The world wasn't built for me. So I'm building something that is.

I was always the tallest. In every class photo, on every team bus, in every family snapshot — the kid bent slightly forward because the doorframe didn't expect him.

I was born in Naarden and grew up in Muiderberg, two small towns outside Amsterdam, in a country that already builds for taller people. Even so, by twelve my school chair sat me with my knees against my ribs. By fourteen the bikes were too short, the showers aimed at my chest, and my mother had stopped trying to buy jeans she hadn't measured first.

At seventeen, the year I finished school in the Netherlands, I left. A prep school in Virginia — Notre Dame Academy — sent for a Dutch kid who could play basketball. I crossed an ocean because my body had outgrown the country I was born in, and a coach in a place I'd never heard of believed in what that body could do.

That was the first time being tall stopped being a problem and started being a passport.

That year in Virginia we won the State Championship. The summer after, I played for the DC Blue Devils, an AAU team loaded with kids who would shape the next decade of American basketball — Ty Lawson and Kevin Durant among them. Indiana University offered me a Division I scholarship, and I took it, chasing the NBA dream that had brought me across the ocean in the first place.

Indiana didn't pan out. Logan College in Illinois — junior college — kept me in the game for two years. Idaho State picked me up for two more, back at Division I, and I finished out my college career. The 2009 NBA Draft came and went without my name being called, and I sat with the silence.

I came home to the Netherlands burned out. Years of chasing the NBA dream in America had emptied the tank, and for the first time in my adult life I needed a season away from the game. So I did the thing I had never done: I got a job. Three years at Dell, learning the inside of a global corporation — how a big business thinks, what makes it move, where it gets things right and where it gets them wrong. I needed to know whether that life was for me. It wasn't. But I have never regretted the time. It taught me how to build something with discipline, structure, and patience — skills no court had ever asked of me.

What pulled me back was friends. An amateur team in Amsterdam — BVA, Basketbal Vereniging Amsterdam — a group of guys who simply loved the game. We had no business winning anything, and we won a championship together. I had forgotten basketball could feel like that. Light, honest, built by people who showed up for each other.

That season is what put me back on the path. In 2013, Apollo Amsterdam signed me. At twenty-seven I finally played a professional minute in my own country, and I made the DBL All-Rookie Team that first season. Three more years in Rotterdam followed. Then, in 2017, the body said enough.

Here is what those years taught me about being tall: the height gets you the audition. After that, nobody cares. What carries you is whether the work is in. Whether your body is built right for what you're asking it to do. Whether your knees, your back, your shoulders, your sleep, your shoes, your chair — whether all the small things are above standard.

I learned that the hard way. Most tall people I know are still learning it.

When I stopped playing, I had to ask a question I'd avoided for twenty years: who am I when I'm not the tallest guy on the court?

The answer took time. I trained as a life coach, founded Stand Tall & Rise Above It, and started working with men who were stuck — successful on paper, lost in themselves. Some were tall. Most weren't. What they had in common was a body and a story they hadn't reconciled.

In the work, I kept noticing the same thing about the tall ones. They had spent so long apologising for their height — ducking through doorways, shrinking on planes, joking about themselves first — that they'd never asked what it would feel like to live fully into it. To stop bracing against the world that was built too short.

That was the moment Above Standard started forming. Not a business idea. A correction.