People Love Your Dreams Until You Build Them
Not Everyone Wants to See You Succeed
Eight months in, and 2026 has already been the most transformative year of my life. I accepted my admission into business school, celebrated my golden birthday, graduated from college, decided to move to a brand new city in the fall, and, perhaps most importantly, finally found the confidence to build something I have wanted to build for years.
ayroandco.
For the longest time, I have let the opinions of others stop me from starting. I worried about what people would think, whether they would take me seriously. Whether anyone would read what I write. Whether people would think that I was strange for trying to build something on my own.
I have spent so much time imagining what I wanted to create that I eventually realized I was spending even more time imagining everyone else’s reaction to it.
So, eventually, I stopped caring. And I started.
When I first started talking about this idea back in January, I remember getting mixed reactions. Some people were excited for me. Some were curious. Some didn’t really understand it. And, if I am being completely honest, what surprised me the most was where some of those reactions came from.
They came from people I was related to. When I started this, I assumed that people from my own family would understand why this mattered to me. I think that is what has caught me off guard.
I was told that I shouldn’t waste my time on this. That I should be reading a book instead, or doing something more productive to prepare for business school.
At first, I tried not to let those comments bother me. But in the past few months I have started noticing something else.
Some family members would see what I was doing, and say nothing. They would see my posts, see my articles, see what I was trying to build, and there would be no acknowledgment of it at all.
And if I am being real, that has been the most difficult thing for me to understand through all of this. Not because I expect everyone to like everything I do, but because I have always been the person who supports the people around me.
If a family member starts something new, I want to know about it. If someone gets a new promotion, graduates, launches a business, or creates something they are proud of, I want to celebrate and support them. Even if it is not something I personally understand, I know what it means to have someone you love be excited about something.
So experiencing the opposite feels strange. There is something particularly uncomfortable about watching people I was related to see the thing I poured so much of myself into, and scroll past it.
The people who have supported me the most throughout this process have surprisingly been the people I am not related to by blood. It has been the outside world.
Now don’t get me wrong, there has absolutely been support from my family, and I don’t want to diminish that. But when I look at the people who have consistently shown up, shared my work, sent me messages, encouraged me, or reminded me to keep going, the majority have been people from outside my family.
I think it tells us something about what we are socially conditioned to believe from a young age. We are taught that our deepest support systems are inherited through blood. That the people who will stand beside us, believe in us, and celebrate our lives are naturally the people we were born into.
But I don’t think that is necessarily true.
Family can be an incredible source of love and support, but blood does not automatically create understanding, and proximity does not automatically create connection.
Some of the people who have believed in me most throughout this experience are people who have chosen me, and those who I have chosen back.
My biggest supporters through all of this have been friends. Acquaintances. People I met through ayro&co. Strangers who happened to read something I wrote and decided it was worth telling me that it resonated with them.
There is something incredibly powerful about being supported by someone who has no obligation to support you.
They aren’t doing it because you’re family. They aren’t doing it because they’ve known you for twenty years. They aren’t doing it because they feel like they have to. They are doing it because something about you, or something you created, made them want to show up.
One thing I have learned in my eight months of doing this has been to stop performing for the people who are never going to show up, and pay attention to those who actually do.
I think that is the hardest part of entrepreneurship nobody prepares you for: you don’t just build a thing, you build an entirely new set of people around the thing.
And maybe that’s what I’ve come to understand about building something of your own.
You don’t always find your people where you expect to. Sometimes you find them along the way.
Maybe that is the strangest thing about building something on your own. When it becomes big enough, when the numbers are impressive enough, when the work is recognizable enough, people will come. They will suddenly understand what you were doing. They will want to be part of it. The thing that once seemed small or impractical will become something worth paying attention to.
But by then, you will already know who was there before it mattered. Because the real value of building something isn’t only what you end up with.
It’s what the process shows you.
It shows you who believes in you before there is anything to gain from doing so. It shows you who celebrates your ambition and who only understands it once it becomes successful. It shows you who stays when there is nothing to celebrate yet.
And, perhaps most importantly, it shows you yourself.
The process has a way of revealing your own colors.
You find out how badly you want something when nobody is watching. You find out how much rejection you can handle. You find out whether you can keep going when the numbers aren’t moving, when the praise is absent, and when the outcome is still uncertain.
You find out what you’re made of before anyone else gets the chance to see it.
Maybe that’s why I no longer think the goal is to convince everyone to believe in what I’m building.
Eventually, if it becomes something big enough, people will come.
But I don’t want to forget the people who were there when it was still small. The people who believed before there was proof. The people who showed up before there was anything to show up for.
Because success might tell the world what you built, but the process tells you who you are.