I was born on a dirt road in Beaufort, South Carolina, raised by my grandmother. I never knew my biological father [sperm donor]. Before my stepfather arrived, the man I studied was my uncle Bobby.
I watched how men moved. Who showed up. Who disappeared. Who kept their word. I was learning what a man’s presence was worth before I had a word for it.
At twenty, I entered prison carrying anger, ego, and shame. I left carrying discipline, self-awareness, and a promise: to become more than the worst thing I had ever done.
It happened when I could no longer distract myself from myself. Prison stripped away the noise. I had information about who I was, the mistakes I’d made, the life I said I wanted. Information wasn’t changing me.
Attention meant sitting with the hard questions. Why did I react that way? What was I proving? Who was I becoming? If I got another shot, what kind of man did I want to be?
That’s when it changed. I stopped looking outside myself for answers. I started listening to what was happening inside.
Data is useful. Attention is where transformation begins.
Every man has two lives. The one he performs for the world, and the one he lives when no one is watching. The second one tells the truth.
I rebuilt piece by piece. Graduating college. Journalism. Entrepreneurship. Service.
The last three digits of my prison number became the 363 in T363. Not to remember who I had been. To never forget who I chose to become. They gave me a number. I made it mine.
Then two decades in fashion and beauty. Bylines in The New York Times and Forbes. People thought the work was about clothes. It never was. I was studying men.
How a man presents himself is how he answers a harder question. Who am I going to be? For twenty years I watched men answer it without knowing they had been asked.
Eventually the surface stopped being enough. I wanted what was underneath.
What were they carrying that they had never named? Who did they call when it fell apart? Who was left when the title, the money, and the applause were gone? I went to Seoul, South Korea to study skincare. I took a cosmetic chemistry course at UCLA. I wanted the science, not another product.
T363 SKIN came out of that. Skin is where we begin. It’s what the world sees first. The work can’t stop there.
Men have more data about themselves than any generation in history. Resting heart rate. Sleep score. Step count. Recovery percentage.
We can measure almost everything about a man now. Except whether he knows himself.
Nobody was building for that gap. So I did. I create rooms where men don’t have to perform. Stages. Boardrooms. Reentry units. A table across from a founder who has built everything except a relationship with himself. Different rooms. Same question. Who are you when there’s nothing left to perform?
I know what it means to have an identity handed to you. I know what it means to lose one. I know what it takes to build another.
I went from a number to a name. Now I help men rewrite what comes next.