My Story

I grew up in North Haven, Connecticut. Bikes in the street, a Nintendo 64 in a friend's garage, and a brain that was always hunting for the next thing to feel.

I ironed my money. Whatever I managed to save, I pressed the bills flat with an iron and kept them in a careful stack. I valued them so much I wanted them to look like they meant something. Some things don't change.

At eight, I built a Lego battleship from scratch on a six-foot folding table in my bedroom. No kit. No instructions. When it was done I took it apart and built something else. I took apart anything I could get my hands on, just to see how it worked.

School was the opposite. I hated it — not in the softened “I learn differently” way people say now. I genuinely hated it. So I engineered my grades: not failing, not good, mediocre with precision, tuned so no teacher would ever call on me. It worked. My GPA was a 1.6. I never took the SATs. Nobody wondered whether I was going to college.

I heard “no” a lot as a kid. Mostly I treated it as a starting point.

I was fourteen when I started selling drugs. It wasn't about the money. I identified a demand, so I found a supply — it kept my own costs low, and I liked how it felt to be the connect. The guy everybody called. Demand, supply, being the one who delivers: the same wiring that runs my company today, pointed at the worst possible market.

I was sixteen the first time I used opiates. I'm not going to dress that up, and I'm not going to make it darker than it was. The truth — the part nobody wants to say out loud — is that it felt like a key turning in a lock. A brain that never once sat still, sat still.

That feeling doesn't come free. It cost me four and a half years.

Opiates. Cocaine. Whatever was available. There's no montage for those years and I'm not going to write one, because addiction isn't cinematic — it's boring. The same day on repeat, each one slightly worse than the last. The money I used to iron went. The trust went. The people went. So did the jobs: an HVAC company fired me, and the Dairy Queen I landed at after that — my last job before detox — fired me too. By twenty, everything I owned fit in a duffel bag, and you already know where the bag ends up.

The full version of those years belongs to the memoir, and I'm writing it. What matters for this page is how it ended: I walked into that detox on New Year's Day and I never walked back out into the old life.

After detox came a sober house in Westerly, Rhode Island. Four months.

I want to be precise here, because “started over with nothing” gets used as a figure of speech. This was not a figure of speech. Nothing is a specific, terrifying amount to own. I was twenty years old, clean for the first time since I was fourteen, fired from every job I'd ever had — and every single thing my life was going to contain, I had not built yet.

There is a strange freedom on the far side of that. When you own nothing, nothing owns you back. Nobody expected a thing from me — which meant every expectation I met from then on was one I had set myself.

A few months after I got clean, a psychiatrist diagnosed me with ADHD.

He explained dopamine dysregulation. Prefrontal cortex underactivation. Why my brain idled rough and revved clean. Why opiates had felt like a key turning in a lock — because for a brain wired like mine, chemically, they almost were.

Then he handed me a prescription.

I never filled it. I still haven't. I had just spent four and a half years learning what happens when I outsource how I feel to a substance, and I wasn't going to open the new life by doing it again with a co-signature. I'm not a doctor, and plenty of people do well on medication — this was a line I drew for myself, not advice for you. But I drew it, and I've held it.

What I did instead was file away everything he told me and start building a system — the one I still run today. That system lives at The Brain, because it deserves its own page.

In 2019 I took over a failing calibration lab in North Haven — the same town I grew up in — and started building Custom Calibration out of what was left of it.

Today Custom Calibration does about $1.3 million a year. I have employees who count on me, which is a sentence I don't write casually — there was a version of me nobody would have trusted with a twenty-dollar bill. I work on the business now, not just in it, and I'm building toward one of the largest calibration labs in the Northeast.

How that actually works — the numbers, the decisions, the software I'm building to run it — lives at The Business.

I married Rosanna — four-foot-eleven, talks constantly, best decision I ever made. We have two daughters: one who overthinks everything exactly the way I do, and one who is so stubborn she won't put her shoes on before school and is going to be completely unstoppable because of it.

My days start at 5am. My spice drawer is organized with a precision most people find slightly alarming. I 3D-print custom Tupperware organizers. I wear an Oura ring and check it obsessively. Ketogenic diet, eighteen-hour fasts, training every day, about twenty grams of creatine — for the brain, not the biceps.

And right now I'm twelve pounds over my baseline. I came home from a vacation with my Italian relatives heavier and off the protocol, and I'm restarting it — in public, on this site. I'm telling you that on the same page where I tell you everything else because the restart is the whole point. I've restarted more times than I can count. The restart is the skill.

Here's where this goes, stated plainly, because I'd rather say it than make you decode it: I want to acquire companies. I want to grow Custom Calibration and eventually sell it. I want to launch new ones. I'm writing two books along the way — the story and the system — and I'm doing all of it out loud, one honest post a week.

I'm thirty-eight years old. I have been clean since the first minute of January 1, 2009. I'm enjoying every second of it.