You Might Be Building Someone Else's Life

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Most people think they want to be billionaires.

So they grind 80-hour weeks, sacrifice everything, optimize every minute.

Then they get rich and feel empty.

Or worse - they never get rich and feel empty anyway.

I'm not saying billionaires can't be happy. Some are.

But most people chase the money without examining the full picture:

You can have wealth AND presence. Money AND meaning. Success AND soul.

But not if you only optimize for one variable while pretending the others don't exist.

For years, I had one goal: get filthy rich.

Nothing else mattered.

I wanted to be a multi-millionaire by 30 and a billionaire by 40.

That was the program running in my head since I was like 12.

Then life started teaching me things money couldn't buy.

Lesson #1: I got dengue fever in India and my body shut down. Money got me a great hospital, doctors, and treatment. But I still lay there for days, wondering what would happen. All the money in the world couldn't make my white blood cells regenerate faster.

Lesson #2: I had a breakup that made me stuck in mind loops. Even if I had all the money ever, I would've still been feeling like crap. So I lived out of a monastery for a few days and that solved more than money ever could.

Lesson #3: Watching my parents get older. Sitting across from them at dinner, noticing my dad's wrinkles. And this thought hit me: One day they'll be gone. And I'm spending 100 hours a week chasing numbers in a bank account instead of Sunday afternoons with them.

Anyways, these things happened at different times and had 0 correlation, but each carried a profound lesson: there was more to life than getting rich.

So I began figuring out how I truly wanted to live.

And that started with talking to someone who had already questioned and realized.

So I started reaching out to people who were already living this way.

High achievers (money still most definitely mattered) who'd rejected the standard playbook, designed their own, and were willing to share how.

And the conversations didn't give me all the answers.

But they gave me permission to ask better questions.

Socrates understood this 2,400 years ago, and he died for it.

Picture this: Athens, 399 BC.

Socrates is on trial.

500 jurors waiting to decide his fate and his crime was that he wouldn't stop asking uncomfortable questions.

To generals: "You say you know courage, but what is courage really?"

To teachers: "You claim to teach virtue, but are you virtuous?"

To everyone: "Why do you want what you want?"

The powerful despised him for it so they offered him a deal:

Stop questioning everything, and live. Keep questioning, and die.

His response: "The unexamined life is not worth living."

They handed him poison hemlock and he drank it without hesitation.

Because to him, a life spent chasing untested goals - money without purpose, success without meaning, achievement without examination - wasn't just misguided.

It was already a kind of death.

He chose actual death over unconscious living.

I'm not saying map out every minute or question every decision.

That's paralysis, not wisdom.

But here's what happened when I started examining my real motivations:

First, we lost a good amount of revenue. (I run a creative agency with my brother, and we decided to get selective.)

Then something interesting happened.

The clients we kept - the aligned ones - started referring people just like them.

The work got easier because we actually cared about it.

The money came back, but now attached to meaning.

Over the last 3 years, I started living by different metrics:

The path revealed itself once I stopped following everyone else's map.

And that's the paradox - when you stop chasing money directly and start chasing aligned work, the money often follows anyway.

But now it's a byproduct, not the product.

And I couldn’t have done it without the people who'd already started designing their lives and even talk about this concept. Those conversations saved me years of climbing the wrong mountain.

And that’s why I highly recommend talking to enough people (and actually getting to see their lives) to know what your definition of success might be.

Here's what I know now: Most people might read this and go back to their unconscious chase. Because examining your life means admitting you might be completely wrong about everything. That the last 10 years might have been pointed in the wrong direction.

That's terrifying.

And I know, because there are still things I’m questioning along the way as I go. I’m only 24 and have a a lot to figure out.

It’s easier to stay busy than to stop and ask: What am I actually building? And do I even want to live in it when it's built?

But Socrates was right.

Because an unexamined life is not actually your life - it's a life programmed into you by people who probably never examined theirs either.

So here's my question: If you achieved everything you're working toward right now - every goal, every milestone, every number - would you actually want the life that comes with it?

Or are you so busy building that you've never stopped to check the blueprints?

The answer might require you to stop everything and start over.

Or more likely, it might just require small adjustments.

But you can't know until you stop long enough to actually look.

Your life is being designed either way.

The only question is whether you're the architect or the construction worker.

Choose wisely.

You only get one chance to build this thing.

In case you’re wondering: An instagram DM and Intro.co connected me with the first person who showed me a life of design was possible - sometimes that outside perspective is worth investing in.