my story.

written version

my name is jacob abdo. i was born march 14, 1988, in grosse pointe, michigan.

from the beginning, my parents treated intelligence as something you build, not something you wait for. i learned to read, write, and do math by two and a half. i skipped grades early and grew up as the youngest, smallest, and smartest kid in every room.

being labeled “the smart one” removed my need for approval. i didn’t second-guess my instincts. i didn’t hesitate socially. that carried straight into dating, long before i had language for what i was doing.

i was athletic, rebellious, and into counterculture. punk, metal, skating, hockey. i also spent my teens in and out of trouble and on probation. i graduated high school late, got a full ride for english, and promptly ignored college in favor of experience.

i dropped out, toured the country working large-scale live events, and learned what it feels like to operate in front of crowds. later, i became a battle rapper in detroit — a space where composure, verbal precision, and pressure are non-negotiable. that erased social anxiety permanently.

i returned to school for engineering, struggled with alcohol, failed out, went to jail, then rebuilt everything from zero. i got sober, earned a 4.0, finished engineering, completed an mba, and worked as a project engineer at ford.

while working remotely, i built a resale business on the side. first ebay, then amazon. i identified an underpriced market, went all in, and scaled it into a seven-figure operation. in 2024 alone, that business cleared over a million dollars in revenue.

amazon shut it down overnight. no warning. no appeal.

that failure burned a lesson into me: never anchor your identity or livelihood to platforms you don’t control. value has to be internal, portable, and rebuildable. that principle applies to money, status, and relationships.

after walking away from burnout, i rebuilt again — this time publicly. i started posting. i started teaching. the response was immediate.

everything i teach comes from pattern recognition across intelligence, social dynamics, pressure environments, failure, leverage, and rebuilding from zero. nothing here is hypothetical.

this isn’t a brand. it’s a worldview forged under repetition.