Like many good stories, this one started in Vegas. My wife and I were with friends, riding up the escalator through The Chandelier lounge in the Cosmopolitan. I looked back at my buddy Dr. Alex and said, "Be The Filament." I don't know exactly why those words came out at that moment. But they did, and they stuck.
The journey to that escalator started a couple of years earlier. My mom had passed away in 2020, and I was lost. Not lost like you can't find your car keys. Lost like you can't find the point. I ended up doing some deep personal work with my mentor, Jose Bolaños, in Nicaragua. Jose has a way of pushing past the surface-level crap most people never get beyond. We spent days breaking down what truly drives me, what makes me feel most alive. And through that process, I figured something out. Or more precisely, I said something out loud that I think I'd known for a long time but hadn't been able to articulate.
I'm the thing that helps other people see the goodness that's already in them.
That's it. Some people would call that a life purpose. I think of it more as a discovery. It was already true about me. Jose just helped me see it clearly enough to say it.
Here's why I landed on the word "filament" and not just "light." Everyone says "be the light." It's on coffee mugs. But a filament is a specific thing. It's the element inside a bulb that transforms energy into something visible and warm. Without it, there's no light at all. And here's the part that matters to me: the filament doesn't generate the energy. It converts it into something people can actually use. I don't think I'm the source of anything. I think I take what's already there in someone and help make it visible.
What surprised me about finding this was how much easier everything else became. Not easy in the "life is simple now" sense. Easy in the "I know which direction to walk" sense. Should I take this client? Does this new service make sense? How should I spend my Tuesday? When you know what you're for, these questions get a lot less confusing. You still have to think, but you're thinking inside a frame instead of staring at a blank wall.
I've been testing this idea against the worst scenarios I can imagine, which is how I know it's real. If everything got stripped away tomorrow, the business, the possessions, whatever people think of as status, I could still be the filament in the lives of people I touch. I could be broke, in any city, in any circumstance, and this would still be true. You can't lose a purpose like that. It doesn't depend on external conditions. That's how you know something is the real thing and not just a nice idea you had once.
I treat it the way I treat sobriety. It's never finished. You don't arrive and stop working. You just keep showing up.
My mom ran a skateboard shop out of the Topeka Flea Market when I was a kid. She'd set up in her booth and every kid who walked in got her full attention. She didn't have business training or a philosophy about it. She just saw kids who needed someone to take them seriously, and she did. Looking back, she was doing exactly what I'm trying to describe. She was being the filament for every one of them. She just never had a word for it.
I think about her watching. I think she'd recognize what I'm doing now, even though I arrived at it through a completely different path. There's something in that, figuring out in your forties that you've been trying to become the thing your mother already was.
I didn't set out to build a philosophy. I set out to figure out why I'm on this huge rock. Turns out those are the same thing.