There was a specific night.
I don’t want to get into all the details. But I came home from a party in bad shape. My wife left the house. I vomited. I fell asleep on the floor.
A few days later, I paid $4,500 for a coaching program to help me quit alcohol.
Why that number
At the time, $4,500 felt like the number that would make it serious.
I’d tried to quit plenty of times for free. Told myself I’d stop. Tried cutting back. None of it worked. There was always a way out.
$4,500 removed the way out. It was a commitment device. If I paid that and it didn’t work, I couldn’t pretend I’d really tried.
And it worked. The program was good. I learned how alcohol actually works in the brain, the psychology behind cravings, the identity shift you need to make. For 3 months, I was genuinely sober.
What went wrong
Month 3. Family dinner.
Someone said: “Try this wine, it’s really good.”
One sentence. And I tried it.
Just like that, I was back. Not right away at full speed, but it crept back up. The old routines came back. The old evenings came back. I thought I was fine. I wasn’t.
Looking back: the program got me 80% of the way there. The psychological understanding was solid. But something was missing.
What was missing
The program was about mindset. About understanding the trap alcohol creates. That’s real and it matters.
What it didn’t give me was visible proof.
When you’re sober for 3 months, it’s easy to forget why. The benefits start to feel normal. The old version of you starts to feel like a distant memory. And then someone offers you a wine and you think: I’ve got this. One is fine.
What I needed was a dashboard. A mirror. Something showing me every day what I was actually becoming. The money piling up. The weight dropping. The days adding up.
Not to make me feel good. To make the identity real and concrete and hard to ignore.
Round 2
When I quit again, I had both things.
The psychological foundation from the program. And my own system for tracking the evidence.
Every time I felt any pull toward drinking, I looked at the numbers. 847 euros saved. 6.2kg gone. 43 days. And the desire just dissolved. Not because I was stronger. Because the evidence of who I was becoming was more powerful than the thought of one drink.
That’s what made it permanent this time.
What I’d tell my past self
The $4,500 wasn’t wasted. It taught me what I needed to know.
But the real work wasn’t the program. It was the identity shift that came from seeing my own results, day after day, until the new version of me felt more real than the old one.
The program changed my thinking. The data changed my identity.
You need both. And you don’t need to spend $4,500 to get there. You need the method and the proof.
That’s what I’m building now. That’s why this exists.