Today we’d like to introduce you to Kevin McAfee.
Hi Kevin, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I grew up in Austin feeling slightly out of rhythm with the world around me. From an early age, I was labeled with ADD and placed on medication, and for years I quietly internalized the idea that something about the way I experienced life needed to be corrected. Outwardly, I moved through the normal structures of school and expectation, but internally I was searching for something I didn’t yet have language for.
Everything began to shift when I studied abroad in Spain during college. For the first time, distance from familiar systems allowed me to question the identity I had inherited. After graduating with a journalism degree, instead of pursuing a traditional career path, I sold my car, bought one-way tickets, and stepped into a much more uncertain life shaped by travel, curiosity, and direct experience.
Along the way, I discovered piano tuning—an unlikely craft that became both livelihood and passport. It allowed me to support myself while moving freely through the world, stepping inside thousands of homes and human stories. That freedom carried me into experiences I never could have planned: filming inside the Arab Spring in Cairo as millions filled Tahrir Square, teaching kindergarten in Shanghai, living in Brazil, cycling around the Big Island of Hawaii, studying macrobiotics and healing, and documenting communities searching for alternative ways of living.
Over time, I realized the deeper journey wasn’t only geographical. Travel became a mirror that forced me to confront identity, conditioning, fear, purpose, and what it actually means to live authentically. The memoir The Piano Tuner emerged from that process—not simply as a travel story, but as a reflection on transformation, neurodivergence, freedom, and the strange ways human connection reshapes us when we allow life to move us beyond the expected.
Today, through writing, film, and storytelling, I continue exploring the intersection of human consciousness, culture, healing, and personal transformation. More than anything, my work is an attempt to document what happens when someone stops living entirely through inherited definitions and begins learning directly from life itself.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
No road that leads to transformation is smooth. Mine certainly wasn’t.
Some of the greatest struggles were internal long before they were external. I grew up feeling fundamentally out of sync with the systems around me. Being diagnosed with ADD at a young age and prescribed medication shaped how I saw myself for years. I spent a long time believing I needed to be “fixed” in order to function in the world. That quiet feeling of not fitting into conventional expectations followed me well into adulthood.
Financial uncertainty was another constant companion. Choosing a life built around freedom, travel, and intuition instead of stability often meant living without guarantees. There were moments sleeping in tents, biking across islands with almost no money, arriving in foreign countries without a clear plan, and trusting that piano tuning—this strange, portable craft—would somehow sustain me. Sometimes it did beautifully. Sometimes it barely held things together.
Travel itself also stripped away illusion. It exposed me to political unrest, cultural tension, loneliness, heartbreak, and the uncomfortable realization that changing locations does not automatically change who you are. I filmed the Arab Spring in Egypt surrounded by millions of people demanding freedom, but I also had to confront my own inner forms of captivity. There were periods of isolation, confusion, and questioning where I had no idea what the larger purpose of the journey was.
But in hindsight, those struggles became the path itself. The obstacles forced me to develop adaptability, trust, and a deeper relationship with intuition. They pushed me beyond inherited definitions of success and into a life that felt genuinely lived rather than simply performed. The challenges weren’t interruptions to the story—they were the story.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I’m a writer, filmmaker, entrepreneur, and piano tuner, though none of those titles fully capture what I actually do. At the center of my work is storytelling—documenting the intersection between human transformation, travel, culture, freedom, and the invisible forces that shape our lives. My background is in journalism, but instead of following a conventional media path, I chose to build a life inside the stories themselves.
Over the years, that path has taken me across the world: filming inside the Arab Spring in Egypt, teaching in China, living in Brazil, cycling around Hawaii, studying macrobiotics, and documenting people and communities searching for meaning beyond modern systems. Through both writing and video, I try to capture experiences as they actually unfold—not as polished performances, but as living moments filled with uncertainty, beauty, contradiction, and transformation.
You can find my book and a multimedia blog that I regularly post at www.humansinspired.com
Ironically, one of the most important parts of my life has been piano tuning. It became far more than a trade. It gave me mobility, independence, and a way to step inside thousands of people’s homes and lives. Tuning pianos taught me to listen—not only to sound, but to people. In many ways, it became the foundation that allowed everything else to exist.
I’m still very much tuning pianos in Austin, you can find me at www.atxpianotuner.com
What I’m most proud of is that I built a life that feels authentic to who I am rather than who I was expected to become. A large part of my work explores overcoming neurodivergence, questioning inherited systems, and redefining success through direct experience instead of external approval. I spent years trying to fit inside structures that never fully made sense to me, and the journey documented in my memoir became a process of reclaiming intuition, creativity, and freedom.
What sets my work apart is that it isn’t created from a distance. I don’t simply write about transformation—I lived it. The stories come from immersion rather than observation alone. Whether through books, blogs, film, or conversations with people around the world, my goal is always the same: to reveal the deeper humanity underneath the surface of modern life and remind people that there are far more ways to live than the ones we are handed.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
Curiosity, without question.
More than talent or strategy, curiosity has been the force that continually pulled me beyond fear, routine, and inherited assumptions. It pushed me to question systems that didn’t feel right, to leave familiar environments, to board one-way flights, to walk into unfamiliar communities, and to keep following experiences that couldn’t always be logically explained at the time.
That curiosity eventually evolved into adaptability. I learned how to survive and create in constantly changing environments—whether tuning pianos in Austin, documenting protests in Egypt, teaching in China, or rebuilding myself through travel and healing practices. Instead of trying to force life into a fixed plan, I became comfortable listening, observing, and responding to what each moment required.
I also think resilience played a major role. Many parts of my path looked irrational from the outside. There were long periods without certainty, structure, or traditional markers of success. But I kept moving forward because something deeper told me there was value in fully living the experience rather than simply chasing stability.
At the core of all of it, though, was the willingness to remain open—to people, to change, to discomfort, and to the possibility that life could be much larger than the definitions I started with.
Pricing:
- The Piano Tuner memoir available on Amazon (paperback & hardcover)
- www.humansinspired.com
- Real Estate: www.austincentraltexasrealestate.com
- Select piano tuning services in the Austin area offered on a limited basis
- www.atxpianotuner.com
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.humansinspired.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/humansinspired/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/humansinspired
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@humans-inspired
