“More mind-blowing awesomeness! Yours may be the first paid subscription that I will leave to run and run. Most don’t make it to month two. You just keep coming up with the goods. Very pleased to have discovered your work in greater depth.” ~ Ando Perez

The Journal is a portal to the world where my work is born. It offers insight into my creative process and a perspective that isn’t available through my other writing. If you connect with my thoughts and essays, the Journal offers a continuation, a depth and breadth, to that exploration.

Access to the the Journal is offered through a monthly subscription of $7.00/month, a price set using reader feedback. When you subscribe, new Journals and Notes will be delivered to your inbox as they’re published.

An active subscription to the Journal also gives you access to all previously published material through the archives.

As part of my commitment to sustainable abundance, 25% of your monthly subscription will be donated to charity and you will receive a free copy of any paid-products that I release during the lifetime of your subscription.

I offer a lifetime money-back guarantee, so you can cancel your subscription at any time and request a full refund.

A sample Journal entry and sample Notes are available below.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some of the topics you write about?

The writing in my Journal comes from a place of reflection and curiosity, so the topics vary greatly. A common thread you will find throughout the Journal is that of seeking truth, sharing knowledge, and exploring the essence of things. 

Here are some of the topics I write about in the Journal: 

• Experiments in creating harmony between nature and technology
• Musings on personal growth, the future, and what it means to be human
• Interesting bits of the web that cause me to pause and reflect (aka Notes)
• Thoughts on creating culture and doing business in a globalized society
• Riffs on working as a generalist, including techniques to learn anything
• Notes on writing, elegance, design, minimalism, and living nomadically

How often do you publish new material?

You can expect to receive 1 – 2 emails per week. New Journal entries will arrive by email as they’re published and you’ll receive a weekly email on Friday containing the Marginal Notes for that week (see What are Notes?).

I don’t live my life based on schedules and I never create for the sake of creating; I create when I have something to share. Creating for the sake of creating often results in creating noise and that’s something I work hard to avoid.

If you would prefer not to receive emails, you can cancel your email subscription and use the account that comes with your subscription to view new material directly on this site (see Archives).

Are there archives of previously published material?

Yes. Your subscription comes with an account on this site which gives you access to all previously published Journals and Notes.

If you have an active subscription, you can login here with your email address. (If you’ve never logged in, you’ll need to reset your password first.)

How did you determine the subscription price?

The current subscription price of $7.00/month was not set by me, but rather by my readers. I used a survey to discover what my readers would be willing to pay for this subscription and then took an average of their responses to set the current price.

I believe everyone should have the opportunity to be involved in the process of pricing products (especially digital products) and I’m dedicated to using that concept to set the price for all my digital offerings. I refer this concept as permission pricing

The current subscription price was set on November 7th, 2011 following a reader survey and may be adjusted following future surveys.

What are Notes?

Notes are little pieces of the web that I’ve curated to share with you: a quote from an article, a piece of an interview, or even a transcribed passage from a physical book. 

They are little bits of stuff that I felt shifted my evolution in some way. I annotate these bits with my own thoughts and then link to the original articles where you can read them in their entirety. (You can find Sample Notes below.)

As part of the Journal subscription, you will receive “Marginal Notes”, a weekly email containing any recently published Notes for that week.

Full archives of previously published Notes are made available through the account provided with your Journal subscription (see Archives).

Lifetime Money-Back Guarantee

I believe in providing value and I trust that you’ll be honest about how much value you’ve received from my work. If you ever feel that our exchange has not been equal, you can cancel your subscription at any time and request a full refund for the lifetime of your subscription.

If you have any questions about the Journal that are not answered here, please ask me.

Sample Journal Entry

Dreaming big, or just big enough?

Published on December 10th, 2011

If you always felt you were born to do something big, something really, really big — something so big that your existence would end up shifting human history and leaving a dent in the fabric of time — what would you do? 

Would you think about what your best career options were, what things you were good at, and go from there?

Would you stress out over money or financial concerns or hunker down and save your money?

Would you focus on doing things that made you comfortable or ensured that people would like you?

Would you limit your focus to things that you could achieve this lifetime?

Would you be realistic?

Or would you think about the biggest, most crazy thing you could imagine? Something that seemed so unlikely for a single human being to achieve but that, when you thought about it or talked about it, filled you with spine-tingling, eye-watering, goosebump-making surges of energy that seemed to emanate from some unknown source deep inside?

That thing that despite being so unrealistic and crazy lingered on your mind, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.

If you ever asked me in person to share my biggest dream, I’d probably tell you that I would like to reach the end of my life and see humanity more connected and forward-looking, to have an end to poverty, hunger, and inequality at least somewhere in sight, and to know that my actions played at least a small role in making that movement happen.

But if you asked me again, what’s my biggest, craziest, most wild dream, I’d likely change my answer.

I’d tell you that I’d like to see humanity not only more connected and in tune with nature, but also exploring and stretching off planet Earth. I’d want to stand on planet Mars before I die and feel that humanity as a whole finally recognizes its precious potential. 

I’d like to witness the beginnings of humanity-level cooperation taking place, pushing the human species forward together to eliminate silly things like poverty, hunger, and inequality so that we, as a species, can move on to bigger and more important things like exploring the universe, not just the universe around us, but also within us.

This is Star Trek type stuff, yes, but if you really asked me what my biggest, craziest dream was, that’s what I’d honestly tell you. I’d like to know that I played a part in moving the human race forward, towards something that my intuition tells me we’ll eventually arrive at anyway.

But you’d never guess any of that reading my writing or even communicating with me online. In fact, very few of my actions in life really reflect that level of thinking.

Why? 

Because I gave up on that dream long ago. It was too unrealistic, too “out there”. If I was going to use my potential for something great, why would I throw it at something so preposterous?

Following that thinking was always a series of justifications, a train of logical reasoning to back up the impossibility of that thinking:

“I’d need to become heavily involved in entrepreneurship and business and investing and money… I just don’t like any of those enough to do something big with them.”

“I’d probably need an engineering degree and that would be too much of a time commitment… I’m too old and my time is running out fast.”

“If I failed to achieve my dream, I will have wasted my time and energy.”

“If I fail, all my potential, my whole life, will have been for nothing.”

“Nobody else is doing this kind of stuff — or even attempting it — so it must be unachievable and silly to even consider.”

I’ve gone through this process more times than I can count — throughout my whole life — often justifying the process itself by telling myself that some dreams really are just too big, but that it’s healthy to think about them anyway. 

However something changed in the past year. Before I returned home from India last year, I won a chance to see one of the last Space Shuttle launches in Florida. 

That experience led me to connect with a whole new circle of friends who were passionate about space and who lived with those futuristic dreams on their minds every single day. 

Those events led to my learning about Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal who, with a real passion not focused on being entrepreneurial and making money but for making humanity a multi-planetary species, went on to found SpaceX, now the leading private space company in the world.

Yes! That’s exactly what I should be doing! But (and here’s where the fear and self-doubt steps in)…

“That’s just not me…”

“Space exploration is so disconnected from the immediate humanitarian needs here on Earth that I really care about…”

“I can’t possibly focus on addressing world poverty if I’m focused on getting people into space…”

“Elon Musk was rich and had tons of money to start with… I’d be starting with nothing and that would make it impossible…”

But Elon is moving the human race forward.

He’s chasing his seemingly impossible dream because that’s what he believes he should be doing. He’s running his business the way he believes it should be run, telling employees and investors face-to-face that he and his business are not in it for the money but for the legacy of humanity.

In the past year I’ve connected with so many people who are fascinated with space and I’ve learned about people like Elon who are taking their dreams and pushing them forward. 

All of this has rekindled within me the “impossible” dreams that I’ve held inside for so long. It’s made me reconsider them and start asking myself questions about what I’m doing and why I’m here on Earth.

Why can’t I become someone who builds businesses that determine their success not based on monetary profit but rather on the welfare of the human species as a whole? 

A space company that addresses humanitarian needs? Why not? So what if nobody else has done it or if nobody thinks it would work.

Steve Jobs said, “stay hungry, stay foolish”. Perhaps to really stay hungry we need to chase dreams that are unrealistic and seemingly impossible; perhaps to stay foolish we need to believe in dreams that seem a little crazy but that call to us, like a whisper from the future, asking us to do the impossible.

Sample Notes

End up at the right destination

Published on December 7th, 2011

I’ve long resisted using social media in a way that didn’t match how I socialized offline (which is to say, not very much). Despite all the online advice telling me I needed to be heavily involved in social media to grow online, I’ve refrained from this because it didn’t feel true to my core.

This bit from a recent letter by Thom Chambers, How to be Antisocial and Become a Better Writer (subscription required), explains succinctly what I felt intuitively:

Your business is your chance to create your very own utopia, your ideal lifestyle. When it comes to your writing, it’s far more honest to have a setup that you want to maintain indefinitely. If you were a best-selling author, would you tweet?

The answer to that may be “yes”, in which case great. But if you’re just putting on a facade of sociability in order to build an audience, then two things will happen. One, you’ll build the wrong sort of readership who come to expect you to be someone you don’t enjoy being. And two, you’ll probably get found out.

Being antisocial might very well mean it takes longer to get where you want to go. But at least you’ll end up at the right destination.

We are the revolution

Published on November 24th, 2011

Paulo Coelho writes about a rising revolution and changing attitudes:

I’d say that the new political attitude for our era is to “die alive and commited.”

In other words, being aware and participating in things until the day we die – something that does not occur very often – people end up dying for the world on the day they renounce their dreams.

We are the revolution taking place. We are responsible for the world in every sense – political, social, moral.

We are responsible for the planet. We are responsible for the unemployed.

Of course, we can blame the banks, the disaster that irresponsible people created in the financial system, the political repression, the inability of the Govts. to hear what people has to say.

But this will not help the world to become a better place. We need to act, and we need to act now.
And we don’t need permission to act.

We are much more powerful than we think we are. Let’s use this power, use the strength that everyone has when he/she is following his/her real Bliss, Personal Legend, you name it.

We are the dreamers, but we are also the revolution.

Dreams are not negotiable.

Also worth reading is his Declaration of Principals. I’ve been keeping notes for the past year to write and implement a declaration of principals for myself.

Cultivating Lion Heart to Push Through Challenges

Published on October 12th, 2011

Satya Colombo writes about ‘cultivating lion heart‘ and explains how challenges are here to push us. If we don’t change when we’re ready to change, we end up wallowing in self-pity and wasting time:

Bad stuff is here to push us to up our game, to make big changes, and to push the edges. It’s just a universal function of transformation.

What happens when you try and ignore it..? It just continues getting worse until you’re forced to change, or become a broken, lost soul.

Think back to bad jobs you knew you shouldn’t be in, but you stuck with ’cause you “needed the money.” You knew it wasn’t right, and it just kept getting worse until you were booted, or you jumped.

Bad relationships? Same deal. You learned what you had to learn, and then it was time to leave. But you were addicted to the drama, sex, co-dependency, whatever (and they were too). So it kept going on until one of you put your foot down.

If you’re in a similar situation right now — or maybe you’re wondering why stuff just “isn’t working” in your career, love, life-mission — try capturing the spirit of lion, and focus on cultivating the great lion heart. Challenges are there for a reason — sometimes you’ve got to just put your foot down, and step up.

Being fearless doesn’t mean you have no fear, it means you’ve got enough guts and heart-strength to go for it anyway. Dive into your destiny — claim it — and let magic happen.