For the record, I do not have a Messiah complex. I have a da Vinci complex. I want to invent, experience life fully, and create things that are useful. I want to teach Harvard-educated hedge fund guys how to become peaceful and kind, how to heal their minds, and how to use their money and power for the universal good. That may be an ambitious idea, but it feels far more worthwhile than simply creating another product and waiting for someone to buy it.
When I look at the business models around me in New York City, including my own, I realize that most of them are two-dimensional. We create a show, add a product, and wait to see whether customers come. They give us money, we give them something in return, and for the longest time, that seemed like enough.
As I develop a deeper understanding of myself, I have started looking more closely at what entrepreneurship should mean. The first thing we must teach one another is to begin with good intentions. The second is to ask, before creating anything: Who could this harm? We have to answer that question as honestly as we can because when greed gets ahead of integrity, it slowly poisons both the person and the business.
These are difficult values to hold because money brings certainty, or at least the feeling of certainty. It gives us the sense that we can control the future. Money is important, and pretending otherwise is easy for people who have never struggled to obtain it. We need money to secure the necessities of life, support our families, and create opportunities. It is a powerful tool, but like any tool, it can be misused. You can pick up a hammer and build a house, or you can smash your thumb with it.
Money can also intoxicate us with an unnatural sense of power. Once we enter its tractor beam, it begins pulling us in without our realizing it. Everyone around us is being pulled in the same direction, so the experience feels completely normal. The problem is not money itself. The question is what we are willing to do to obtain it and, once we have it, what we choose to do with it. Are we using it to create something meaningful, or are we endlessly consuming, accumulating possessions, and trying to fill an emotional hole or suppress our anxiety?
We can take our anxieties and build businesses that become extensions of them. We can create products from those anxieties and then transfer them to everyone we sell to. That is what we have to examine. This examination transforms a two-dimensional business into a three-dimensional one, a business concerned not only with transactions but also with its effects on people, communities, the planet, and every living thing touched by what it creates.
I am no longer afraid to say these things publicly because I have already walked through the gauntlet of shame I imagined would come from trying to become a better person. People can judge me. They can say, “That guy has made a lot of mistakes. They are right out in the open. Who is he to talk about integrity?” I do not care. The only questions that matter are whether these ideas are true and whether they resonate with you.
If I am saying these things publicly, it means I am working on them privately. It means I am placing them into my subconscious mind and holding myself accountable to them. For me, that is how ideas gradually take form and become part of the way I live.
To be clear, I do not mind making a lot of money if I can figure out how to do it without betraying myself. What I eventually do with that money is my business, but I hope to become great at spending it one day, and not on more possessions. I already have a storage room filled with things I will probably never use. That is part of an old habit, the belief that acquiring something will somehow settle the mind.
In developing my existing business, I feel stuck. We know how to make the product correctly, and we have created a great show, but I want this brand to do much more than sell products. I want to find a way to serve knowledge, and not merely my own, because my knowledge is limited and I am finite. I might have a low IQ, who knows? What I can do is bring together gifted teachers who understand the things many of us genuinely care about but were never properly taught.
How do we build a business around teaching parents to be present with their children, which is something I am still working on myself? How do we help musicians learn to sing? How do we teach young children that their self-esteem matters and give them practical ways to regulate their nervous systems? How do we make wisdom, emotional health, creativity, and genuine human connection part of what a business delivers?
These questions matter to me because I understand that I will not be here forever. At this point in my life, very little feels as meaningful as giving back whatever I have managed to learn. Writing about these ideas creates accountability because once I put them into words, I have a responsibility to live by them. The business I want to build cannot merely sell people more things. It has to help them live better, and if I can find a way to do that with integrity, then perhaps I will have created something truly three-dimensional.