I’ve had multiple distinct professional chapters in my life (the “what do you do?” question). Less spoken about, but very significant and formative to me was the eight year span I worked for a franchising video game retail chain. I started working for this company when I was only 12 years old, and spent 8 years there. For as much as I talk about my lack of paper education, this was an...
A good friend of mine, Shermain Melton, asked me a simple question last week: What do you stand for? What comes up for you when you think it? To take a stand means to believe in something. To defend something. To fight for something. Taking a stand means it’s worthy of you getting up in the morning and working towards it. It means you care enough about it that you want others to have...
Earlier this year I announced my 2024 book project, I made some progress, and then… something wasn’t right and I decided to listen to myself and put it aside instead of push myself through it. Four months later I was inspired again, and I realized that’s a big part of it… inspiration. It’s important for my process. It’s also the most common word used when people describe what they receive from me...
I’m not sure where I picked up the phrase “quality problem”, but I’ve been using it recently to describe the doldrums I have found myself in. I’ve written previously about the not-so-helpful habit of comparing my “quality” problems to other people’s “real” problems. Like some prior advice to myself, I’m going to “stop...
Here’s a powerful tool that I’ve created to help myself deal with some of my feelings lately around success and guilt. The point of it is to bring clarity in, and get out of the amorphous haze of letting the emotions run roughshod over you when they’re simply not even true and certainly not deserved. This has been modeled on previous tools I’ve created, except this time focused on the particular...
We’re living in a time of peak nostalgia. It seems everything was better back in the day. The thing is, we’re comparing the VERY BEST of the past with now. We forget all the crap. For every hit song, there are countless forgettable ones. For every iconic movie, there are dozens of others we can’t be bothered to watch again. I’ve been wondering if I’m suffering from nostalgia for my old life. One...
For reasons I cannot explain clearly, my momentum on my book has stalled. I went from being excited and inspired, to days and weeks passing with no progress. Once I hosted my recent Zoom on my creation process (with the actual evidence held in my hands of my past books), something about the whole project evaporated for me. It’s clear to me a large contributing factor is that I’ve already...
We live in a world controlled by algorithms. Our behavior is influenced and affected in ways we don’t understand. Places like social media use people (like you) as the product, to create content, for them to then serve ads on, to the real customers – the advertisers. Certain types of content generate more views, shares, and engagement than others. This lets the companies that own them...
Here is the recording where I share my unique processes of writing, book creation, what’s important to me when creating books, and sharing the outline of my upcoming title: The Victory Lap: Redefining Success After Making the Big Bucks.
Last week inspiration struck: I would create my next book and have it completed and for sale in 90 days. I had a few inspired days of clarity, and I announced my plans to my community. I got some work done, and then… the self-doubt started to creep in. I started to regret that I had announced it. What was I thinking? This is completely self-inflicted. However, that was exactly WHY I did it...
Writing is a tool of my own self-mastery. When I write and share my story and what I’ve learned, it allows me to understand and crystallize what is actually going on within me, and then in addition benefit the reader, and the world. I also create autobiographical books about my life and what I’ve learned. Books are part of my legacy. They’ll be here after I’m gone. Every once in a while...