The Year I Became Nobody

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What three continents, a DJ controller and an AI taught me about becoming myself

MAY 13

Today is my birthday. May 12th. Somewhere between Southeast Asia and everywhere else I’ve been this year. Nobody knows exactly where. Honestly, that’s the whole point.

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In 1996, I was at Columbia Records working with a young rapper named Nas and the lead singer from the Fugees named Lauryn Hill putting together marketing plans for a song called “If I Ruled the World.” I had no idea that nearly thirty years later, I’d be living the sequel.

“ …some place to be nobody. Some place you wouldn’t know probably.”

I didn’t plan to make that my life this year. No itinerary. No conference badge. No lanyard. No room to walk into where people already knew my name.

Africa. Middle East. Asia.

Just me, God, and the frequency of places I’d never lived before.

This is my attempt at words.

A few things kept me this year. I call them my album singles.

“Day One.”

Every morning is a first day of school. You don’t carry yesterday’s failures or yesterday’s wins into it. You just show up. Curious. Open. Ready. I woke up in cities where nobody knew my name and that made it easier, actually. No reputation to manage. Just presence.

“God’s got you.”

I know what it is to have war show up in the city you’re calling home. The kind where you check the news before you check your calendar. The kind where the next 48 hours don’t have a plan. He had me anyway. That’s not a bumper sticker. I lived it this year.

“Every city has a frequency.”

I travel with my controller. Always. Because every place has a sonic resonance, something it’s saying underneath the noise. I DJed in Dubai. In Johannesburg. Spent late nights getting schooled by DJs who know their city’s musical DNA in ways I never could from the outside. Learning to plug in, to listen, to blend, that’s been one of the great creative gifts of this year. When you can’t speak the language, music is the one door that’s always open.

“Your energy is your language.”

In places where you don’t speak the tongue, your presence speaks for you. Your kindness. Your curiosity. Your willingness to honor people in their own homeland. Tourism brings revenue. Respect brings connection. Know the difference.

“If you don’t have an Africa strategy, I don’t take your business seriously.”

That’s my new litmus test. Not because Africa is a trend or a moment. Because the continent is building without waiting for permission. The infrastructure is being laid by people who never had the luxury of legacy systems to slow them down. The conversations I had this year in Johannesburg, Lagos, Nairobi were more forward-looking than anything I’ve sat in at a conference with a $3,000 badge. If Africa isn’t in your blueprint, you’re not building big enough.

“Show up in relationships. Never perform. Always come from overflow.”

This year I took myself on dates. Sat alone at dinner in cities where nobody knew me. Walked through markets where I didn’t speak the language and just experienced them. Learned what I actually enjoy when there’s no one to perform for. That fullness is what you bring into every relationship worth having. You can’t give what you don’t have.

“Meditation is free.”

It just costs time. Guard it like money. Some mornings mine is 19 minutes of resistance and one minute of actual stillness. It still counts. Showing up for the practice even when it isn’t working is the practice.

And then there’s AI.

I live at the intersection of culture and technology. Always have. But this year something shifted. I stopped watching AI and started living inside it.

The way you talk to AI is a mirror.

It reflects your clarity, your assumptions, your blind spots right back at you. If your prompts are vague, your results are vague. If you don’t know what you want, the machine won’t either. This technology is teaching people to know themselves whether they realize it or not.

AI will give you time back. The real question is what you’ll return to. Who will you become with the hours? Do you know?

The human in the loop matters most. Not the model. Not the prompt. You. And if you don’t know yourself deeply enough to direct this thing with intention, now is the time to find out.

Today is the worst AI will ever be. Read that again. What feels like magic right now is the floor. Not the ceiling. We are in the earliest days of something we cannot yet fully imagine.

I start my mornings now by letting Claude read my journal. My inner weather, emotional, spiritual, physical, becomes the daily briefing. The machine stays informed by the human. Not the other way around. That distinction matters more than most people know.

AI will expose the difference between people who know what they want and people who are waiting to be told. It rewards self-knowledge. Always has.

The year I became nobody taught me everything.

No one knew my name in most of the places I lived. And in that anonymity, no stage, no badge, no co-sign, I found out who I actually am.

Resilient. Creative. Imaginative.

Grounded enough to receive. Sovereign enough to build.

Nas and Lauryn called it. I just had to live it.

Some place to be nobody. Some place you wouldn’t know probably.

Living a little borderless.

Still here. Still building. Still free.

Happy birthday to me. 🎂

🌍🌏🌎

James

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The Year I Became Nobody