Why I’m Replatforming (Again)

When I was a teenager, my piano teacher told me to give up.

Not dramatically. Not cruelly. Just factually.
He said I didn’t have it.

So I went home and taught myself.

A year later, I ran into him by chance. He had heard me playing somewhere and asked how I played a particular riff. I remember the moment clearly, not because it felt triumphant, but because it felt… quiet. Something had closed. Something else had opened.

By eighteen, I was playing sessions in recording studios. I played professionally until my mid-twenties. Music was my first language for systems. Patterns, timing, tension, release. You learn very quickly that performance is not talent alone. It’s regulation. Presence. The ability to stay coherent under pressure.

Then I replatformed.

I started a business or two. They did okay. Eventually they failed. Not catastrophically. Just thoroughly enough to end the chapter.

At twenty-nine, I was waiting tables. One night, an idea dropped into my head with no warning: learn how to program.

I didn’t have a plan. I bought a book and taught myself.

Nine months later, I had a programming job. Four years after that, I started a consulting firm that I would run for fifteen years. Over time, I found myself inside increasingly complex systems, working with large organizations, mapping problems that looked personal on the surface but were architectural underneath.

I spent the next two decades in technology. I worked at the executive level. I led digital transformations. I worked at Microsoft. I worked at Amazon. I built systems, teams, frameworks, processes. I learned how outcomes are produced, not just how they’re explained.

And eventually, I saw the same pattern I had always seen.

Most failures aren’t failures of effort.
They’re failures of architecture.

When I turned that lens inward, toward my own body and behavior, I saw something unsettlingly familiar. The reactions. The patterns. The versions of myself that appeared under pressure. They weren’t random. They weren’t flaws. They were systems doing exactly what they had been built to do.

Insight didn’t change them.
Optimization didn’t change them.
Performance didn’t change them.

That realization led to a book.
It led to a framework.
It led to tools.

Not because I set out to leave tech, but because I followed the same instinct that has guided every replatforming in my life: move upstream until the system makes sense.

This site marks another transition.

I’m not leaving systems work.
I’m not abandoning rigor.
I’m not becoming a coach or a guru.

I’m shifting domains.

I want to work with humans instead of machines.

The work I’m doing now lives at the intersection of nervous system science, identity formation, and lived experience. It’s about how survival patterns become selves, why insight often backfires, and what actually allows change to take hold.

If you’re here because something that once worked no longer does, and you’re trying to understand what’s underneath that shift, you’re in the right place.

This isn’t a pivot.

It’s the same work, deeper.