The Gift of Being Involuntarily Set Free

As you may know, budget contractions in health care tech recently caught up with me. I've been through a number of personal ups and downs and industry booms and busts in my career. But this time is different. This time, the macro-socioeconomic changes affecting all of us actually favor me. This time I'm not just transitioning from one job to another. I'm transitioning from selling my time to legacy value creators, to creating new kinds of value for others myself. Here's why.

We've all witnessed the industrial age's institutions being challenged by the digital economy for a couple of decades now. Voluntarily or not, we're now being pushed further through complete upheaval—"disruption," if you prefer—of the institutions that gave birth to the modern global economy. So much uncertainty.

I'm not writing today to predict which socioeconomic dominoes LLMs or AI agents will knock down in what order. With so few analogs from the past to help us predict that, even experts are guessing. Big-picture predictions are fun, of course. But this is personal.

Most of my career has been spent in large organizational structures, mapping and navigating complex decision-making processes. As a digital designer, my focus was on helping industrial-age management frameworks, designed to control specialized workers and ensure productivity, to evolve and adapt to new modes of communication, using newer collaboration frameworks. "Transformation," "Design Thinking," and "Innovation Lab" programs proliferated through the 2010s. And as many of you know I eagerly embraced every opportunity democratize empathy and collaboration. Despite great challenges, I found genuine, intrinsic satisfaction in the work.

That's largely behind me now. Thank goddess.

Kicking off 2025 by being laid off reminds me of the time I first drove my Lotus Elise on a racetrack. On the street, the limits of my ability to test and improve my driving skills were external—speed limit laws and social conformity. On the track, being set free from all external constraints except those of physics itself made me face the ultimate limitation: me. In other words, the removal of external constraints forced me to confront myself, with humility, in order to grow. A challenge I embraced wholeheartedly, leading to an amateur racing career.

"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." —Joseph Campbell

Facing our own limitations—most of which are ultimately (if not always consciously) self-imposed—can be humbling. And terrifying. At the back of Plato's cave lives a bear. Or a tiger. A rejected, more primitive self. Our own shadow. But as I learned in competitive motorsports, performance improvement comes by an internal executive order: to facilitate in real time (not reflection) a diplomatic negotiation between one's amygdala and frontal cortex.

To perform above our preconceived expectations, we have to identify our self as the referee and mediator between our amygdala and frontal cortex--functions of early evolution conversing with later ones. This is the inner game that makes the outer game fulfilling—by allowing us to achieve the next level of our own self-actualization.

The race against time just started.

The timing could not be better, right now, to be set free from the limitations of large, lumbering, cumbersome organizations designed in and for a dying age.

The industrial segment of the economy will obviously continue to exist for all activities requiring physical interactions. There are probably only a few more years of relatively low disruption, though. The attention-driven cloud economy's hockey-stick-shaped curve upward bends at the rise of AI-LLMs. Right now.

Again, this isn't about big-picture predictions. Right now just happens to be the best time to get ready to board the bullet train of change pulling into our collective station.

Imagination is (sometimes) more important than knowledge.

Instead of prediction, just imagine this: a significantly larger economy of flatter, more evenly distributed wealth and power, comprised of so many more entrepreneurs than we've ever seen before that being one is the norm instead of the exception.

Looking back, the computing and information revolution, from its inception, has been about one thing: augmenting, extending, and amplifying human capabilities. Everyone being able to transact with everyone else on the planet is recent, but not new anymore. An individual being able to perform most, possibly all, of the activities that currently require the incorporation of hundreds or thousands of people to perform—that's new. That's next.

From the institutional conditioning we've been subject to our whole lives, for generations now, this might look threatening. But if we recognize the institutional and economic powers that have colonized our consciousness for generations—to the point of learned helplessness—then we might also be able to see a way clear and free of them. For the first time since the beginning of the industrial age, liberating more people than ever from selling their time, as hourly employment, in order to survive appears possible. Possibly even necessary.

I've always been a multi-disciplinary generalist. I'm going to LOVE the new environment. And it's going to love me.

So, you ask, what the hell is my plan now? To transform myself into a business.

Perhaps a personal brand. Perhaps not. Perhaps a hybrid. Stay tuned. It's going to be wild! A struggle, often. I'm sure. And as transparent as possible.

What career success I’ve enjoyed in design came primarily from doing two things:

• Tenaciously sticking to what I enjoy most and am best at (they usually go together), regardless of external signs or signals of potential reward that could lead me astray.
• Listening to an inner voice—sometimes barely perceptible—a flash of irrational inspiration when I see or hear something that gives me a little zap of "yes, that's it. Do that!"

A gift of age is self-knowledge. And from self-knowledge, self-confidence.

My plan is simple: Listen to and follow my inner voice, the unique life force energy lent to me, with confidence in my proven abilities to realize unexpected success in the face of both external and internal obstacles and doubts by leaning on, and into, the two essential habits that have brought me what success I've enjoyed so much in life and business:

• Exercise my creative mind every day.
• Exercise my athletic body every day.

As a business, this means making my mission helping others—you—with laser focus. Doing everything in my power to help you live up to your absolute peak mental and physical performance, in every activity that brings you fulfillment and closer to full self-actualization. By studying and sharing knowledge about how to achieve it. While training to apply that knowledge with full awareness that the journey, together, really is the destination.

I call it Apex Performance Life – linkedin.com/company/apex-performance-life

Apex Performance Life is the culmination and alignment of my life's journey, my mission, and my vision for the future. All of my interests and endeavors have led me here. This is where I belong. Join me, and let's get out and live it!