The Prophecy

The Burden of Potential

Image Inspired by Rene Magritte’s art and created using ChatGPT & MidJourney.

I remember the prophecy from the lady who ordered a latte.

I was a scrawny 17 year old kid with black polo shirt, Sears bought black pants, and the Starbucks siren squarely on my chest from the neatly-tied green apron. Back in those days¹, when baristas talked to you, I treated customers like podcast guests—conversing in between the hisses of the steaming milk and the crunch of the espresso beans transforming into bittersweet, brown fuel.

One day, at the end of my conversation with a lady in her mid 40s, she looked intensely into my eyes as I was serving her drink. She said: “You have incredible charisma. I think you will go on to do great things. Maybe even become President.” I thanked her and explained that I could never be President of the United States since I wasn’t born here.²

I’ve been bound by that prophecy and similar sentiments I heard growing up. In high school, I won “most likely to be President,” which again, I was confused by, but accepted graciously.³

From my high school yearbook, circa 2008.

Throughout my 20s, I would routinely self-inquire on whether I was on the path to greatness, ascending “true potential” rock with the aplomb of Alex Honnold and his reality-defying climbs. I wanted to fulfill the prophecy not only for my benefit, but to give people—strangers, friends, and family—the satisfaction of sound judgment for foretelling my greatness.

Every year that went by, my professional career demanded a bigger leap. The ascent needed to be parabolic. Stratospheric. Each milestone immediately shrank to ant-sized success at the expense of the next goal. Oh you work at Boeing? That’s not cool enough. Now you work at Google? Well, it’s not what it used to be.

If I wasn’t a startup founder who raised $100M+, spoke at TED (the real one), and made the Forbes 30 under 30 list, I would be falling behind.⁴

Something had to give, and what eventually gave was my mental health, which ripped open like tight pants while doing the limbo. I burned out and tapped out of Google at the end of 2022 by way of a sabbatical.

Sabbatical life was liberating, purifying. The step away from corporate life helped me challenge the notion of laziness, forced me to confront my rat race withdrawals, and redefined my idea of accomplishment.

There is wisdom in stillness, and a sabbatical is an effective way to stay still. I avoid telling people what to do to become the best version of themselves, but I do think that taking a sabbatical, if able, is one of the most meaningful actions to reclaim agency and discover your essence.

My sabbatical didn’t really have an end date. Its open-endedness nurtured my self-discovery, but once it started running longer than a Christopher Nolan film, it became a hazard on my finances.

Halfway through 2023, I started making some money by editing essays for Write of Passage. Apparently I didn’t suck, because they kept bringing me back. That spurred the thought that maybe I can make money by writing and/or helping other people write.

By December 2023, I had my first client.

Alex Exum

⁵, a fellow Write of Passage student, had seen my writing. When we met at an event in Austin, he offered me a copywriting trial for his Test Prep company. Mind you, my copywriting experience was limited to writing cold emails at Google—unless you count that college phase where I fancied myself the next Don Draper.⁶

Alex was the best first client you can have: he gave clear directions, was patient with my freelance n00b questions, and paid quickly. I went from “could I really do this?” to “maybe I can do this.”

Other jobs came in. My good friend

Suad Fakih

⁷ asked me to help her develop all the brand language for her family venture, Vistto. Working with her and her family showed me the possibility of doing interesting, meaningful, heart-filling work as a freelancer.

Then, my summer/fall of Yoga. That's a tale deserving its own telling. To give you the gist of it: I spent hours researching how to clean mirrors, wrestled with Meta Business Suite and Squarespace (easily the worst platforms I've ever used), all to help save the yoga studio where my Mom and I had been practicing for over a decade. Hard work, but gratifying.⁸

So, if you are counting, that’s nearly an entire year of freelance work, with a big side quest thrown in the mix. Objectively, the divergence and looseness of sabbatical life effectively ended in January 2024. It wasn’t a return to corporate life, to climbing “true potential” peak. But it wasn’t nothing.

I avoided defining it. Whenever people asked if I was still on sabbatical, the only response I could muster was “kind of,” which often drew quizzical looks, like when I dip cheese in hot chocolate.⁹

In my own thoughts and journals, I referred to this period as a limbo; a liminal space with a different focus from sabbatical life, but lacking the specificity I was accustomed to. It felt like being in the sea; continuously diving underwater looking for safe haven from the surface, and remaining hidden.

Hiding from what?

From telling people that freelance writing was going to be my next act. The craft I sought to master, come what may.

I avoided saying the thing I had been doing all year out loud because it felt like a capitulation, and admission that no, I was not going to be President of the United States, that I would have no fancy three letter title to brandish on my Linkedin, and that those people in the rafters who predicted my inability to reach my potential, had been right all along.

It all boils down to FOPO (Fear Of People’s Opinion).

Nowhere was my avoidance more evident than on Linkedin, where I let the cobwebs gather in my profile, leaving just a tagline that said “On Sabbatical | Writer.”

It was during my depressive episode a couple months back¹⁰, that I realized I was staying underwater for so long, hiding from the world and their opinions—fictitious or otherwise—that I was turning blue and risking hypoxia. My safe haven had become a perilous place.

I was half-assing it. Turns out a big part of freelancing is TELLING PEOPLE YOU'RE OPEN FOR BUSINESS. News to me. And this half-assed approach came with the crushing feeling that I was failing at my escape plan from my previous failure. The heaviness of it all felt like a ballooning medicine ball on my lap, anchoring my ass to the ground.

So I could stay underwater looking upwards at the surface but remaining static and eventually drown, or I could stop half-assing it and actually full-ass it—total gluteal engagement into the endeavor of being a writer and being financially successful.¹¹

The first thing I did was hire a business coach. I realized I couldn’t get out of the water by myself. I’m self-aware enough to accept that I cannot undo my FOPO in just a few months. I needed someone to kindly show me the way, but to hold me accountable so that I would not betray myself and go back to half-ass mode. Remember: total gluteal engagement or nothing.

This is where Alice Lemee came in. As any coach would do, she asked me to drop and give her 50 push ups during our first call. Not really.

She’s whipping me mentally into shape and steadying my squirrel-like focus while making me more self-reliant and generously giving me all her best tools and tricks with a singular focus on my success. That’s the kind of people you want in your corner wiping the blood and sweat off your face while you are getting roughed up by Ivan Drago.¹²

The second thing I'm doing is writing this. Telling you in my long-winded, very Camilo way, that yes, I am open for business and ready to work with companies and individuals who—in the age of ChatGPT-everything—are excited about the opportunity to not do that; opting for effective, delightful, and distinctively human content. To zag, while others zig towards the lowest common denominator.

The third thing I'm doing? Not focusing on the prophecy: No more clinging to this mythologized destiny of greatness—whether from that Starbucks lady, my high school yearbook, or years of well-meaning predictions.

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Greatness isn't something you are meant for. It's something you do. It is a daily choice: the exponentially difficult commitment to persistence, discipline, and finding joy in what you do. Without the third one, it's hard to sustain the first two.

Joy doesn't come from 'living up to our potential.' It comes from doing work we used to daydream of—work that erases time, work where your heartbeat whispers inspiration and your heart feels so full you're thrilled by the idea that this inspiration is infinite.

That epiphany is worth holding onto over any prophecy.

1. Please read in an old man's voice.

2. This is my subtle call to all of you to push through a Constitutional amendment that would allow me to be President.

3. These “prophecies” always remind me of Denzel Washington’s anecdote about the lady at the beauty parlor and her prophecy that he would go do big things and speak to millions of people. A prophecy that came true.

4. Speaking of clairvoyance, no list has been a better predictor of white-collar crime.

5. Who now runs this awesome company.

6. Minus the mistresses—due to the lack of seductive and time management abilities.

7. You should check out her Substack and follow her on Linkedin. She’s putting out consistently interesting stuff in the world of beauty, wellness, and fashion.

8. Charlie, I know you hate it when people tease stories and don’t go into them, but just trust me on this one.

9. It’s a Colombian thing. Try it.

10. Which I wrote about a couple weeks back.

11. Somewhere in Heaven or Hell, James Joyce, Herman Melville, and Oscar Wilde, are laughing at my naïveté.

12. Ivan Drago is a metaphor for all the punches (rejections) I am bound to take in my freelancing journey. Get it? Get it?