually I took a sabbatical — about two years — to work on healing and internal growth. It came about oddly: through doing digital marketing for a client whose entire business was that kind of work. I looked at what they did and thought, oh. This is the work I need to do.

I became a team lead inside Mantalks Alliance, a men’s personal-development organisation, and did a great deal of nervous-system and childhood-trauma work.

But the part that actually changed things was simpler and harder than any of that. Two years of time with nature and time with myself, working on one specific thing: removing the dependency of making money in order to feel good.

Learning to be kind — to myself, and to other people — regardless of whether any money was involved, and regardless of the amount. That sounds soft written down. It is the least soft thing I have ever done, and everything after it rests on it.

Because here’s what I understood by the end: for most of my twenties, my sense of my own worth moved with my income. Twenty-two on a balcony in South Beach, I was worth something. Twenty-six in a car in Arizona, I wasn’t. Same person, same skills, same hands — and I had let a number do all the deciding.

You cannot build anything durable on that. Not a business, not a body of work, and not a life.

And when that settled, my love for music came back — in my early thirties, with a flame I’d never had before.

But I knew one thing clearly: if I came back, it would be on my own terms. With the balance I actually needed. Supporting the life and priorities I’d chosen. Not at the mercy of “industry standards,” not at the mercy of anyone gatekeeping me, not at the mercy of anything.

Which is how I found the thing this entire publication is built on: the merging of business, entrepreneurship, and marketing with the creative work. Not as a compromise. As the thing that makes the creative work survivable.

And it’s how I ended up doing what I do now — production work on my own terms, and mentorship: working with artists, producers, and songwriters through programs I built rather than through rooms somebody else controls.

Which, if you’ve read this far, you’ll recognise as the thing I needed at eighteen and could not find anywhere.

And I do it from Gainesville, Florida.

I have a fully-fledged home studio that produces recordings and mixes at the same standard as a Hollywood room, and I work remotely with people anywhere in the world. The industry moved to embrace remote collaboration, and that single shift changed the economics of my entire life — because the cost of living and the tax situation now work for me instead of against me.

Sit with what that undoes. In Section IV, I was told in a classroom that if I wanted to succeed I would have to move to Los Angeles, Miami, or New York, and here are the specific studios. In Section XII, a third of my year’s labor disappeared before I ever saw it, in a city I could barely afford to sleep in.

Neither of those is true for me anymore. Not because I beat them — because the industry changed underneath them.

And the last one is the strangest. I once slept on the floor of a world-class studio because I had nowhere else to go. I now own a room that does the same work.

“But what if you’d stayed?”

I get this one a lot. Wouldn’t you have made it bigger if you’d stayed in Hollywood? More success, more awards, at least more nominations?

Maybe. I’m not going to pretend otherwise — proximity is real, and I’ve written enough about how these rooms work to know that being in them matters.

But here’s what I’d put against it. I’m happier. I’m healthier. I’m more stable. I’m still making music I’m proud of and still love doing it.

And I’m making more of my own music now than I ever did in Los Angeles — because in LA I was mostly making other people’s, to make rent, in a city expensive enough that making rent was the whole organising principle of my life.

That’s the trade nobody puts on the poster. You can be at the centre of the industry, working on records people will hear for decades, and be doing almost none of your own work — because the cost of standing there consumes the time you’d need for it.

And the discovery underneath all of it, which I genuinely did not expect: you can be deeply happy and fulfilled doing this work outside of Los Angeles. Not settling for less — actually fulfilled.

When you’re inside that bubble, it does not feel like a bubble. It feels like the only room where anything real happens, and everywhere else feels like giving up. That belief is very useful to the people who benefit from you holding it, and it is not true.

I don’t know what the alternative version of me achieved. I know this one is writing his own songs.

XVII. What I’d actually tell you

Real life has been the best university I ever attended. That’s the result of accounting. The most valuable things I know were learned in rooms, on jobs, from courses that cost a fraction of a degree, and from failing publicly and expensively.

You do not need the paper. I watched a nineteen-year-old with no degree climb the same ladder I was on and win a Grammy. The credential is not the gate, and anyone telling a teenager otherwise is selling something.

But you do need the education, and it will come from somewhere. Mine came from a Roland recorder, a studio floor, a hostel, a laid-off afternoon, three thousand miles of driving, a voicemail, a Facebook message, eighteen months in a car, and a marketing course I took to check my own work.

And the skills that actually moved my career were never technical. Being someone people want in the room. Communicating clearly. Following up. Asking for the thing. Saying I can probably help you with this — give me a chance, which is the sentence that doubled my income at twenty-two.

I had to learn to knock on doors literally — cold calls with sweaty palms and a closing throat. I moved through it anyway, and every time I did, I came out with a skill that made me harder to stop.

I’m in my late thirties now, about to enter my forties, living a life that is finally peaceful and stable and healthier than what came before.

And I’m sharing all of it — the fall as well as the rise — because almost nobody does. These things get kept behind the scenes, or told as a highlight reel, or painted in a way that isn’t true. I would have given a great deal, at nineteen, to know that the ups and downs were normal. That I wasn’t alone in them. That there was a direction through it.

That’s what this publication is. It’s the thing I needed and couldn’t find.

— D.C.

The Second Craft: You Didn’t Choose a Career. You Started a Company. → · Nobody Says It Out Loud → · Who Does What — and What It Pays → · Provenance & IP: Prove Your Music Is Human →