Trump Made Me Do It

Entrepreneurship is often wrapped in mythology: go all in, risk everything, push forward without pause. But growth rarely works that way. To scale is to slow down. Recalibration requires space—time to rethink, restructure, and reimagine. The paradox is that slowing down feels like the opposite of progress, yet it is the very condition that makes progress possible.

The difficulty, of course, is that pausing is expensive. It requires buffers to absorb the impact of deceleration. Without these supports, slowing down feels dangerous, not liberating. And yet, to move forward without pausing is to risk collapse.

For me, the solution was clear: I returned to employment.

“I returned to employment because scaling requires stability.“

Jerry Seinfeld, after years of sitcom fame, found his way back to stand-up. Dave Chappelle, after leaving television at his height, returned to intimate comedy clubs. Both understood that going back is not regression. It is reclamation.

One of my own first loves is teaching—being present with students in the unpredictable and sacred process of growth. Returning to the classroom seemed like an anchor, a way to remember who I was before leadership roles and business-building expanded the scope of my work.

In a culture that glorifies acceleration, circling back can feel like defiance. It resists the assumption that only forward motion counts. Returning is not about nostalgia; it is about authorship. It is about reclaiming the right to direct one’s own trajectory.

And more than that, returning is a way of integration. Growth is not always about adding. Sometimes it is about gathering what was set aside in earlier seasons and weaving it back into the whole. To return is to integrate. To circle back is to carry forward the pieces of self that remain essential but unfinished.

“Growth is not always about adding. Sometimes it is about gathering what was set aside in earlier seasons and weaving it back into the whole.“

In a calmer political season, I might have pared down my lifestyle and taken the risk of slowing without added stability. But in times like these, vulnerability takes on a different weight. To pause without security is not just a business risk; it is a survival risk.

Here is where scaling and politics converge. To scale requires slowing down, but slowing down requires safety. And in this political moment, safety itself is precarious. Decisions that look personal on the surface—like returning to employment—are shaped by currents much larger than the self. What we call choice is often adaptation, a way of making life possible inside of instability.

My decision to return was therefore not just economic. It was political. It was about survival in a Trump- landscape where unpredictability has become the rule, not the exception.

“Decisions that look personal on the surface—like returning to employment—are shaped by currents much larger than the self.”

Finally, this choice also reflects who I am as a thinker and leader: a pragmatic progressive.

Progressivism has always insisted that learners are whole, contextual beings—capable not only of receiving knowledge but of constructing it. It refuses the reduction of education to compliance, consumption, or memorization. Yet in practice, progressivism often fails when placed inside under-resourced schools. Applied as an add-on to traditionalist structures, it becomes decoration. The spirit of traditionalism still prevails.

Pragmatic Progressivism begins here, not by abandoning progressive ideals but by refusing to romanticize them. It insists that liberation must be possible within constraints. It takes power seriously—naming the ways control and adult comfort distort schools, while still holding onto the conviction that students can access wholeness through learning. It modifies progressivism so that equity becomes practical, not just.

This is how I hold my work now. Returning to employment is not a contradiction of my liberatory commitments—it is their extension. It is my way of honoring the reality that vision must be durable if it is to survive. Survival itself is not surrender. It is resistance. And resistance that lasts requires pragmatism.

The task has always been to act inside contradictions. To find ways of surviving that are also forms of resistance. To refuse fragmentation, choosing instead to weave the disparate parts of one’s life into a fabric sturdy enough to carry vision forward.

That is the heart of being pragmatic without losing what is progressive.

” Survival itself is not surrender. It is resistance. And resistance that lasts requires pragmatism.“

So here I am: slowing down to grow, returning to what first gave me life, navigating political instability, and making choices that keep my vision intact. Employment, in this season, is not retreat. It is resilience. It is care. It is strategy.

And in a moment when unpredictability reigns, it is protection.

Trump made me do it.