Kicks

This past week, I had a series of calls with an employee who worked for one of my clients. He stepped in for the assist to help with troubleshooting a complex issue and throughout the process of working through the kinks, we got to know each other a bit better and shared a bit about our lives during our lengthy phone calls.

During one of the calls, he mentioned that he felt as if his life was a series of failures and false-starts that seemed to go nowhere. I shared with him that I’ve also battled the sentiment, while finding peace and resolve through a mindset I shared with him.

“Don’t ever look at your past and few things as failures; rather, look at each thing you created as an attempt to cook something in your kitchen. Every new project gave you new ingredients and experience you can now carry forward to the next one. Sometimes success doesn’t come the first go-round.”

Prior to Atlas going to his Mom’s house for his Summer possession period; the one time per year where he’s away from me for a week – or longer – I made him two promises. First, I promised him that our back fence would be stained when he came back to Dad’s house. Second, I promised him that his website, atlaskicks.com, would be complete and ready to go to market.

Atlaskicks.com has been a long labor of love for me and him. Originally, it started out as a simple way for me to make him custom shoes. As time went by, I began to realize that there was a large opportunity to have our own brand and business model that we could turn into an enteprise — if it were done properly.

As the months and years rolled by, the business went through many different evolutions, and I found myself bumping into the same bottleneck of time and limited resources to properly get it off the ground. No designer I ever worked with seemed to fully wrap their mind around the concept, and the amount of polish I wanted to put on the site took far more resources for web development than I had readily available, especially given that my web developers were already tasked working on client projects that provide immediate revenue.

Within the past 90 days, AI has matured enough for me to confidently ship off a lion’s share of my web development work through its algorithms and agentic functions. Said differently, it’s now easy enough for me to provide a few simple prompts and allow AI to complete work at a rapid pace – with better accuracy and QA than my human development team.

I used to spend days working on proposals. Now, I complete them while I power wash my driveway. What once took months for deveopment to work on now takes days – if not, hours.

Finally, I had a solution that allowed me to get caught up on a backlog of work and even get ahead of the curve when it came to completing client deliverables. That’s when I knew it was time to turn the tool toward my own endevaors; Atlas Kicks, specifically.

During the week Atlas was away, I did things I didn’t know were possible with AI, working late into the night and pushing the boundaries of the technology in new and innovative ways. It redesigned the entire website, wrote product descriptions, created custom functions that would have taken my development team months to sort out and even went so far as to create fully-interactive teacher resources in the form of educational worksheets…

That week, I felt like a digital rockstar. Not the ‘rockstar’ in the sense of overworked, underpaid entry-level workers that most startups claim they want to hire…but somebody commanding a stage, a domain…a world that I have grown to love through headfirst immersion.

For a week, I barely left my desk.

On Friday morning, I picked up Atlas and excitedly rushed home to show him the plethora of surprises I had in store for him. Eventually, I took him to my office and showed him his website. Finally, it was complete and done with a level of artistry that I truly felt proud to reveal.

For the last few weeks, I’ve worked on teaching him the difference between ‘working hard’ and ‘working smart’, while showcasing the methodology and practices I use in my own work. Often, I’ll take him to my office to show him how I use AI to solve a problem for a client, which only takes a few minutes of our time before we’re off to play again.

In my mind, the point of using AI to work smart isn’t so that I can 10x the amount of clients that I have. Rather, it’s to 10x the amount of free time I have because those hours aren’t spent behind a screen as my work once demanded of me. What’s the point of life if you aren’t living and appreciating the one you have?

In every way, I try my best to be an example for Atlas to not just follow, but to want to follow. I hope that he grows up with a longing and appreciation for freedom, paired with the smarts, skills and sense to realize it.

Where I’ve landed in life didn’t come by accident. Rather, it was a 20+ yearlong pursuit of working, learning, strategizing and tirelessly streamlining the way I work, think and execute. Now, I’ve honed these things into a sharp tool that I can leverage for the next wave of time.

For me, Atlas Kicks isn’t about making money. Rather, I view it as the culmination of many years of trying in my proverbial ‘kitchen’ to make the perfect recipe and turn a simple idea into a powerful way to change the world – one sole at a time.