Greg LaVecchia was standing at the top of Ajax Mountain in Aspen, Colorado, looking out at roughly 30 privately owned jets parked at the airport about a mile away, their price tags ranging from $20 million to $90 million. His eight-month-old son was back at the house with his wife. Bloom, the company he co-founded with her in 2019, was on pace to move more than half a billion cans of a single beverage in just its second year of nationwide distribution, with each of its three portfolios clearing nine figures. What he wanted to talk about was not the jets. He wanted to talk about the decade of decisions that made them irrelevant to his sense of self-worth, and the eight lessons he wished someone had handed him in his 20s.
The word that built the company
The first and, by LaVecchia‘s own account, most underrated lesson is a single syllable: no. He describes the running joke among his peers and in the towns where he works as just how good he has gotten at saying it. Not because he is difficult, but because he understood early that saying yes carries an opportunity cost most people never bother to calculate. His analogy is direct: a baby learning to crawl cannot hold something in its hands at the same time. The crawl requires everything. ‘It is easier to not drink alcohol than it is to just have a few drinks,’ he said flatly. ‘It is easier to not socialize for 3 to 6 to 9 to 12 months than it is to socialize a few times a week.’ The abstinence is not punishment. It is a trade, a few months of locked-in focus exchanged for the ability to say yes to the things that actually matter later.
The second lesson reframes the entire idea of mentorship. LaVecchia said he does not have mentors in the traditional sense, no monthly dinners, no apprenticeships. What he has are people he watches. When he wanted to understand what a competing brand was doing, he spent $30 on their product, tracked the packaging, studied their email flow, pulled up their Facebook ad library, and searched their name on social platforms to map their influencer patterns. ‘The arena is public,’ he said. ‘It is all accessible to all of us.’ He adds a sharp caveat for anyone tempted to copy a successful person’s current routine: study what they did at the beginning of their journey, not what they do now. By the time someone is running a hundred-person operation, their daily structure looks nothing like the years that built it.
What 18 months of smoking weed in Boulder actually cost him
Consistency is lesson four, but LaVecchia twists it in a way most motivation content avoids. He points out that the person hitting the McDonald’s drive-through every day is also consistent. The question is not whether you are consistent but whether you are consistent in the right things. He learned this the hard way in Boulder, Colorado, where he and his wife launched Bloom. Every night for 18 months he smoked weed to decompress, convinced himself it was a necessary shutdown ritual, and only realized after leaving the city that it had been quietly capping his output the entire time. The moment he stopped, what had taken 12 hours of work started taking three.
The remaining lessons build on each other: do what you say you are going to do, because announcing goals on social media produces fake dopamine while the actual achievement produces fulfillment; stop starting new things, because the seeds planted today will not show output for 12 to 36 months; audit your routines every six months and cut what is not working, whether that is a habit, a relationship, or an app; and recognize that the society built around them is a meritocracy that rewards consistent, directed input regardless of GPA. LaVecchia graduated with a 2.4. His wife left school entirely. Neither fact showed up anywhere on Bloom’s growth chart.
The jets and the question he keeps asking himself
The 30 private jets on the Aspen tarmac, each worth between $20 million and $90 million.
LaVecchia stood there and felt nothing like envy, only the same question he says he now asks every time he sees something someone else has built: if somebody else has done it, why can’t I? That question, he argues, is not motivation-poster material. It is a repeatable cognitive reset, and it is the one habit that connects every rule on his list.
