I want to tell you about the lowest point of my life.
Not prison. People always assume it was prison. It wasn’t. The lowest point came before that, on a small hill not far from my house, where I dropped to my knees on the rocks and screamed at God until my voice gave out.
But you can’t understand the hill unless you understand how I got there. So let me back up.
I had believed the myth. You know the one. The Silicon Valley story where in order to have a great origin story you have to risk it all, and then a little bit more, and that’s how it all works out and you rise to these heights of glory.
So I spent it all.
I took all of my personal capital and poured it into my business. Every dollar I had. Every bit of relationship capital. Any respect points I’d earned over the years — I cashed all of those chips in. I spent like the company was going to keep growing forever.
It didn’t.
My ego ran wild. I lost sight of the day-to-day details, stopped paying attention to the little things. And those little things turned out to be big things. And then one day I’m standing there federally indicted and headed to prison.
Social media was trashing me. My detractors and my haters were having a field day. The newspapers wrote about me — thank you, LA Times, for getting most of what you wrote false. Everything was crashing down at once.
Every single thing I held dearly, all of it, gone. Everything I’d worked so hard for, ripped away.
I went from a paper millionaire to a very real broke ass.
I don’t know how else to say it. The pain was indescribable. I felt naked and beaten. And I don’t mean “beaten” like I lost a race. I mean like a gang of pipe fitters attacked me from every angle and beat me to near death. From every direction, it hurt. I watched friends disappear. All that status I’d spent my life chasing was now lower than zero. Far lower than zero.
And then, at my lowest point — it happened.
A family member who is mentally unwell attacked me. Relished in the hurt. Celebrated my destruction. And I was so beaten down already that I couldn’t do the thing I knew I was supposed to do, which was brush it off as the mentally unwell person doing what they do.
It broke me.
I took a long walk. I wasn’t going anywhere. I just walked. And I circled back and found myself on top of that small hill near my home, and that’s where it happened.
I broke.
I screamed. And I don’t mean I raised my voice. I mean a blood-curdling scream of someone in pure hell. Deep anguish. Near death. A scream I had never made before in my life and have never made since.
I dropped to my knees. Tears pouring down my face. My knees hit the sharp rocks on the ground and I didn’t even notice. The pain in my chest was so intense it was like I was being run down by a truck.
And I screamed at God.
I swore at him. I yelled at the top of my lungs. I challenged him to a fight. I said every horrible thing I could think of to God. I cursed him and I asked him why he hated me so much. I asked him how it was that I’d been a good person my whole life and he kept making my life so freaking hard. Why couldn’t my life just be normal? I wasn’t even asking for a break. I was just asking to be left alone, frankly.
I cursed him for what must have been an hour or more. Screaming into the sun like some whacked-out insane person.
I cracked. That’s the honest word for it. This is what raving mad actually looks like. It’s a breaking point where your mental faculties just stop making any sense. It was an outpouring of everything from a man who had just tipped over the brink of sanity. Screaming into the sun and talking shit to God himself.
“I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU,” I screamed.
I screamed it to the point where my vocal cords felt like they were scratched and shredding, like a mad death-metal guitarist on some coked-out guitar riff. My hands shook in pure rage.
I’ve been mad before. We’ve all been mad. This wasn’t that. This was a level of pure blind rage that would have me spitting in the eye of the devil himself. In those thunderous moments on top of that hill, screaming with my fists to the heavens — I would have fought God and punched him right in the nose without fear or hesitation.
The adrenaline was coursing through my veins. My heart was beating at redline.
And then, eventually, I ran out.
My tear ducts ran dry. My breath came back to normal. Completely drained, but still seething. That kind of raw emotional experience where even your breath is full of vinegar.
And I’ll tell you what I’d found up there.
My lowest point. Everything stripped down and ripped away. My reputation, which mattered to me more than I want to admit — gone. That was the ego. My business, which I prized like a firstborn son — gone. Every asset — gone. And on top of all of it, I was about to lose my freedom.
What else could I possibly lose? That wasn’t even a question worth wrestling with.
Except — here’s the thing nobody warns you about. There is more you can lose. You can, in fact, be kicked while you’re already down. Not one but two family members kicked me while I was down. Calling me names on social media, to other family members, to friends.
But here’s what surprised me. As it turns out, I still had fight in me. I wasn’t left for dead like I’d thought.
And here is the part I most want you to understand, because it’s the part that changed everything.
When you break — and I mean really break, all the way down — fear and self-preservation disappear.
They just leave.
When I finally went to prison, I wasn’t afraid. And people don’t believe me when I say that, but it’s true. I was afraid before going. Of course I was. How could you not be? But by the time I walked in, the fear was gone. And the reason it was gone is almost too simple. You feel insane levels of rage by deeply believing you have nothing left to lose. And a man with nothing left to lose isn’t afraid of anything.
I’m not telling you that as a strategy. I’m not recommending it. I’m just telling you what’s true. The very bottom — the place you’re terrified of ending up — has a strange gift buried in it. When the worst thing has already happened, the thing you spent your whole life bracing against, you stop bracing. And something in you that was clenched for years finally lets go.
Because here’s where it went, eventually. Not that day. It took time to process and marinate into my bones. But I turned to God, who I had just blamed for everything — which is impossibly stupid of course, but that’s where I was — and somewhere in there I found a level of spirituality that actually fits me.
I came to a kind of agreement with myself. That I am no more capable of understanding the universe than I am of understanding God. But I’m reasonable enough to know there’s something. A grand design. Something far bigger than the tiny bit of processing power between my two ears.
So I accepted it. I surrendered to the fact that I don’t know, I don’t understand, and I never will.
I threw down my sword and my shield, and I said to myself: whatever happens is what is supposed to happen. I am just going to move forward, whatever that means. It will all work out. It just will.
That, apparently, is called faith.
So now I have faith. That’s how I found it. On a hill, on my knees, with a shredded throat, having just told God I’d kill him.
And I’ll be honest — I’m a grown man who prides himself on stoic resolve, and I still crack emotionally just thinking about my connection to something higher than me. That response still surprises me every single time it shows up.
So if you’re at your bottom right now — if everything’s been stripped away and you’re down there on the rocks with nothing left — I’m not going to tell you it doesn’t hurt. It’s the worst pain there is.
But I’ll tell you what I couldn’t have believed that day, screaming into the sun.
This is not the end of you.
This is the place where the fear dies. And on the other side of that fear is a version of you that nothing can scare anymore.
“God will give me justice.” — Edmund Dantès
Next chapter: Hope Is a Drug Worth Sharing →