Celebrating One Year of Beyond Ordinary: The Story Behind This Newsletter
A year ago, I was nervous as hell, sitting in a Bangkok Starbucks, about to hit "publish" on my very first Substack post.
I don't feel like saying I sent my first newsletter, because only my wife Rosie and I received it 😂
To celebrate the one-year anniversary of Beyond Ordinary, I want to share the real story behind this newsletter with you.
Why I Started Writing
The reason why I started experimenting with writing on LinkedIn first, then here on Substack with Beyond Ordinary came down to two things:
"Content is King" when you're running an online business. However, I don't vibe with videos. I don't like creating them, especially short-form content. If I wanted to be consistent creating content, I had to find a medium I connected with. That's how I picked writing.
I know the value of building an email list. It was the main driver of revenue in my previous business, the Warrior Flow School. That's why I switched my writing from LinkedIn-first to this newsletter-first, with "side-posting" on other written-based social media platforms. If I was going to be serious about this, I wanted to "own my audience" instead of relying on an algorithm dictating who would see my posts.
Back then though, I didn't have any specific goals in mind. It was writing for the sake of writing and building the habit. I had no idea where it would take me.
What Happened This Year
I didn't have any expectations when I started writing. I knew no one was reading anyway 😂
If you scroll back in time in my archive, you'll notice that I posted pretty much daily from August 26 to September 23, then I switched to my usual weekly newsletter. The reason behind this intense cadence was because I was actually reposting content I'd created for LinkedIn over the past year. I naively thought it was important to have everything centralized here and that readers (you) would go back to read them. You don't 😅
My first real subscriber (besides myself and Rosie) was my good friend Carlos aka carlitos “el dragon" 🐉. Once I caught up with my old posts, I shared it with a handful of people, and even got my first paid subscriber Julien Gomez 🙏
It wasn't until the end of January 2025 that I decided to be open about it and share it more widely. I manually reached out to many of my friends (many of you reading this) to tell them about it. That was a stretch for me. Even knowing that anything I put out there online can be seen by anyone, proactively sharing it with friends felt very vulnerable. I was putting myself out there, risking to be seen, if that makes sense.
At the same time, I started being consistent on Substack, posting on Notes, etc. It's around this time that I started to realize you were actually reading what I was writing. I was getting real, legit comments, replies, and private messages. Words of affirmation aren't my main love language, but I appreciated reading them all and seeing that some people resonated or even felt inspired by my words!
Since then, I feel like I've been letting more and more of myself out, weaving in more personal and intimate parts of my life while still doing my best to bring value to you.
From early October 2024 onward, I got into my current rhythm of writing consistently on a weekly basis (I'll miss next week while visiting family, but that'll be my first break since early December).
Some fun stats: I now have subscribers from 30 countries (crazy coincidence since I've been to 30 countries myself!). My most viewed and commented post was also the one that meant the most to me: "Saying Goodbye to My Baby Boy: The Decision That Changed Me Forever." It was the hardest one to write by far, the most honest and raw post I'll probably ever write. It was also scary because I was touching upon a sensitive topic, but all I received was love from everyone, and I'm extremely grateful for that.
What Beyond Ordinary Represents
This newsletter is called Beyond Ordinary because I want to show you what it's like to live an unconventional life away from the traditional path society expects from us and that it's possible for regular people like you and me.
There is more available to us beyond the ordinary lives that many people live.
To showcase this, I picked three topics:
Personal Growth: because you cannot get away from the conventional path if you're not willing to step outside your comfort zone, change, and grow.
Business & Entrepreneurship: because it's much easier to embrace a beyond ordinary life when you're in control of your time and life, which is easier to achieve working for yourself.
Digital Nomadism: there are many ways to live an unconventional life, and this is the lifestyle my wife and I chose.
The Matrix Moment
The reason I decided to write about this is because I consider myself lucky enough to have been behind the curtain. And once you've seen it:
You cannot unsee it.
You want everyone else to join you on the other side.
Years of conditioning by traditional education, parenting, and society made me believe there was only one way to live a good life: graduate, get a job, climb the ladder, build a family, retire at 65, relax and enjoy life.
That's the narrative many of us are sold. And the one we chase! We attach success to our finances and status. We do everything we can to fit in, giving up on our dreams, hoping that we'll be able to pursue them when "our time" finally comes with retirement.
I was set on this path myself. Until I experienced a late pregnancy loss in 2017, a termination for medical reasons. It was traumatizing. But what came out of it was that I realized the preciousness of life. From there, everything changed. I woke up a second time, like Neo in The Matrix.
"We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one."
I promised myself I wouldn't waste time in this second life. I would live it on my own terms, instead of based on what others expected from me.
And since then, I've never looked back.
My mission now is to help others get there.
If you're reading this and feeling that pull toward something different, but you're not sure how to take the first step, I'd love to help. I work with people who are ready to break free from the conventional path but need guidance on how to actually do it. If this resonates with you, book a call with me and let's talk about what's possible for your life.
Why This Matters
Look around. So many people around us are not satisfied with their lives. Maybe it's their jobs, their relationships, things about themselves. They dread getting out of bed, they live for the weekend, they spend their time complaining about everything going wrong, and they feel powerless. Like they have no control over their lives and situations.
Can you relate?
We cannot force people to change. But some of you are ready. You're tired of feeling the way I just described. You can feel the itch, the discomfort. Staying where you are is starting to become unbearable. You know there's more to this life. But you don't know where to get started, where to look.
That's what inspires me to write and do the work I do.
As cheesy as it sounds, I want to support people in living their best lives.
It's within everyone's reach. It's not this idealistic, inaccessible fantasy.
It's real. And it can be achieved by anyone with one condition: you have to be willing to do the work because no one is just going to give this unconventional life to you. You're going to have to go and get it yourself.
What Drives Me
That's why I write and work with people.
That's what fulfills me these days.
I don't know how long this newsletter will last. I don't know if it will remain the same forever. In a way, I still feel like I'm getting started and I'm still experimenting with what works, what doesn't, what resonates with you, what doesn't, what my style is, and more.
But for now, I don't overthink it. I don't plan any big changes after this anniversary (at least at the time of writing this 🤓).
Here's to year two of building something beyond ordinary together.
Thank You
I'm grateful for you and the other 200+ subscribers for deciding to press subscribe. I'm grateful you're letting me into your inbox and taking a bit of your precious time each week to read what I have to say.
200+ might not sound like a lot in this social media world with influencers everywhere having thousands and thousands of subscribers, but as I often say, if I had to say out loud what I'm writing each week on a stage in front of all of you, I would poop my pants every time 😂
So thank you for your trust. I appreciate you.
Please consider interacting with my posts if they make you feel anything (positive or negative). I always appreciate hearing from you (writing a newsletter often feels like writing into a void, to be honest 😅). Hit reply and tell me what originally drew you to this newsletter. I read every response.
Congratulations on your 1 year 🥳💕