Chapter 12: The Fuse
838 notes to myself, a babymoon in Bermuda, Quikrete and philosophy, and the afternoon the fuse caught fire
Recap —
Chapter 11 covered 2017… the year everything happened all at once. The competing job offer, turning 30, buying and gutting a house, adopting a dog, bachelor parties across the Eastern seaboard, CAGNY, the Sons of the Revolution ball, 90 notes to myself, and the Weebly source code completing its twelve-month compilation. By December I was drafting exit resumes the day after Christmas, reading Sapiens, and writing fiction ideas about Mars. The velocity was relentless. But 2017 was just the warm-up.
2018 was the year everything caught fire.
The notes-to-self went from 90 to 838. The existential and philosophical fragments that had been running parallel to my career suddenly overwhelmed it. Then our first son was born. Then I was promoted to Vice President at the bank. The team made Institutional Investor runner-up in two separate sectors… food and restaurants… an uncommon and difficult feat on Wall Street. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, on a Monday afternoon in June, I wrote four notes to myself in fifty-one minutes that changed everything.
This chapter covers January through June. What came after… the birth, the work revelations, the exit ideas crystallizing… is the next one. But the fuse was lit here.
Before You Read
This chapter is even denser than the last one. 461 notes in the first six months alone, plus the densest travel, social, and domestic calendar of my life. If you’re short on time, here are a few things I learned from this period before the story itself…
The Hamilton reading sprint of January 2018 was the most consequential reading I’ve ever done. Hamilton’s failure to take the Monty Hall door… to go upstate with Eliza, to choose the simple life he claimed to want… became a warning I couldn’t stop hearing. My wife told me I reminded her of Hamilton. I took that as both compliment and caution.
Your camera roll is a truer autobiography than your resume. I was saving screenshots of Cappadocia hotel terraces, volcanic skiing, Fantastic Mr. Fox wolf artwork, and a Bukowski quote on a Chipotle bag… all on the same phone where I was reading Tyson’s earnings releases and photographing subway congestion. The gap between what I was consuming aspirationally and what I was living professionally was the tension itself, documented in images I didn’t know I was curating… or maybe I did.
There is a specific moment when a seed becomes a plan. On April 20, 2018, at 5:14 PM, I saved a screenshot of the Junto Wikipedia page to my phone. Five years before the first Substack post. The same day, at 6:48 PM, I wrote: “First of all my future is going to be absolutely incredible.” One hour later, at 7:54 PM: “Am I immature?” The oscillation between irrational confidence and brutal self-interrogation was the alternating current.
Now, the story…
