A Million Dreams

"They can say, they can say it all sounds crazy"

Happy New Year to my Readers!

It’s been a while hasn’t it?

I’ve gone more than half a year without a single post on a Substack blog that got off to a bit of a false start back in the summer of 2022. I was initially a bit uncertain as to how to go about approaching “Reinventing Dad”, thinking that I should write posts about useful tools that I’ve come across that made my life better, or articles on how to be a better father/parent.

I was so off the mark of what I really wanted to do.

I close my eyes and I can see, a world that's waiting up for me, that I call my own…

I imagined that it might resemble those “Top 10 Ways to Make Your Kid Go Potty On Demand” kind of posts that have been SEO optimized. I was advised to write at those with a Grade 8 reading comprehension. Ten words per sentence. Three sentences max per paragraph. If you’ve made it this far, let me know if you’re a parent who’s in Grade 8.

Reinventing Dad was always meant to be a story of my journey that came about as a result of being let go during a hot COVID summer. I had a long successful career in real estate and didn’t quite know what to do with myself. It was supposed to be part self-therapy and a guide for those soul-searching fathers (and mothers) who came to the conclusion during the pandemic that life cannot go on the way it did before in their personal lives.

This blog was meant to help set people free. I wanted to build this into a cash-flowing blog that would allow me to support my young family and be the ultimate stay-at-home dad. I wanted independence. Freedom from employment contracts and the tyranny they imposed was what I craved.

I struggled. Everyday I brainstormed topics that could merge parenting and finance together. My synchronized brain came up with, “Hedging risk in child rearing…avoiding Black Swans but embracing Black Sheep” as an example. Then I ran it through ChatGPT to see what kind of blog outline it would spit out. I built Business Model Canvases (BMC) to map out my vision, and even bought the 50-paper BMC pad from Strategyzer and still have 48 sheets remaining.

Through the dark, through the door…

Then I was offered a job, all because I had reached out to an acquaintance on LinkedIn.

It was in infrastructure, something I had a cursory interest in. My best friend had been raving about infrastructure as an asset class to invest in and I thought, “Why not give it a try but at the project level?” I had been talking to my wife about the potential benefits of public sector work, the predictable 9-to-5 hours, the gold-plated pension, etc.

My heart protested, “No, it’s not you. It was never you.”

My head pointed out, “It’s the responsible thing to do. Man up. There are bills to pay.”

My gut grumbled, “You’re going to be reasonably good at it but your mind, body and soul will wither away and die.”

I took it.

And all three were right.

Where dreams go to die. A number on a concrete wall. Prisoner 24601.

I only made it a few months and then I got sick. Very sick. First it was COVID-19. Then it was round after round of every infection you could imagine. Everything that could hit a compromised immune system hit me hard. I was sleeping on the couch for nearly two months.

Imagine being subjected to endless hours of Microsoft Teams conference calls with 100 participants and only two people talking.¹ Update meetings, where people summarize bullet points on the screen-shared agenda and add a little bit of colour that were already sent in an email anyways. Meetings before the meeting. Meetings after the meeting. The 1-on-1 debrief that follows that. Now to be clear, the people themselves were amazing to work with, but I felt like a nail that was put into a wall, to be hammered daily.

This…is what we call modern corporate life in North America. This…was my rude awakening that something had to change, effective immediately and not with four weeks’ notice. I was ready to walk away from being a key player on one of the city’s greatest infrastructure projects and then I got talked into staying.

"Just a little longer. Things will get better if you just change departments.”

“Give it another chance.”

Through where no one's been before, but it feels like home

What feels like home is writing this post at 11:56pm on a Tuesday night, spending two hours writing to this point, and never knowing if another soul will read it.

During the work day, my brain is fried by 4pm. Then it’s daycare pickup, dinner preparation, baby bath time, FaceTime with the grandparents and baby bedtime, all between 5pm and 8pm. By 9pm my free time actually starts and I don’t have the mental stamina left to even follow a Netflix show. So I end up playing games on my iPhone.

It’s been eating away at me because months have gone by and I have nothing to show for it other than a paycheque, and it’s not the most consistent paycheque either. If I’m sick, if there’s a statutory holiday, if I go on vacation, I earn zero. So why do I allow this to continue?

“Because a salary is the worst possible addiction a man can experience. It is worse than drugs, alcohol, gaming, etc. because you are conditioned from a young age to seek it out aggressively and take it. Society has normalized this and encouraged excess consumption.”

Where does that leave you with? A complete inability to walk away without experiencing significant withdrawal symptoms. The loss of identity and the disappearance of the routine/habit you have of your daily commute. The fear that you can no longer relate to non-salary addicts.

Instead of being chain-smokers, we are chained-workers. Instead of an hourly cigarette, it’s an hourly wage and you get eight of them per day, simultaneously wanting more of them but knowing that you really shouldn’t. The the weekend comes along and you take a break from your addiction and attempt to recover. But you only last two days before you relapse. Psychological addiction is real as it is a combination of behavioural habits that are unconsciously reinforced and the massive dopamine hit you receive every second Friday.

They can say, they can say it all sounds crazy

They can say, they can say I've lost my mind. An addict’s friends will always say the same thing. Whether you’ve joined a company, cult or religion, have you noticed that it’s nearly next to impossible to leave because of the fear of being ostracized, branded an outcast, and left alone in the wilderness?

“It’s reckless of you to try cold turkey.”

“You’re being irresponsible.”

“What makes you think you can quit? You’ll be back soon enough.”

Every time somebody wishes me “Good luck” I imagine Liam Neeson hearing it on the other end of the line from the movie “Taken”, just after his daughter has been kidnapped. My soul, my economic freedom and the joy of doing what I enjoy the most has been kidnapped by salary traffickers, pimped off to the nearest corporation to be trained, used, and discarded once I’ve outlived my usefulness.

And like Liam said, “I will find you.”

We can live in a world that we design

The only thing worse than doing something poorly is doing nothing at all. There’s always an excuse for not doing something. Not enough time, not enough sleep, not enough energy, not enough support, not enough everything.

“They invade our careers and we fall back. They assimilate entire resumes and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!”

— Jean-Luc Picard, Executive Vice President, Enterprise-E, if Starfleet was a corporation.

So, what does this mean for you, dear reader?

Future posts are going to be about me documenting the process of reinventing myself into an AI-augmented solopreneur. As I discover, assess and utilize various tools to build a solopreneur-ship, I will write about my real-world and unbiased opinion, and not everything is going to be about AI. Originally, I thought I was going to do a lot of parenting-related posts, or articles on blockchain and real estate.

You’re unlikely to see any posts on “Top Ten Apps to Build a PowerPoint Pitch Deck Using Generative AI.” Somebody has probably done a post on it, and if what you’re looking for is a simple review of pros and cons, go somewhere else. If I do talk about an app, I’m doing to discuss how I personally use it, in a particular context of someone looking to build a solopreneur kind of business. By the time this blog has been flushed out, you’ll know everything from how I incorporated, so the frustrations I experienced with opening a corporate bank account because you can’t do it in person anymore, all the way to how I got my first subscriber, and the emotional ups and downs I experienced along the way.

And for any parents out there, I’m still going to cover some parenting-related topics since one cannot reinvent themselves as a dad without mentioning the rest of his family. But in sticking with the AI theme, you might see an post such as, “How to train your kid to use ChatGPT before ChatGPT trains your kid to use you.”

Reinventing yourself is not a straight line. There is no “Four Steps to Reinvented Success” that anyone can follow. It won’t be a ChatGPT written book of mine either. Failure is a necessary part of success and half the lessons you learn are from your failures. Therefore, you’re going to learn about them.

So that’s the key product differentiation if you will say.

My other Substack blog, [link to be disclosed after it’s up] is going to be less personal and more professional in the context of Artificial Intelligence, delivering the latest news, trends, possible investment ideas or business use cases. It will be a bit punchier and more in the style of a newsletter with the occasional editorial or commentary on any major developments. There will likely be a preview and paid section once I work out the format, and you’re going to see the evolution of it.

Until next time.

Rex del Tenebrio

1. The Psychology Behind Meeting Overload, Harvard Business Review, November 12, 2021