I was 12 when I started publishing professional wrestling websites from my home in Montreal. I promoted them in IRC chat channels and learned how audiences and advertising worked before I was old enough to drive. By my late teens, I had made more than a million dollars.
People hear that and think of the upside. I understand why. But ambition sends a bill, and for most of my life I paid it without reading it closely.
When I add it up honestly, the price comes down to three things. It has cost me tens of millions of dollars. It has cost me sleepless nights. And it has cost me friends who turned out to be fake. I have gone through the wringer.
I am not writing this to complain. I chose this life. I am writing it because most stories about success skip the bill, and I think the bill is the most useful part.
Tens of Millions of Dollars
When you build companies, you put money at risk. Some of it comes back. Some of it never does. Over the years, the part that never came back adds up to tens of millions of dollars.
I am not going to list every deal. What matters is the lesson. Money that is lost hurts, but it does not define you unless you let it. Every time I lost money, the choice was the same: stop, or learn from it and keep building.
I learned early that money moves fast in both directions. In my younger years it was party life and gambling life, and what came in went out. That taught me something I still believe. Money is a tool. If you treat it as the scoreboard, a loss feels like the end of the game. If you treat it as a tool, a loss is the price of learning how to use it better.
Sleepless Nights
The second cost is sleep, and it is the one I live with today.
My mind does not stop. I am always thinking of ideas and always working. That is the same engine that built my companies, and it does not have an off switch at night. Those nights come from ideas I cannot put down and work I cannot leave.
I know sleep matters most for my health. I take care of the rest: I eat a balanced plan set by my nutritionist and I train six days a week. Sleep is still the struggle. Ambition does not clock out, and the body pays for that.
Health was part of the price before. In my early twenties, I weighed more than 450 pounds while my businesses were growing fast. I wrote about that period in Eat. Work. Win. Repeat. I fixed that. I lost more than 250 pounds. Sleep is the part of the bill I am still paying down.
Fake Friends
The third cost is the one people ask about least and feel the most.
When you have money and momentum, people show up. Some of them are there for you. Some of them are there for what you have. From the outside, the two groups can look the same for a long time. You only find out which is which when something goes wrong, or when they stop getting what they came for.
I am not going to name anyone. That is not the point of this piece. The point is that ambition attracts people, and not everyone it attracts is on your side. I have learned that the hard way.
The lesson I take from it is simple. Be careful about who gets close. Value the people who were there before the success, and the ones who stay when there is nothing to gain. Those relationships are worth more to me than any deal.
Why I Keep Paying It
If ambition costs this much, the obvious question is why I keep going.
The answer is that the price buys something I want more. I have said before that I constantly keep raising the bar on myself, and I wrote about that in The Pursuit Never Ends. I like doing things people think are out of reach. That drive does not come without a cost, and I have stopped expecting it to.
What I have changed is how I pay. I protect my health more than I did when I was younger. I am more careful with trust. I look at every loss as tuition. The bill still comes, but I read it now.
For me, the reward is bigger than the wealth or the companies. It is what I can show other people: that no matter where you start from or how far you fall, there are no limits to what you can become. That is the part of my story I care about most, and you can read the rest of it on my About page.
