A Note About Myself
Today is personal.
Sorry, today is a personal note.
I have thought about writing this for a long time. I have thought about putting these thoughts down on paper and sharing them with people, about being honest about who I am and what I have become, but I keep stopping myself. A big part of that is fear.
I worry about what people will think of me, how they will judge me, and what it means to be this open about myself in public. There is always this anxiety about being seen too clearly, about saying things that I cannot take back once they are out there. Still, I feel like I need to write this now, because the last few years have changed me in ways that are too important to ignore, and keeping all of it inside no longer feels right.
Over the last 5 years, I have changed more than in any other phase of my life. Not in one dramatic moment, but slowly, through a lot of failure, uncertainty, small wins, exhaustion, and conversations that nobody else ever sees.
It is much easier to write about business, markets, products, or numbers. Writing about yourself when you know you are still becoming something feels a lot more uncomfortable. But this piece is not about the company or the brand. It is simply an operator’s note about me, the person underneath everything else.
2021: Lost and Hungry
Back in 2021, I was lost and hungry. Hungry to do more with my life, hungry to build something meaningful, but completely lost on how to get there. I had decided not to take another job and to go all in on entrepreneurship. I burned through all my savings, tried idea after idea, worked with different co-founders, chased ex-colleagues as clients, and for the longest time nothing really worked. Every few days I would convince myself that I had found the next big idea, the thing that would finally change everything. After a few conversations and half-baked attempts at building something, I would realize that the idea was bad. That cycle repeated for months.
Eventually I had no money left. I had to take a loan from a friend just to survive and find some work. That period crushed my confidence. I started doubting my ideas, my judgment, the people I chose to work with, and slowly, myself. At the same time, the hunger never went away. Even when I was tired, even when I was disappointed, even when I was embarrassed by how little I had to show for all the effort, I still wanted to build a different life for myself. I just did not know how yet.
When My Body Was Falling Apart Too
Around the same time, my health was in a bad state. My energy was low, my sleep was poor, my habits were messy. I used to drink a lot, ate too much, had a beer belly, and felt sluggish most of the time. I was 80+ kilos and could not seem to bring it down no matter what I tried. I remember that I tried to run on cool winter morning. I could not even finish 1 km.
I remember sitting in my apartment in Dubai in 2021 and writing down 5 life goals for next 5 years. One of them was to run 5km. At that time it felt almost ridiculous. My body was heavy, my focus was all over the place, and emotionally it made me feel incompetent, like I was failing at basic things that other people seemed to manage without much trouble.
Imposter Syndrome and Overdrive
When I started building again, I was drowning in imposter syndrome. The first group of people I worked with did not really trust me (that’s my perception) and I could feel that every day. I overworked, rarely switched off, and was constantly chasing whatever I felt was missing. I compared myself to other founders, other brands, other companies. I pushed my team hard because I was trying to prove something, to them and to myself. That this would be a serious business. That it could become global. That all this struggle would eventually change everyone’s life if we just kept pushing and did not do anything half-heartedly.
For a long time I carried this quiet fear that someone would eventually find me out, that I did not really know what I was doing and that I was just figuring things out as I went.
How Confidence Actually Got Built
That feeling did not disappear because I suddenly became special or smarter. It faded because I stayed in the game long enough to learn. Writing ads. Running campaigns. Learning TikTok. Managing livestreams. Making difficult decisions. Hiring and letting people go. Failing publicly. Solving problems over and over again. That repetition slowly builds something inside you.
There was no single moment when I suddenly felt like I had arrived. The shift happened gradually, through many small milestones. Watching ideas work and fail. Seeing numbers move. Building products that people genuinely cared about. Getting feedback from the market, from my team, from people who had watched my journey closely. Solving problems that once felt impossible. At some point, I stopped seeing myself as someone trying to be a CEO and started seeing myself as someone doing the work properly.
Rebuilding My Relationship With My Body
My relationship with my body changed slowly too. I started showing up more consistently, training, moving, pushing myself a little further each time. Over time I went from not being able to run one kilometer to running fifteen. From being scared of signing up for HYROX to finishing multiple races and actually wanting to do more. Today I know that running a marathon is not a question of ability. It is a question of training and making a mental decision.
That shift in how I think about my body ended up spilling into everything else I do.
Who I Am Now
Today I am more confident than I was before, not in a loud or dramatic way, but in a grounded one. I trust myself more. I trust my ability to learn, adapt, and survive whatever situation I am in.
The biggest difference between the person I was in 2021 and the person I am now is that I no longer feel like I am lacking. Back then I constantly felt behind, as if I was missing something fundamental that everyone else had figured out. Now I understand that growth is built through staying in the game longer than most people are willing to.
I am more ambitious now, more direct, more honest with myself and with others. I care deeply about people, but I also care deeply about execution. I have learned what focus actually means, how to hold many ideas in your head but commit fully to pushing one thing forward. None of this feels finished. This is not a story about arrival. It is simply a record of becoming, and I am still very much in the middle of that process.
Closing Note
When I quit and everything felt like it was falling apart in early 2023, I started writing this blog. At the time, I did not think of it as “content” or a newsletter or anything public-facing. It was simply a way for me to journal my journey, to capture how I was thinking, the decisions I was making, the mistakes I was repeating, and the things I was learning along the way.
Over time, it has become a reflection of where I am today and how I look at the future. It holds my fears, my hopes, my doubts, my confidence, and all the messy thinking in between. In all honesty, this blog is written by me, for me. It is something I want to come back to years from now, when I am stuck somewhere again, in business or in life, and need to hear my own voice reminding me that I have been here before and I found a way forward.
Today is the last Sunday of the year - I wish you a Happy, Peaceful and Prosperous Year Ahead. I hope you take a moment to look at your own life, at who you are, what is working, what is not, and what you want to do differently going forward. Life is not constant. It is a continuous evolution of you as a person, shaped by the choices you make and the signals you receive from the world around you. The more honestly you listen to those signals, the more clearly you can move forward.
If anything I write here helps you reflect on your own journey, I am grateful for that.
But at its core, this is me talking to myself.
And today, this is what I needed to say.
