Life Experience

At my core I’m an erudite hermit who studies the world, seeking to understand it better.
I read a lot of books when I was young.  My reading focus shifted from reading encyclopedias and the Bible to books on evolutionary theory and history, as I was deeply confused about the mismatch between ‘how the world was supposed to be’ and the stupefied and relentlessly cruel reality I encountered every day. 
My life growing up was terrible, I lived in an alcohol and cocaine fueled chaotic home. A series of live-in boyfriends meant experiencing all sorts of violence, the worst aspects of human nature. 
After dropping out of high school, I went on to be very successful in college. I taught very successfully as a schoolteacher at the alternative high school I graduated from, then I started entrepreneuring. 
Among other projects I worked on, I helped an isolated and conservative Amish community to market their furniture online and maintain their way of life in the face of modernity. 
I also worked in politics and ancestral health & fitness, managing conventions and political campaigns intended to help uplift and improve people's lives.
I love learning, understanding the world around me better.

Self-Overcoming

Through over 3 decades of intensive work on self-healing and self-improvement, I’ve learned that self-overcoming is not a linear curve. It is a slow and erratic climb. 
Change is difficult. It requires strength, bravery and hope. 
Change requires doing difficult new things, and sometimes (or often) failing. 
Sometimes it feels like the hardest thing you can do is pick yourself up off the floor and crawl an inch, after the world has kicked you down and thrown sand in your face for the fifteenth time in a row.
But the hardest and most powerful thing that you can do is open your heart up to the hope and belief that you can overcome all internal barriers to create a life of limitless beauty, joy and meaning.
We can’t remove every external barrier to our success, because we have little control over the world around us.
Yet we do have immense power over ourselves, power over how we react to this environment – the path of self-overcoming. 
  • Study and Analyze

    The first step is to understand the current environment, with eyes unclouded by ego or attachment. A clear analysis is essential to making real progress.
    Analysis at the heart of strategy as defined by Miyamoto Musashi in The Book of Five Rings. Study and analyze, master all forms, and then strike with one decisive blow.
  • Adapt and Overcome: Do

    Getting too focused on a tactic that's worked for you in the past, or a strategy that is sub-optimal, are two common ways that people fail to succeed with their goals.
    Fluidity is an essential component in most successful outcomes; do not bend your ethics, but do bend your tactics and strategies.
    Study, Learn then Do.