I met him on ome.tv: that odd little roulette wheel of faces where you can crash into a stranger’s life for a few minutes and try to leave it better than you found it. He popped up shy and watchful, the way some kids do when they are deciding whether the adult on the other side is safe. I told him I was on a college campus. He asked what college feels like. I said what I believe: college can be a place to explore, to get good at something real, to find people who stretch you.

He said he was not going.

I asked why. He said he planned to sell drugs.

There is a pause that happens after a sentence like that. It pulls you into the present the way cold water does. I asked him why that path. He said it was the only thing he knew. He wanted money. He had friends with things he did not have. He wanted that rush of catching up.

The Ceiling and the Wall

I told him the truth as I have learned it. You can make fast money that way, but there is a hard ceiling and a hard wall. The ceiling is the limit on how far you can grow when you are running from the very systems that make growth safe. The wall is prison, violence, and the loss of time you cannot buy back. You can be clever and still lose to probabilities that never get tired.

He pushed back. He said the name that always shows up in these conversations. What about Pablo Escobar. Did he not make more money than almost anyone. Would he not still be the richest if he had not died. I said that is the point. He died. Elon Musk is alive. One path ends early and takes others with it. The other path is brutal in its own way, but it builds, and it keeps you breathing. You do not need to become a billionaire to see the difference. Being alive is already a gigantic difference.

The Question

The conversation turned. He asked me for advice, then asked a question I did not expect from a fourteen-year-old in Phoenix. Are you content with who you are.

That is a tricky one. Happiness and contentment are cousins that do not always visit on the same day. You can be happy and restless. You can be unhappy and at peace with your direction. Right now I am neutral on the happiness dial, but I am content. I have seen enough of the landscape to know where I want to walk. The next step is not discovery, it is execution. Less noise. More focus. Contentment for me is not a finish line. It is alignment between my values and my calendar.

What I Told Him

He asked what he should do. I told him to go to college if he can, to study something with leverage like computer science and AI, not because the acronyms are shiny but because they compound. Skills that compound are different from cash that burns. I told him to start a business to learn how value moves. Flip trading cards if that is his world. Detail cars in his neighborhood. Become the kid who shows up on time, keeps promises, and gets paid because people trust him. I offered a contact if he wanted to learn how to sell cards the right way. Start small, learn fast, repeat, then pick a bigger hill.

He is fourteen. That matters. Neighborhood gravity is real. The map you inherit shapes the roads you think exist. But a fourteen-year-old who can ask about contentment already has a compass. If you are that kid, your edge is not what you know today. Your edge is your willingness to trade fast illusions for slow power. You can win that trade.

Money as a Stand-In

What struck me later was how quickly money became a stand-in for other needs. Money is safety, status, and permission all rolled into one. It is also a story we tell ourselves about what we deserve. A lot of kids do not want to hurt anyone. They want to stop feeling left behind. Illegal money promises to end the ache with a shortcut. The problem with shortcuts is not only the risk. The problem is that shortcuts steal the parts of you that would have loved the long way.

College is not a magic spell. Neither is coding. The magic is compounding. Learn a skill that gets sharper with use. Put yourself near people who think in long arcs. Say yes to hard, boring reps that teach you taste and judgment. Keep your name clean so your future self can take phone calls you have not earned yet. That is the part the movies never show. The richest payoff is optionality, the freedom to choose better problems later.

A Strange Crossroads

I still see his face in the glow of the laptop screen. Fourteen, bright, careful with his words, testing the edges of his life. The internet is strange. It lets two people who will never meet share a crossroads for ten minutes, then drift back into their separate days. If he ever reads this, I want him to know I meant every word. The world is not asking you to be perfect. It is asking you to stay in the game long enough to matter.

I hope he picks compounding over combustion. I hope the next time someone asks him if he is content, he can answer without flinching, not because everything is easy, but because his choices line up with his values. And I hope he finds his way into rooms where the air feels clean, where people build things that last, and where money is a byproduct of usefulness instead of a replacement for it.

That is what I wanted to say. On a random night on ome.tv, a kid from Phoenix reminded me that contentment is not the absence of hunger. It is the presence of direction.