10/07/2026
I was 6 or 7 when a boy blocked a broken barbed wire fence at my school in Jamaica and told me I couldn't pass because I was too dark.
He pulled the wire while I was climbing through, and it left a scar I'd carry for the next 30 years. What I remember more is the decision I made at that fence: I'm going anyway, and whatever comes with it, I'll take.
I had honestly forgotten that story until I sat down with Claude to mine my own stories for my brand messaging. Then it explained everything.
It's why I spent high school organizing students to get our bus passes extended past practice. It's why I was basically a professional protester in my 20s. And it's why the business I run now exists. I learned really young that your voice is your power.
Now the part that applies to you.
Corporate America rarely says "not you" out loud. Nobody tells you that you can't post that, can't say that, can't disagree in public. You just know. And after 15 or 20 years of knowing, a lot of brilliant people start their own businesses and keep following the same rules, even though nobody can fire them anymore.
So everybody starts to sound the same. And the people who lose when everybody sounds the same tend to look like me.
You end up locally celebrated. Your clients know you know your stuff backwards, forwards, and sideways. Industrywide, it's still the same few names, and you have as much experience as they do. Usually more.
I'm not judging the fear. When I was still in corporate, a board member at the association I worked for went through my LinkedIn page and made me defend the numbers on it. That fear lived in my body for years after I left.
What moved me was getting clear that my why is bigger than that fear. If yours isn't bigger than your fear, that's not really your why yet. Maybe you need a different one.
Because AI-generated videos, people with more audacity than expertise, and flat-out scammers are all getting louder. Quiet experts lose that fight by default.
Day 2 of my 100-day YouTube challenge is live today, and the whole story is in it: youtube.com/
What's one thing you know cold about your industry that you still haven't said out loud in public?