A few weeks ago, a woman who works in PR told me I was all over the place.
“Business. Mountains. Travel. Wellness. It’s too much. Pick one thing. Talk about Gevity. Post less. Look more like a CEO.”
She was not trying to insult me. She was giving me the advice she believed would make my story easier to understand and my personal brand easier to market. From a traditional branding perspective, she probably had a point.
The internet rewards simple identities. The fitness person talks about fitness. The travel person travels. The founder posts photographs from conference rooms and writes about leadership. Everyone gets a category, the category gets a content calendar, and eventually the person becomes indistinguishable from the role they perform online.
It is clean. It is repeatable. It is easy to explain.
I just do not want to live that way.
The part of her advice that stayed with me was not “pick one thing.” It was “look more like a CEO.”
I kept wondering what a CEO is supposed to look like. Do I become more credible if I stop climbing mountains? Does sharing a story from Iraq make me less serious about building Gevity? Should I talk less about my marriage, my health or the places that have shaped how I see the world because none of them fit neatly inside the founder lane?
I understand the need for focus. Building a company requires an almost unreasonable amount of it. Most businesses do not struggle because the founder lacks ideas. They struggle because the founder tries to pursue every good idea at the same time. I have learned, sometimes painfully, that focus matters.
But focus is a way of directing your attention. It should not become the border around your identity.
I can be deeply committed to building Gevity without making Gevity the only interesting thing about me. In fact, the company would not exist without the rest of my life.
Travel taught me how to walk into unfamiliar rooms, speak to strangers and adapt when the plan disappeared. Mountains taught me how to remain patient when progress was slow, uncomfortable and difficult to measure. Training gives me the energy to lead. My marriage teaches me more about partnership, communication and humility than any business book ever has.
Those parts of my life do not compete with the work. They feed it.
Gevity itself came from questioning why life had been separated into so many lanes. We worked in one place, exercised somewhere else, recovered somewhere else and hoped we might eventually find time to connect with people somewhere in between.
I never understood why those parts of life had to remain disconnected. So Espoir and I built a place where focused work, movement, recovery and human connection could exist under one roof. The business was born from the same belief I am now apparently supposed to abandon in order to market it properly.
Maybe people are not meant to be divided into departments.
The Renaissance approach is not about being distracted or collecting hobbies for the sake of appearing interesting. It is not an excuse to avoid commitment. It is the decision to keep developing range, even while taking the work in front of you seriously.
Build the company. Climb the mountain. Learn how to cook. Pick up a camera. Become a better husband. Read something outside your industry. Travel somewhere that makes you reconsider what you thought you knew. Try something you are terrible at and remain there long enough to become slightly less terrible.
Not everything needs to become a business. Not every interest needs to be optimized, monetized or folded into a personal brand. Some things are valuable because they keep us curious. Some make us more capable. Others simply remind us that being alive is supposed to involve more than becoming efficient at one role.
There are seasons when one part of life requires more attention than the others. Gevity has demanded that from me. The mountains will demand it when I begin preparing seriously for Himlung Himal. Marriage, health and family will each have seasons when they move closer to the center.
Balance does not mean giving everything equal time every day. It means refusing to forget that all of it matters.
The danger of becoming very good at one version of yourself is that the world will reward you for staying there. People learn how to describe you. Opportunities arrive because of it. The lane becomes comfortable, and eventually you stop noticing how much of yourself has been left outside it.
I would rather be slightly harder to explain.
I am building a company with my wife. I climb mountains. I travel because unfamiliar places still rearrange something in me. I care about health, hospitality, human connection and the kind of life all that work is supposed to make possible.
That may not fit perfectly into one category. I am no longer convinced it should.
Build. Become. Explore. You get one life. Why make it one lane?
