I spent a good portion of my twenties doing things that made very little sense on a résumé.
Teaching English in rural Thailand. Knocking on strangers’ doors in Australia. Wandering through countries where I barely spoke the language, occasionally getting lost, regularly getting humbled, and generally figuring things out as I went.
Today, I’m building a private wellness club with my wife in Austin, Texas. A business that requires a remarkable amount of patience, adaptability, problem-solving, and the ability to get comfortable with things going sideways.
As it turns out, I’d been practicing for years.
Not intentionally, of course. That would make the story far more organized than it actually was.
A fairly unconventional education
After studying economics and business at university, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do professionally. I did, however, know that I wanted to live and work on as many continents as possible before turning thirty.
So I did the obvious thing and moved to Thailand to teach English at a small rural school.
I wasn’t particularly interested in following a conventional career trajectory. I wanted to experience different ways of living, meet people whose backgrounds looked nothing like mine, and see what happened when I stopped organizing my life around familiar surroundings.
Teaching was an unexpectedly useful place to begin. Standing in front of a classroom where English wasn’t everyone’s first language forced me to reconsider how I communicated. It wasn’t enough to know something. I needed to figure out how to make it understood, often with a healthy amount of improvisation.
Outside the classroom, daily life offered its own education. Navigating unfamiliar customs, eating whatever looked interesting, making friends across language barriers, and finding my way around places that had never heard of my carefully constructed plans.
I wasn’t collecting business lessons. I was simply enjoying being somewhere different.
And when the opportunity came to move to Australia, I figured I might as well keep going.
The Australian school of getting rejected
I arrived in Melbourne on a working holiday visa, needing employment and somewhere to sleep. Fortunately, I found a company offering both.
The job? Selling paintings door to door.
Commission only, but accommodation included. A rather attractive arrangement when your professional qualifications at that particular moment consisted mainly of a backpack and a willingness to try something new.
I shadowed another salesperson the evening I arrived, and the following day I was out knocking on doors by myself.
I made around $250 on day one.
Naturally, I assumed I’d discovered some extraordinary hidden talent.
On day two, I worked six hours and made absolutely nothing.
Welcome to sales.
Despite the occasional bruising to my ego, I found the whole thing fascinating. Every door presented a different personality, a different conversation, and a new opportunity to figure out what made people tick. Some were friendly. Others had absolutely no interest in entertaining my existence. Australians, I’ve learned, possess a particularly colorful vocabulary for communicating that sentiment.
Eventually, my appreciation for regular meals led me to another job selling gas and electricity, this time with a base salary.
What surprised me was how much I enjoyed the work. Not necessarily the selling itself, but the psychology behind it. Learning to communicate with strangers, understanding their motivations, reading a room, dealing with rejection, and discovering that the quickest way to lose someone’s attention was to make the conversation entirely about yourself.
It felt strangely familiar.
Because traveling alone had been teaching me many of those same things.
The connection I hadn’t noticed
When you travel independently, especially through places where you don’t speak the language, you become remarkably comfortable not knowing what you’re doing.
You learn to approach strangers, ask for help, negotiate with varying degrees of success, and occasionally accept that whatever plan you had for the afternoon is now completely irrelevant.
You also learn that being curious about people tends to get you considerably further than being interesting yourself.
Some of my favorite travel memories have nothing to do with the destination. They’re the conversations that began because I sat beside someone on a bus, accepted an invitation to share a meal, or spent an afternoon with a person whose life I knew absolutely nothing about that morning.
You can’t really manufacture those experiences. You have to be present enough to recognize them and open enough to follow wherever they lead.
Sales, I discovered, wasn’t terribly different.
The best conversations rarely followed a script. They happened when I stopped worrying about what I was supposed to say and started paying attention to the person standing in front of me.
Travel had given me the confidence to begin those conversations. Sales gave me a reason to become better at them.
From knocking on doors to building teams
After roughly three years abroad, I returned to the United States and continued my career in sales. I eventually became director of sales at a startup, where I helped build a team, expand into new markets, and grow a business.
Later, I moved into technology sales, taking on larger responsibilities and learning an entirely different side of the profession.
The stakes were different from selling paintings in Melbourne, although the fundamentals hadn’t changed much. Understanding people still mattered. So did listening, building trust, handling uncomfortable conversations, and finding ways forward when the obvious approach wasn’t working.
As I moved into leadership, those lessons became even more valuable. You’re suddenly responsible for people with different personalities, motivations, ambitions, and ways of approaching problems. Being good at your own job doesn’t automatically make you good at helping someone else succeed.
I began to appreciate how much of leadership comes down to the same curiosity I’d developed traveling: recognizing that another person’s perspective might be completely different from your own, and taking the time to understand why.
By late 2022, I’d built a career I was proud of. I’d recently been promoted, was performing well, and had no immediate plans to walk away from it.
Then the organization dissolved part of its sales team, and I lost my job.
Not exactly the next chapter I had penciled into the calendar.
Another detour
I’ve noticed that the most consequential changes in my life have rarely arrived with much advance notice.
Getting laid off wasn’t some heroic decision to abandon corporate America and chase a dream. It was an unexpected setback, and I wasn’t particularly thrilled about it.
But it created an opening.
Rather than immediately jumping into another role, I decided to travel again. I had spent years working, building a career, and following a relatively predictable professional path. Suddenly, I had the opportunity to do something different.
So I went back to what had always made me feel most curious and alive: exploring.
What followed was another stretch of travel, unfamiliar places, new perspectives, and a lot of time to think about the life I wanted to build when I eventually returned.
Somewhere along the way, during a conversation after an ice bath, an idea began taking shape.
What if there were a place that brought together the things I kept returning to throughout my life? Movement, recovery, meaningful work, and genuine human connection. Not as separate destinations scattered around a city, but as parts of the same daily experience.
That idea eventually became Gevity.
And suddenly, I found myself facing an entirely different kind of unfamiliar territory.
Building something from nothing
Espoir, my wife, and I spent 669 days taking Gevity from an idea to opening its doors in Austin.
I’d love to tell you we approached the process with extraordinary foresight and a beautifully organized roadmap.
We did not.
There were spaces to find, financing to figure out, permits to navigate, people to hire, and an endless parade of problems neither of us knew existed until they arrived.
Building a business has a funny way of making you feel like a beginner again, regardless of how experienced you thought you were.
And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, I began recognizing pieces of my earlier life.
The uncertainty felt familiar. So did having to ask questions I probably should have known the answers to, navigating conversations where I didn’t fully understand the other person’s world, and relying on the generosity and expertise of people willing to help.
Travel had taught me how to enter unfamiliar environments without immediately retreating to what was comfortable. Sales had taught me how to communicate, understand people, and keep going after a difficult day.
Entrepreneurship demanded all of that, then introduced a few new challenges just to keep things interesting.
Of course, building a business carries responsibilities that backpacking through another country doesn’t. People depend on your decisions. There’s money at stake, a team to support, and something you’ve created that requires attention long after the exciting part of opening the doors is over.
But the underlying willingness to figure things out has remained remarkably similar.
And that’s become one of the more interesting realizations of my life.
The different seasons of becoming
For years, I thought of travel, my career, and eventually entrepreneurship as distinct chapters.
Travel was something I did because I loved it. Sales was something I stumbled into and happened to enjoy. Building Gevity was a completely different adventure that began after an unexpected setback.
Only recently have I started appreciating how much those experiences overlap.
They’ve influenced one another in ways I couldn’t possibly have anticipated. The things I learned in a classroom in Thailand became useful knocking on doors in Australia. The confidence I developed selling to strangers helped me lead teams. The curiosity that kept pulling me toward unfamiliar places eventually influenced the kind of business I wanted to create.
And building a business has changed the way I think about travel, too. I appreciate time differently. I notice hospitality, thoughtful design, and the small details that make people feel welcome. I’m probably more interested in how a place operates than any traveler on vacation reasonably should be.
None of these experiences belongs neatly in one category anymore.
Which is fitting, because I’ve never particularly liked the idea that we need to pick one version of ourselves and stick with it.
I still want to climb mountains, explore unfamiliar countries, build something meaningful, and spend time doing things that have absolutely no professional benefit whatsoever.
Not every interest needs to become a business opportunity. Not every trip needs to teach you a lesson. And not every detour needs a convincing explanation.
Sometimes you follow your curiosity simply because something interests you. Years later, you might discover it shaped far more of your life than you realized.
I certainly didn’t know that knocking on doors in Melbourne would have anything to do with opening a wellness club in Austin.
Then again, I didn’t know much of anything when I started.
That’s been half the fun.
