What 7 Years of Sobriety Taught Me
Writing about sobriety publicly is not something I take lightly. It’s personal in a way that most things I share are not. But seven years is a milestone that deserves to be acknowledged out loud and if telling this story helps even one person who is in the middle of their own version of it, then it is worth every uncomfortable moment of putting it into words.
It Started as Survival
I didn’t get sober because I had a plan. I got sober because I needed to. The version of me that existed before June 9, 2019 was functional on the outside and quietly coming apart on the inside in the way that a lot of high performers are before something forces them to stop and look at what’s actually happening beneath the surface. I was social, driven, hitting numbers at work, and showing up to everything I was supposed to show up to. I was also using alcohol as the operating system underneath all of it. The social lubricant, the reward at the end of a hard day, the thing that made the transition from work mode to off mode feel possible. I didn’t recognize how dependent that system had become until I decided to remove it and found out how much of my daily architecture had been built around it.
The early days of sobriety weren’t dramatic in the way people sometimes imagine. They were quiet and uncomfortable and disorienting. I had to relearn how to be in a room full of people without a drink in my hand. I’ll never forget the first time I went to a bar and didn’t drink. I was at Lottie’s Pub in Bucktown. I had to figure out how to celebrate, how to decompress, how to socialize, how to handle the kind of stress that used to have a very reliable outlet. I had to rebuild the entire operating system from scratch and I had to do it while the rest of my life kept moving at full speed.
Athletics Saved Me in the Second Chapter
What filled the space that alcohol left was movement. Running specifically. I started taking running seriously in 2019 and started competing in 2021 as an endurance athlete and what I found was that the discipline, the structure, and the community of that world gave me exactly what I had been looking for in the wrong places for a long time. Training/competing gave me a reason to show up, a standard to hold myself to, and created a version of myself I could be genuinely proud of at the end of a hard day.
Endurance sport taught me things about myself that no other environment could have. It taught me that suffering is temporary and that your mind will tell you to stop long before your body actually needs to. It taught me that the person you become through the process of preparing for something hard is more valuable than the finish line itself. It taught me that community built around shared struggle is one of the most powerful forces in human experience. All of those lessons became foundational to how I operate today as a founder, as a leader, and as a person. Athletics was not just a hobby I picked up in sobriety. It was the school I did not know I needed.
What Sobriety Actually Changes
I want to be specific here because I think people underestimate the scope of what sobriety restructures in a person's life. It’s not just about the absence of alcohol. It’s about everything that absence makes possible.
It changed who I spend time with. When alcohol is no longer the organizing principle of your social life, the people who remain are there for different reasons. The relationships that survived and deepened through my sobriety are the most honest and sustaining ones I’ve ever had. The ones that fell away taught me something too.
It changed how I think. Clarity is not a small thing. When your mind is not managing the cycle of drinking and recovering, the cognitive bandwidth that opens up is significant. I became sharper, more strategic, more patient, and more capable of sitting with difficult problems long enough to actually solve them. That clarity is a direct input into everything I have built professionally since 2019.
It changed where I live. I moved to Denver in part because I needed a new landscape, a new community, a new environment, and a new version of myself that was not tethered to the patterns and places of who I used to be. That move led to the athletic community that sustained my early sobriety, the professional network that eventually made HUMN possible, and the life I am living today.
It changed what I do for work. I don’t think I could have built HUMN as the person I was before June 9, 2019. Not because that person wasn’t capable but because he didn’t have the self-awareness, the patience, the emotional discipline, or the clarity of vision that this work requires. Sobriety didn’t just change my habits. It changed my capacity and that expanded capacity is what made it possible to walk away from a 14-year corporate career in 2025 and bet everything on an idea in a notebook.
The Milestone Isn’t the Point
Seven years sounds like a long time and some days it feels like it. Other days it feels like I blinked and here we are. What I have learned is that the number is not really the point. The point is what you build inside of the time. The relationships, the clarity, the discipline, the version of yourself that compounds quietly over years of choosing the harder and more honest path every single day.
I’m running a 100-mile ultramarathon in August 2026. It’s the last race of my athletic career and I’m doing it on my terms, as a closing of that chapter before HUMN opens its doors in March 2027. When I cross that finish line I will have done everything I set out to do as an athlete. None of it would have been possible without June 9, 2019.
I share this not to perform vulnerability or to make sobriety sound like a clean and linear story because it’s not. I share it because the version of me that is building HUMN, that is sitting across from investors and partners and telling this story with conviction, was built in the years of quiet work that nobody saw. The 4am runs. The uncomfortable social situations navigated without a crutch. The decisions made from clarity instead of habit. That is the foundation underneath everything. Seven years taught me that the most important work you will ever do is the work you do on yourself.
Change is possible.
