4 A.M.

It was the middle of the night and I could not sleep.

My mind was doing the thing it always does. Turning words over, pulling them apart, looking for the second meaning hiding behind the first one. I have always been like this. Language, to me, is a playground. You move the letters around and suddenly a word is holding a door you never noticed.

I was lying in the dark, half awake, chewing on two phrases. Two of the most well known affirmations there are.

The future is WOW.

The future is NOW.

I was not trying to solve anything. They were just circling each other in my head, the way words do at 4am when you should be asleep.

And then I saw it.

Look at the W. Really look at it. Sitting right there in the middle of that letter, held inside it the whole time, is an N.

Which meant I did not have to choose. I could write both phrases at once. The same letters. One word wearing another word underneath it.

I got up.

The room was completely dark. I found my iPad, one eye barely open, and I drew it fast, before the morning could take it from me. A rough scratch, nothing more. Then I put it down and went back to sleep.

In the morning I opened it again in daylight to see if it was real, or just one of those ideas that only works at 4am.

It was real.

So I went looking. I searched the internet, certain someone had already done this. A thing so simple, so obvious, sitting inside a letter everyone has read a million times. Someone must have found it before me.

Nobody had.

I was genuinely shocked. It felt so obvious, so asking to be found, that I could not understand how it had gone unnoticed. The N was always there. In every W anyone has ever read. It just never had a reason to shine forward.

I did not rush it onto anything. The idea sat with me. It was my motto anyway and the way I see life, for years before it became a cap. An affirmation pointing both directions at once. When I catch it, I feel good. I feel steadier. And I wear caps every day of my life, so eventually it was obvious where it belonged, the place I can pass this message. On my head. For me, first, then to the world.

Three years passed between that night and the first cap actually sitting on my head, one piece in the world.

Then I started wearing it out.

The first time, nothing. Silence. But after that, people began to stop me. Complimenting the cap, before there was ever a cap for sale. And what I noticed was the moment it clicks for them. You point at the W, they see the N, and something opens in their face. It is the feeling of spotting a thing that was right in front of you the whole time. And when that thing is folded into a phrase so familiar to all, it lands even harder.

That is what made me make them. Not a business plan. Just people, on the street, seeing it and wanting it.

So (for now) I gave it two homes. The full phrase stayed where it began, THE FUTURE IS WOW/NOW, on the Genesis collection, my founders first run. And I let the word go out on its own too. Just WOW, with the NOW living inside it. Cleaner. Endless room to play. More colors, more directions, more ways to turn it over.

Whether the world buys it or not, I honestly do not know yet. It has been on the market less than a month. That part is not up to me, but you.

Look at the W.