The Parallel Path: How to Build Without Blowing Up Your Life
For the professional who has something they want to build — and a life they’ve worked too hard to blow up in the process.
Highway 17. Santa Cruz. 2013.
I was driving with my mom, the way you do when you need to think out loud without meaning to. Somewhere on that stretch of road, I said it: I think I have an idea for something. I teared up behind the wheel. Not from sadness — from recognition. That specific feeling when something that belongs to you finally surfaces after sitting below the surface for too long.
The idea was men’s professional activewear. Performance garments built to move between a boardroom and a workout. 100% USA made. Recycled materials. A suit you could train in. Nobody was doing this in any serious way. Rhone didn’t exist yet — they started in 2014. The category I was standing at the edge of in 2012 was still largely empty, and I knew the idea was real.
I sat on it for nearly four years.
Not because I didn’t believe in it. Because the Armani career was running at full speed — Vietnam, Paris, Barcelona, Italy, building and leading global color direction for one of the most demanding creative organizations in the world. The idea was real. The life was full. And the conditions for moving on it didn’t feel right yet.
What I know now, looking back: the conditions were never going to announce themselves. The window was always going to have to be created.
The Build Begins — Inside Everything Else
Early spring 2016. Still at Armani. Full career in motion.
I started brainstorming IN MOTU seriously for the first time — sketching the brand concept, researching fabric, starting to map what it would actually take to build what I’d been carrying since that Santa Cruz drive. The parallel path was running. I just didn’t have a name for what I was doing.
June 2016: laid off. Armani consolidated its brands, kept the Italian teams, let the American designers go. Ten years. I was not scrambling. The concept was already real. The research had already started. The layoff didn’t initiate the build — it removed the reason to keep it in the margins.
As I wrote in You Don’t Have to Quit Your Job to Build Something Real — the moment of the exit is almost never the moment the idea becomes real. The idea becomes real while the career is still running. The exit just removes the last reason to keep it quiet.
In 2017, I moved to Los Angeles to work on IN MOTU full-time. What followed were three of the most exhilarating and most challenging years of my life. I learned fabrication and development from zero, an entirely different discipline from anything I’d built in a creative career. I wanted the brand to be 100% USA-made and produced. Recycled materials. The manufacturers I approached couldn’t see the vision. Didn’t believe the category existed. That same category exploded during COVID. Every major brand eventually entered it. Rhone, which had started in 2014, was already building. I had conceived the same space two years before they launched. I was ahead on the idea and behind on the execution.
I was self-funded. When the capital ran out, the build stalled in ways it didn’t have to.
On March 15, 2019 — my birthday — I drove back to Highway 17. I was wearing full IN MOTU. I pulled over and took a picture on the side of the road. Seven years ago, I had this idea. Now I was in it.
What the Parallel Path Actually Is
The parallel path is not a compromise. It is not the responsible version of the real dream. It is the actual method — and it works precisely under the conditions most high performers are already living in.
The Armani career was not an obstacle to building IN MOTU. It was the resource. A decade of income, global credibility, and the kind of schedule pressure that forces you to build efficiently or not at all. What I built in the margins of a demanding career — the concept, the early research, the brand architecture, the brand voice drafted late at night in LA — was real before it was official. The constraint was the forcing function, not the barrier.
This is the inversion most people miss: the job isn’t the enemy. The job is the sponsor.
When I did a real audit of where my time was going during the IN MOTU build period — something I wrote about in Your Calendar Doesn’t Lie: A Time Audit for High Performers — the margins were already there—the early mornings. The lunch hour nobody was protecting. The hour after the house went quiet. That time was available. It was just going elsewhere.
The binary of stay or go, security or progress, is the trap. Most high performers resolve it in favor of security. Then spend years wondering why they never moved. The parallel path rejects that binary entirely. You don’t build the next chapter when the current one ends. You build it inside the current one — in the time that already exists, using the structure that’s already there.
What I See in the Professionals Who Build
The pattern I recognize most in the professionals I work with is the gap between when the idea arrived and when the first real move happened. That gap is almost always longer than they want to say. The idea was real. Life was full. The conditions weren’t quite right. Another year passed.
I recognize it because I lived it. Santa Cruz to early spring 2016 is nearly four years. The concept was real. The category was emerging. The window was open. And I was waiting for conditions that would never show up on their own.
The professionals who make real progress are not the ones with the most time or the fewest constraints. They are the ones who stop waiting for a cleaner version of their current life and start building inside the one they already have. They commit to a specific window — morning, lunch, the hour after the house gets quiet — and they protect it. Not perfectly. Consistently. The build grows slowly, then faster. The parallel path became the main path because it had grown much longer before it was officially designated.
One move before the next article: name the window. Not the idea — you already have the idea, and it has probably been with you longer than you want to admit. The specific time in the next seven days when it gets thirty minutes of committed work.
That’s where IN MOTU started. On a highway, in a conversation I almost didn’t say out loud.
The first brick is always the one you weren’t sure you’d lay.
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