Chapter 11: Everywhere All at Once
Competence and disillusionment, cages with latches, a kitchen sketched by hand, Mayakoba, Kansas City, San Diego, Colorado, turmeric remedies, a toolbox over a gold watch, and 90 notes to myself
Good morning and thank you to all the new paid and free subscribers who’ve joined this week. If you’ve been following for a while, skip this section. For new folks, I’ll explain what this is.
The Junteau is a clubhouse-in-waiting… an homage to The Junto, one of the first social clubs in America, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1727 as a “club for mutual improvement.” It gathered artisans, tradesmen, and scholars to meet at a local tavern to discuss business, philosophy, morals, civic affairs, and the general goings-on in the world. Junteau honors that spirit… globally inspired but grounded in reality. Think part Monocle, part Bloomberg… but stripped of pretension. More attainable, more lived experience. Something I’ve called “striped collar” in that it’s equally legible to blue-collar and white-collar audiences.
My focus now is a sort of mini memoir called the Anti-Course. I call it anti-course because it’s not a playbook… it’s just a simple story, parts of which I privately tell all the time to people who ask me for guidance. A story you might draw influence from or borrow in your own way, big or small. Or maybe just as a bit of comfort… a reminder that it’s OK to act on the ideas floating around in your head, even if you feel like no one will listen or understand.
People have enjoyed it because it does several things at once… it explains how a blue-collar construction kid from Jersey somehow made it to Wall Street and then to Europe… it illuminates the psychological and philosophical behind-the-scenes of what by all accounts would appear to be a person with an accelerating successful professional career with growing social standing… it demonstrates a very untraditional career track for those considering such a track themselves… and it’s just a good story… global travels, ambulance calls, earnings season chaos, and the growing realization that you can build a life of your own design.
There’s still roughly eight years of story left to tell to reach the present… kids, the Wall Street exit, resigning to explore self-employment, and Europe which has became the most intense travel and lifestyle season of our lives so far. Once the timeline catches up to the present, the Junteau will shift back to interviews with interesting people and entrepreneurs, deeper philosophical and cultural essays, and lifestyle content.
Most of the Anti-Course lives behind the paywall. Even with names and certain details obfuscated, a lot of this is sensitive and personal… the paywall ring-fences it from search engines and keeps it in a more controlled space. It’s the only way I’d be comfortable sharing some of these stories at all.
Recap —
Chapter 10 covered the climb out of the darkest professional stretch of my life. The first months at RBC, the weight loss, the imposter syndrome, the people who kept me from quitting. Then the world started opening back up. Vieques, Colombia, Cartagena, CAGNY, the Big Ten Championship drive to Indianapolis. All while 92 Weebly fragments were being written on a blog nobody read — the source code of everything I’d eventually build and write. By the end of 2016, I was getting my footing. The job was starting to work. And the world was getting a lot bigger.
2017 was the year everything happened all at once.
Before You Read
This chapter is dense. A full year of simultaneous activity across professional, personal, travel, homeownership, a dog, and often contradictory philosophical fronts, plus 90 standalone notes from the archive woven throughout. I realize many won’t read the whole thing — and that’s fine. I need to write these. But if you’re short on time, here are 7 lessons from this year before the story itself…
