For a long time I thought I was four different people.
There was the photographer, who spent seven years shooting for NBA Entertainment and later opened his own studio. There was the bass player, who wanted to be a punk-rock-star at 14, who has never quite stopped finding a band to play in, and who spent the covid years collaborating with musicians through a screen. There was the cyclist, who only found the road four years ago and had his life quietly rearranged by it. And there was the one who gets paid: the guy who is genuinely, unironically fascinated by the human interactions of big SAP transformation programs.For years these felt like separate lives. The art over here, the sport over there, the work in its own building. I used to think the photographer, the musician, the cyclist and the consultant had nothing to say to each other.
Then recently it clicked. They are not four passions. They are one instinct, showing up in four places. The instinct is this: structure is what sets the soul loose. You master the mechanics so completely that they disappear, and what is left is freedom. Discipline is not the opposite of expression. Discipline is the thing that makes expression possible.
Let me show you what I mean.
Photography
NBA All-Star Weeknd 2014 - D-League Dunk Contest - ©Sergio Hentschel/NBAE
Photography looks like art, and it is, but the art is almost never in the moment you press the shutter. It is in the thousand hours before, when the exposure triangle stopped being a diagram and became something my hands just know. You learn the rules of light and composition so well that you forget you ever learned them. And then the moment arrives, the real one, the slam dunk that lasts a quarter of a second, and you are not calculating anything. You are simply present, and you catch it.
The studio taught me the rest. Running a space, managing clients, delivering on a promise with a deadline attached. That is its own discipline, and it is the unglamorous half nobody photographs. But it is what let the seeing happen. The structure underneath the art.
Music
Summer Concert - Belgium 2025
I play bass (and drums occasionally). People who do not play often think of the bass as the background instrument, the one you are not supposed to notice. I think that is exactly the point. The bass and the drums are the foundation. We are the structure that lets the melody flow. When we are grooving, nobody in the room thinks “good rhythm section.” They just feel that the song is moving, that it has a floor under it. That is what we call “the pocket” among musicians: the sweet spot when bassist and drummer are locked in.
During covid I learned this the hard way: collaborating with other musicians remotely, fighting latency, managing different time zones, trying to lock a groove across a distance. You cannot fake your way through that. The timing has to be real. And when it works, the discipline of the groove becomes invisible. You stop hearing the count. You just feel the freedom sitting on top of it.
Cycling
De Brabantse Pijl, Belgium 2026
Cycling found me late, four years ago, right after moving to the Flanders region in Belgium, arguably the road cycling capital of the world, and it changed my life. I do not say that lightly.
The road taught me something the other passions had only hinted at: the breakthrough is always on the far side of the boring work. The open road, the long ride, the feeling of flying down a descent with the whole day still ahead of you, none of that is free. You buy it with months of base kilometers that nobody sees, with the discipline of showing up when it is cold and dark and pointless. Endurance is just patience made physical. You suffer on purpose, in a structured way, and the reward is a kind of freedom in your own body that I did not know was available to me before.
It rearranged how I think about effort. About limits. About the long game in everything else, too.
Ways of working
With my team in Bucharest, Romania 2025
And then there is the work. This is the one everybody assumes is the opposite of the other three. Corporate, structured, the unsexy cousin. Methodology. Ways of working. Delivery.
But it is the same instinct, just made explicit. A good way of working is not bureaucracy. It is not spreadsheet decision-making. It is the drum & bass line for an entire region and its programs. It is the structure that lets a hundred people build something together without sliding into chaos. When the method is right, nobody feels the method. They just feel that the thing flowed, that somehow all these people moved as one. That is composition. That is a locked groove. That is a peloton holding its line at high speed.
I spend my days designing the structure that lets other people create. I genuinely cannot think of anything closer to my heart.
The same instinct
So no, they were never four lives. They are four windows into one room. Each one taught me the same lesson from a different angle: freedom and soul do not come from the absence of structure. They come from structure so well practiced that it dissolves. The exposure you no longer calculate. The groove you no longer count. The kilometers already in your legs. The framework nobody has to think about because it simply holds.
When the mechanics disappear, what is left is you. That is the moment I have been chasing my whole life, with a camera, in a band, on a bike, in ways of working. It turns out I was always chasing the same thing.