How I Went From Being Stuck To Free (And How You Can Too)
Hi everyone! Anyone who knows me has seen me go through an enormous amount of personal growth in the past five years. I talk about it all the time on this site and in my interactions with people.
I used to be 100% mainstream. Blindly fumbling through life just trying to do what the system prescribed for me. You know:
go to college
get married
find a good job
buy a house
buy a car
work your ass off every day
take a few long weekends off here and there (Maybe if I get lucky I’ll be able to travel to Europe for a couple weeks while I’m still young enough to enjoy it.)
hopefully have enough saved up so that I can retire someday
That’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it? It’s what everyone else does. It’s what they taught me to do in school. It’s what the media depicts in every TV show and movie. It’s the American way.....the American Dream. And it’s the only way I knew because it’s the only thing I was ever taught.
I knew there were people that lived outside of that system. You know - the people you see acting in those TV shows and movies. Or the professional athletes. Or simply: The Lucky Ones. Those people were all unicorns. Or athletic freaks of nature. The chosen ones who were plucked from obscurity by the gods to live a life of freedom and happiness.
When I was 35 I had long ago come to the realization that I was not one of those people, and I was never going to be. I would have been already by that point, I thought.
But what about those other people that weren’t actors or athletes, but still had lots of money and/or freedom? People like entrepreneurs or inventors, or savvy salespeople. People that were driving Porsche's around while still in their late 20’s. I sure as hell wasn’t one of those people either. They didn’t offer entrepreneur or inventor classes in my high school. That type of activity was discouraged because it was too abstract. It was too risky. Its path to success involved lots of failure. That’s scary.
I knew lots of those people still existed though. I would see them sitting in traffic in their fancy cars every day when I drove to my corporate job in my old beat up Toyota truck. What did these people know that I didn’t? And where could I go to learn it? These people weren’t famous, but they were still doing something that I clearly wasn’t. Somehow blessed with a life that was well outside of any norms that I grew up knowing.
One day at work my boss came to me and said, “You did really great this past year - we’re going to give you a 5% pay raise, keep up the good work, we really value your contributions.” In the moment I was super stoked. That 5% pay raise equaled about $3000 a year. Great! I’ll take it! But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that at this pace I will NEVER be one of those unicorns. I’ll never be able to afford the life I dream about. I will never be sitting in traffic in a Porsche in my late 20’s. Or my late 50’s for that matter.
Maybe I had just chosen the wrong profession. When I was trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, I learned that the I.T. profession could be very lucrative. And in a sense it was. I got to a point where I was making $65,000 a year before I had even earned a college degree. But $65,000, or even $100,000 was still a pittance compared to what these mysterious successful people were making.
Maybe I should have learned more about finance, or business in the beginning. But instead I chose I.T. because it came easy for me. For whatever reason I had a real aptitude for it. And it totally fit within the system that had been ingrained in me since I was born. It was a completely honorable profession and would probably allow me to do all the buy a car, buy a house thing, so I just rolled with it. It wasn’t like I knew anything different anyway. Nobody in my family had anything other than a regular job and a mainstream lifestyle.
The only example I had of anything outside the realm of normal was at one point in my early teens, my mom and one of her brothers moved to Nashville in an attempt to become country music stars. It wasn’t a horrible time by any stretch, but in the end the shady music business of the 80’s basically chewed them up and spit them out despite the most valiant of efforts. Regardless, the level of defeat I witnessed probably cemented in my brain the notion that climbing out of the mainstream pool and jumping off the high-dive was fraught with risk. Risk that I wanted nothing to do with.
So there I was, existing in my mainstream life, not really happy, not really content, always wondering why my chosen path didn’t lead to the level of excellence I desired. Even though I was ambitious, motivated, and worked really hard, it never seemed like enough. On top of that I was growing more and more unhealthy and overweight. I was stagnant. I was bored. I watched more TV than I would ever want to admit.
My life was passing me right on by.
Then one day I met Katie. Well that’s not true. I had actually known Katie for several years, but that’s a different story for a different day. Let’s say one day I started dating Katie. At that time we were both freshly divorced and in the process of a major life change. We were primed for something different but we had no idea what. We both just knew that the “system” that we were all living within was actually total bullshit.
It’s a funny thing to sit with this notion in your head. To sit there and think “I know all these things I’ve been doing are not the right path at all, but I still have absolutely no idea how to get on the right path, in fact I wouldn’t even know what that path looked like if it was sitting right in front of me.” Sadly there are no degree programs on how to be a unicorn. And unless you’re born into a family of unicorns, you have no model to follow.
All we could do was force ourselves outside of the system, operate with the knowledge that the system did not have our best interest in mind, and just work to learn as much as we could and grow as we went along. But we didn’t want to be one of those people that were so outside the system that we had no way to make money. We didn’t want to be gypsies. We didn’t want to alienate our friends by taking taking taking all the time. We still knew that we would need the system, we just didn’t want to be wrapped up in it. We wanted to work the system to our benefit while still living on its outermost fringes.
So we set out on epic journeys of personal growth. We consciously worked to put ourselves outside of our comfort zones. We subjected ourselves to failure. We tried hundreds of different ways to make money. We made LOTS of mistakes. We were humbled. Sometimes it really sucked. But we also knew we were doing the right thing. Any time my mom thought I was being crazy, I knew I was on the correct path. (Love you, mom). :-)
We traveled to Europe with low budgets for months at a time, three times! We gained perspective on the world. We learned about different cultures. We saw first hand what kinds of things worked and what didn’t.
We read loads of books and watched documentaries about becoming the kind of people we wanted to be. We learned about food and diet and exercise. We both became properly excellent home cooks.
We saw all kinds of counselors, practitioners, healers, a real-life shaman, body workers, energy workers, you name it. A handful of them were complete wastes of time, most were helpful, and another handful of them literally flipped me upside down and dumped my bullshit belief systems all over the sidewalk in the best possible way. I cried, I laughed, I learned, and I grew.
The more I learned, the more I wanted to teach people about what I had learned. So I did. Unfortunately one of the things I hadn’t learned early on was how to market or promote myself. So whenever I did teach, I was lucky if five people showed up to listen. But I didn’t care because those five people benefited from hearing me, and I benefited from teaching them. The more I taught, the more I learned.
Along the way Katie and I fumbled through the process of making websites and blogs. For five of the past six years our websites have reflected all of the fumbling that had taken place. The initial iterations were frankly awful. In a sense we didn’t even care because we weren’t claiming to be web designers, we just had things to say and wanted some place to put them. But the more we fumbled, the more we learned, and the better we got. At this point I am proud of the site we have created and feel like it can hold its ground with most other blog sites out there.
We have also created a sizable amount of content. Sure, maybe a quarter of it is garbage. You know, the early stuff. Sometimes I just cringe when I go back and re-read some of the old stuff I wrote. I was just trying to find my voice, but at the time I didn’t really know who my audience was, let alone how to speak to them. But we still just kept at it knowing that someday it would be “something”. Even if that something was just a big ol' pile of words.
So where am I going with all this?
We’re almost there. Two months ago Katie and I were reading in bed one night and she says to me, “hey I just read this really long awesome blog post about this cool chick who made a bunch of money selling e-courses.” And I was like “yeah, uh huh, we see shit like that all the time, good for her, blah blah.” But for some reason I decided to read that same really long blog post too, and it totally blew my mind. A huge switch in my brain just flipped. Her name is Mariah Coz. She runs this website called femtrepreneur.co. And she’s flippin brilliant!
She offers all these great courses on how to create and market e-courses. We tore through all of the free content that she offered hoping to find her key to success. And we realized that we have loads of great content just sitting on our website. We also realized we have loads of great ideas to offer in a course. So we looked at each other and said “we’re gonna crank out the best e-course anyone has ever seen!”
I don’t think we literally said those exact words, but you get the idea. Then we looked at each other and said “WTF is an e-course anyway?” It turns out an e-course is pretty much just what it sounds like. It’s like a class that you take on the internet, duh. It can be delivered on a daily or weekly schedule, or you can just deliver the whole thing all at once. It can include videos, audios, worksheets, pictures, whatever you want. It can be one module or a hundred. It can be free or it can be $5000.
After a couple days of brainstorming, we decided that we were going to take every major life lesson and skill that we’ve learned over the past five years and put it into this course. We’re going to teach people how to live this amazing life of freedom that we have created for ourselves. We’re going to teach people how we lived on the fringes of the system, and still worked the system to our favor. We’re going to teach people how to be unicorns!
Immediately we were inspired in a way that we’ve never been. That first week I don’t think I managed to fall asleep before 2AM once. My mind was constantly racing all the time. We wrote and wrote and wrote as much as we could, every day. We were being driven by a force much greater than ourselves. Every module we wrote was more inspiring than the last. This has literally been the most creative and inspiring two months of our whole adult lives. We started out with zero words, and as of this writing we are 170 pages in and counting.
This our masterpiece. Our magnum opus.
Now we are ready to unleash it onto the world. We are ready to teach all the people out there who are still sitting in a cubicle, wondering where they took a wrong turn. We are ready to show all the people who think we’re lucky that luck has nothing to do with it. We are ready to give hope to the lost. Clarity to the masses. Lift the veil on the system and show everyone how they can be healthy, live with true freedom, have passive income streams, travel frequently, and dictate their own future. Are you ready? Are you ready to show the system who's boss?
The whole time we were writing this course we constantly wondered how much we would charge for it. We didn’t know if it was gonna be $50 or $500. We didn’t even know what the “going rate” was for something like this. Talk about jumping in head first without even thinking about it.
So we thought about all the time that went into learning these lessons. We thought about all the time it took to clearly articulate these lessons into a course format (over 200 hours). We thought about how much time a person would save by taking this course as opposed to figuring these same things out on their own. We looked at lots of other e-course outlines and how much they were charging based on the amount of content they were offering. We thought about other ways a person could go about learning the same material if they were to attend a weekend workshop or seminar, or college class, or conference or convention. We thought about what all those different things cost.
It’s funny, I’ve gone to a handful of weekend conferences over the years. One I paid $1500 for. $1500 for basically two days of listening to speakers. Sure, it was cool, but $1500 for two days? It’s not like I walked out of there and made a million dollars the next week. Or even enough to pay for the conference for that matter. Furthermore, at this point I couldn’t recall a single lesson any of them taught me, and I have no way of going back and viewing any of the transcripts. I also went to the University of Phoenix online. Yep, that’s me. I’m one of the 7 people out there who actually went there and graduated. Each and every one of those 5 week classes were about $1500 each.
I have lots of friends who teach weekend workshops too, and nearly all of them charge a few hundred dollars or more. And the more I think about it, the more I know that our course is a lot better than any weekend workshop. Because unlike a workshop, you can have full access to all the course lectures and materials forever. And whenever they get updated or improved, you still have continued access without having to pay any more. If you need to recall everything we ever said about passive income, nutrition, sex, or anything else, it’s all there, all the time.
Plus our course has 19 modules, which will probably take you at least three weeks to even get through, and many more months to process and implement. This course will be your guide in life for the next several years or more. It will be your constant companion. It will be constantly referenced. Constantly thought about and constantly talked about. It will literally be the best $300 you have ever spent. It will pay for itself a hundred times over.
If someone would have walked up to me in my office cubicle six years ago and said give me $300 and I’ll show you the path. You know, that elusive path? You want to be a unicorn, don’t you? Well, don’t you? I would have jumped out of my chair right on the spot and given them everything I had.
So just what exactly do we talk about in this course anyway?
The Modules:
Eliminating Clutter: Physical Items + Emotional Baggage
How to recognize and clear out your emotional triggers
Healthy Relationships: How to Set Boundaries and Eliminate Guilt
How to Cultivate Community
Monogamy, Polyamory, Sex, Commitment, and Intimacy
Overcoming Jealousy & Learning to Express Yourself
Masculine/Feminine Polarity
Sex Education
Getting comfortable being transparent and authentic
Food and plants are medicine
Exercise and physical movement
Mindfulness, meditation, spirituality
How to eliminate toxins from your life
Buy less, reuse more, reduce your impact
A Paradigm Shift: From Health Insurance to Prevention
Lower Your Overhead: Cars, Housing, etc.
How to get clear about what you want
Assessing the job situation: how to make a shift
Passive income - the new retirement plan
How to make Travel a part of your lifestyle
How to not waste time planning and just make it all happen
And before you say, “that’s great and all, but I just want to get a new job, why do I have to learn about eliminating toxins or overcoming jealousy?” Because it’s ALL related. You can’t just “get a new job” without working on the rest of your life or you’ll just end up in a shitty new job with all the same problems that you had before. You can’t just change one thing and be a different person, you have to change everything. You need a complete paradigm shift on multiple fronts. You need to change the way you view the world and how you interact with people. It took many years to mold you into the person you are now, and it’s going to take a similar amount of effort to mold you into the person you want to become. There are no shortcuts, you have to put in the effort.
Who is this course for?
Anyone who is sick of their mainstream job and their mainstream life. Anyone who knows there is a better way but can't figure out how to get there. Anyone who is struggling with their relationships with people, food, and themselves. Anyone who wants to wake up every day and do something that they love instead of something that is slowly killing them. And anyone who never wants to set a regular alarm clock again and drag their ass to work every morning.
Who is this course NOT for?
Anyone who has spent the last several years working on personal growth. Anyone who lives their passion every day and loves it. Anyone with a deep connection to themselves. Anyone who is healthy, happy, and literally loves their life. If you are one of those people, first of all, good for you! Even though you might enjoy reading our stories and lessons, you probably won't get much out of our course that you don't already know.
Details
The course is called Reality Rehab: Your Road Map To A Life Of Freedom,
If you wanna be really crazy and just dive in head first, click here and just buy the damn thing already. And then marvel at how quickly you become the coolest person you know. Your friends and family won't even recognize the bad ass you are about to become.