For years I struggled with doing the same thing for a long time. I love to initiate (!!). And initiating, for me, is creating. Creating means new. But after a few months in the creator’s chair—once the thing I made was out in the world, some would even say it was born—boredom crept in. Then I’d want to create something new. And soon enough, the new became old. For many years that was the loop: creation, sinking into boredom, time passing, then a new creation.
On my twenty-fifth birthday, I made a different kind of move. I signed a five-year contract in real estate. In writing. There were hard moments—times I was so over it, big time. I’m a theater actor who became a director, who enlisted and became a programmer, who became a commander, who became a teacher, who became a business owner, who became a real estate entrepreneur. You could sprinkle music, party production, and graphic design somewhere along that path too. I’ve worn a lot of hats, and for a long time I thought my nature demanded constant reinvention.
Today I see how all those roles have settled into a kind of harmony, born out of sticking with real estate. Creation has many faces, and we only get to name it in hindsight. I rediscovered business as a creative act inside my own company—how to build a training that actually grows an employee, how to design processes that seem to run themselves. I brought AI and gardening into that learning, both curiosity and craft feeding the same engine. And I’m not quitting real estate. I brought the lectures too—the rhythm, the one-on-one, the one-to-many. Even under the same “title,” I’ve learned I can weave in whole worlds of different content.
I love life. I love the everyday. I love this exact moment. Here I am, writing this right now.
And here’s another realization as I read myself back: that headline I chased for years—the single defining label—I don’t want it anymore. I want to be Dan, in all my evolutions. Not “just one topic to share with the world.” I am me, and the simplest, truest thing I can share is myself, as myself.