People, places & Names
- On identity

I took a comprehensive psychological assessment 7 years ago. This was the first time I had spoken to a mental health professional since (what felt like) the hundreds of meetings I had with shrinks between the age of 14-17. I passed the ADHD assessment with flying colors (successful diagnosis, go me!) but fell just short on borderline personality disorder. I wouldn’t be surprised if my state at the time skewed the data a bit. The doctor told me he wanted to diagnose me with multiple conditions but the ADHD diagnosis / medication would be enough to treat all the symptoms and overlapping conditions.

I mean, where you do draw the line, really. Most mental disorders are connected, in more ways than one. The food you eat, the people you know, the places you visit, the projects you’re involved in, all have a way of shifting your sense of self and rewiring the circuitry within your brain.

You can be in momentum one month and experience no symptoms. Throw the tests out the window. Invalid sample. Or, you can get stuck in a rut and feel like you’re back to square one. You might lose income, access to expensive medication and / or supplements, start eating poorly, become impulsive with dopamine, less travel experiences… next thing you know you’re back to the person you were before.

People are complex, with multi-faceted identities. We do the best we can with where we are. The companies we work in. The people we follow. The people we lead. We’re all constantly shaping our identities in context to the environment around us.

Sometimes people try to manipulate our identity and sometimes they try to empower it. If we’re lucky, we find ourselves in empowering environments around empowering people.

But when we’re not, we have to wrestle with how we’re being discounted. We have to form an identity apart from the way that other people see us. If we’re not self-aware, our identity gets put on fire sale. We lose grasp of our discernment and fall victim to the opinions of others. And sometimes we end up putting negative labels on ourselves based on the flurry of information coming in.

For a long time I lived in my trauma, but that’s no one else’s fault. I deflected it upon my self by focusing too much on the past. The childhood mental illness, the car accidents, the manipulations, the hospital visits, the health issues, the medications, the eating disorder, the attacks, the hits to my skull, the cuts on my arms, the mistakes I made, the money I wasted, the drugs that kept me in negative feedback loops or the people that judged me for how I was wired.

Or the places I ran from. The people I ran from. The people that left because I was too much too handle. The people I left because I didn’t trust the way they were treating me. The trust that I left behind after years of misunderstanding. The trust I couldn’t find in my relationships for so long.

Sometime in 2023 I got it in my head that I didn’t just want to build a company I wanted to build a portfolio. An interconnected ecosystem of creative projects that blended a mix of software and service. Strategy and soul. Struggle and perseverance. A platform embedded in modern values that takes the chaos of risk and turns it into a more confident endeavor. For people, for businesses, and for an entire ecosystem.

At first I wanted to call this Cracked Culture. I bought the domain and planned it within my portfolio strategy. “The future of work belongs to the cracked culture”. It’s a good name. Maybe even a good idea. Who knows. But after stalling on the project for a while, I realized something. This was too reminiscent of my trauma. It was almost like I was celebrating it…. living in my past. Yes I’m cracked, and yes it has driven me. But marinating in that trauma has kept me stagnant for too long. I don’t want that to be a premise in which to bring to life a vision for a portfolio.

So I’ve decided to go with an alternative brand identity.

The Compounding Creator. A domain I purchased a few years ago after thinking about the commonalities between all the things I love doing. Writing. Designing. Analyzing Data. Exploring new places. Meeting new people. Distributing ideas. Helping others distribute their ideas. Making quantitative decisions that blend qualitative aspects. Improving every day through creative / technical pursuits despite the difficult patterns that I sometimes find myself in.

This ecosystem will combine high value skills and projects that have an inherently risky side, sure. This is the nature of anything worth doing. I’ve lost thousands on the charts. Thousands to the sports books. I’ve designed my best work during my most challenging times. I’ve put my heart into designs, into projects, to be left with nothing in the end. This is the nature of anything high value. It sometimes leads to nothing. It sometimes feels wasted. And sometimes, it invokes reinvention.

But it’s not wasted because skills are eternal. They are forged through failure. Shaped through collaboration. Brought to life through the constant pursuit of improvement within the dynamics in which they exist.

That improvement is what I’m chasing, each and every day. When it sometimes feels like day one, I reflect on the data more than I do my emotions. This helps me move forward more effectively. 1% better every day.

And hopefully not just for me, but for an entire ecosystem of day traders, sports bettors and designers that share these common values.

Using technology as a catalyst, yes, but experience, real life experience, as the ethos; ultimately creating prosperity through an interconnected skill development ecosystem that on the very surface may seem like it exists in silo; but If you look deeper at the interface, or take a peek into the back end, you can see that they are far more connected than it seems.

A multi-disciplinary lifestyle with exponential upside; pursued alongside people that enrich the journey despite the harrowing pivot points that crystalize the highs and lows.

There’s no test. No psychological assessment. Just pure symmetry in relation to a series of crafts. Blending spiritual growth, technical prowess and tactical execution to stack the odds each day.

That’s the identity I’m leaning into now.

That’s what The Compounding Creator is all about.
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*I’m excited to realize these initial brand mock-ups, for the parentco itself, and the first software product in it’s portfolio.*

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