I’ve spent my whole life figuring out where I belong. That search made me a strategist.
I realized that people look for entry passes into worlds where they feel understood and became obsessed with dissecting how belief is built, why communities form, and what makes a narrative stick.
Because at our core, human nature is always the same: irrational, ritualistic, easily bored, and desperate to belong.
When you understand that impulse, building worlds people buy into becomes second nature.
In 8th grade, I taught Newton's Laws of Motion inside of Fortnite and it caught fire in front of hundreds. It proved that if you understand what a community cares about, you can build a narrative that commands their full attention.
That spark gave me the nerve to launch my own commercial production business. Across 150 client projects, I learned how to construct visual worlds from behind a camera and how to translate a client’s business problem into a narrative that lands.
In 11th grade, that business was selected as the live client for a VCU Advertising Capstone class. Sitting in the back of the room as college seniors dissected my business, a lightning bolt hit that I wanted a seat at the strategy table.
College was three and a half years of side quests, learning, and cleaning up messy human truths like unpacking why Gen Z refuses to wash on cold with Tide and rebuilding a student ad club from the ground up, among other things.
All of it leads back to finding the human truth, pulling it into the light, and shaping a world worth joining.