May 19, 2026: Monday

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

Please help me draft a message based on lessons I learned from the book Won’t Get You Here Won’t Get You There. I read that book while incarcerated, and it had a big impact on my thinking.

The author of the book helped people who aspired to advance from one stage of their career to become the CEO of the business. I always learned lessons from leaders who built great businesses. They had to be intentional, always thinking about the opportunity costs that accompany every decision.

While incarcerated, I had to make intentional decisions. In the beginning, I had to start by defining success. As a person who would serve multiple-decades in prison, I had to think about ways that I could make my time useful. I’d pondered questions such as:

• “What could I be the best in the world at doing?”  

I anticipated that I’d served multiple decades. For that reason, I hoped to leverage the experience to work toward reforming the system. My hopes were to bring ideas that would lead to changes. Instead of measuring justice by how much time a person served in prison, I wanted to advance a different idea.

Society should encourage people to work toward reconciliation, and prepare in ways that would lead to their success upon release.

Building in Phases:

To succeed, I’d have to build in phases. The first phase would be to develop academic and professional credentials. With academic credentials and communication skills, I hoped to persuade people to think differently about justice. Rather than seeking vengeance, I wanted them to consider the merits of incentivizing the pursuit of excellence–getting people ready for the job market.

The second phase would begin after my release. I had to build income streams that would allow me to become financially independent. With financial independence, I’d have freedom of time. I could deploy my resources to build programs, write lessons, and begin building systems that would allow me to measure the progress of people who’ve gone through our system. After building equity of a few million dollars, my wife and I decided that I didn’t need to focus my time on earning more money. The investments I’d made would support us and grow on their own. I could transition my energy to work full time on impact–striving to help as many people as possible use time in prison to prepare for success upon release.

The third phase was to build broader support. One of the world’s leading impact investors, Bill McGlashan, became a believer. Bill is the founder of TPG Capital, and also The Rise Fund. He invests in people with expectations of building sustainable ventures. He spent 100s of hours teaching me on the principles of impact investing, and he also donated resources that would help our nonprofit grow.

The fourth phase was to scale. I shared my vision of working to transform America’s prison system with other wealthy individuals, including Changpeng Zhao. To succeed, I anticipated that we’d need a multi-year commitment, with a budget of $2 million per year. I did not have sufficient resources to fund that initiative alone, but I would work without compensation. Those resources would allow us to develop better relationships with government officials. They could help us build a transparent platform, showing people who were working to prepare for success upon release. We’d collect data that we could use to advance conversations on reforms that would encourage people to work toward earning higher levels of liberty, through merit.

The fifth phase will be to build transparency. We’ve built our platform, and more than 7,600 participants are using Prison Professors to memorialize the steps they’re taking to prepare for success upon release. Those people have published more than 12.1 million words on our website. They are building assets, a body of work that they can leverage to advance arguments for a higher level of liberty upon release, and income opportunities.

The next phase will be to build our community. As a result of CZ’s memoir, Freedom of Money, a team of Web 3.0 developers launched an initiative to support our mission. They created a website to describe a token project that has resulted in donations for our nonprofit that are currently valued at more than $400,000.

https://prisonprofessorstoken.com/

Members of the community even drafted a graphic to help others understand the Web 3.0 community, showing how they are using the #BNB platform to support the mission of our nonprofit.

https://x.com/kolosxbt/status/2052474488818741742?s=20

In the months to follow, we’re going to develop the next phase, which is to grow our community. We want to reach athletes, celebrities, influencers, and others. We can show them how Prison Professors works to improve outcomes for all people in the criminal justice system. Through these initiatives, we can work to end intergenerational cycles of recidivism and poverty, while simultaneously improving the culture of confinement.

Step by step, we’re always going to build and build.