If I'm Being Honest

Over the past few months I’ve been following some athletes on LinkedIn, watching them share their stories in their own words.

Maya Dodson, a Stanford engineer playing professional basketball overseas, writes these raw monthly essays about what that life actually looks like. She doesn’t dress it up. She just documents what nobody else documents. The loneliness, the growth, the in-between. Moses Moody built an AI version of himself to scale mentorship to kids in his hometown because he couldn’t be there in person. And then there was the discourse around Drew Dalman leaving the NFL, walking away from a $24 million contract at the peak of his career, and Spencer Jones talking about why that decision may have made sense for him. Not the hot takes. An athlete making sense of another athlete’s choice.

I’ve really been inspired watching all of them tell their stories from a first person lens. But more than inspiration, it forced me to ask a question I’d been avoiding: why haven’t I done this?

The Excuses

I had a few ready.

Playing sports at a high level, you get so used to others sharing your story for you. Coaches introduce you. Schools write your bio. Media decides which version of you gets airtime. And that dynamic doesn’t stop when the sport does. You just kind of keep waiting for someone to tell the next chapter too. Even though social media has changed that with more personal branding and narratives, the lens is generally never first person.

That was excuse number one. And it’s real. There is a comfort in letting other people hold the pen. You never have to decide what the story is. You never have to risk getting it wrong.

But if I’m being honest, there’s something else underneath it.

The Fear

I’ve always been multi-faceted. Basketball, engineering, nonprofit work, AI, a dozen things at once. And I’ve never known how to present all of that without seeming incoherent. How do you fit all of this into one person? How do you introduce yourself when the answer to “so what do you do?” takes five minutes and people’s eyes start glazing over somewhere between “I played D1 at Duke” and “I’m using computer vision to solve a basketball problem?”

I think that fear, of being seen as scattered, of not fitting neatly into one box, is part of why I stayed quiet. It was easier to let people see one slice and not deal with the confusion of the full picture.

But watching Maya write about the split between engineer and athlete like it was the most natural thing in the world, watching Spencer frame his basketball career as a business launchpad without any awkwardness about it, I started to realize that the multi-faceted thing isn’t the problem. It might actually be the story.

Why Now

I’m not starting this because I figured it all out. I’m starting because I realized that waiting until the story is clean and coherent and perfectly packaged is just another excuse. The story is messy. It’s always been messy. That’s the point.

I have a lot to share. The past few years have been full, in ways that most people around me don’t even know about. Basketball that surprisingly never stopped. A real basketball problem I’ve been using technology to solve. A nonprofit that’s growing. Technical work at Microsoft that’s shaping how I think about AI. Identity questions that come with having roots on two continents.

I’ve been sitting on all of it. Waiting for the right time, the right framing, the right version of myself to show up and tell it properly.

I don’t think that version is coming. So I’m starting with this one.

What to Expect

Over the next few weeks I’m going to start sharing. The real version, not the polished one. How much of a role basketball has played, and honestly, how surprisingly central it still is. A real basketball problem I saw as a player that I’m now solving as an engineer. What the Ready Leaders Foundation is becoming. What I’m learning about AI that I think most people are missing.

Not a tech blog. Not a sports memoir. Not a founder diary. All of those things, none of those things. Just the honest version of what’s been going on.

My brain has many tabs open. I’m done pretending that’s a problem.