I Was Thinking About the Launch When I Crashed the Car

3am

It's past 3AM and I can't sleep. My mind is still running.

A few hours ago, I smashed my neighbour's car. Not a scratch. A real crash. The bang was loud enough that the whole neighbourhood came out. Bumper crushed. Front light broken. People standing around in the dark wondering what happened.

My neighbour's car. The bang was loud enough to wake the whole street.

What was I thinking about when it happened? The Dodeez launch. We were supposed to go live on May 20th. I was running through the marketing strategy, the content, the client work still sitting unfinished. All of it cycling in my head while I was physically behind the wheel.

I wasn't there. My body was driving. My mind was somewhere else entirely.

The first thing I felt

When the crash happened, I wasn't panicked. I wasn't calculating the cost. My first thought was about my neighbour. How do I make this right for him, how do I make him feel okay, it's late at night and I've just ruined his car.

All I could say was: go fix it, I'll pay for everything.

And then, almost immediately after that, a second thought came. I don't want this to take up more mental capacity. I can't afford another thing to handle right now. The launch is still live. The team still needs me tomorrow.

I felt bad about that second thought. I still do.

The promise I made myself

When I was younger, when I first started imagining what success would look like, I wanted a Lamborghini. Not to show off. That's not what it was about.

It was a promise I made to myself. A way of saying: after everything you went through, after all the hardship and the late nights and the uncertainty, you deserve this. You made it.

The car wasn't the point. The meaning was the point. It was proof that I kept the promise.

I don't want the Lamborghini anymore. I want an MPV and a driver. Not because I've given up. Because I finally understand what I was actually trying to buy.

What I realised at 3am

Here's what scares me about tonight. I wasn't distracted by something trivial. I was distracted by the things that matter most to me. The app, the team, the client, the people depending on me. The very thing that makes me who I am is what took me off the road.

I measure myself by whether I keep my promises. To my co-founders who work harder than I could ask for. To the people I love. To myself. Every unfinished thing, every delayed launch, every moment I can't fully show up, it doesn't just feel like a setback. It feels like a crack in who I am.

And that feeling is what fills my head at night. On the road. At 3AM.

But tonight I realised something. You cannot keep your promises to everyone if you are never fully present anywhere. You cannot show up for your team, your neighbour, the people you love, if your mind is running launch strategy while your hands are on the wheel.

Protecting your attention is not a luxury. It is the condition for everything else.

What success looks like now

The Lamborghini was always about telling myself: you deserved this. But there is a version of arriving at success that is hollow. Financially there, mentally gone. Present on paper, absent in life.

I still want to make it. I still want to build something that matters, to take care of the people I love, to see real people using something I built and having their problems solved. None of that has changed.

But I think what success actually looks like, at the end of it, when the company takes off, when the promises are kept, is not the car.

It's being able to drive down your own street without destroying your neighbour's bumper. It's being present for the life you built, not just the life you're building.

An MPV and a driver. And a mind that's actually where my body is.