Last week my wife clipped my daughter’s nails.

A few days ago she sat down to start filing our taxes, as she does every year.

Yesterday she did 3 or 4 loads of laundry for our kids.

Last night she scrubbed our shower, ran the dishes, washed our couch pillow covers, and wiped down the bathroom.  Continue reading →

So far in this 4-part series on making complex topics simple we’ve talked about nutrition, fitness, and habits. Today we’re digging into a topic that’s woven throughout all of the others – mindset.

Without a good mindset, most of our other efforts will be in vain, because it’s our mindset that makes life palatable, and even enjoyable. Life is hard. For everyone. And if we don’t have the right framework and paradigms to operate within, that difficulty is amplified. I wrote about mindset last in this series, but in reality it should be first because without it nothing else matters.  Continue reading →

So far in this series we’ve talked about simplifying the complexity of nutrition and fitness. Today we’re digging into another topic that I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time reading about, studying, and applying – habits.

Over the years I’ve found three things to be critical in creating new habits and killing bad ones.  Continue reading →

Yesterday I wrote about the complexity of the world of nutrition. This is a 4-part series that reduces the complex to simple, and today I’m tackling fitness.

Important Note: None of the below is intended to be prescriptive. It’s simply my thoughts on the simplest way to accomplish a goal. To actually put any of these into practice, I recommend first and foremost to find a good coach.  Continue reading →

Have you ever looked at two different diets that have wildly different methodologies, yet purport the same benefits?

Have you ever looked at two different methods of working out that have wildly different methodologies, yet purport the same benefits?

Have you ever looked at the 1000 different ways to be happy in life, and been confused by what is what and why?

Welcome to the world of complexity – where entire industries thrive on confusing the general public. It’s in this place that clarity is the foe, and convolusion is the solution to keeping us all scratching our heads.  Continue reading →

I’m nearly one month into my goal of “turning pro” by writing 500 or more words every weekday for a year. And I’m proud to say I haven’t missed a day yet.

But I’ve also had more than a couple days where I was tempted to write “word” 500 times in a row and call it good. I even started to get creative with it, thinking through different ways I could write 500 pointless words in a way that would be funny.

And then I brought myself back to reality and nixed the idea of turning my project into a joke.  Continue reading →

This isn’t a book review in the traditional sense, because my concern when reading isn’t to uncover if the book is good or bad. My goal is simply to take what’s valuable and applicable from the book and extract it into my life.

Book #3: The Cities That Built the Bible by Robert Cargill

When we’re born we have zero context to the world that surrounds us. We don’t know about history, science, or religion. We don’t know what is true, what is false, or what is opinion. We don’t know…anything.

Over the next decade or two of our lives this changes. We absorb the constructs of the adults that surround us. They teach us what to believe, what not to believe, and hand us the paradigms that we are supposed to view the world through. This is how belief systems have been passed down for all of human history. Continue reading →

Have you ever looked at a lake in the early hours of the morning before the boats are on the water? The surface looks like glass because it’s so smooth and uninterrupted. It’s one of my favorite scenes.

I’ve noticed something about myself in the past year or so. I’ll have moments in life that remind me of those glass lake scenes. It’s the moments when I feel completely stress free. Continue reading →

When I started a digital advertising company in college I had no idea what I was doing. I lost other people’s money, did my best to pay it back, learned, and moved on.

When I started a digital greeting card company with my wife and good friend I had no idea what I was doing. We lost our own money, but I learned a little bit more, met a bunch of amazing people in the process, and I moved on. Continue reading →

Parenting is a funny thing.

When you’re on the outside looking in, it’s like this black box of mystery where you can kind of make out the edges, but you aren’t entirely sure what the complete picture is.

And those on the inside, the “initiated” parents, don’t help the situation at all. They just beat around the bush when it comes to describing what it’s like. They’ll use ambiguous phrases like It’s great or It’s hard. But try to get them to paint a realistic picture of life on the other side of the delivery table, and their words fall short.  Continue reading →