Tell your story enough times and it becomes a product.
I've told the story of how I built my business maybe two hundred times. The version I tell now has almost nothing to do with what actually happened.
The clean version goes like this. Built a logistics company at 19. Ran it for a decade. Sold it. Realized I'd been building the wrong thing. Started over. Now I run digital products from wherever I want, work two hours a day, and surf when the waves are good.
That version is technically true. Every fact checks out. But it's missing everything that matters.
It's missing the part where I dropped out of college because I was scared, not because I was brave. The part where I hired my first employee and paid him with a check I wasn't sure would clear. The part where my girlfriend at the time said she felt like she was dating the company, not me, and I told her she was being dramatic. She wasn't.
It's missing the eighteen months after I sold the company where I delivered Chipotle orders and sat in parking lots trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do with a life that didn't have a 5am start time anymore. The part where I moved back into my childhood bedroom at 35 and my mom pretended that was normal because she loved me too much to say what she was thinking.
None of that makes the story.
A buddy at a bar last month asked me how I got here. And I heard myself give the version. The smooth one. Three minutes, clean arc, clear lesson. He nodded and said man, that's inspiring. And I felt something curdle in my chest because I knew I'd just sold him a story I wouldn't buy if someone sold it to me.
That's the trap. You tell your story enough times and it becomes a product. You sand off the ugly parts because people don't want ugly. They want the version that makes them believe they can do it too. And you give them that version because it feels good to be the guy who figured it out. It feels good to see their face change. It feels good to matter in someone else's narrative.
But every time you tell the clean version, the real one gets a little quieter. The details blur. The fear fades. The shame softens. And eventually you're walking around inside a story that belongs to someone smarter and braver and more intentional than you ever actually were.
You've done this. Maybe not with a business. Maybe with a breakup. A career move. A decision you survived through stubbornness and dumb luck and other people's patience. And now when you tell it, you make it sound like a plan. Like you saw the path and chose it.
You didn't. Nobody does. But the edited version is so much easier to carry.
I started catching myself about six months ago. Someone would ask and I'd feel the clean version loading up like a script. I started interrupting it. Adding the parts I usually skip. Saying things like "honestly I had no idea what I was doing" and "I think I just got lucky on the timing" and "the two years after were the worst of my life."
It's uncomfortable. People's faces change. They don't lean in the same way. The conversation gets weird because they came for the blueprint and you're handing them a mess.
But something happens after. The ones who stay, the ones who don't check out when the story stops being useful to them, those are the only conversations I remember the next day. Everything else was just a performance I gave for free.
I spent a whole decade building a business around being needed. Then I spent the next few years building a life around not being needed. But the thing I never stopped doing, the thing I didn't even notice, was building a version of myself that wasn't real and handing it to anyone who asked.
That version is easy to like. He's clean. He's confident. He made hard choices for clear reasons and came out the other side with a good story and a laptop on a beach.
The real guy panicked most of the time. Got lucky more than he earned. Hurt people he cared about because the business was always louder than they were. And still isn't sure he's doing this right.
The real version of anyone's story is never a straight line. It's a mess of accidents and bad calls and people who helped when you didn't deserve it. The polished version might be easier to tell. But the second you start believing it, you lose the only thing that actually got you here.
The willingness to have no idea what you're doing and keep going anyway.
— Best, Jose
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