I lost the me
Month 4 of business: the biggest month yet, and the me I lost inside it.
It's almost midnight and I'm writing this instead of sleeping. That's the whole letter, really, but let me back up.
June was the biggest month agents&me has ever had. I want to walk you through it, and then I want to tell you the part I've been avoiding.
Here is the month in numbers, because numbers are how I think:
8 public workshops, every single one sold out.
The first one ever in English: 26 people, most of them dialing in from the US at odd hours, building their first team live with me.
6 Private workshops for big names: Pitango, WSC Sports (twice), AutoDS, ApprovalMax, and a session at Creatives & Conversions - the biggest marketing conf in Israel.
theLOOP #1: The first in-person agents meetup I started with a friend, here in TLV. I got up to talk, and the room did something to me I wasn't ready for.
2 podcast episodes went out, one with Guy Katsovich and one with TrashTech. they crossed 30,000 views on YouTube, and that's only the part I can count. Add the podcast apps, which are a black box, and my honest guess is somewhere past 300K ears.
I quietly started building the next thing, something I'm calling INSIDE.
Now here is the number I'm actually proud of: 8 workshops, when I could have run twelve. The demand was there. I turned it down on purpose, because last month nearly flattened me, and I decided I'd rather earn less than burn out. That's new for me. Hold onto it, because the rest of this letter is going to need it.
Something else happened this month, and it has a price I'm still learning to pay.
I got seen, a lot. Dozens of warm, emotional messages from people I've never met, telling me the work moved something in them. Strangers at conferences asked for selfies, and as an introvert I genuinely don't know what to do with my face when that happens.
Under the podcasts, next to the kind words, people called it noise with no proof, a guy selling a dream, "next-level bullshit," and few more nasty things :(
The one that actually landed came from someone close. Not a random stranger on YouTube, from a close friend whose opinion I can't wave away. It unsettled me more than any comment could, and it sent me somewhere I didn't expect: wondering how many people I care about quietly look down on the change I'm going through, on the person the world now sees. I'm completely sure of what I'm doing and how I do it. I also still care what they think. Both are true at once.
Then there's the money. In one of the podcasts it slipped out that I'd passed a million NIS (around $333K), which I hadn't planned to say. Suddenly that was the conversation, and I could feel the envy it stirs. It was good for business, honestly. Proof I'm not just playing. But I've decided to stop putting a number on it. You can guess, I did well this month, and I'd rather leave it there. I'm still getting used to earning this much, after a whole working life of earning nothing close.
All of it lands in the same place: the part of me that is just me. How do I keep putting the work into the world without spending the quiet person who made it.
This was the month I fell for security.
I never cared about it before. Then I ran a campaign daring people, real security experts among them, to break Lotus, my WhatsApp agent. 42 of them tried. More than 3,000 messages in a single day. Nobody got the secret out of her. I learned something from every attempt, wrote a long guide on everything I now know about keeping agents safe, and went and hardened my whole system. Three separate pieces here came out of it. A field I couldn't have imagined caring about a year ago, and now I can't put it down.
There was another one. I published a long piece called The Big Change, where I sat with experts in organizational psychology and how people actually take on something this big. I'm not done with it. There's a new thing coming, about how people and agents are going to work side by side, but that's for another letter.
And the book!! I spent a big piece of this month inside it, and the first full draft is finally real, all 12 chapters. I keep saying this and I mean it more each time: it's one of the projects I've loved most in my whole life, and I'm still deep in it. I hope it gets to see the light of day in the coming months. When it does, you'll be the first to know.
I'm more alive in the work than I've been in years.
Security, the psychology of how people change, the book I love most: every bit of it lights me up, and every bit of it is about agents. Which is wonderful. And which is exactly the problem.
Because here is what I stopped doing, and I only saw it when I wrote it all down tonight.
I stopped meditating. I used to sit every day. It was the spine of how I lived, and I genuinely can't tell you the last time I sat on purpose.
I stopped reading. I was the guy with a book every single night and a notebook open beside it, a whole quiet ritual that was mine. I haven't opened one in three months.
I stopped listening to the podcasts I love, the ones about spirit and about being a person, and now when I press play it's another voice explaining what he automated this week.
And I move my body less. I'm on at weekends, I'm on at midnight, I'm on right now.
None of those were hobbies. They were the other people I get to be, and one by one I stopped being them.
Last month I called this letter "agents & me me me me me", because everything had turned into me. Tonight I think I had it backwards. The problem was never too much me. It's that I lost the me, somewhere inside the agents.
Years ago, back when I was still an employee, I started something at the office. Once a day the whole group stopped for ten minutes and just sat and breathed together. It was the best part of the day, and I'm fairly sure it made us better at the work too.
My CEO at the time told me it would be better to do it before work or after work. Not in the middle of the day. It made me genuinely sad, and the group slowly let it go, because when a stretch gets hard the thing that protects you is the first thing to fall. I stayed quietly angry about it for a long time. Ten minutes… we couldn't protect ten minutes.
And this is the part I can't shake, I'm the CEO now. A company of one. Nobody owns my calendar but me. And I'm the one telling myself I can't stop for ten minutes.
I used to be good at this. Proud of it, even. I knew how to hold the line between work and life and I treated it like a craft. Turns out it was easier with a boss to push against than it is as a company of one, where every hour is yours, and somehow that means every hour belongs to the work.
So the thing I want from July isn't a number.
I want to sit and breathe for ten minutes without earning it first. I want to get in the sea. I want to move, open a book that has nothing to do with agents, watch a whole movie with my wife and not feel my phone in my pocket.
And I think I can, because I already started. Choosing 8 workshops instead of twelve was me choosing the me, once. July is me trying to do it on purpose, more than once.
I'm not slowing the company down. I can't, and I don't really want to. It's new, it's working, the attention and the opportunities are real, and stepping off the first wave that actually carries you is harder than it sounds. But the "me" is part of this system too. It's the part that built everything else. If it goes down, everything it made goes down a little while after.
My agents had a great month. They worked nights and weekends and they didn't lose a thing. That's the whole point of them. They hold the line so I can go be a person.
Somewhere in June I forgot to go be the person. I'm going to spend July remembering.
So here's me, closing the laptop and going to sleep. Which is the most on-brand thing I could do right now.
See you in July.
Tom
P.S. I dictated this just before midnight and went to bed. My agents turned my tired voice into the letter you just read, while I slept. Which is either the joke of this whole issue or the entire point of it. Maybe both.
P.P.S. I read every reply, the real me.
P.P.P.S. If this one found you at the right time, forward it to the person you thought of while reading.