One thing I do on this blog is always talking about health first and mental wellness first. Because no one can win or celebrate anything material if they obtained it at the cost of their health and peace of mind. This is why I explain we cannot uplift the Black community if our people are eating bad food causing high blood pressure and other long-term problems. This also goes for the sellouts – your money gains from being a sellout cornball means nothing in this world full of real work folks who not going to respect a cornball sellout. Stay healthy and stay purposeful – without that, your accomplishments will be empty or not lived up to their fullest reward and enjoyment.

I have decided to start jogging again as I wanted to get out on the Atlanta Beltline for the summer. I have not gone jogging since the quarantine started in 2020, I have done walking but have not run. So I decided to sit on a mat and start stretching out my legs and foot muscles – that’s when everything turned for the worst. I woke up one morning and the next thing I realized my bottom feet were in pain and my toes – all of them were in constant sharp pain. I could not walk and my toe tendons were so tight I would push down on my toes and my toes would snap back into a straight position like a rubber band. I discovered I am experiencing a foot injury known as plantar fasciitis.

This is one of the most painful experiences I had in my life because every toe was randomly emitting pain and the bottom of my feet was making it hard to walk around the house. Also, speaking with my doctor, I realize the cold winter we had here in Atlanta caused my tiled floor to be extra cold and this made the bottom foot condition even worse as I walked about barefoot, it would take less than a minute for my feet to go into an extreme pain episode walking on a cold tile floor. But what makes things worse is I simply could not even work/concentrate because the pain was constant, random, and disruptive and I cannot even think straight.

What happened as a result of the injury is I could only work for a brief moment before the pain in my foot would kick in randomly. My doctor let me know it is going to take weeks and possibly a couple of months to fully heal pain-free from plantar fasciitis. It’s been a few weeks and the pain has been reduced significantly but I remember how bad it was the last several weeks when I could not even blog without stopping and responding to the random pain on the toes and bottom of my feet. I wouldn’t wish that pain on anybody because foot pain is different because the pain is all over the place from one toe to another, then if you not walking right, your ankles and shin become painful as well and it can get worse from there. You will see a lot of homeless people not walking right because of they have not addressed their foot pain properly. So I been resting and recovering and not going out and about as much.

What annoyed me is this pain happened as I was preparing for my global launch but I was not going to let that stop me. The global gateway hubs were already established and deployed earlier this April. I had one more major task and that is implementing the media gateway for our platform ecosystem. The media platform is a core system broken off our Kolin-Avers platform and is a dedicated system for upstream media (upload) and downstream media (download/streaming) that will be set up as a content distribution network or CDN in key markets around the world.

The media gateway is a critical component of our ecosystem as ToshikisoSDK allows this to be managed through our media asset library. One feature for example is to stream advertisement videos on a jumbotron, stream product promotions at a grocery store, run podcasts and pay-per-view media streaming or host images for content platforms. Plus in addition, allow us to distribute PDFs and e-books or assets for the metaverse. As I was in the middle of deploying our media gateways, the foot pain took over and I simply could not work and was in deep pain disrupting every 5 minutes. If you ever think of stretching out, please take it slow, you do not want to experience this.

My team is taking over the implementation and I’m advising while recovering on setting up the final gateway. We have the billing and payment gateways setup, the API gateways setup, and the APIs and data layer all set up as well. We are very well on track to officially launching the 2nd quarter but the good thing is I have an actual team that respects me and my skills to stand up and assist in getting everything out. A lot of people don’t have a backup crew nor do they train their team to do the heavy work as well because they protect their ego and sense of being the smart one. I’m glad I’m smarter than that and when I need my team, I prepared them to step up if one of us go down.

With this said, a foot injury is one of the worst disruptive, knock-out-the-game events that can happen to an entrepreneur. Most entrepreneurial folks don’t even have health insurance and something like this can be disruptive to their venture and their finances and their wellness. This event was a major lesson to be prepared for unexpected events. It’s bad enough unexpected events occurred like the pandemic, now Ukraine and Russian tech talent disrupted and now I experienced a foot injury. This is on top of Indonesia banning palm oil (a major global disruptive food supply issue) and Biden increasing ethanol in gasoline (that caused deadly riots in the Caribbean and Africa over 10 years ago due to corn shortage) that we have to be prepared for anything.

Always have an emergency plan but most important – do things the right, solid way. Most folks talk a lot in this tech game but they just got folks who will run to another tech firm that will pay them more money to be poached. I train and empower my folks who know they don’t get this level of skills and development with other folks who are promoting their own egos and personality. Because I give respect from the beginning, I get respect from others and in this case, folks stepped up to help me stay on the journey. And I appreciate that.

I’m still on track, we will have our gateways, hubs, and platforms set up and start accepting customers and start billing them around the world. We are diversified and quietly kicked the Black community to the curb who was side-watching and judging me instead of openly supporting the genuine work I was doing while the Black community was openly following ignorant charlatans on YouTube and social media. Once the business is established, the next step is to prepare the long journey to consider working with SPACs for our long-term goals. We going to be moving fast in the public but this has been years in the making in private.

I fully expect more setbacks, disruptions, and Black Swan events, even things personally to me will show up in 2022. We all have to just go for ours and let whatever happen as long as we prepared ourselves to accept uncertainty then deal with it and keep pushing forward. My injury has gone away but I still need to take it slow to avoid re-injuring the bottom of my foot - I’m going to keep moving forward and am glad that I have hedges leverages and backup plans to keep the show running. My foot injury and the pain made me realize I’m not a super entrepreneur and that I can be taken down and put on the injured reserve list. There is no important moment in time that we all need a continuity plan and people we can trust and fall back on, make sure you have all of this in place in 2022 – that’s the lesson.