I’m Connor.
On New Year’s morning, I woke up in a dark hostel room in Bangkok, unemployed, hungover, and wondering what on earth I was doing with my life.
Exactly one year later, I was standing on the summit of Aconcagua, nearly 23,000 feet above sea level, thinking about that very same room.
Between those two mornings, I’d traveled through 27 countries, fallen in love with a woman I’d met over a game of chess in Spain, and started imagining a business that would eventually change both our lives.
None of it was particularly planned. Especially the unemployment.
But I’ve come to appreciate that life’s greatest blessings have a strange habit of arriving disguised as setbacks. Some of my favorite chapters began with circumstances I would have happily avoided. And the older I get, the more I realize how little we know about where a particular road might lead.
A life with more than one ambition
I grew up the oldest of five in an entrepreneurial family, where hard work, curiosity, and taking initiative were part of everyday life. I always wanted to build something meaningful, but I was equally fascinated by the world beyond whatever career I might pursue.
That curiosity has taken me through 61 countries, across deserts, into remote villages, and onto some of the world’s highest mountains. I’ve climbed three of the Seven Summits, spent weeks sleeping in tents at altitude, and shared meals with strangers who became friends despite our inability to speak a word of the same language.
Somewhere along the way, I realized that the experiences that changed me most rarely had much to do with comfort.
Travel challenged the way I understood the world. Mountains taught me patience, humility, and the peculiar satisfaction of voluntarily making life much harder than necessary. And both introduced me to people and perspectives I never would have encountered by staying where I was.
I’ve always been drawn to the idea of living a Renaissance life. Not in the sense of being exceptional at everything, but in refusing to believe we have to spend our entire lives being just one thing.
I want to be a thoughtful husband, a capable mountaineer, a curious traveler, and a good entrepreneur. I want to keep learning, occasionally fail spectacularly, and remain open to the possibility that my next great passion might be something I haven’t even discovered yet.
From the road to building something real
Somewhere in the middle of my travels, I met Espoir.
Two strangers playing chess in Spain eventually became two people exploring the world together, falling in love, and dreaming up a life that combined the things we cared about most.
Travel had shown us what happens when people feel genuinely welcome, when health is part of everyday life, and when good company has a way of turning ordinary afternoons into something memorable.
An idea that first took shape during my travels followed us home to Austin, where we began writing a business plan on the floor of a mostly empty apartment.
That idea became Gevity.
Today, we’re building and scaling a wellness business together that broke $1 million in revenue eight months in, bringing movement, recovery, meaningful work, and human connection under one roof.
Entrepreneurship has been its own expedition. Different terrain, considerably more emails, and no shortage of moments when you wonder why you signed up for this in the first place.
But there’s something deeply rewarding about creating a place that becomes part of other people’s lives. And getting to share that experience with my wife, from the earliest scribbles to the realities of running a growing company, has made it all the more meaningful.
Build. Become. Explore.
I’ve never seen travel, business, and personal growth as separate pursuits. The lessons tend to follow me between them.
The patience I learn in the mountains comes home with me. The people I encounter while traveling influence the kind of hospitality we create at Gevity. Building a business challenges me to grow in ways no expedition ever could.
Different seasons of life ask different things of us. Some are for wandering, others for putting down roots. Some ask us to take enormous risks, others to show up consistently for what we’ve already committed to.
That’s the thinking behind Mindful Mindsets.
Explore the world and everything it can teach you.
Build something meaningful with what you’ve learned.
Become someone who keeps evolving along the way.
This is where I share the stories, lessons, misadventures, and occasional hard-earned wisdom from all three. From remote mountain passes to the realities of entrepreneurship, from health and longevity to the people and places that have shaped how I see the world.
I don’t have a grand blueprint for how a life should unfold. If anything, my own has been a fairly convincing argument against having one.
That guy waking up in Bangkok had no idea what was coming. I suspect the version of me writing this doesn’t either.
And I’m quite happy about that.
Work hard.
Take pride.
Lead with empathy.
And stay curious enough to see where it all goes.