The Beginning

Welcome to A Nonlinear Life! My name is Jay, and I’m a 30-something tech worker in Upstate New York who’s been working in cybersecurity startups (either someone else’s or my own) since late 2015. Across that period, I’ve had a handful of great successes, plenty of minor failures, and a few bigger failures (if looking solely through the financial lens). 

The initial purpose of this blog is to serve as a place for me to capture some of my bigger picture thoughts – things like:

• the exceptional importance of knowing what is “enough”
• success is seldom an "up and to the right" path
• live where you’re happy, not where society tells you 
• why investing time into your network is super important
• how my cycling and walking rituals have spurred immense creativity
• how important a strong support system is for entrepreneurs and other high-performers

But in reality, I expect to use this quite a bit like a categorized journal. I have a lot of things that I think about, write down on some odd piece of paper or email to myself, then lose in the ever growing physical and digital clutter of life. More often than not, those thoughts would be useful to keep handy for future situations – a reference book for my own life, if you will.

Beyond that, I want to share, because I suspect those ideas would be useful for others to consider in their own lives (whether as a counterpoint to common beliefs, reinforcement for something you’ve been pondering, or a source of inspiration to be yourself).

Before I wrap up this post, I want to address the meaning of the title: A Nonlinear Life. Initially, inspiration for the name came while on the seat of my road bike (a 2015 Cannondale SuperSix EVO, for any bike nerds out there). I was working through names that captured the ethos of my existence – that instead of holding a standard 9-5 job at the same place and slowly moving up the ranks, I often find myself taking big, calculated risks in the startup scene. While that’s the original meaning, I’ve realized that it’s much more broadly applicable in my life. For example, instead of just working my day job, I’m almost always busy working on side passions – whether that’s real estate investing, beating my own cycling PRs, organizing events for friends and family, or creating this blog!

I hope you’ll find something here that makes you think, worry less about fitting in with the status quo, and do the hard work of exploring what makes you you.