From Silicon Valley CEO to Living in a Trailer Park: How Doublewide Thinking Changed My Life

Amanda Powers
Jul 30, 2017 · 5 min read

By Amanda Powers

Before my fall from grace, I was the CEO of Chakracom, the fastest-growing startup in the inner-peace tech space. Before we came along, no one was making enlightenment a click away. Everyone was still doing Vipassana meditation (yawn) and spending a fortune on plane tickets to Kripalu and Omega and Spirit Rock to eat brown rice for a week and not talk. Chakracom made spirituality accessible to millions of people.

Our startup was valued at nineteen billion dollars. The message app alone, En, had five hundred million active users. Then the unthinkable happened, and my world collapsed. A Kentucky judge sentenced me to live in a Casey County trailer park for ostensibly mismanaging it as the owner-operator. My estranged father had left the trailer park to me in his will two years prior. I had been too busy running our road show and hiring executives from Uber’s C-suite — those poor, traumatized people — to know what was going on. How was I to know that the trailer-park manager on site was charging people four hundred dollars a month for their water bill and letting raw sewage seep underneath their pads? When the story broke — “Habitat for Inhumanity” — I lost my job, my company, my reputation, and my position on the board of WARKCon.

Turns out hillbilly justice was one of the best things that ever happened to me. My year and a half managing a trailer park changed me. I want to share the five key insights that transformed my life. My hope is to transform yours with what I call Doublewide Thinking (DWT):

1. Quirks don’t matter, people do.

Steve Jobs used to soak his feet in the toilet as a stress reliever, and now, thousands of bearded brogrammers do the same thing, hoping for a flash of insight that will put them on a plane to Y Combinator. I, also once a special snowflake, used to insist staffers pet my emotional support snake, Daisy.

But when the sump pump broke down at the trailer park, it didn’t matter if I was meditating or binge-watching Switched at Birth. If that sump pump wasn’t fixed, and soon, five hundred people could end up in a sinkhole. That’s a lot more important than jumping rope with my Official USA Wrestling Jump Rope. There’s nothing more powerful than changing someone’s life. Focus on what you can do in the moment for folks instead of lofty, abstract visions.

2. Also: People don’t exist in order for you to monetize them.

When I give DWT talks today, I always say that my new definition of success is how many people I have in my life that I can call at three in the morning if I get in a pinch. That’s what I learned from the good people of Kentucky, who are amazing once you get past the Confederate Flag onesies and the doctors and nurses smoking cigarettes on their breaks outside the hospitals. Sure, someone scratched KKK into the free-weights stand at my gym, but no place is perfect. The denizens of Court Estates were the most generous and kind people I’ve ever met, and they don’t even use exclamation points. In Kentucky, I wasn’t namasted for eighteen months. But when Daisy got sick and passed, her memorial was packed. Everyone supported me for weeks with homemade meals and lots of what is called fellowship. I learned that community can be found everywhere you look, especially when you look for it. (Note: If you would like to book me for a DWT event or conference I’m @amandaplabs.)

3. Just eat it. Or grow it.

Before I moved to Kentucky, I was obsessed with what I ate and drank. Blueberries are supposed to prevent Alzheimer’s, but would I have to whiten my teeth even more with activated coconut charcoal from eating them? Smoothie kits: good or bad? Did my pastured butter contain Activator X? Is mealworm flour gluten-free? In Kentucky, I didn’t have access to my beloved Impossible Burgers, and the judge also sentenced me to live on a trailer-park manager’s salary, which torpedoed buying organic. So I ate what I could afford: sardines, mac and cheese, eggs, factory-farmed chicken. Nothing bad happened to me. In good weather, we grew tomatoes and corn and cucumbers. I’d never made refrigerator pickles before. You should try it. Bottom line: stop worrying about your ketones and get a life.

4. Collaboration = innovation.

Once upon a time, I was a lone wolf, even as the CEO of a successful company with over a hundred employees. I never consulted anyone on key initiatives or decisions. But everyone can change, gosh, once upon a time, Mitch McConnell was a moderate who fought for women’s rights before he became the dude who says stuff like, “All Citizens United did was level the playing field for corporate speech.”

Mitch—proof anyone can change in startling ways. He was once a moderate who fought for women’s rights.

But living in a trailer park, I learned about working with other people to come up with solutions to big problems. As a result of collaboratively studying odor control, we invented a line of holding-tank deodorizers made with essential oils. Today at my new company, Amanda Labs, I’m involved in a range of efforts to improve people’s lives, from the use of nattokinase enzymes as an alternative to statins, to developing alt-edibles and altmountaintops, to building libraries in Afghanistan and Palo Alto.

5. You are your own unicorn.

When I lost my company, I thought my career was over, that I’d reached the end of my design life. But over time, I realized I simply needed to find a new story, one that reflected who I had become. In Kentucky, I learned that nothing is cut and dried (except tobacco). My best advice: find your own narrative. Not Reid’s or Marissa’s or Sheryl’s. You have all the power you will ever need. You and Mark Cuban. Use it well and track it with Hour.ly. Namaste, Amanda.

Amanda Powers is a pseudonym.

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