02Personal Stories · June 2026 · 5 Min Read
What the chapter nobody photographs teaches you about commitment, endurance, and becoming.
Begin Reading ↓The Unseen Chapter
There is a chapter in every dreamer’s life where you work harder than you ever have, earn less than you imagined, and quietly wonder at 2 a.m. whether any of it is going somewhere.
For my twin brother Jimmy and me, that chapter had a name. We called it the Tuna Era.
What It Looked Like
Right out of high school, we started a company in a 10-by-10 windowless office that we loved with everything we had. At 11:45 every night, an alarm sent us to newspaper delivery routes—because the money was real and the dream still needed fuel.
Tuesdays, we allowed ourselves 29-cent hamburgers from McDonald’s. Dinner, most nights, was cans of tuna.
Always available. Always enough.The Tuna Era is where you find out
what you are actually made of.
What It Was Building
I did not sit in that office thinking, “This is character-building.” I thought about cash flow, deadlines, and whether the client would call back.
But the Tuna Era was not simply something to survive. Inside it, without realizing it, I was developing a relationship with commitment that I could not have built any other way.
You do not develop that relationship in the good years. You develop it in the years that ask whether you mean it.
Do Not Compress It
Everyone has one. It is the chapter later reduced to: “It was hard for a while.” Do not rush through it or treat it as the pause before the real story. It decides whether the dream is real—or only a preference.
Real dreamers eat the tuna and get back to work.