i outlived my expiration date.
seven years ago, a doctor gave me a timeline. degenerative. progressive. incurable. five years before i’d lose the basics—walking, speaking, feeding myself.
i did the math. clock set to run out by mid-thirties.
so i started building. not for prestige. for urgency.
launched a company. scaled internationally. collected accolades. moved fast because moving slow meant not finishing.
this wasn’t ambition.
it was a race against biology.
then the deadline passed & i was still here.
not unchanged—wheelchair now, speech slower, every action costing more than it should.
but undeniably present.
& that created a problem i never prepared for:
what happens when the ending you rehearsed doesn’t arrive?
there’s no playbook for this.
no framework for “survived your own timeline.” no mentor who’s been here. no training data.
in machine learning, zero-shot learning means doing something new without prior examples. no training data. just general knowledge transferred into unfamiliar terrain.
that’s what being human feels like now.
zoom out & it’s everywhere.
the models get to train on the past. we don’t.
rules shift. industries collapse. certainties evaporate.
everyone’s navigating without training data. mine is just more visible.
the old playbooks exist. they just stopped applying.
the company i poured everything into? stepped away.
the next venture? failed—not financially, but in meaning. we built a casino. optimized for engagement, not impact.
so i’m resetting.
not because i failed.
because real growth often demands the reset.
you keep the meta-learning. you shed the identity. you start again at level one.
every new chapter is zero-shot.
the founder playbook—raise, hype, scale aggressively—doesn’t fit my physical reality anymore.
but i’m convinced another way exists.
a method built for constraints, not despite them.
i just haven’t found it yet.
this blog is the search.
not a manual. not a triumph narrative. not motivational content.
experiments. constraints. lessons that survive.
me—writing my way forward, navigating without training data.
the map is gone. the territory remains.
let’s see where it leads.