Fires, Urine, and The Danger of the Comfort Zone
With smoke swirling around my head, a pantsless senior citizen standing next to me, and my flip-flops splashing in an unknown-but-I-can-assume-it’s-bad liquid on the floor, only one thought came to mind: What the heck did I do to get here? Let’s jump back. I’m 21 years old, living in my first apartment with my best […]
The Terror in My Basement (or “Why Experts Are Worth Paying For”)
I thought we had a mouse problem. I was wrong. We bought a house in January, and while the bones of the house are very strong, the finishes and little details of the place are downright terrible. The house was poorly maintained, and with 4 acres of field surrounding it, one of the first concerns […]
The Unlikely Job that Made Me a Master Freelancer
You learn skills from the unlikeliest of places sometimes.
You want a freelance career? Don’t be a “wine mom”
I don’t normally react to movies or TV shows while I watch them. Especially alone. But I let out an audible groan in horror the other day. I watched Dieter Dengler describe a beheading that came out of nowhere. The documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly is not long or visually graphic. It tells the story of a soldier […]
How I Broke My Wife’s Heart for $2
We hit our Worst Case Scenario… and I had to get us out of it.
Death By Efficiency: The Dangers of Scaling Up Before You’re Ready
“Money favors speed”… but moving too fast kills your chances of success. Do this instead…
How Self-Imposed Limits Destroy Your Chances of Success
On the dangers of quitting before you even try.
Book Guilt and the Shaming of Subjective Thought
When I was in college, I already knew I wanted to write in some creative capacity for a career. I didn’t know what that was yet, so I dipped my toe in a few academic arenas just to see where my interests were. In the meantime, I had all these other credits I had to […]
How to Hack Your Brain’s Filter for Success and Happiness
“How stupid that he killed himself. All that money and success, wasted! What an idiot!” This was the reaction my then-boss had when news broke of Heath Ledger’s death in early 2008. I was setting up the restaurant bar while we watched the headlines unfold on the giant TV hanging on the wall. My manager […]
How the Corporate Approach Made Creators Lazy – and Killed Mainstream Creativity
There is intense debate on the internet these days about the quality of storytelling and media that is available, especially in the mainstream. On the one hand, you have the generational argument: that everybody grows up thinking their generation’s music and movies are better than what the “young kids” are listening to nowadays. But on […]