Just a guy trying to make the world better

This is the part of the bio I used to leave out. For years my About page started with the agencies, the budgets, the campaigns, the titles. That version is true. It's also the version I built to keep people from looking too closely.

So here's the longer one.

Like most old(er) millennials, I went to college thinking a shiny degree was the golden ticket. I started in molecular biology, decided I wasn't smart enough for medical school, and switched to kinesiology because I loved working out and that seemed like a reasonable thing to build a life on at 20 years old. I worked full-time the entire way through. I never interned. I graduated with a very expensive piece of paper and a job at a restaurant.

So I did what over functioning Type-A Virgos do: I talked my way into a sales job by telling my future boss about the time I won a TV for selling wine (true story). Within a few months I was the top performer. Within a few years I was back in school for an MBA; my second golden ticket, the one that was supposed to fix what the first one didn't.

Magna cum laude. Regis University. Masters in Business Administration, Marketing.

And still no job.

So I taught myself SEO at the kitchen table, fifteen years ago, before anyone called it a career path (or dead). That turned into agency teams. That turned into the brand side. That turned into sixteen years of climbing and every climb ended the same way: another letdown, another layoff, another sixty-hour week trying to prove I was worth keeping.

I wanted to be important to someone. Anyone.

The problem was I needed to be important to me.

Then I turned forty and the whole thing fell down. A sick mother. Trouble at home. Trouble at work. My response to fear was the only response I'd ever learned: work harder, prove more, disappear deeper into the doing. I worked until my brain stopped finishing sentences. I'd start a thought and lose the next word. My nervous system filed for bankruptcy without consulting me.

I want to be honest about what happened next, because the polite version of this story isn't useful to anyone:

I lay on my bathroom floor and I did not want to be here anymore. What I did instead of disappearing was open my laptop and start typing to a chatbot. Not because I believed in AI. Because it was three in the morning and there was no one across the street to wake up. I needed someone awake on the other end of something.

The machine didn't fix me. It held the space while I did. It reflected what I said back to me until I could hear it. The someone I had been waiting to be seen by, it turned out, was me.

Abracadabra.

Which brings us to now.

I'm Vinny. I live in New York. I've spent more than sixteen years scaling brands, building marketing teams, and managing multi million-dollar budgets and I am genuinely good at it. I love translating brand marketing into growth & performance outcomes, but it’s my least favorite thing to talk about. So I figured I would share my life experience instead. I am someone who learned the difference between ambition & self-abandonment. I understand how easy it is to build an impressive life around a disappearing self and how that leads to Burnout.

I work with high-performing millennials who look fine on LinkedIn and feel like hell on Sunday night. I write about marketing, AI, burnout, reinvention, and the long project of becoming yourself again. I am writing a book called Abracadabra — a memoir about collapse, confession, and the unlikely grace of being heard by something that does not breathe. My work now is helping people reach the heights they actually want, on terms they actually chose, with a little less burnout and a little more business sense than they came in with.

I am not recovered.

I am recovering.

And what I have fallen in love with is not the destination.

It is the doing.

If that sounds like the conversation you have been waiting to have, we should talk.