In the beginning,God created the heavens, the earth, light, sky, land, vegetation, and kids from Canada playing hockey 🏒.
I was one of those kids.
From about age 10 straight through to age 22, I did what every respectable Canadian 🇨🇦 kid does: I weaponized hustle. I cut lawns in the summer 🪏, raked leaves in the fall 🍁, shovelled driveways in the winter 🥶, and delivered newspapers after school 📰.I played competitive hockey 🥅 in elementary school and high school — which, in Canada, is less of a hobby and more of a personality type. The hockey rink is a training ground for alpha males. Some refer to this stage of a teen males life as being full of "piss and vinegar" 💪. Hockey taught me a few things I still believe today:
Dealing with pressure – You learn how to stay calm when it actually matters 😳. It taught me discipline and follow through. Waking up at 6am on cold 🥶 winter mornings for hockey practice and games.
Resilience – You will eventually screw up and make a mistake on the ice 🫩. Your teammates will temporarily resent you 🤬 until you redeem yourself and you coach will berate you. During one game the advice I was given by a coach after I returned to the bench after giving the puck away to the other team while penalty killing was, "listen Mike use the KISS principle - KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID" You will mess up. You learn how to come back instead of collapse. Finally, it taught me follow through. Set a goal, make a list, take small steps everyday and eliminate the negative people and noise around you. Surround yourself with the smarter 🤓, positive people. It forces you to raise your game.Around that same time, I started working in the entertainment and corporate events world ( age 16). My glamorous job? Blowing up balloons 🎈 for bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, and big corporate parties 🎉. I’m not joking. I once made $5,000 in a single weekend filling a ballroom with balloons. I handed most of that money to my dad to invest in a custodial investing 💰 account. He bought Berkshire Hathaway Class B shares. Good call, Dad.
Then I met a stock promoter who promised me “the next big thing,” and I made my first private placement. My dad told me, “Ask for the prospectus.” I did not ask for the prospectus. I never saw the money — or that guy — AGAIN! 🤬. So technically, I paid tuition for a very fast finance course called Due Diligence Matters.
High school years? I delivered Domino’s pizza 🍕. I also destroyed my parents’ car in the process of delivering these pizzas (wear and tear). I would show up to dates after a Friday night shift smelling like a three-way collision between Polo cologne, pepperoni steam, and hockey glove sweat. Shockingly, I did not get married in high school.
Then things got interesting.
I went to Texas A&M University 🇺🇸 for firefighter and emergency medical technician training 🧑‍🚒 🚑. After I came back to Canada, the hiring process for the fire service took time, so I did what I’ve basically always done in my life: stack skills and solve problems.
First, I strapped on a gun 🔫 and drove an armoured truck💰. My job was to pick up gold bars ⚱️ flown in from Russia and quietly deliver them to the big banks in downtown Toronto. (Yes, real gold. Yes, it’s heavy. Yes, it makes you walk differently.)
On nights and weekends I picked up work at nightclubs. One night club owner took a chance on me and said, “Think you can run a valet company?” So I built a valet company. I hired guys from my hockey team and a few friends, built a 15-man roster, and we were parking 300 cars 🚗 a night at some of the biggest night clubs in the city.At 23, I was hired as a professional Firefighter 🧑‍🚒. That part of the story is still being written. I’ve spent my adult life showing up fast when things go wrong, running into places normal people are running out of, and making decisions under pressure when panic is the default setting for everyone else.
But I didn’t stop there.
On my days off from firefighting, I went to night school 🏫 for five years while working full time. Eventually the college program coordinator pulled me aside and said, “You want to teach the rookies at this college?” So I started teaching Firefighting 101 on my days off at the college.
I used all my certifications from my college certifications to expand again. I became a Risk Control Specialist for the insurance industry 🧐. ( iinspect.ca ) I spent my “days off” traveling across the country 🛫 🛬inspecting hospitals 🏥, schools 🏫, and commercial sites 🏢 for major insurance brokers. My job was basically: walk into a multi-million-dollar operation, find the risks that could burn it down 🔥 (sometimes literally), explain the discovered risk and liability to them in plain english, and suggest how to fix the liability before the problem became a million-dollar problem.And that brings us to today.Building digital assets 💻 - digital real estate 👨‍💻....... One asset at a time.

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