The Brain
The Test Point I Never Built
Three days camping, a 4:30am email, and every system I built to watch myself reading green while I feel like I am scraping by in every direction at once.
Kevin Mastriano
The wiring never changed.I just finally figured out what to do with it.
I walked into detox on New Year's Day, 2009, with everything I owned in one duffel bag. I've been clean since the first minute of that year. Eight years later I joined my uncle's calibration business, an owner-operator out of East Falmouth, working from the back of his vehicle, brand new to the trade, and spent two years learning it beside him. Then I took it over, brought it to North Haven, built the lab, and grew Custom Calibration 5×, past $1 million a year, no degree, an ADHD brain I never medicated. Life, business, family, the protocol: this site is me documenting all of it, restarts included.
// WHAT THIS SITE IS
Social media is a highlight reel. This is the whole tape.
Business owners post the revenue screenshot and the 5am alarm. Fine. I have both. But here you also get the beach week in Jersey, the two weeks of my wife's Italian relatives right behind it, the 12 pounds that came with them, and what the restart actually looks like. The highlight reel is easy. The whole tape is the useful part.
The short version of me: clean since the first minute of January 1, 2009, not roughly 2009, the first minute. ADHD, diagnosed right after I got clean; handed a prescription I never filled. A calibration company in North Haven doing over $1 million a year, with employees who count on me. Two daughters, and Rosanna, the best decision I ever made.
I'm against pretending. I'm not a doctor, I'm not a programmer, and I never took the SATs. I'm for showing the work: the protocol I actually run, 5am, keto, an 18-hour fast, 15 to 20 grams of creatine a day, and the weeks it falls apart. What I do, not what you should do.
I've restarted more times than I can count. Diets. Training cycles. My entire life, once, with that duffel bag. The restart is the skill. Falling off isn't the story, getting back on is, and you'll watch me do it here in real time.
And I'll say the ambitious part out loud: I want to build Custom Calibration into something my uncle would be proud of, and something my employees are proud to be part of. Grow it. Buy other companies. Start new ones. Writing it all down as it happens keeps me honest, and lets you check my math.
“I didn't fix myself. I aimed myself.”
// WHERE TO START
// WHAT I'VE BEEN WRITING
Building
The Web Made Explicit
Part 2 of a series on running a calibration company with AI in the loop. The standards were always deterministic. The problem was the web of references connecting them, which lived only in our heads. Making that web machine-readable is what kills the failure mode from Part 1 at the root.
Building
The Instrument That Agrees With You
Part 1 of a series on running a calibration company with AI in the loop. The real danger is not that AI fails loudly. It is that it agrees with you confidently. How a caliper procedure got quietly tightened to a spec my lab cannot hold, sailed through approval, and got caught at the bench in seconds.
Live Wire.
One honest post a week: business, brain, body, and whatever I'm building. Written by me, not a content team.
No spam, no funnel, no course at the end. Unsubscribe whenever. I won't chase you.