If you’ve read my story about being born severely bowlegged with little chance of walking properly, then perhaps you’ll understand why mom and grandma kept me away from sports.
But somehow, pop warner football slipped through the cracks and I found myself playing tackle football for the first time in my life. I was 12 and boy was I thrilled!
Over a decade ago, I heard someone say something that has stuck with me ever since.
He said: “You are the average of the 5 people you associate with most.” That really impacted me on a gut level.
Simply put, if you hang around all “10s,” you’ll be a 10. If you hang around “3s” and “4s,” you can’t help but to be somewhere in between.
That’s why, at an early age, I made it a point to hang around superstars…
There’s a popular saying I’ve subscribed to for several years: “Don’t reinvent the wheel.”
It means don’t go about overcomplicating things by trying to start from scratch… especially when someone’s already done the work for you.
Long before I started applying it to music, I used this wise advice in other areas of my life. But it didn’t start that way. It took me a while to be cured of my chronic “reinvention” habits.
For example, when I started hearandplay.com, I sought out to…
I know you’ve probably been wondering what happened to Musician Breakthrough… the 14-disc, 16+ hour project we announced at the end of last year.
In fact, tons of you have been e-mailing, calling, and contacting us on facebook wondering what happened.
Before we postponed it, we had over 16,700 people signed up on the early bird list, over 711 comments, over 5,200 votes, and tons of buzz.
But we had to make it perfect. It’s 12 discs and over 16 hours with 7 different musicians… not an easy task to get right but we did it…
Experts say it takes 21 days to develop a habit.
Of course, some habits are easier to develop than others. While the 21 days generally holds true for any behavior, being able to perform desired activities consistently for 21 days is typically the problem.
Skipping a few days, doing it when you want here and there, all break the pattern and inhibit habit formation.
Pushing yourself to…
The funniest revelation came to me the other day when I was ordering pizza only to notice pizza from a few days ago already in my refrigerator.
Now, to our defense, we’ve been doing a lot of cooking. More than in times past. But we just happened to have family over this past weekend and ordered pizza for the whole gang.
Having forgot about that, I ordered more a few days later when I could have easily warmed up the pizza we already had…
If you’ve been reading my newsletter, you know we’re going to be on the next season of “House Hunters,” a show that has been running on HGTV for over a decade.
The show is detailing our transition from a smaller home into one that will hold our rapidly growing family — wife, 2 daughters, 1 son, myself… and maybe even another future son, if things work out as planned! :-).
So needless to say, space, in the search for our next home, was a pretty big deal to us!
Believe it or not, it takes 5 full days to…
So I just came back from a business conference in Phoenix, AZ where I was honored to be speaking as a finalist for Businessperson of the Year.
We each had around 30 minutes to present to an audience of 1000+. I went last. The first two speakers were amazing. In fact, the first speaker, Janette, literally had folks in tears. Her story was truly amazing.
The second speakers (they were partners) were full of energy and very fun. They started a healthy vending machine company that’s poised to do some really great things… very soon. When you see one pop up in your area, you’ll know what I mean!
I went last. I talked about my story and how I started Hearandplay.com with $70 at…
Many of you know I’m taking golf lessons on the side and have practically fell in love with the game.
But I just had a revelation that could help you with your focus.
Think about the golf course for a second…
There are 18 holes.
You start at hole 1…
As many of you know, we’re moving into our next home. With 3 kids now, we’ve outgrown our current place.
So with that comes packing and reorganizing stuff. And since my wife has adopted this “decluttering” philosophy, it means methodically going through EVERYTHING to see what deserves to be kept, donating and trashing everything else… not just throwing stuff in boxes and figuring it out later (as I probably would have done).
In all that, I came across my old high school yearbook. I flipped to this one page and there I was, “Mr. Jackrabbit!”
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