Gerard Powell likes a sentence that arrives without slippers on. On his own website, the founder of Rythmia introduces himself by refusing the grand title often handed to people with a book, a stage, and an idea. “I’m not a thought leader,” he says. It is a useful opening move. Powell has spent enough of his life selling things to know that the quickest way through a room is sometimes to decline the velvet rope.
The résumé behind that modest line is less modest. Powell, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, made his way through direct sales, the vacation-home trade, telemarketing, property, and consumer services. He says he became a millionaire in his twenties, bought a plane in his thirties, took a company public, lost his footing in the dot-com collapse, and built again. In 2004, he sold his next company for a reported $89 million in cash. He was 41.
Most business profiles would stop there, preferably beside a photograph of a handshake. Powell’s story becomes interesting because he treats the exit as an incomplete answer. Money had proved he could play the game. It had not proved the game deserved the years he gave it. The arithmetic worked; the meaning did not. His later career would be built inside that gap.
The map of his working life makes the change visible. His early biography moves through Pennsylvania sales floors, a stint at a club in Melbourne, Australia, and later ventures in property and consumer services. Rythmia moved the center of gravity south, to a tropical province on Costa Rica’s Pacific side. Powell’s LinkedIn profile still places him in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania; the company he leads is headquartered in Guanacaste. His public identity now stretches between the practical vernacular of the Poconos and the metaphysical vocabulary of a retreat. He sounds comfortable in both.
The salesman changes the product
Powell’s reinvention did not involve throwing away his old tools. He kept the operator’s instincts: define the offer, remove ambiguity, build a repeatable week, assemble a team, invite recognizable teachers, and make the unfamiliar legible. Rythmia, founded in Guanacaste in 2016, became the physical expression of that approach. The retreat combines plant-medicine ceremonies with classes, breathwork, movement, food, and structured reflection. Whatever one thinks of the category, the product is not shy about what it asks of a guest: come for a week and pay attention.
There is a strange founder-market fit here. Retreat culture often speaks in vapor. Powell speaks in schedules, percentages, staffing, and capital. He has said publicly that he expected to risk a few million dollars on Rythmia. By the end of its second year, he said his own investment had reached $11 million. The remark has the tone of a man discovering that purpose, like every contractor, sends change orders.
He also carried over a salesperson’s instinct for repetition. Rythmia has a defined program, a weekly rhythm, recurring speakers, and a vocabulary that appears across its website, videos, and guest conversations. “Miracle” is the company’s favored word for a profound personal shift. “Soul merger” is Powell’s phrase for becoming aligned with one’s inner purpose. The claims belong to Rythmia and its guests, but the architecture belongs to the operator. He took an experience difficult to describe and built a container people could recognize.
A curious theory of competition
Founders are usually trained to defend the moat. Powell has publicly described a different ambition: prove the retreat model well enough that ordinary businesspeople can reproduce it. More operators would mean more competition, lower prices, and wider access. It is a striking thing for a man forged in direct sales to say. He still wants the model to work. He simply does not want ownership of the entire category to be the prize.
That does not make him indifferent to commercial discipline. Quite the opposite. Powell’s thesis is that a mission survives only if its economics do. He has worried openly about being Rythmia’s single point of failure. If the founder vanished before the company became viable, conviction would not cover payroll. Purpose, in his telling, is not an exemption from the balance sheet. It is the reason to make the balance sheet durable.
The board around Rythmia reflects Powell’s instinct for public bridges. It has included eleven-time surfing champion Kelly Slater, the Rev. Michael Bernard Beckwith, Martin Luther King III, entrepreneur Toni Ko, and comedian Ron White. These are not interchangeable endorsements. They are people with distinct audiences, each offering a route from an unfamiliar retreat category into a recognizable cultural world. Powell’s network is part board, part translation layer.
Writing after the scoreboard
Powell turned his reinvention into two books. The first, Sh*t the Moon Said, appeared in 2018. Its title captures his preferred register: metaphysical subject, barroom delivery. It tells the story of the experience he says redirected his life and provided the seed for Rythmia. The moon is allowed to be mysterious. The title is not allowed to be solemn.
His second book, Truthenomics, arrived in 2022 through Health Communications and was distributed by Simon & Schuster. The coined title joins inner honesty to personal finance. Powell’s argument is that wealth cannot be evaluated only by what appears on a statement. This is convenient advice from someone who has already had the money, but it is also why the argument has texture. He is not romanticizing a scoreboard he never reached. He is reporting that he reached it and still had questions.
Paradox
Keep the machinery. Change the assignment.
Sales skill, capital discipline, repetition, and measurement survived Powell’s reinvention. What changed was the result he wanted those tools to produce.
The word that keeps returning in his recent work is not happiness or abundance. It is useful. Powell encourages people to become a “beneficial presence,” which he links to mastery, commitment, and giving more than one takes. In a 2023 essay, he wrote that working hard can matter more than talent or creativity. Spiritual vocabulary aside, this is factory-floor advice: learn the craft, sign your name to the work, and keep going when the first attempt is ugly.
That insistence helps explain why Powell’s voice remains so blunt. He does not narrate his old self gently. Interviews are full of sharp self-descriptions, quick profanity, jokes at his own expense, and sudden turns toward love, faith, or responsibility. One interviewer described him as gregarious, outgoing, charming, and intelligent. The list fits the footage. Powell talks like someone who has never trusted a whisper to close a deal.
The long work of a second act
A second act is often marketed as escape: leave the suit, burn the plan, discover linen. Powell’s version is more demanding. He did not retire from the habits of building. He redirected them. The selling continued, now in service of an experience and a philosophy. The numbers continued, now as company-reported measures of guest response. The ambition continued, now aimed at proving a model other people might copy.
His public output has also kept moving. There are podcast interviews across nearly a decade, the recurring Messages from the Medicine videos, and long conversations in 2025 and 2026. He revisits the same origin story often, but the repetition is not accidental. A founder must tell the story until the organization can tell it without him. Powell, aware of the single-point-of-failure problem, seems to be writing the operating manual out loud.
The format changes while the structure stays remarkably stable. On a podcast, in a blog post, or on a publisher page, Powell begins with the old scoreboard, introduces the moment it stopped satisfying him, and returns to usefulness. It is founder storytelling reduced to three beats: achievement, reversal, assignment. The pattern is polished because it has been repeated, yet the plain speech keeps it from feeling lacquered. He may be discussing a spiritual idea, but he delivers it with the timing of a closer who knows the room has another meeting in ten minutes.
The cleanest lesson is not about retreats, plant medicine, or even money. It is about transferable intensity. The qualities that can make a person formidable in one life do not disappear when that life stops making sense. They wait for another assignment. Powell’s appetite for the deal became an appetite for proof. His fluency in persuasion became a way to explain an unusual category. His fascination with winning became a question about what, precisely, was worth winning.
That question remains open, as good questions do. Rythmia is still operating in Guanacaste. Powell is still its founder and CEO, still publishing and appearing on microphones, still repeating his case for truth in a voice built for a crowded room. The first career gave him the exit. The second gave him a reason to stay.