Glass Chewers Anonymous | Finding redemption after failure

What failing at chewing glass taught me about God and building business

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Entrepreneurs are known for their grit. As the great Elon once said:

“Running a start-up is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. After a while, you stop staring, but the glass chewing never ends.” 

Something is energizing about this statement to a certain sliver of humanity that was exceptionally bad at games like truth or dare.

If you’re anything like me, when you hear Elon’s quote, your initial response is, “You don’t think I can chew this glass for the next 20 years? WE’LL SEE ABOUT THAT.”

And so you look for some glass to chew and get after it. 

But It hurts like a mother effer. 

You look around at the other glass chewers to see if it hurts them as badly as it hurts you, but they all just grin like they’re eating brownies.

 Then you look around at your customers whose glass you’re chewing. They look very uncertain about your pale complexion and the blood pouring from your teeth. 

And then you turn to face your team, who are counting on you to chew more glass so they can make their paycheck. You just know the only thing to do is stuff the pain, smile, and ask for more. 

You want to portray confidence, assurance, and success; you want to show that you’re an up-and-coming glass-chewer who definitely belongs in the Forbs 30 under 30 glass-chewing club. 

You got in this game to prove you could do it, and you’re going to see this through because you’re not a freaking quitter.

2019

So, if you followed me online in 2018-19, this is what you saw:

A get-up-and-grind business owner leading an up-and-coming creative community, an Italian Napoleon married to an Aruban princess. He had an Instagrammable house in a great neighborhood with a growing family. He looked like he was everywhere: on all the podcasts, speaking at all the events, presenting in all the board rooms. 

He looked like he was living the dream.

That’s what you saw, but on the inside, I was a mess.

⌚ I'd been working 60-80 hours a week between my firm and community

💵 I hadn't been paying myself enough

🏋‍♂️ I had been resentfully doing team members' work instead of addressing the problems

😕 I was anxious all the time; the second I slowed down, I started getting crazy

🐑 I was sleeping 4-5 hours a night

😨 Everything was a crisis. No problem was too small for me to freak out about.

The fact that I’d decided to build a business serving dysfunctional Catholic nonprofits COULD have been a factor, but I digress. My “I’m going to prove that I can do it” attitude was about to collapse.

Enter: CELLI

My son entered the world in January 2020. From the moment I laid eyes on him, I was utterly captivated. But along with his arrival came the challenges. For some parents, it’s the loss of freedom that gets them. For me, it was that my son wouldn’t freaking sleep unless a literal human rocked him because, apparently, he needs human connection as much as I do.

One evening, in those early days of fatherhood, I found myself in the dim nursery, bouncing my son to sleep on a medicine ball. I usually listened to business podcasts to pass the time, but fatefully, my phone slipped from my pocket to the floor, and the headphones popped out of the jack. 

My son was just beginning to drift off to sleep. I knew any sudden movement to retrieve my phone would disturb his fragile slumber, so I sat in that dreaded silence for the next few minutes. For the first time in years, I was all alone with my thoughts. 

Eventually, as I relaxed into the present moment, my frustration and boredom melted into a trance. I smelled hair, took in his warmth, and traced the delicate eyes and shape of his face…his mouth was the same as mine. 

And then I had a mystical experience.

Mystical experiences are tough to describe, so bear with me.

This all took place in the span of a few seconds:

I heard a voice inside me: “I love you just like this” 

Then, suddenly, I wasn’t holding my son; I was holding myself.

I was a little kid in my own arms. 

I saw myself speed along the timeline of my life:

• The kid that got picked last for grade school dodgeball

• The homeschooler with the big glasses and chili bowl haircut, trying to make friends in public school

• The try-hard benchwarmer was one of three kids who got cut from the C team

• The angry teenager who got brought home by the cops more than the school bus

• The punk rocker who traded his soul for a following

• The admiration addict who drowned his pain in likes and sales

Suddenly, I started to cry. The crying turned to sobbing. I loved my son and hated myself. 

As the sobs slowed, a deep foreboding came over me.

I felt like a Pandora's box had opened inside, and I couldn’t shut it. 

I felt like something fundamental was shifting in around me that I had no control over.

The next week, the media started freaking out about a virus called COVID-19, which apparently was like… really, really dangerous guys. A month later, we went into lockdown.

That was when everything I’d chewed glass to build fell apart:

• 📞 Clients called one at a time to end contracts we were counting on

• ❌ We didn’t qualify for government loans

• 💔 I had to let go of team members who’d moved to Dallas for us just a few months ago.

• 😨 Panic attacks became a daily occurrence

• 🌙➡️🚫 My sleep problems became insomnia

• 💑➡️🥊 My wife and I started fighting, and then the fights got bad

I was confused. I felt I’d done everything right, served my God, and did well for my family. 

Holding on

But I’m not a quitter. I belong in the glass chewers club! So I kept on munching. There wasn’t as much to munch as before, so I tried new types of glass, but the old jaws weren’t chewing like they used to. You could see the blood on my shirt collar.

^Blood from my produce glass chewing. Also… that look on my face…Lighten up, past Marcellino.

By the end of 2020, I was barely holding it together. 

One night, I was on a nightmare international trip. The home we were staying in was a wreck; there was no food, no air conditioning, no privacy, and my son was freaking out. 

I started to panic again, but this time, it was worse. This panic attack was like an out-of-body experience. All the dogs were barking for miles, and I knew they were barking at me. I started to seize. 

I prayed, God, if you are here, let me see you.

And I did. 

God the Father came into the room.

He held me and said: “Surrender” 

This time, I knew what he meant. All year, I’d been fighting it, trying to keep the door shut on it all, trying to prove that I was somebody, so I had to become nobody for as long as it took to change. I decided to let go.

When I got back from the trip,

I sold my community

I stopped posting on social media

I put my company on ice 

And we moved out of our house and in with my family

I needed to stop trying to prove that I could do it. 

The truth was, there was nothing to prove and no one to prove it to

The Passover and the Wilderness

The day before we moved out of our house, I cooked lamb. Though it was the middle of February, I sat the family down for a sedar meal. Before we left, I took some of the blood and painted it on the door posts. This time, I intended to surrender to the wilderness.

Before I surrendered, I thought going on a few healing retreats, reading self-help books, and going to therapy a few times a year was enough to keep me going. This wilderness season taught me that healing is an all-commitment.

Everything had to be given the Marie Kondo treatment. I had to examine it, ask whether it was good for my recovery, and discard everything that was not. When I say everything, I mean everything.

This season required me to completely surrender my feelings, thoughts, and decisions to others. If you’d like to try this yourself, join a 12-step program. It’s too bad Glass Chewers Anonymous doesn’t exist yet.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of a sponsor, in simple terms, they own your ass. The calls would go like this:

Me: “Hey, I’m considering making organic pesto and chicken piccata for dinner tonight. What do you think?”

My sponsor: “Bro, lower your expectations. Make some store-bought mac and cheese and use the time to pray instead.” 

Needless to say, I learned a lot. Mostly, I learned that I didn’t know half of what I thought I did. I didn’t learn a set of how-tos or shortcuts to apply to get through. Systems and shortcuts both died in the desert. 

Into the Promised Land

I thought this season would take a few months, but God works in centuries, and generations, not minutes.

It wasn’t until January 2024, three years later, that we moved out of my parents' house into a small two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in a rough Dallas neighborhood. We named it the Jericho house. 

The night we moved in, I held my son again and cried tears of relief. I’d come through it. 

My marriage was intact, my business was rising from the ashes, and when I held my son, I saw myself in him again, but this time, I loved that kid, too.

What has emerged from that was a new me.

Entrepreneurship is less about proving something now and more about living the identity that God gave me.

This new me

• ✋ Accepts my limitations

• 🌱 Takes care of myself

• 🚫 Doesn’t say yes to opportunities I shouldn’t

• 💔 Says no to people I love, even when it makes them upset

• 🛑 Doesn’t get involved in problems that aren’t mine

• 🤲 Doesn’t try to force solutions (as often)

I’m still the same intensely opinionated idealist that I have always been, but I’m a much better husband, father, and entrepreneur than I was before. 

I wanted to share this story because I felt like I was the only one going through this. However, I've learned that most lifetime entrepreneurs have undergone similar internal rearrangements, some sparked by failure, some catalyzed by the emptiness of success. 

When you’re an employee, someone else tells you what your value is. 

When you're a business owner, you get to assign yourself your own value 

And for broken people, that is a tricky gorram business.

It’s just the kind of thing God uses to transform you.

A mentor and close friend, Jason Jensen of Tilma, supported me through my three-year self-pity party. He gently helped me discern the movement of the Spirit in what felt like a dark and stormy sea with no shore in sight.

He said,

“You’ve been making life work apart from God, and in his kindness, he’s allowing that false life to collapse so that true life can be found. There is another you on the other side of this, and I’m looking forward to meeting him.”

So if you’re going through something like this, I’ll say the same thing.

There is another you on the other side of this, and I look forward to meeting them.

But you have to let it happen. It’s the only way.

She said, 'I will go after my lovers, who give me my food and my water, my wool and my linen, my olive oil and my drink.’ Therefore, I will block her path with thornbushes; I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way.

She will chase after her lovers but not catch them; she will look for them but not find them. Then she will say, ‘I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I was better off than now.’

“Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she will respond as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt.

“In that day,” declares the Lord, “you will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my master.’”

Hosea 2:5-6, 14-16