Johannes

I decided at seven that I would be a footballer. Nobody in my family had played, so nobody was there to tell me it was unrealistic. That is the only reason I got as far as I did.

Twenty-one minutes in the Europa League. I still had two years left on a professional contract at that point. Then everything changed at once, and none of it was about how I played.

Over the years that followed I was told five times that it was over for me. Never by a coach, and never about football. It was contracts, agents, people deciding above my head. So I started again with a camera and a laptop. Different work, same discipline.

Today I build websites for founder-led brands. The one I would show you first is Become A Yogi, built with Jonah Kest. It carries everything this page just told you: one obsession, done properly, owned by the person whose name is on it.

Football taught me everything I know about work. Get up, do the boring part, do it again tomorrow, and let twelve years of that add up to one night. I still work exactly like this. Only the object changed.

What came after was not a plan. New people I would never have met inside a squad, good coffee in places I could not pronounce, and the discovery that a life is allowed to be wide instead of narrow.

A new chapter began. Same discipline, new object, and this time the thing I was building had my own name on it.

The training never stopped. It only stopped being for somebody else's team sheet.