I don’t think I was always very intentional about my life.
In my late teens and early 20s, I was ambitious, but I’m not sure I had much of a bigger picture behind it. I started a marketing company around 19 and spent a couple of years unsuccessfully trying to make it work. Like plenty of guys in their early 20s, I was pretty sure I was going to get rich. The details of how that was supposed to happen were a little less clear.
I had goals. I just hadn’t spent much time asking what I actually wanted those goals to add up to.
Somewhere around 22, that started to change.
There wasn’t one dramatic moment where I suddenly figured everything out. It felt more like the floodgates opened. I became curious about where my family came from. I started thinking more seriously about my career, money and what kind of life I wanted. I commissioned as an Army officer. I went back to Bosnia, started traveling more and eventually spent a month working remotely from my sister’s attic in Montenegro, which was not something a younger version of me ever pictured doing.
More than anything, I started zooming out.
Around that same time, I asked a senior sales executive at a company a family member worked for what one piece of advice he’d give someone my age.
He said, “Stay curious.”
That stuck with me more than I expected.
Looking back, curiosity has probably shaped a lot of what happened next. I became more curious about my career, my family, money, travel, relationships, fitness and what kind of life I actually wanted to build.
The funny thing is, I don’t think I’ve become less ambitious since then. If anything, I’m probably worse.
What changed is what I’m ambitious about.
At 22, success was pretty easy for me to picture: make a lot of money and figure out the rest later.
Now I care a lot more about the process of building a life.
I got serious about fitness and learned to genuinely enjoy the discipline and slow progress that comes with it. I’ve reconnected with family and parts of my heritage I barely thought about when I was younger. I’ve traveled more, worked from Europe, bought my first property, built a successful career in sales and made the uncomfortable decision to leave a job I was good at when I realized I wanted something different from my career.
None of that means I’ve figured life out.
Mostly, it means I’ve accumulated a lot more things to think about.
I like the building part. I like the progress, the experiments, the mistakes and looking back six months later and realizing I was very confident about something I now think was completely wrong.
That last one happens more than I’d like.
Why I’m writing
I’ve wanted a place to write these things down for a while.
Part of this site is a creative outlet. Part of it is a record of what I’m thinking and experiencing while I’m still close enough to it to remember what it actually felt like.
I also hope it’s useful.
I’m not writing because I think I’ve mastered career, money, relationships, fitness, travel or life in general. I’m writing because I’m living through those things, paying attention to what happens and trying to take something useful from the experience.
Sometimes that means writing about something that worked. Sometimes it means writing about something I got completely wrong.
A note on how I write: The experiences, ideas, opinions and point of view on this site are mine, and I want what you read here to sound like me. I use AI as an editor, researcher and sounding board to help organize ideas, check facts, challenge my thinking and improve drafts. I don’t use it to invent experiences, opinions or a personality for me.
If something I write helps you think more clearly about a decision, ask yourself a better question, see a tradeoff differently or just feel a little less alone while figuring out your own path, that’s a win.
I’d also be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about what this could eventually become.
Maybe it creates opportunities. Maybe it turns into a real business. I hope it does.
But I don’t want to force it there by turning this into something I wouldn’t want attached to my name. For now, I’d rather make things worth reading and see where that takes me.
That feels worth doing.
Take what’s useful
I don’t expect anyone reading this site to want the same life I do.
That’s kind of the point.
I want to build a successful career, make good money, travel, stay close to my family, build strong relationships, stay in shape, experience different parts of the world and actually enjoy my life while I’m doing it.
Your list might look completely different.
What I hope the writing here does is make you a little more curious about your own.
What are you actually working toward? What matters to you more than you admit? What tradeoffs are you making without really thinking about them? What would you change if you stopped doing something just because it’s what you’ve always done?
Years ago, someone told me to stay curious.
I still think that’s some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten.
Stay curious about what you actually want your life to look like. Ask better questions. Try things. Pay attention to what happens. Change your mind when you need to. Keep building.
And don’t get so focused on building a good life that you forget to actually live it.