You Don't Need to Build an Empire.

This episode is the third installment of In Between, the miniseries where we talk about the parts of building a life and a business that don't make anyone's highlight reel. I sat down with Vincent Brathwaite, a Caribbean American design leader and founder, to talk about what happens when people leave the nine-to-five and quietly rebuild the same cage they just escaped. Note: this post may have affiliate links and we donate 100% of those funds to non-profits and a children's group home🫶🏾 

Most people who leave corporate to build something of their own are chasing freedom. Somewhere in the first year, a lot of them build a smaller, more exhausting version of the job they left. Same urgency. Same performance. Same nervous system running on a loop of proving something to someone who was never going to be satisfied anyway. Vincent and I spent this episode naming the version of entrepreneurship nobody markets: the one where the goal isn't more, it's enough.

Peace Is a Decision, Not a Mood

Vincent grew up in Overtown, one of Miami's most under-resourced and heavily policed neighborhoods, and he carried a specific kind of exhaustion into every room that followed: the Ivy League campus, the national design boards, the meetings with clients twice his age. He was performing competence for people who had already decided what they thought of him before he opened his mouth. That performance didn't stop when he became a founder. As one of the small percentage of Black tech founders in his space, he found himself over-polishing pitch decks and rehearsing his own sentences, bracing for an attack that was mostly happening inside his own body.

"Every time I tried to prove someone wrong, I was letting their limited perspective dictate not just my energy, but my entire emotional state." — Vincent

What changed wasn't his circumstances. It was the decision to stop starting each day preparing for battle. He started naming an intention instead of a defense, and setbacks stopped reading as indictments and started reading as data. I think about a story I return to often from my theology training, the one where Jesus is asleep in the bottom of a storm-tossed boat while experienced sailors panic around him. When they wake him, he doesn't summon peace from nowhere. He commands it, because it was already there, underneath the noise, waiting to be claimed. Most of us have never been taught to relate to peace that way. We wait for it to arrive instead of calling it forward.

What Over-Explaining Actually Costs You

I grew up in a house where emotions weren't met, they were managed, and I learned early that clarity wasn't rewarded, compliance was. So I became the kid who explained her feelings until they made sense to someone else, who smoothed things over before they cracked, who tried to be so digestible that safety would eventually get handed to me as a reward. That pattern followed me into work, into love, into every disagreement I've had as an adult. I thought over-explaining was protection. It was actually a slow, ongoing abandonment of myself, dressed up as consideration for other people.

Healing didn't teach me to explain better. It taught me I don't owe anyone a full psychological transcript before my boundaries get respected. Vincent named the same pattern from inside a Caribbean household that taught a similar lesson: justify your existence with enough words and maybe, this time, you'll be believed. Peace, it turns out, was never about being understood by everyone in the room. It was about no longer betraying yourself to be palatable to them.

The Smallest Team Wins

Ask Vincent what he's intentionally kept small and he doesn't hesitate: his circle, on both the personal and business side. He's learned the hard way that not everyone clapping for you is rooting for you, and that depth beats breadth every time trust is actually tested. His team is small on purpose, everyone on it believes in the mission and in him as a leader, and he's capped it at ten people, even as the company grows.

I run my teams the same way, and not because I lack ambition. Big teams create big disconnection. Misalignment gets expensive fast, and speed without a shared sense of purpose tends to burn more than it builds. Keeping a team small has given both of us room to co-create from clarity instead of manufacturing synergy across ten meetings nobody needed. We measure the work by how much we laugh together, how much rest we're actually modeling, whether the people doing it like each other. Sustainability can be a spiritual practice. Rejecting empire-building in favor of something smaller and more alive might be the most radical move a founder makes all year.

Contentment Hides in the Wildly Ordinary

Somewhere in the conversation we both landed on the same surprising answer to what's been making us feel alive lately, and it had nothing to do with revenue. For me it's been food that isn't designed to keep me sick, sleep, strength training, and walking through my neighborhood in Querétaro with nowhere urgent to be. For Vincent it's people-watching in a mall food court he doesn't even particularly like, quietly noticing the couple deep in conversation, the parent negotiating with a toddler, the person eating lunch alone. Nothing about it produces a KPI. It reminds him he's building for real humans, not a use case.

I catch myself scrolling LinkedIn some days thinking: we are all going to die, and none of this urgency is going to matter the way it feels like it matters right now. My best friend since middle school, a vegan doctor who specialized in caring for the terminally ill, died unexpectedly in her sleep in 2022. She did everything right. That kind of loss reorders your priorities without asking permission. I don't want to endure my life. I want to be nourished by it, and lately that has looked like walking my dog and noticing what's blooming instead of listening to a podcast that makes me feel productive.

The Scoreboard Nobody Sees

Neither of us measures whether we're doing life right by what shows up on a resume. For Vincent, it's whether people feel safer, seen, and heard after they've been in his presence, the strangers at airports who end up telling him things they've never told anyone else. For me, it's a standing Friday appointment on my calendar with my partner that we call team time, thirty minutes to an hour of not pitching or performing, just checking in on who we're becoming and not only what we're chasing. Nothing on a client testimonial. Everything to do with whether the life underneath the business is actually one worth having.

One Small, Risky Step This Week

If you're afraid to step off the hamster wheel of more, Vincent's advice is to start small: find one area where the stakes are genuinely low and experiment there. Don't answer email after 7pm for a week. Cancel one non-essential meeting. Say no to something you'd normally say yes to out of obligation, and then notice, honestly, whether the world actually fell apart. My version of the same experiment: cancel something you said yes to out of guilt this week, and don't replace it with anything productive. Let the space stay empty. Readiness isn't a feeling you wait to arrive. It's a decision you make while the fear is still sitting right next to you.

Choose courage over comfort with us this week. If building something sustainable, rather than just bigger, is the season you're in, my free guide on booking your first ten discovery calls is built for exactly that stage of building.

Originally aired as Episode 26: "You Don't Need to Build an Empire," featuring Vincent Brathwaite, on the Choose Courage Inc. podcast.