10am on a thursday in paradise, and I felt completely useless

The world is changing, and so am I

It was 10am on a Thursday when I found myself on a four hour walk across the Venetian Islands in Miami. Contractors were trimming giant hedges along the road, leaf blowers humming in the background like a reminder that the world was still producing, still moving.

And then there was me.

Doing nothing. Producing nothing. Just putting one foot in front of the other because it was the only thing I could bring myself to do.

Miami was glistening. Blue water, perfect sun, palm trees, waterfront villas. Paradise all around me, hell inside my mind. My body was in full fight mode, gripping onto the identity I had just stepped out of - CMO of an $850M company, operator of a team of marketers serving a global organization.

I had willingly left it. I had chosen to take time off. But when I stepped into that time off, time swallowed me whole.

Because without the title, the meetings, the decisions, the calendar blocks, the production machine humming around me, I was confronted by a truth I had never faced so nakedly:

My entire identity had been built on producing.

I thought I had to earn every hour of my life.

As I walked, thoughts surged through me like tiny electrical shocks.

I needed to launch my newsletter.

I needed to post on LinkedIn.

I needed to text people back.

I needed to clean the closet.

I needed a better diet.

I needed a better routine.

I needed to move the furniture around.

I needed to earn the right to live that day.

It felt like I was on an invisible clock, where before the clock struck the top of each hour, I needed to justify the next one. But I wasn’t doing any of it. I was paralyzed. The to do list kept rolling over to the next day and the next, like a tide I couldn’t fight.

People talk about the emptiness that hits after crossing a peak - selling a company, finishing a marathon, hitting a big goal. But it’s not an elegant spacious emptiness. It’s a tidal wave that asks, without compassion or warning:

What is your purpose now?

So I kept walking. Somewhere deep down I knew I needed to let it all come up. I told myself I would walk until I was empty. And I did.

Purpose isn’t something you’re given. It’s something you answer.

I was in the middle of reading two books at the time.

The first was Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I had read it years before, but it landed differently this time. There was a passage I couldn’t shake:

“We had to learn ourselves, and teach the despairing men, that it did not matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”

Frankl wrote this in Auschwitz…starved, humiliated, everything stripped down to nothing. The only freedom he had left was the freedom to turn his suffering into meaning.

The argument he makes is that sitting around asking life for answers is not how meaning works.

“We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.”

So there I was, walking past multimillion-dollar homes in perfect sunshine, asking all the wrong questions. Asking life: what do you have for me? Asking for direction. Asking for clarity. Asking for something outside me to fill the emptiness.

It’s a subtle shift, perhaps - but instead of looking outward for meaning, it’s looking inward.

I’m not asking, I’m answering. And there’s a sense of agency in that.

The second book was Mastery by Robert Greene, which triggered me into a deeper spiral.

“You are committed to your Life’s Task, to giving it full expression. It is up to you to find it and guide it correctly. You are on your own.”

Was I on the path I was meant to be on?

Did I even know what my Life’s Task was anymore?

Had I confused the momentum of success with the meaning of purpose?

The pressure to use this sabbatical to find my “calling” felt crushing. I had imagined a tidy, beautiful process of self-discovery.

Instead, it was hell.

Letting go felt like giving up, but it was the first moment of freedom.

The shift happened quietly, about halfway across the Venetian bridge. The city was strangely silent. Cruise ships towered above me, the skyline framing puffy clouds. But the air was still.

Every time one of those urgent thoughts surfaced - “you should be doing this,” “you need to be catching up,” “you’re falling behind,” “you’re wasting time,” “you’re useless” - I just kind of shrugged and let it go. I told myself all I needed to do was put one foot in front of the other.

With every step, I felt a tiny sliver of space open up. A small internal unclenching.

It felt a little like giving up, but it wasn’t. It was the first moment where I could see my thoughts, almost from above, instead of being ruled by them.

With each step, I started to see the pattern from the outside instead of drowning inside it. I saw how deeply I had internalized the industrial model of worth. The clock-driven model. The hours-equal-value model. The one that rewards output, not meaning.

I realized I didn’t want to live inside that system anymore.

What I wanted was to create something meaningful. To build systems that produced value without consuming my life. To stop measuring myself by how much I could grind through in a day and instead measure by what I could architect - what could endure, connect people, and compound without hollowing me out.

I didn’t want to be a piece of the engine.

I wanted to design systems that made space for humans - including myself.

Long ago I had declared war against idleness, and that was useful for a time. But that war was long over. I knew curiosity and connection would serve me better than fear in the future.

I’ve been a storyteller since I was a kid on a roof in Africa.

When I was a kid living in Africa, we weren’t allowed outside the gates of our house. The gate was tall and lined with outward-facing spikes. So I would climb on the roof with a notebook and write for hours.

When we traveled across the US for my parents’ nonprofit, my dad always let me speak into the microphone. At eight years old, my line was “the spiders there are as big as Daddy’s hand,” (which unfortunately was true), and it always made the crowd both laugh and understand a tiny slice of what our lives there were like.

At fourteen, I read an entire grammar book for fun.

And, I wrote a novel (every time I see my grandfather, he asks me “when are you going to publish your book?”).

Recently, reading Mastery, something clicked. Greene writes about paying attention to what you were naturally drawn to as a child - the things you’d do for hours without reward, without instruction, without an audience. He describes them as early clues to your life’s work.

Writing, speaking, storytelling…these weren’t hobbies. They were clues. And for years, I expressed them through marketing (which, in retrospect, makes perfect sense).

But the next chapter feels different. It feels like returning to something original. Something that belonged to me before it belonged to any company or any job.

Green writes, “If you lose contact with this inner calling, you can have some success in life, but eventually your lack of true desire catches up with you. Your work becomes mechanical. You come to live for leisure and immediate pleasures.”

Launching this newsletter wasn’t a strategy.

It was a homecoming.

I dare say it might be part of my Life’s Task, part of my answer to meaning. Part of me knew that at eight and at fourteen.

We don’t win by being machines. We have machines for that now.

In the weeks that followed, things did not suddenly become neat or peaceful. I still had moments of panic. I still battled the voice that told me I was useless. But I understood something new: I could make meaning out of this unraveling.

For the first time, I understood I was rewiring a way of operating that not only no longer served me, but no longer fits the world we’re entering.

We have AI for the robot work.

We don’t win by being machines.

We win by being unmistakably human.

Meaning makers. Builders of engines that scale our time, not consume it. Creators of connection, using our intuition and uniqueness.

This realization is shaping how I think about my next chapter.

One of the reasons I left Kandji (after 6+ years I’m immensely proud of) was the desire to build from the ground up at an early stage company in a new era. An AI era. A leverage era. A meaning era.

The companies that win now will be built by people who know how to create engines, not fill them. People who think in leverage, not tasks. Leaders who build real connection, not endless to do lists.

The mindset shift I fought on that bridge - the one that felt like death - is the exact shift this new era demands.

It’s no longer: How much did you produce today?

It’s becoming: What meaning did you create today?

My identity is no longer something I trade my life for.

What remains after stepping out of a title is what was real all along.

My worth is not based on my work.

My identity is not the sum of my output.

My value is not my inbox, or my calendar, or the size of my team.

My life is not a production schedule.

I want to create from the depth of who I am, to trust my intuition, and to find meaning in my life.

I want to make choices that my eighty-year-old self would look back on with peace.

And none of that requires being a machine.

There is no final answer. Only the act of answering.

When I picture myself back on that bridge now - the sun on the water, the stillness in the air, the world working all around me - I see something I didn’t see then:

My job isn’t to wait for life to tell me its meaning. My job is to answer the question life asks me, day after day. Not with certainty or perfection. But with movement. One foot in front of the other.

There is no final answer.

There is only answering.

And somewhere between the water and the sky, I took the first step.