The Version You Keep Running

It took me fifteen years to learn that the chapter I kept leaving open was the one keeping me from writing the next one.

For most of my post-football career, I operated with both doors open. The athlete door cracked wide enough to get visibility and access. The business door open wide enough to prove I belonged in rooms that had nothing to do with sports.

Every interaction required a manual decisions:

That seesaw ran for years. And it cost me more than I realized while I was on it.

Every interaction was a negotiation between two versions of myself. That negotiation had a cost I could not see while I was paying it.

The athletic past opens doors. That part is 100% real. But where those doors lead is the problem nobody warns you about.

I have been invited into corporate settings to support initiatives focused on athlete development and financial education. Most one of them positioned me the same way: in the talent seat.

The positioning where my role was to validate their perspective and parrot their talking points.

The premise was always the same: athletes going broke after retirement. Each program framed the conversation as if every athlete is a multimillion-dollar contract holder who mismanaged their wealth.

The vast majority of professional athletes, specifically in the NFL where I played, earned at the bottom of the salary structure and played fewer than three years. These organizations were painting an entire community with a broad stroke based on assumptions about a very select few at the top. And they wanted me to co-sign the narrative.

That is the mascot seat. You are not there to contribute expertise. You are there to give a misaligned perspective credibility by attaching your name to it.

When the room needs your name more than your perspective, the door it opened leads nowhere.

For years, I tried to manage both versions on parallel tracks.

Use the athletic past enough to open doors. Suppress it enough to be taken seriously as a business operator. Every conversation carried this invisible calculation.

The problem is that neither version gets your full capacity.

You are constantly toggling, reading the room to determine which version is safe to present, adjusting in real time. You cannot fully commit to the new chapter because you are still servicing the old one. So you operate in a permanent in-between where neither version reaches its potential.

Running two versions of yourself splits your capacity. Neither one reaches full power.

Over the last two years, I stopped leaving that door open. I rarely reference football in my day-to-day business interactions. The only time it comes up is as a bullet point in my background, a line of historical context, nothing more.

What I did not expect was what that retirement actually produced.

When I fully retired the athletic chapter as a live artifact and converted it to a static asset, something shifted. I could deploy it on my own terms without it driving the conversation.

It became a tool in my kit instead of the foundation of my positioning.

That division gave me the ability to compartmentalize other people's assumptions. When someone reduces me to the athlete, it no longer lands the way it used to. That identity is a historical fact, not an active piece of my positioning. Their assumption says something about their lens, not about my value.

When the old chapter becomes a static asset instead of a live artifact, other people's assumptions lose their weight.

Retiring the old version is not about erasing it. It is about creating enough distance to use it with precision instead of dependence.

Once I made that shift, three things changed.

In corporate settings where organizations wanted me to validate their narrow view of athletes, I could tell them directly: your perspective is wrong. Your framing lacks the nuance to account for the full athlete community. And in doing that, I could identify who genuinely wanted to understand the community versus who wanted to check a box on their corporate philanthropy mission.

As I started doing more press around one of my funds, some outlets came into the interaction with a preconceived idea: another VC fund with an athlete face attached for visibility. They expected me to be the front, while someone else did the real work on the back end. Early in the press cycle, I would walk into these misaligned interviews, try to correct the narrative from inside the conversation, then wonder why the story never came out the way I envisioned. There is an inherent laziness in that approach to generalize and lead with assumptions. Journalists have a responsibility tied to integrity, to do enough diligence to understand the structure they are reporting on. Getting comfortable with retiring the old chapter moved me from accepting misaligned opportunities to turning them down entirely. If someone is going to put me in a box with a lazy, uneducated take on what I am building, why should I invest time and effort to create more work for myself unwinding a misaligned article?

Some want to get it right but do not have the context. Retiring the old version gave me the patience to work with those people and the clarity to identify those who had no intention of getting it right in the first place. When the misalignment is clear and the intention to fix it is absent, I save my time, energy, and effort for the places where it will actually be invested the right way.

Distance from the old version is what gives you the clarity to use it on your terms.

This is not an athlete problem — it’s universal. This is a version problem. And it shows up everywhere.

The old version worked. That is what makes it hard to retire.

But the longer you keep it running alongside the new one, the more it competes for the same resources: your energy, your positioning, and your capacity to be fully present in the chapter you are actually living.

The separation does not happen when you add the new version. It happens when you retire the old one completely enough to use it as a reference, not a crutch.

The separation does not happen when you build the new version. It happens when you stop letting the old one run the show.

Explore Separation OS — the personal innovation system I built for high-capacity performers.