On a professional level, I'm an entrepreneur and digital marketer. I've been helping my friends to sell their products and services online since the World Wide Web became a thing.

The primary work of my life, however, has been survival. Rising above my broken and destructive family to achieve academic and entrepreneurial success, learning to heal myself when my doctors said I'd be dead by age 30, surviving and overcoming numerous backstabs and betrayals.

Through this intensive process of self-healing and self-improvement, I’ve learned that upgrading yourself is not a linear curve. It is a slow, difficult and erratic climb that necessitates internal change.

Internal change is difficult. It requires strength, determination, bravery and hope. 

Change requires open-mindedness, learning, and trying new things. Which means encountering failure.

Failure requires picking yourself up off the floor, dusting yourself off, and doing. Again and again and again. Even when the world tells you you're wrong, stupid, broken, unfixable.

(If I listened to the 'experts' I'd be dead several times over. I believe in trying new things, I believe in quantifiable data, and I believe in doing what works. It doesn't matter what the world around me thinks. They're often wrong).

We can’t remove every external barrier to our success, because we have little control over the world around us.

Yet we do have immense power over ourselves, power over how we react to this environment. This is a process of self-overcoming. 

I believe in one simple concept -- that we can accomplish whatever we set our minds to. Whatever the barrier.