It was the same approach I’ve used since I built my first home at 23. While my friends were all renting, I saved every penny I could for a down payment, took out a small construction loan (that’s all the bank would lend me), and built much of that house with my own hands to keep costs down. I still remember those long, hot days on the job site. They made the term “sweat equity” feel very accurate. That strategy, repeated over the years, has added millions to my net worth. That’s the power of compounding.

As many of you know, I’m a real estate guy at heart, and when I get going on the subject, I can’t help but geek out a little. Real estate is the tool I’ve used to build a life I love, and to fund the things I value most..

You can decide what investments make the most sense for you. Whether you love real estate or never give it a second thought, we all need a place to live, so housing is already part of your financial picture. The only question is which side of the ledger it sits on. When you own, your home is an asset that can grow in value over time. When you rent, it’s purely an expense, a check you write every month with no upside. That’s not much of an investment.

Subscribe now

You don’t need to be an investor or know your way around a job site to do what we did. You just need to think about your home a little differently, and it comes down to three steps: own it, improve it, move it.

Step 1: Own It

For most families, the housing payment is the biggest bill of the month. When you rent, that money is gone the moment it leaves your account. When you own, it does double duty: part of every payment quietly builds savings in the form of equity, and ownership comes with real tax advantages along the way.

The biggest advantage is one most people have never heard of. When you sell the home you live in, you can keep up to $250,000 of the profit tax-free if you’re single, or up to $500,000 if you’re married, as long as you’ve owned it and lived in it for at least two of the last five years. That isn’t a loophole or a tax you’ll owe later. It’s simply yours, and you can use it again every time you sell a home you’ve lived in for two years. We’ve used it more times than most people, and each time it’s put our family further ahead.

Owning a home also fits my overall philosophy on life: get in the game. If you stand on the sidelines, life will only pass you by.

Step 2: Improve It

Owning is the foundation, and improving is the accelerator. This doesn’t have to mean gutting a house down to the studs. Some of our projects were big, like a new kitchen or opening up a floor plan, but many were as simple as fresh paint, new flooring, and a weekend spent on the yard. Every time, I asked the same question before spending a dollar: will this make the house worth more, or is it just for us? Both are fine, but it’s worth knowing the difference.

That two-year house is a good example. We bought it for $660,000 and put about $100,000 into it, adjusting the floor plan and refreshing the kitchen and bathrooms. Two years later, it sold for $995,000. After selling costs, we walked away with about $200,000, and because it was our home, we didn’t owe a cent in tax.

Will every home work out that well? No. But renting guarantees you lose that money every single time. Do something like this a handful of times over your life, and you can build real wealth while upgrading the place your family calls home.

Step 3: Move It

This is the step most people resist, and I understand why. We get attached to our homes, and for good reason. Many people also stretch to buy their “forever home” too early and then stay put for decades. That can feel safe, but it often means leaving tax-free gains on the table. We took a different approach. Every few years we sold, kept the profit, and moved up.

I’ll admit my wife was ready to be done moving two homes ago. She declared we were finally in our forever home. Then we moved again, and now she calls this one our “forever-and-ever home.” This time I think she’s right, at least until our boys are out of the house. But our willingness to move did more to grow our wealth than almost any other financial decision we ever made.

I also know moving isn’t right for everyone. If your kids are rooted in a school they love, or you’ve built a community you’d never trade, staying put may be the richest choice you can make. The point isn’t to move for the sake of moving. The point is to make it a conscious choice, not the default.

One practical tip if you’ve been in your home a long time: if your profit is getting close to that $250,000 or $500,000 limit, it may be worth thinking about your next move. Anything above the limit is taxable, so selling before you cross it lets you keep the gain tax-free and start building again.

Why This Works

Your home is a uniquely powerful tool because it does several things at once that almost nothing else can. You put down a fraction of the price but benefit from the growth of the whole house, so even modest increases in value of 4 to 5% a year add up to something significant over time. Every monthly payment forces you to save, whether you feel like it or not. Smart improvements add value that often comes back to you tax-free when you sell. And unlike a retirement account, you get to live in it and enjoy it the whole time.

Should You Buy Now?

That’s a decision only you can make. Prices are at all-time highs, but prices are at all-time highs most of the time. Mortgage rates are in the mid-7s, which feels high compared to recent years but is actually right in line with the average since 1971. As for where rates and prices go from here, I wish I had a crystal ball. What I do know is that waiting for the perfect moment usually means waiting forever.

The Bigger Picture

This was never about chasing a bigger house. Some of my best memories are from homes we lived in for only a couple of years, the projects we tackled together, and how each place fit the season our family was in. The house was always the tool. The goal was what it made possible: more freedom, more security, and more room to focus on the people and things that matter most.

Live in your home, love it, and enjoy it. But also see it for what it can be: one of the most powerful tools you have for building a life with more options and less worry.

Start Bold

Know your equity. Pull up your latest mortgage statement and compare what you owe with what similar nearby homes have recently sold for.

Audit your improvements. List what you’ve done to your home and decide which projects added value and which were just for you.

Check your number. If you’ve owned for a while, estimate your profit against the $250,000 or $500,000 limit.

Your Turn

Is your home just a place to live, or is it also working for you? What’s the best improvement you’ve ever made to a house?

Leave a comment

Minor in money. Major in life.

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process - people who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the life you’re building, you’re in the right place. New here? Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

If you enjoyed this week’s content, please share it with a friend.

Share

I didn’t know it then, but those Sunday drives are where I caught the real estate bug. I took it and ran with it. I’ve spent more than 30 years selling real estate, and through my companies, I’ve been involved in billions of dollars in transactions. Today, the overwhelming majority of my net worth comes from real estate.

So I pay attention when the internet decides homeownership is dead. Every few months a new wave of financial influencers, and even a recent Wall Street Journal piece, makes the case that renting and investing the difference is the smarter move. With mortgage rates back above 7%, close to the highest levels we’ve seen in more than twenty years, that argument is getting louder, and so many of you have asked me some version of the same question: should my kid buy now, or wait for rates to come down? I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a neutral observer. Real estate is what I do. That’s exactly why I don’t want you to take my word for it. I want to show you the math.

If you already own your home, congratulations. You’re building wealth every month, and you can skip the next two paragraphs on the numbers. But do you have a friend or a child who doesn’t own yet? This one is for them, so share it. Do they need to buy a home right now? Maybe not. But should they set money aside and save for a down payment so they can buy that first home one day? Absolutely.

That’s really just my simple formula for getting rich at work: earn more, spend less, invest the rest. It starts with always spending less than you earn. Want to spend more? Earn more. Then invest the money you save, and over time it grows and compounds. And one of the best places to start investing is the home you live in.

The Math Most People Skip

When people compare renting and owning online, they usually focus on one thing: the return on the home’s purchase price. Homes have appreciated about 4.7% a year nationally over the last 30 years, while the S&P 500 has averaged about 11%, so stocks win, and the case is closed. The problem is that almost nobody pays cash for a house. When you run the numbers, including financing, which is much harder to calculate, the picture changes completely. You put down 20%, but you earn appreciation on 100% of the home, while the mortgage pays down a little more each month.

I ran a full side-by-side comparison on a $700,000 home with 20% down at a 7.5% mortgage rate, and I gave the renter every benefit of the doubt. The renter’s monthly cost starts out lower, and I credited them for it. I subtracted maintenance, selling costs, and all taxes on the renter’s investment gains, and I assumed strong market returns and no rent increases beyond inflation. After ten years, the owner’s $140,000 down payment turned into a net worth increase of about $357,000. The renter who invested the same $140,000 in the stock market came out about $185,000 ahead. Owning nearly doubled the result, even at today’s rates.

Even Better When Rates Drop

That comparison assumes the owner is stuck at 7.5% for the full ten years, and they almost certainly won’t be. Rates go up and come down, and when you own, you benefit when they fall. If rates drop back to 6% a few years from now, where they were earlier this year, our owner could refinance and save roughly $500 a month while the house keeps appreciating. The renter has no such option. In fact, when rates fall, buyers pile back into the market, prices rise, and rents usually follow.

That’s why timing the housing market is a lot like timing the stock market. Everyone waits for the perfect moment, rates at the bottom and prices on sale, but that moment almost never arrives as people expect. Over time, the best returns go to those in the game, not those watching from the sidelines.

What No Spreadsheet Can Measure

In a 1931 address, Herbert Hoover said, “To own one’s own home is a physical expression of individualism, of enterprise, of independence and of the freedom of spirit.” Nearly a hundred years later, that quote still holds true.

Like my dad, I take so much pride in owning my home. Every day when I drive down my driveway and see it, I still get that little rush of excitement that comes from knowing it’s mine. And it’s so much more than an asset. Our home has been the backdrop for so many of our family’s memories: the holidays, the birthdays, the ordinary Thursday nights that become the ones you remember. I can still vividly picture the house I grew up in, the living room where we opened our gifts on Christmas morning, and the home my dad spent so many weekends improving with so much pride. That house shaped who I became.

Owning also gives you a kind of stability that renting never can. As long as you pay your mortgage, nobody can tell you it’s time to move. No landlord decides to sell, no lease renewal comes with a surprise increase, and nobody uproots your kids in the middle of a school year. And because you will skip a meal before you miss a mortgage payment, your home becomes a forced savings plan that builds wealth in the background whether you think about it or not.

Large institutional investors have figured all of this out. Build-to-rent has grown from almost nothing into a multibillion-dollar industry in just a few years. Those investors aren’t buying houses because homeownership is dead. They’re buying them for the wealth that comes with owning them.

When the Time Comes, Buy It Right

If you’ve saved a down payment and can comfortably afford the monthly payment at today’s rate, get into that first home. It doesn’t have to be perfect. That’s why it’s called a starter home. Just remember that your return depends on the price you pay, and you’re not buying the whole housing market; you’re buying one house from one seller. Study the comps, prioritize location even if that means a smaller or older home, and don’t overlook the house that needs some work, because that’s where sweat equity turns into real equity.

Start Bold

If you own: take a minute this week to appreciate what your home has given you, both on paper and in memories.

If you don’t own yet: open a separate savings account and name it “Down Payment.” Even a small automatic deposit every payday will get you started.

Share this with someone who’s on the fence. Especially if that someone is your child.

Your Turn

What’s your favorite memory from a home you’ve owned or grew up in? And if you’re renting, what’s the one thing holding you back from buying?

Leave a comment

I’m not your financial advisor, and everyone’s situation is different. Run the numbers for your own life before you make a move.

Minor in money. Major in life.

This is the first in a series of upcoming posts on real estate, where I’ll share how I actually built most of my wealth, starting with the house you live in.

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process - people who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the life you’re building, you’re in the right place. New here? Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

If you enjoyed this week’s content, please share it with a friend.

Share

A year ago, on October 7, 2025, I hit send on the first official issue of this newsletter. I could use this anniversary to tell you what the past year meant to me, but that would miss the point. The most meaningful part of these twelve months didn’t happen at my keyboard. It happened on your side of the screen, in your homes, with your families, and in the decisions you made after you finished reading.

Let me start with a question. What did you feed your mind this week? Most of us never really choose. Social media, the news, and politics choose for us, and what they serve up is mostly outrage, fear, and comparison. You chose differently. Every week, you set aside time to read something long, something that asked you to think honestly about your money, your relationships, and the life you are building. That choice matters because what we consume every day quietly shapes who we become.

What you did with it

You didn’t just read. You acted, and I got to hear about it.

A father told me an article helped him cope, even a little, with the loss of his son. Several men wrote to say that the stories about my dad helped them finally come to terms with the death of their own fathers. An 80-year-old woman told me she now looks back on her life with pride, because she realized that a life without a career was never a lesser life. She had lived it fully aligned with her values, and that was what counted. Readers booked the vacations they had been putting off for years because they decided experiences were worth more than things. One dad read the Omaha article and took his sons on a football weekend abroad. Many of you told me you are trying the 5:30 email rule in your own lives. And nearly every time I wrote about money, parents and grandparents told me they had passed it along to their kids and grandkids.

Those are your stories, not mine. I wrote the words, but you did what mattered: you took an idea and let it change something real.

Almost none of that showed up in the comments. It came by text, email, and direct message, and I understand why. What we talk about here is personal, and most of us don’t want to share our grief or regrets in public. I know I wouldn’t. So if you have been reading quietly all year, please know that quiet readers count. Some of the most powerful messages I received came from people who have never left a single public comment. I always knew when a post had struck a nerve, because my phone would light up.

What I learned about you

Nearly 1,000 of you read this newsletter weekly, and together you have read these articles more than 65,000 times. That number might look small next to an influencer with millions of followers, but those followers are scrolling past a ten-second clip. You are reading close to 2,000 words a week. In a world built for short attention spans, you are doing something increasingly rare. You are choosing depth.

I also learned that you are wonderfully different from one another. Some of you love the personal stories. Some of you love the aspirational ones. Some of you want the failures, the mistakes, and the lessons that cost real money. Some of you skip straight to the finance. With 1,000 readers, there are 1,000 opinions about what makes a great post, and I have made peace with the fact that no single piece will land for everyone. That is okay. You aren’t looking for one universal answer. You are looking for the idea that fits your life right now, and I hope you keep finding it here.

The lesson hiding in a year of Tuesdays

I’ll share one thing about my own experience, only because I think it applies to you. Writing does not come naturally to me. I am a left-brain thinker who is most comfortable with hard numbers and facts. I was an incredibly shy kid, and I am still an introvert at heart, so telling the whole story, including the uncomfortable parts, has never been easy.

What made the difference was a deadline. Every week, Tuesday was coming whether I was ready or not. Some weeks the ideas poured out, and I wrote several issues at once. Other weeks I stared at the calendar thinking, I need to write something. But after more than 50 issues, it has gotten easier. The skill compounded the same way money does: slowly at first, then all at once. Pressure really does make diamonds.

Whatever you have been avoiding because it doesn’t come naturally to you, whether it is investing, a hard conversation, getting in shape, or starting the business you keep thinking about, the lesson is the same. You don’t need natural talent to begin. You need a Tuesday. Pick a recurring deadline, show up, and let repetition do the work.

Why the name changed

I started this newsletter as BOLD Wealth. To me, wealth always meant something much bigger than money, but many of you understandably read it as a finance newsletter and nothing more. In a way, you were telling me something important. What mattered most to you was never the balance in an account. It was the life that money makes possible.

That is why this is now The BOLD Life. The word I keep coming back to is rich, and I don’t mean rich in money. I mean rich in life. Money is still an underlying theme, because it matters. If you ignore money completely, you will miss out on the freedom and experiences it can fund. If you focus on it too much, you will drift away from your values and end up unhappy no matter how much you have. The goal is to understand money well enough that it fuels what really matters to you.

If you are new here, or if you want the money side of this entire first year in four steps, here it is. Eliminate consumer debt. Buy a home. Invest the rest. Let compounding do its work. Give it time, and you will build financial wealth, and with it, freedom. It works every time.

What’s next for you

A book is on the horizon one day, but not anytime soon. The next step is a podcast, and it is really a response to you. Many of you have told me that finding time to sit down and read long-form is getting harder, yet you still want the full stories rather than quick soundbites. Listening fits into the life you already have, on your commute, on a walk, or with your AirPods in while you tackle the yard. Meaningful life lessons need time and words to land, and I think the spoken word delivers them better. Stay tuned.

A Favor

Before you go, I have a favor to ask. Tell me either the article from this past year that has stuck with you the most, or a topic you would love for me to write about next. Leave it in the comments so other readers can see it too, or hit reply if you would rather keep it between us. I read every message, and your answers will shape year two.

Leave a comment

Thank you for spending your Tuesdays with me. We only get one life, and it isn’t easy. Making sure the ups outweigh the downs takes effort and a willingness to challenge yourself. You have already proven you are willing to do that. So here’s to another year of refusing to live an ordinary life, and choosing instead to live a BOLD one.

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process - people who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the life you’re building, you’re in the right place. New here? Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

If you enjoyed this week’s content, please share it with a friend.

Share

Did you do the 5-5-5?

I did, most days. Not all days. I missed some. We were traveling in Europe for the latter portion of the month, and that disrupted my normal daily schedule. I didn't beat myself up when I missed a day. But here is what surprised me. Just knowing I was supposed to do something related to health, relationships, and money every day was enough to pull my attention to all three areas far more often throughout the month than it would have otherwise. The challenge worked less like a scoreboard and more like a lens. It kept putting the same three things back in front of me, over and over, until paying attention to them felt normal instead of like an assignment.

Health

On the health side, I leaned on bodyweight squats more than anything else. Whenever I realized toward the end of a day that I hadn’t yet gotten my extra five minutes of movement in, squats were my default. No equipment, no excuse, no reason to put it off until later. I would just stop wherever I was and knock them out. Having one simple fallback move helps on days when you haven't planned ahead, because the plan isn't really the point. The five minutes is the point; however you get there.

Subscribe now

Relationships

The relationship leg was the most impactful. I reconnected with a handful of friends this month that I probably would have gotten around to eventually, but not necessarily in September, and maybe not for a while longer than I would like to admit. It reminded me that life is built on relationships, and that men in particular tend to fixate on work relationships and family and let everything else slide into “I will call them later, when I have more time.” The problem is that can get kicked down the road indefinitely. Later never actually arrives on its own. You have to go create it. I was genuinely happy to catch up with people I had not talked to in a while, and every one of those calls left me better off than the five minutes it cost me.

Money

On the money front, I found myself more conscious of it all month long, in a good way. I finally did a number of things I had been letting sit for too long. I rebalanced some stock allocations that I had let drift. I updated some long-term plans that needed a second look. In general, money stayed more in focus in a different way than usual, because I already have systems that mostly run in the background. I do not think we need to overemphasize money, and this newsletter has never been about that. But I noticed something true this month: when you make time to focus on something, positive energy tends to follow. And when you can move money out of the stressor column and into the life-enhancer column, that is the entire point of earning it in the first place.

The real win

I enjoyed the challenge, and I hope you did too, whether you were with me for all thirty days or joined partway through. Even one day of the 5-5-5 is still one more day than you would have had otherwise, and that day counts. If you managed every single day, you may already be noticing the early edges of some new habits forming, and those daily habits compound over time the same way a dollar invested today compounds over years. Neither shows its full return right away. Both are still working in the background, whether you are watching closely or not.

If my main point from this whole month is one thing, it is this. Do not put off change or action until January 1st. You can reset your goals any day you choose. Waiting for a cleaner starting line is usually just another way of staying comfortable a little longer. So why not start reaching higher today instead of some date three and a half months from now that is no more real than this one. You get one life. Build a bold one, starting now.

Your Turn

Did you do the 5-5-5, even for a day or two? Tell me which of the three (health, relationships, or money) was most impactful for you. I love hearing from my readers.

Leave a comment

Start Bold

1. Pick one thing from health, relationships, or money that the 5-5-5 got you moving on this month, and keep it going even though September is over. The challenge was never about the month. It was about proving the habit could start.

2. If you fell off partway through, restart today. Not October 1st, not January 1st. Today. The whole point of this challenge was that you never need permission to begin again.

3. Tell someone what you kept from this month, even if it is one line. Naming it out loud is usually what makes it stick.

We build financial wealth not for status or scorekeeping, but to fuel the areas of life that matter most: family, health, growth, generosity, joy. September was never really about September. It was thirty days of proof that small, consistent attention to what matters most will move you, even when you are not perfect about it.

If you enjoyed this week’s content, please share it with a friend.

Share

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process - people who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the life you’re building, you’re in the right place. New here? Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

My mom grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Pittsburgh, in a household of six that shared one bathroom. Bath time meant everyone used the same tub of water, one after another, and because she was the youngest, she got to go first, while the water was still clean. Her father, who had come through Ellis Island with little more than a bag of clothes and worked hard as a concrete finisher, got to go sixth and last, in the cold, dirty water. But he was happy because all he wanted was for his kids to have a better life than he did. My mom became the first in her family to go to college, then a schoolteacher, and eventually she built a career that gave me a very different childhood than the one she had.

Subscribe now

The Treadmill

I think about that bathtub whenever I catch myself measuring my life against the wrong thing. You close the deal, you get the raise, the stock finally pops, and for a few days you feel like the richest person alive. Then you adjust. The new number becomes the new normal, and some quiet part of your brain starts looking for the next one before the last one has even settled in.

Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation. I just call it the treadmill, because that is exactly what it feels like once you notice it. I have run on it myself more times than I can count, and you can run as fast as you want while the scenery never changes, because the finish line keeps moving with you.

The fix is not one more win. I have chased enough of those to know that the top of the mountain always reveals another mountain behind it. The fix is where you point the comparison. Most of us compare up and forward, to the next milestone, the next number, the neighbor’s newer Range Rover in the driveway next door. Compare that way long enough, and you will feel behind no matter how far you have actually come. The comparison that actually works points backward instead. Measure yourself against where you started, and if you are willing to look a little further back, against where your family started, not where someone else is now.

Luckier Than You Think

My mom got the clean water because she was the youngest. Right now, roughly one in four people on this planet lack reliable access to safe drinking water, something you and I get by turning a handle in the kitchen. We live in the richest country the world has ever produced, and simply being born here put you ahead of a staggering share of humanity before you ever earned a dollar of your own.

I am not saying that to guilt anyone, myself included. I am saying it because we lose sight of it constantly. No matter where you sit financially today, somebody else on this earth would trade places with you in a heartbeat. We all have a lot more to be grateful for every day than we sometimes think.

What Would Your 18-Year-Old Self Think?

This is the question I think about when the treadmill starts speeding up. Not what does the guy two rungs up the ladder have that I don’t. What would eighteen-year-old me, or fifteen-year-old me mowing lawns around the neighborhood, think if he could see this exact life? The house. The family at the dinner table. The freedom to build what I want to build. He would not be unimpressed. He would be blown away.

That question works because it changes the direction you are measuring in. The version of you further down the road will never run out of things you don’t have yet. The version of you further back is a fixed point, and against that fixed point, almost everyone reading this has already done something remarkable. You do not have to wait for the next milestone to feel it. You can feel it right now, about the distance you have already covered, and still want to cover more ground tomorrow.

The Balancing Act

None of this means stop striving. I am not interested in a version of contentment that looks like giving up on growth, and I do not think you are either. Wanting more is not the problem. Wanting more while forgetting to notice what you already built- that is the problem. That’s why two of my favorite words are gratitude and progress. Together, those two words lead to happiness. Tony Robbins famously says that “progress equals happiness,” and I have a slight twist on his formula. For me, it’s “Gratitude + progress = happiness.” Appreciation is not the opposite of progress. It is what makes the progress worth having in the first place.

If you are so locked onto the finish line that you never look up and notice the race itself, you will cross every line you set for yourself and still feel like you are losing. Life is a journey. Enjoy the miles you are on right now, and keep pushing for more ground tomorrow, because both are true at the same time, and neither cancels out the other. Gratitude for the mile behind you and hunger for the mile ahead are not in competition. They were always meant to run together. Be grateful for what you have, but stay driven to keep making your future better.

Back to the 5-5-5 Challenge

This is where the money leg of the 5-5-5 Challenge comes in. Hopefully you have spent a few minutes each day for the last three weeks thinking about your money as part of the challenge. Those few minutes are part of the progress side of the formula. It is a small habit, but being conscious of your money rather than letting it drift on autopilot will have long-term positive repercussions. Remember, money compounds over time, and so does the positive daily habit of managing it. When you combine deliberate action with compound investing, your money can truly grow over time.

And why are we growing our money? To use it to magnify our values and live the life that matters to you. Minor in money, major in life.

Your Turn

Picture your eighteen-year-old self standing where you are right now, looking at your life today, your family, your work, what you have built so far. Tell me in the comments, in one line: what would they say?

Leave a comment

Start Bold

1. Write down one thing in your financial life right now that your eighteen-year-old self would consider a miracle. Not the goal you haven’t hit. The one you already have.

2. The next time you catch yourself comparing up to the bigger house, the newer car, the louder success story, catch it, and consciously flip the comparison backward instead.

3. Do your five minutes on money today, whatever that looks like for you this month, and let it be driven by gratitude for how far you’ve come as much as ambition for where you’re headed.

We build financial wealth not for status or scorekeeping, but to fuel the areas of life that matter most: family, health, growth, generosity, joy. You are almost certainly further ahead than you give yourself credit for. Keep building anyway. That is The BOLD Life.

If you enjoyed this week’s content, please share it with a friend.

Share

My brother used to try to squeeze me into a box and sit on me to make me fit. He was older, and for a stretch of my childhood I was less of a little brother and more of a toy, something to build with and put away when he was done. That is not exactly the tender origin story you would want for one of the most important relationships of your life, but it is mine, and it is where this one starts.

Being on someone’s team never meant agreeing with them. That took me a long time to understand, especially with my brother. It works the same way with your kids, your spouse, your friends, your co-workers. Nobody agrees all the time, and if you’re waiting for full agreement before you feel good about the people in your life, you’ll be waiting forever. The question was never agreement. It’s whether they’re on your team, and if they are, you accept them as they are instead of writing them off over one disagreement, one bad week, or one thing they said that they probably regretted the moment it left their mouth.

Subscribe now

My Brother

He is my older brother, so when we were kids, he liked to use me as his play toy, boxing me up, quite literally being one version of it. As a teenager, that same brother gave me his best advice and hard-won wisdom from what he had already lived through, and it helped me get through high school, especially while our parents were going through their divorce. In our twenties, we went into business together, framing houses from sunrise to sunset. By our thirties, we were fighting nearly every day at work, and the relationship became unsustainable both in and out of the business. By our forties, we had quit working together, and we had pretty much quit being friends too.

Now, we are rebuilding that relationship. It’s taking time but we are making progress. I have learned that relationships require both people to want to be in it. You cannot convince the other person to want the same level of commitment that you want. I wanted Cindy Crawford to be in a relationship with me for all my teenage years, and she didn’t know I existed. Wanting something from your side of a relationship has never been enough on its own, whether that relationship is a schoolboy crush or a brother you grew up with. But when both people are finally willing to show up again, even a relationship that broke down completely can be rebuilt. That is what my brother and I are doing now, one small step at a time, and I would rather be rebuilding than never try at all.

The Same Rule Everywhere Else

I am fortunate that I have always had a great relationship with my parents and with my kids. That part has never been complicated for me. My marriage runs on the same rule as the team. Jana and I don’t agree on everything, and I have learned to be grateful for that, because if we did, one of us wouldn’t be necessary. We have a rule that has saved us more than once: we do not go to bed angry. Some nights that just means we agree to keep talking about it in the morning instead of letting it sit overnight and grow into something bigger than it ever needed to be.

The same thing applies at work. We spend more waking hours with our co-workers than with our closest friends, unless you happen to work with your best friend, which I do, by design. If you don’t enjoy the people you work with, you are handing away a massive portion of your one life to people you wouldn’t choose to sit next to at dinner.

Invest a Little Every Day

A financially rich man with no friends is not a happy man. A man who surrounds himself every day with loving family and friends is happy, regardless of his financial situation. Life is about sharing joy with others, but sharing joy requires daily investment, the same way building wealth does. If you want to get financially rich, you set aside a little money every day, invest it, and let it compound. If you want to be relationally rich, you invest a little in your relationships every day, and you let that compound too.

Here is a test worth thinking about. If you had an emergency in the middle of the night, how many friends could you call who you know, without a doubt, would show up? If that number isn’t as high as you would like, start growing it now. It starts with something as small as a text or a phone call to reinvest in a relationship you have let go quiet.

Your Turn

Think about the people on your team right now, the ones you would call in the middle of the night without a second thought, and the ones you have quietly written off over something that probably wasn’t as big as it felt in the moment. Tell me in the comments: who do you need to talk to today? A friend? A family member? A co-worker? You don’t have to name them, just tell me which type. And if you want to share why, I’d love to hear it.

Leave a comment

Start Bold

1. Do your five minutes today. Call or text one person, someone different than yesterday, and make it a real conversation instead of a “we should catch up soon” that goes nowhere.

2. Pick one relationship where you have been quick to arm up instead of extending the benefit of the doubt, and extend it today instead.

3. Ask yourself honestly whether being on your team has quietly started to mean agreeing with you. It shouldn’t.

Money can buy a lot of things. It can’t build your team. That, you have to do yourself, one small investment at a time.

If you enjoyed this week’s content, please share it with a friend.

Share

P.S. Saturday was Jana’s and my 17th wedding anniversary. Seventeen happy years, although happy doesn’t mean perfect. We challenge each other, we’ve grown together, and at the end of the day, we know we are on the same team, always. Happy anniversary, Jana. I love you!

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process - people who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the life you’re building, you’re in the right place. New here? Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

My sons are fourteen. They can dive for a loose ball, land wrong on the concrete driveway, and be back on defense before their brother can get the next shot off.

I’ve thrown my back out picking something up off the ground.

That is the gap. That is not going to close no matter how many workouts I stack or how clean I eat, and it is not going to reverse itself either.

Energy declines with age. No amount of fighting stops that fact. And decline, on its face, is the opposite of everything we talk about here at The BOLD Life, because progress equals happiness, and decline is not progress. So if you take that equation at face value, you might think getting older means getting less happy, because your body is literally providing less to work with every year.

I do not believe that, and I want to tell you why, because it matters for the health leg of the 5-5-5 Challenge we started together a week ago. If you are one week in and wondering whether five minutes of extra movement a day actually does anything against a body that is aging no matter what you do, this is for you.

Where the equation holds

Here is what took me a long time to understand. “Progress equals happiness” doesn't require the decline to stop. It only requires that you stop expecting it to stop, and start counting something else as the win. The win is not turning back the clock. The win is the fight itself. Showing up. Lifting when you would rather sit. Stretching when you would rather scroll. Choosing the stairs one more time even though the elevator is right there. That is the progress. Not because it beats the twenty-year-old version of you, because it never will, but because it beats what you would look like if you gave in.

I do not have the energy I had in my twenties. I never will again, and neither will you, whatever your version of that decade looked like. But I have more energy today than I had at thirty-five, and that gap did not happen by accident. It happened because somewhere around my mid-thirties I let myself get out of shape. Weak, tired, coasting. I wasn't paying attention, and the body doesn't wait for you to notice before it starts costing you.

The wake-up call

Mine came from two four-year-olds. I had my boys at thirty-six, and by the time I turned forty, they were four, which meant they were up before six on Saturday mornings, ready to go, full volume, full speed, zero patience for a dad who was still moving slow. I could not match that energy the way I was living. Something had to change, not someday, but now, because the version of me that was tired all the time was not the father I wanted to be standing in that kitchen at 5:45 in the morning.

So I started fighting back. Not all at once, because that never sticks, but small. I put a standing desk in my office and told myself I would stand for one hour a day. Just one. Some days I did not even make it that long before I needed to sit back down. But I kept at it, and over about six months, that one hour slowly became most of the day, and now, a decade later, I stand at my desk all day, every day, and sitting for long stretches feels foreign to me. I started taking the stairs instead of the elevator whenever I had the choice, which is a small thing that means almost nothing on any single day and means quite a lot stacked across a decade.

The tweaks that never stop

None of this was one big change. It was a string of small ones, and honestly, I am still making them.

Food is the one I keep refining more than any other. I do not think I will ever call it finished, and I am fine with that. What I know about my own body by now is simple: too many carbs in a day, especially early in the day, and I am dragging by mid-afternoon no matter how well I slept or how hard I trained that morning. So I keep adjusting. A little less bread, a little more protein, paying closer attention to how a meal makes me feel two hours later instead of just how it tastes going down. It is not a diet in the sense of a plan with a start and an end date. It is an ongoing tweak, because energy through food is not a habit you finish; it is one you keep tuning for the rest of your life. I wrote more about how I think about food and energy in Habits, Part 1: Physical Energy, if you want to go deeper.

Alcohol was a smaller tweak than people probably assume. I was never a big drinker, just a normal social one, a couple of drinks on a Friday or Saturday night with friends. But four-year-olds do not care whether you slept well or had a good time the night before, and I noticed pretty quickly that even one drink showed up in how patient and present I was at six the next morning. So I let it go. Nearly ten years later, I don't miss it, and I don't think of it as giving something up. I think of it as handing that energy to my kids instead of to a headache. And I feel healthier knowing that I don’t drink.

My mom is proof

My mother is the clearest example I know of what this looks like on the other side of a whole life. She grew up in a generation that never set foot in a gym, never had a wearable counting her steps, never heard the word macros. And yet she is still go, go, go, every single day, all these years later. Does she have the energy she had twenty years ago, or forty? Of course not, and she would be the first to tell you that. But she chose, decade after decade, to keep moving instead of sitting down and letting the decline win early. She is living proof that the fight does not require youth. It only requires the decision to keep having it.

That is the real why behind the health leg of this Challenge. Five minutes a day won't make you twenty-five again. What it does is put you on the side of the fight instead of the side of the couch, and that choice, repeated daily, is what determines how much life you actually get out of the years you have left, regardless of how many of them there are.

Energy is everything. When you are tired, life feels heavy, and everything feels harder than it should. When you choose to build energy instead of surrendering to its decline, you are choosing happiness, on purpose, one small rep at a time. That is the whole equation. Progress equals happiness, and the fight against decline, not the defeat of it, is the progress.

Your Turn

Maybe you started the 5-5-5 Challenge with me last week, and today is day eight of the fight. If that is you, tell me this: what is your version of my standing desk- one small tweak you are using right now to fight back? Tell me in one line.

Leave a comment

And maybe you read that first email, meant to start, and then life happened the way it always does. If that is you, I want you to hear this clearly. You have not missed anything. No late pass is required, and you don't need to wait for October, next January, or some cleaner starting line that will never arrive. If you want to see what the Challenge actually is, here is where it started, and start today, whatever today happens to be.

Start Bold

1. It does not matter what day of the month it is. The only Challenge that counts is the one you start today, not the one you meant to start on September 1st.

2. Pick one conscious choice today, in your health, in a relationship, or in your money, that moves you a little closer to the life you actually want to be living. Small is fine. Small is the entire point.

3. Do it again tomorrow. That is the whole system. Health, relationships, and money, worked on daily and on purpose, exist to fuel the things that actually matter, so you can build and live The BOLD Life.

We build financial wealth not for status or scorekeeping, but to fuel the areas of life that matter most: family, health, growth, generosity, joy. None of that works without energy to spend. Whatever day you are starting on, the fight is the progress. Go have it.

If this one hit home, share it with someone who needs to hear it today.

Share

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process - people who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the life you’re building, you’re in the right place. New here? Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

Over the last few months, the schedule loosened, the pace softened, and maybe we let ourselves off the hook a little. That’s summer.

But now September is here. The kids are back in school. The calendar fills up. The days get shorter, and something in us shifts too.

In nature, spring is the season of growth. Fall and winter are for slowing down. For a long time, I assumed people worked the same way - that the energy and ambition we started the year with would naturally fade as the year went on.

But we’re not trees. We get to decide how we finish. Four months remain in 2026. That’s a third of the year - more than enough time to change what you’ll say about this year when it’s over.

Take a minute and think back to January. You probably set a resolution or two, maybe wrote it down, maybe just said it out loud to yourself in the shower. How is that going? If you are like most people, the answer sits somewhere between barely and not really. That is okay. Resolutions rarely survive contact with a real year, with real work, real kids, real life. But here is a new way to look at it: you do not have to wait until next January to start over. We still have four months left in 2026! That is enough time to build real momentum, if you are willing to commit to it starting now, not on some future Monday that keeps sliding back a week.

So instead of waiting for the calendar to reset itself, let’s reset ourselves. I am calling it the September to Remember Challenge, or the 5-5-5 Challenge for short, and the framework is simple on purpose. For every day in September, you commit to just five minutes in each of the three areas of life that run everything else: health, relationships, and money. Fifteen extra minutes a day. Not a course. Not a coach. Not a 90-day transformation program. Just daily reps, in the three places you cannot outsource to anyone.

Subscribe now

Health

Health, in this challenge, is simple. Every day in September, do five minutes of physical activity beyond whatever you already do. Not instead of your normal routine, on top of it. Some days that might be a five-minute walk around the block after dinner. Some days a quick five-minute run. Some days five minutes of pushups, squats, or whatever bodyweight movement you can squeeze in on the office floor between meetings. You decide what it looks like. The only rule is that you do it every day, without exception. Five minutes feels small enough that you never have an excuse to skip it, and that’s the point.

If you want to go deeper on why movement matters so much to how I run my own days, I wrote more about habits in a series back in January.

Relationships

Relationships work the same way. Every day in September, spend five minutes reaching out and making one real connection. And here’s the twist: not the same friend twice. Call someone different each day. Check in with old friends you haven’t talked to in months, sometimes years. You never know who is having a hard week and needs a five-minute phone call more than they would ever admit out loud. The bar is low on purpose: a call, a voice memo, a real conversation instead of a text that says “we should catch up soon” and goes nowhere. Commit to making one genuine connection every single day, and let the list of who you are calling get longer, and more surprising, as the month goes on.

Money

Money gets its own five minutes a day too, and this is the one people skip because it feels less urgent than the other two. Don’t skip it. Spend five minutes a day, every day, doing something focused on your money. Some days that might mean reviewing your budget. Other days it might mean setting a new financial goal for the quarter ahead. Some days, pick up a book on money and read five or ten pages.

And if you want more options to rotate through, there is no shortage of them. Check your net worth. Review last month’s statement line by line. Look at your retirement contributions and see if you can nudge them up even slightly. Audit your subscriptions and cancel the ones you forgot you were paying for. Research one stock or fund you’re curious about. Calculate your savings rate. Negotiate one recurring bill. Learn one financial term you’ve always nodded along to without really understanding. Sit down with your spouse or partner for a five-minute money date where you just talk openly about where things stand. Pick whichever one fits that particular day. The point is not which move you make. The point is that you show up for your financial life every single day, instead of only thinking about it when something goes wrong.

Have a plan, and write it down

A challenge like this only works if you know exactly what you are committing to before September 1st arrives. Vague intentions don’t survive a busy Tuesday. Specific, written commitments do.

Here is what mine might look like, as an example:

1. Five minutes of movement beyond my normal day, a walk after dinner, a quick set of bodyweight exercises, whatever fits that day.

2. Call one friend every day, a different friend each time, especially the ones I haven’t talked to in a while.

3. Five minutes on my money, rotating between reviewing the budget, reading a few pages of a money book, and checking in on our goals.

Write your version down. Then track it every night. Go back to your list before bed and mark down what you actually did in each of the three areas. That’s the whole system. Nothing complicated, nothing that requires an app or a subscription, just a piece of paper or a notes app and the willingness to be honest with yourself for 30 days straight.

Here is what I have learned after years of setting and chasing goals. Motivation gets you started, but tracking is what keeps you going. Write it down. Use your notes app, a whiteboard on the wall, whatever works for you. At the end of each day, check the boxes. At the end of the month, look back at what you built.

And remember this while you’re doing it: habits compound the exact same way money does. A dollar invested today is worth more than the same dollar invested next year, not because the dollar changes, but because time is doing the work in the background, every single day, whether you’re paying attention or not. Your habits work the same way. Get one percent better each day and stick with it for a year, and you don’t end up 365 percent better; you end up nearly 38 times better, because each day’s progress builds on every day before it. That is not a metaphor. That is the math.

Fifteen extra minutes a day does not sound like much. It isn’t, on day one. But I believe those 15 minutes will compound over the course of the month and the year into better health, better relationships, and better control over your money. And all three, working together, point to the only goal that actually matters underneath any of this: a happier life.

Start Bold

1. Pick your 5-5-5 today: one physical activity, your plan for who you’ll call, and your money move. Write all three down in one place.

2. Choose your tracking method: notes app, spreadsheet, whiteboard, journal- whatever you will actually use- and check it every single night in September.

3. Tell one person you’re doing this. Accountability compounds too, and you will be far more likely to finish what you started if someone else knows you started it.

We build financial wealth not for status or scorekeeping, but to fuel the areas of life that matter most: family, health, growth, generosity, joy. September isn’t about becoming a different person by October 1st. It’s about proving to yourself, in small daily reps, that you don’t have to wait for a new year to become the person you actually want to be. Four months is plenty of time to turn 2026 into a year you are proud of, if you stop waiting for permission to start.

Your Turn

Are you in for September? Reply and let me know which of the three- health, relationships, or money- you think will be hardest for you to stay consistent with. That is usually the one worth focusing on most.

Leave a comment

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process - people who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the life you’re building, you’re in the right place. New here? Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

If this one hit home, share it with someone who needs to hear it today.

Share

Milo’s mom took him to the pediatrician for what she thought was a cold. The doctor looked him over, ran some tests, and sent her home to pack a bag. A hospital room was already waiting for them. A seemingly healthy three-year-old walked into that appointment. A family walked out into two years of fighting for his life.

This past weekend, that same little boy dominated our basketball hoop. My teenage sons and their friends kept feeding him the ball, and every shot he made, they cheered as if he had just won Game 7. If you had pulled up to our driveway and seen nothing else, you would have seen a happy six-year-old showing off for an audience that adored him. You never would have guessed what his family had just come through.

A Wish Granted

For my 50th birthday, we raised money to provide a Make-A-Wish trip for Milo, who was in treatment for cancer. You can read that story here: My Greatest Accomplishments at 50. That was earlier this year. His dream was a vacation to the Disney Resort in Hawaii, or “to fly to the beach” as he put it. This past weekend, we finally got to meet Milo and his parents in person and hear the whole story, from well before the trip through the trip itself.

Subscribe now

One Dream

“A healthy man has a thousand wishes. A sick man has only one.” Proverb

I watched that play out for forty years with my own dad and his MS. I watched it again standing in my kitchen listening to Milo’s parents.

For two years, they did not have a hundred plans for their lives. They had one hope: a healthy kid. They put life on hold for that single dream.

But, the Make-A-Wish trip gave them something to look forward to. Thinking about a future trip, talking about it, planning every detail of it, became their focal point during the most painful parts of Milo’s treatment. Not a metaphor. The literal thing that got a family through chemotherapy. When Milo finally rang the bell marking the end of treatment, they could not wait to go.

It hit me again how fast a life can change. One ordinary appointment, and everything after it is different. None of us know what is ahead. That is exactly why today is worth embracing while you have it.

The Trip of a Lifetime

And once they went, they loved every minute of it. The resort was incredible. They met other wish kids there and got to share that particular, uncomplicated joy that only kids can share with each other. Milo rode the lazy river over and over, “one more time,” the same three words my own boys used to beg me for when they were his age.

Halfway through the trip, Milo turned to his mom and said, “Mom, this is the trip of a lifetime.” I imagine those words will ring in her ears for the rest of her life.

His parents told us the whole thing marked a new chapter for their family. Before, there was the battle. The trip was the celebration. After was a new life, a normal, cancer-free life.

Anticipation, the Trip, the Memory

It brought me right back to a three-part way of thinking about experiences and vacations that I have written about before: I Cried the Whole Ride Home. I love looking forward to a trip, the anticipation of it. I love the trip itself and the experience shared with the people I love. And then I love what comes after: the return on that investment, a memory that lasts a lifetime.

I have used that framework to talk about family vacations. I had never used it to talk about getting through cancer treatment. Watching Milo’s family live all three parts of it, under circumstances so much harder than anything my family has ever faced, gave it a weight I was not ready for.

A Room Full of Parents

Milo’s parents told this whole story out loud, to a room full of our family and friends. I looked around partway through. Every parent in that room had the same look on their face, eyes welling up, imagining what it would feel like if it had been their own child on the other end of that visit with the pediatrician. Nobody said it out loud. Nobody had to. We were all grateful we had never had to go through it ourselves.

Just a Kid Again

Our family has been fortunate. We have never had to face a life-threatening illness with our boys. But we learned more from this little guy in one afternoon than from almost anywhere else this year. At our house, Milo was not a kid with cancer. He was just a kid, splashing around in our pool and holding his own on the basketball court against boys twice his size, who let him dominate and cheered every shot as if it belonged in a highlight reel.

I am sure the afternoon meant something to Milo and his parents. But it meant more to the rest of us who were there. Watching that kid and hearing what he and his family fought through to get to this ordinary, joyful Saturday is something I will not forget.

To everyone who donated to Milo’s wish, thank you. Your money mattered, and it did real good in the world. But the memory created for my family that afternoon, watching a boy who beat cancer just be a boy again, is something no amount of money could have bought on its own. Money was the tool. The memory is the return.

Start Bold

1. Look into a cause doing this kind of work near you, whether it is Make-A-Wish or something local, and give something this month, whatever size makes sense for you.

2. The next time you plan a trip or an experience for your family, pay attention to the anticipation itself. Let looking forward to it be part of the joy, not just the lead-up to the real thing.

3. If you know a family walking through something hard right now, do not wait for the perfect moment to show up. Milo’s family needed something to look forward to in the middle of the fight, not just after it.

Your Turn

What’s one thing you’re looking forward to right now? Drop it in the comments. I would love to hear.

Leave a comment

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process - people who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the life you’re building, you’re in the right place. New here? Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

If this one hit home, share it with someone who needs to hear it today. And if you have a minute, tap the heart below. It helps more people find these posts, and it genuinely makes my day.

Share

P.S. The Bold Life September to Remember Challenge kicks off next week! Get ready for a bold way to make the most of the rest of 2026. 5 minutes a day, 3 areas of your life, 30 days. Details coming next Tuesday.

“Readers are leaders.” I have been telling my kids that their entire lives. I believe it completely. And for most of my life, I didn't live it at all.

I grew up loving sports, not books. If I had free time, there was zero chance I was picking up something to read. I was picking up a baseball, a soccer ball, or whatever ball I could find first. We had a massive collection of CliffsNotes in our house that got me through high school without ever finishing an actual book. It worked well enough that I never questioned it.

Subscribe now

College Changed the Equation, Slightly

In a literature class in college, I finally decided I had better read the real thing instead of the summary if I wanted an A. So I did. And I realized reading was not nearly as painful as I had built it up to be in my head.

That cracked something open. In my twenties, I started reading personal growth books. My eyes had already been opened to that world a little earlier, thanks to motivation tapes I grew up hearing when my mom took a job in the training department at a financial services company. I did not know it at the time, but that was planting a seed. Throughout my twenties, I read a handful of books a year. Not a habit yet. More like an occasional visit.

The Lull, and What Came With It

Then my thirties hit, and reading all but disappeared, right alongside my physical fitness. That was the first time in my life I really felt decline instead of progress, and the two showed up together. That wasn't a coincidence then, but I understand it now.

Turning it around did not start with a grand plan. It started with tweaks. I started eating better. I started working out again, and it was hard and demoralizing at first. I was weak and out of shape and had to be honest with myself about both. But I kept showing up. And somewhere in that same stretch, I started reading again too, just a few pages a day.

In time, that small habit picked up momentum. It started compounding, the same way money does when you leave it alone and keep adding to it. I began to see the real impact reading was having on how I thought and how I made decisions. People hand you the best lessons from their entire lives in two hundred pages. I can learn in a few hours what it took somebody else fifty years to figure out. That is an absurd trade if you think about it.

For the last several years, I have been fully hooked. I read around thirty books a year now. That number sounds like a lot until you break it down. Thirty books a year is less than twenty pages a day. Reading checks two boxes at once for me. It helps you grow and get better, and as I like to say, progress equals happiness. Self-improvement is one of the spokes on the wheel of life, and it is one I ignored for a long time before I finally picked it up.

Where I’d Start

So let's get into a few books I recommend. I have dozens I could point you toward. Plenty of great modern-day books are out there, but so many are rooted in the classics, like these three. People have been writing about what makes a happy life and how money fits into that picture for over a hundred years. Money, mindset, and people. Many modern books simply repackage these same underlying storylines.

Three Classics

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Written in 1937 after Hill spent two decades studying the most successful people of his era, it has sold more than 100 million copies. The title makes it sound like it is only about money, but it is really about mindset, persistence, and defining what you actually want before you go chase it.

As Man Thinketh by James Allen. Written in 1903, barely a hundred pages, and still sold more than 10 million copies without a marketing machine behind it, just word of mouth across generations. The core idea is simple and still underrated: your circumstances are shaped far more by your thinking than most people want to admit.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Written in 1936 and with more than 30 million copies sold, it reminds us that none of this works in isolation. You can master your mindset and your money and still miss the point if you never learn how to genuinely connect with people. Wealth without relationships is not much of a wealth at all.

None of these books are flashy. None of them promise a shortcut. That is probably why they have lasted a century.

Start Bold

1. Pick a book that interests you and can help you become better.

2. Set a target of ten pages a day. Not an hour. Just a few pages. Trade a few minutes of scrolling for a few minutes of reading.

3. Keep a running note, digital or paper, of the one idea from each chapter you actually want to remember.

Your Turn

What is one book that changed how you think about money or life? Drop the title in the comments. I am always looking for the next one.

Leave a comment

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process - people who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the life you’re building, you’re in the right place. New here? Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

If this one hit home, share it with someone who needs to hear it today. And if you have a minute, tap the heart below. It helps more people find these posts, and it genuinely makes my day.

Share

I am systematic about my calendar. I optimize nearly every minute of the workday, and most days that means back to back meetings from 8:30 in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon. I learned a long time ago that I need at least two hours of flex time built into that window, time for emails, phone calls, and the unexpected fires that always show up. It is a simple rule. I know exactly why it exists.

Last week, I broke it anyway. One day I let a last minute meeting pop up and take away one of my flex hours, so I only had a single hour of flex time instead of two. By early afternoon I was already behind, and the stress of being behind made me start moving faster than I should have. Somewhere in that rush, I approved two new tires for my car that weren’t the ones I wanted. I did not catch it until the end of the day, after they were installed, which meant I now had to schedule another appointment to swap them out. Wasted time, wasted money, and a mistake I made because I did not give myself room to think clearly.

But the part that actually stuck with me was not the tires. It was that I walked into my house that night carrying the frustration of a day I had rushed through, and I was short with my family over something that had nothing to do with them. The bad decision did not stay contained to my afternoon. It followed me home.

Subscribe now

Why I Get More Upset With Repeats Than With Mistakes

I hate losing. I hate making mistakes. But nothing gets under my skin quite like making the same mistake twice. I know myself well enough to know that when I fail, I do not hide from it or make excuses. I let it sink in, not so I can wallow in it, but so I remember exactly how it felt and make sure it does not happen again. So when I catch myself breaking a rule I already learned the hard way, like my own flex time rule, I do not just get frustrated at the situation. I get frustrated at myself for knowing better and doing it anyway.

That is the part of failure most people do not talk about. It is not just the mistake. It is the argument you have with yourself afterward, the one where you already know the lesson and you still have to relearn it.

The Bank Note That Almost Broke Us

When something gets hard enough that most people would walk away, I have found that is often the exact moment right before things turn. My belief is that this is the best time to push forward, to push beyond the uncomfortable and get to the other side. And the other side is where all the riches lie. I have seen this play out in business more than once, but nothing tested it like 2008.

That year, I opened a letter from our bank. We had a construction loan we expected to renew for another year without issue. Instead, the letter said the note was due in full within thirty days. Roughly a million dollars. We did not have anywhere close to that sitting in cash, and no banks were taking on new loans.

I had friends in real estate who walked away from loans that year. They called it “the cost of doing business.” They handed the keys to the bank. I understood why they made that choice, but it was never going to be mine. When I sign my name on a loan, that is my word, and I do not sign my name to something I do not intend to follow through on. We brought in a partner to help carry that loan, and to stay in business through those down years, we got resourceful. We ran the company lean, and because clients could not sell their existing homes to move up into a new build, we shifted into renovation work instead, helping them improve the homes they already had.

Coming out of that stretch, we bought a self storage facility at a price that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier, using a private loan from a former client because banks were still hesitant to lend. We turned the facility around, tripled our money on it, and used that as seed capital to buy more than ten investment properties in the years since. None of that happens if we walk away when the letter arrives. It only happens because we stayed in it past the point where quitting would have been the easier, and more accepted, choice.

The Cost of Holding On Too Tight

Here is the part I have been slower to admit. The same scarcity mindset that got us through 2008 also held me back for years afterward. For a long time, my instinct was to do everything with our own money and keep ownership entirely to ourselves. It kept us lean, and it is a real reason we survived when others did not. But it also meant our growth ramped up much slower than it could have.

It took me the better part of fifteen years to fully shift into an abundance mindset, to bring in more partners, ask for more help, and lean on more mentors instead of insisting on figuring everything out myself. Once I did, I watched something interesting happen. Dividing up the pie did not shrink what I had. It let the whole pie grow so much larger that my slice of it became worth far more than the entire pie ever was when I held onto all of it myself.

Where This Shows Up for You

You do not need a construction company or an investor to feel this. You just need one place in your life right now where you are protecting a small slice instead of growing the whole pie. Maybe it is a coach you know you need but will not pay for. Maybe it is mowing your own grass every Saturday to save a hundred dollars, while your kids are inside wondering when you will finally be done so you can spend time with them. Maybe it is simply refusing to ask for help, at work or at home, because some part of you still equates asking with weakness instead of strategy. The pie only stays small because you are the one holding onto every slice.

The Pillow Test, Updated

I have always relied on what I call the Pillow Test. If I can go to bed knowing I did the best I could with the information I had that day, I sleep soundly, win or lose. I still believe in that. But I have added something to it over the years. The Pillow Test tells me whether I gave my best effort. It does not always tell me whether I was gripping too tight.

Failure is fertilizer, but only if you let it show you both things, the mistakes worth pushing through and the grip you need to loosen. Push through the moment that seems too hard for anyone else to survive. Just do not mistake that same stubbornness for a reason to carry everything alone.

Your Turn

What are you doing yourself right now that you should be handing off or asking for help on?

Leave a comment

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process, people who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the life you’re building, you’re in the right place. New here? Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

If this one hit home, share it with someone who needs to hear it today. And if you have a minute, tap the heart below. It helps more people find their way to these posts, and it genuinely makes my day.

Share

What would being financially rich actually change in your life? For me, it doesn’t start with a bank account balance. It starts with what money allows me to do.

Money lets me surprise my wife with a pair of fancy purple cowboy boots just because. It lets me create memories with my boys that they’ll carry for the rest of their lives. It lets me take friends on trips that deepen the relationship instead of just filling a calendar. It lets me buy healthy food to fuel my days. It lets me build businesses and hold a portfolio of investments. And it lets me give, generously and often, to the people and causes I care about.

Every spoke of life gets stronger when money becomes fuel instead of the destination. That’s the whole idea. Money is not good or bad in itself. It’s fuel, and fuel only matters for where it takes you.

Are there people with more money than me? Yes, of course. Do I care? No. There will always be someone with more than you have. There is only one richest person in the world. Does that make him the happiest person in the world? I don’t think so. I’d dare to say I live a richer life than he does. Sorry, Elon.

We’ve done the groundwork already. A few weeks back we talked about knowing your target, then we identified the money mindset that’s been running quietly in the background of your decisions, and worked through what it actually takes to change your money mindset. If you’re just joining us, it’s worth going back to read those first. Today, we get practical.

Subscribe now

The Get Rich Formula

If you remember nothing else from today, remember these three lines.

Make more. Spend less. Invest the rest.

Make more. Grow your income, whether that’s through your career, a side business, or building skills that make you more valuable. This is the lever most people ignore because it feels harder than cutting a subscription. It isn’t. It’s usually the fastest way to change your trajectory.

Spend less. Not deprivation. Intentionality. The gap between what you earn and what you spend is your freedom margin, and it’s worth protecting fiercely.

Invest the rest. This is where the real wealth gets built. Every dollar that gets invested instead of spent starts working for you instead of the other way around. Consistent, boring, unglamorous investing over time, not a hot tip or a lucky break, is what lets time and compounding do the heavy lifting.

Three levers. Pull all three, and the compounding does the rest. Simple to say. It takes a lifetime to master. But mastery isn’t the bar. Progress is. And once your money starts to grow, make your money matter. When you spend on the things you value most, it creates an internal drive to make even more of it.

Revisiting the Money Moves

I previously wrote about the 16 specific strategies that made the biggest difference in my own financial life. Sixteen is a lot to hold onto at once, so let’s zoom out. Almost all of them fall into three buckets, and they map directly onto spend less and invest the rest above.

Build a reserve for the unexpected. Before you invest a single dollar, you need a cushion. Life doesn’t ask permission before it throws a nail in a tire, an unexpected medical bill, or a broken HVAC unit in your direction. A reserve isn’t about fear. It’s what lets a thousand-dollar surprise stay a thousand-dollar surprise instead of becoming a crisis.

Be strategic with debt. Not all debt is the enemy. Debt used to buy an appreciating asset, like a home or a business, can build wealth. Debt used to fund a lifestyle you can’t afford is what keeps people stuck. Avoid consumer debt as a rule, and if you’re carrying any high-interest debt right now, pay that down before you do almost anything else. There’s no investment out there that reliably beats the return of eliminating a 22 percent credit card rate.

Start investing. Once your reserve is in place and your high-interest debt is handled, this is where the game shifts from defense to offense. Consistent, boring, unglamorous investing over time is how real wealth gets built, letting compounding work its magic.

None of this happens overnight, and it isn’t supposed to be. You build the reserve, then you clean up the debt, then you invest, and you keep doing all three at once as your life evolves. That’s how you get rich financially. Not through a single decision, but through the accumulation of many smart ones, made consistently, over a long period of time.

One Smart Decision at a Time

This week, don’t try to fix everything. Just pick one of the three buckets and take a look at where you stand.

If you don’t have a reserve, open a separate interest-bearing savings account; every dollar counts, and set up a small automatic transfer into it. If you’re carrying high interest debt, write down the amount and the actual rate on each one, then make a plan to attack it first. If you’ve handled both of those, look at whether your investing is actually consistent or just occasional. The best way to make it consistent is to automate it.

Habits are amazing. I’ve brushed my teeth twice a day for more than 40 years. But the money going into my retirement account happens without me thinking about it at all, which is even better than a habit that requires action. Don’t worry, Elon is working on a robot that will automate that tooth brushing for us too.

Pick one bucket. That’s how the long game is won. One smart decision at a time.

Your Turn

Which one needs your attention most right now: your reserve, your debt, or your investing?

Leave a comment

Minor in money. Major in life.

If this was useful, consider sharing it with someone who could use the reminder that financial wealth is built over time, not all at once.

Share

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process, people who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the life you’re building, you’re in the right place. New here? Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

By the time I was in high school, I was the one paying our family’s bills. I wrote the checks, I balanced the accounts, I knew where every dollar was going before it went there. Not because anyone assigned it to me. Because I understood the numbers better than anybody else in the house, and somebody had to.

My mom’s move into financial services put me around people with money for the first time, and it lit something up. I wanted to understand what they understood. So when it came time for someone in our house to manage the bills, I was the one who’d already started paying attention.

Subscribe now

Pinching pennies runs in my family. My Uncle Tony could work a coupon deal so well that he’d walk out of the store with the product and the store owing him money. That was the water I grew up swimming in. Money wasn’t just tight. Squeezing it was a skill, and we were proud of being good at it.

So when I started in business years later, I brought that same operating system with me. Every decision ran through one filter: what’s the cheapest way to do this. Cheapest materials, cheapest labor, cheapest everything. It felt like discipline. It felt like the smart move. For a while, it was.

Last Week and This Week

Last week we talked about the money story you’re living, the sentence you repeat to yourself often enough that it starts to feel like fact. I told you mine was rooted in scarcity, and that even after I started studying money and investing, that story didn’t let go easily. It stuck around for decades.

Here’s what I didn’t unpack yet. Awareness is step one. It tells you what story you’re living. It doesn’t hand you a new one. This week is about step two: choosing the identity you actually want to build from.

The Identity That Got Me This Far

I want to be clear about something. The scarcity identity wasn’t all bad. It made me sharp with numbers when I was young. It gave me a work ethic and a respect for a dollar that never left me. It’s part of why I could take over the family finances as a teenager without messing it up.

But an identity that gets you started isn’t always the one that gets you where you’re going. Mine had a ceiling. If every decision runs through “what’s the cheapest way to do this,” you end up optimizing for cost instead of value, and you miss the fact that some of the most important returns in business and in life don’t show up on a spreadsheet.

The Shift Nobody Told Me About

It took me a long time to see it, but here’s what changed everything. I started noticing that the moments my business actually grew weren’t the moments I saved the most money. They were the moments I gave more than I had to. Paying a good trade partner fairly instead of squeezing them on price. Taking care of a client in a way they didn’t expect. Showing up for someone with no immediate ask attached.

Treat somebody well, and something in them wants to return the favor. Not because they owe you. Because that’s how relationships work, in business and in life. That single realization did more for my wealth than any budget ever did. Connection and generosity compound the same way money does, and honestly, they compound faster.

That was the second identity. Not the penny-pincher who could out-coupon anybody in the room. Someone who understood that abundance, shared freely, is what actually makes things grow.

Choosing Your New Identity

You don’t get to a new identity by arguing yourself out of the old one. You get there by deciding, on purpose, who you’re becoming, and then feeding that decision with the right inputs. That’s step three in the formula we’re building together: new mentors, new books, new rooms to stand in, environments that make the identity you want feel normal instead of foreign.

So here’s the exercise. Name the identity you’ve been operating from. Not the polished version, the honest one. Then name the identity you want to build from instead. Not a personality transplant. Just a different default answer to the decisions you make every day.

Your Turn + Start Bold

Your Turn: Name your old money identity in one phrase, and the new one you’re choosing in one phrase. Drop both in the comments. I’ll go first: I was the Penny-Pincher. I’m becoming the Connector.

Leave a comment

Start Bold: This week, find one place where your old identity is running the show by default, and make a single decision the way your new identity would. Small is fine. Consistent is the point.

Why We Build a BOLD Life

At BOLD, we believe money is not the goal. It’s a tool. We build financial wealth not to keep score or to chase status, but to unlock freedom: freedom to live aligned with our values, to be connected to the people we love, and to be fulfilled by the choices we make every day. That’s the real payoff. That’s what it means to minor in money and major in life.

Minor in money. Major in life.

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process, people who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the life you’re building, you’re in the right place. New here? Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

If this post gave you something to think about, would you consider sharing it with one person who needs to hear it? It’s the best way for this newsletter to grow.

Share

P.S. Uncle Tony still won’t tell me exactly how the coupon math worked. Some family secrets stay family secrets.

I was a young child when I first realized my dad wasn’t like the other dads anymore. He was one of the nicest, hardest-working men I have ever known, and at forty he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Over the years that followed, I watched him lose his ability to walk, and eventually his ability to do almost anything physical at all.

I could have taken that and written a story out of it that said life isn’t fair, or that we don’t get to choose the cards we are dealt. Honestly, both of those things are true. But somewhere along the way I decided that wasn’t going to be my story. I decided that watching my dad lose so much, so slowly, was going to be my call to action instead. Life is short. Don’t let the grass grow under your feet. That sentence has run underneath almost every decision I have made since, in business, in money, in how I spend my Saturdays with the boys.

Subscribe now

Here is the part I want you to sit with this week. My dad didn’t hand me that story. The event happened to both of us. I am the one who decided what it meant.

Last Week and This Week

Last week we talked about knowing your target: understanding where you actually stand today, where you want to go, and why you want to go there. That’s the compass. Before we get into the tactical side of getting there (the budgets, the systems, the investing) we need to spend some time on something that comes before all of it. Your financial mindset.

The Question Underneath the Number

Here’s something I’ve wondered about for years. Why do some people with plenty still feel like they don’t have enough? Why doesn’t hitting a certain net worth automatically unlock freedom? I’ve met people with more resources than they could spend in three lifetimes who still can’t quite let themselves use any of it. The number changed. The feeling and their story didn’t.

That gap isn’t a math problem. It’s a mindset problem, and it sits underneath every formula we’ll ever talk about here. The block was never in your spreadsheet. It was in your story.

Everybody Has a Story

Everybody has a money story. Not everybody is aware of it.

A money story is the sentence, or small collection of sentences, you repeat to yourself often enough that it starts to feel like truth. Something like, I’m just not good with money. I’ll never catch up. I didn’t grow up learning this stuff. Money just stresses me out.

That sentence shapes almost every financial decision you make, and most people never stop long enough to question where it came from or whether it’s even true.

The Story I Didn’t Choose

I didn’t grow up with much financial intelligence. I grew up in a humble household with blue-collar roots in Pittsburgh. My mom was a teacher, and my dad was a draftsman. They did the best they could with what they had. We owned a home and took real pride in it. But nobody sat me down and explained investing, or compounding, or how money could work for me instead of against me. Money showed up as something you worked hard for, spent, and hoped there was enough of.

Money from a scarcity perspective was common in our household. Money was a factor in every decision. What time we went to the movies (matinee, of course), when we went to the baseball game (Buck Night, aka dollar tickets), we mowed the lawn, changed the oil in the cars. We didn’t pay for anything we could do ourselves. There was no consideration of the value of our time.

That experience planted a story in me. Not a dramatic one, and not a victim story. Just a plain belief that money was something you dealt with, not something you mastered. Everything was a transaction. I lived inside that story for a long time without ever realizing it was there.

Here’s the part most people miss. You didn’t choose your money story. You inherited it from your parents, your environment, your friends, your early experiences. You absorbed what felt normal, what felt safe, what felt risky, what people like you did with money. Then, without ever consciously deciding anything, you started living it out.

That’s why two people with the same income can end up in completely different places twenty years later. Same numbers. Different stories.

We didn’t have rich friends growing up. We didn’t know anyone who ran their own business. But when my mom switched from teaching to working in the sales training department at a financial services company, I was exposed to people who were financially well-off, and I wanted to be like them. I figured people with money didn’t carry the stress ours carried, so I started studying money and investing. That scarcity mindset didn’t let go easily. It stuck with me for decades, even as I kept learning. When I finally shifted to an abundance mindset, the financial results followed.

We may inherit our mindset from others. But we have the ability to rewrite the story to our choosing.

Victims Explain. Leaders Decide.

Once I saw my own story clearly, something shifted. The problem was never that I was bad with money. The problem was that the story I was living no longer matched who I wanted to become. Once you can see the story, you regain your power. Until then, you’re just reacting to it.

A lot of people are living out a victim-style money story without ever calling it that. It sounds reasonable. This is just how things are. I don’t really have control. I’ll deal with it later. I’ll save more once I make more.

Leaders live out a different story. They don’t wait for perfect conditions, or for the moment they feel fully confident, or for the day they finally know everything. They choose a direction and then act in line with it.

The Question That Changes Your Perspective

One of the most useful shifts I ever made was trading one question for another. I stopped asking, "Why is this hard for me?" and started asking, "Who do I want to become with money?" That single change moves the goal from perfection to progress, and progress is a much easier thing to build a life around.

Where Most Financial Advice Gets It Backward

Most personal finance advice starts with tactics. Budgets, apps, rules, spreadsheets. Those matter, and we’ll get to plenty of them in the weeks ahead. But tactics never stick when they conflict with your identity. If you believe deep down that you’re not good with money, no budget will save you. Eventually you’ll sabotage it, just to stay consistent with the story you believe is true.

The story always wins, until you rewrite it.

Rewriting your money story doesn’t mean pretending your past didn’t happen. It means deciding your past doesn’t get to write your future. It means trading a story that keeps you small for one that moves you forward. Not overnight, and not dramatically. Just consistently.

The Formula We’ll Build Together

Over the next several weeks, here’s the path we’re going to walk. First, you identify the story that isn’t serving you. Then you choose a new identity. Then you bring in new inputs, mentors, books, environments that reinforce it. Then you practice alignment, small daily decisions that back it up. And then you let compounding do what it always does.

That’s it. Simple. Not easy, but powerful.

Today we’re only working on step one. Awareness. Because you don’t change a story by deleting it. You change it by seeing it clearly, maybe for the first time.

Your Turn + Start Bold

Your Turn: Take five minutes this week and write down the sentence you most often tell yourself about money. No judgment, no fixing, just write it down. Then ask yourself one honest question: Does this story help you become who you want to be?

Drop one word in the comments: is the money story you grew up with rooted more in scarcity, or abundance?

Leave a comment

Start Bold: This week, simply notice when that story shows up. When you swipe your card. When you avoid looking at an account. When you delay a decision you already know you should make. Awareness is not weakness. It’s where change begins.

Why We Build a BOLD Life

At BOLD, we believe money is not the goal. It’s a tool. We build financial wealth not to keep score or to chase status, but to unlock freedom: freedom to live aligned with our values, to be connected to the people we love, and to be fulfilled by the choices we make every day. That’s the real payoff. That’s what it means to minor in money and major in life.

Minor in money. Major in life.

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process, people who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the life you’re building, you’re in the right place. New here? Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

If this post gave you something to think about, would you consider sharing it with one person who needs to hear it? It’s the best way this newsletter grows.

Share

In April of 2023, a woman named Betty Glover finally retired. Not at sixty-five, not at seventy. She was ninety-one. She had spent seven decades in the workforce, and for her last ten years of working, into her eighties and then her nineties, she was still scanning groceries at a store in Oregon because she had no way to stop. She was not working to have a purpose or to stay sharp. She was working because she never built the security to walk away. The only reason she got to hang up her apron is that strangers on the internet raised eighty-two thousand dollars so she could afford food and medicine without standing at a register to earn it.

Nobody plans to end up there. What actually happens is you go through life without taking the time to examine where you stand, in this case, financially. You check your accounts, you feel more or less fine, and you move on without ever asking whether “fine” is actually enough. That is not a financial failure. It is a drift, the same drift we have talked about in this newsletter before, and ignoring your number is one of its easiest forms. Addressing it feels harder than avoiding it, right up until the years make the choice for you.

Subscribe now

Wherever you are and whatever is currently sitting in your accounts, you very likely have more time than Betty did before her GoFundMe Hail Mary at 91. Time, paired with compounding, is still available to you. But it only works if you start now, not five years from now. Step one in moving toward any goal is figuring out what the goal actually is.

Money is a tool, not the goal. The whole point of building wealth is to buy yourself options, freedom, and time for the people and pursuits that actually matter to you. But you cannot trade money for those things if you do not understand your own money. The first step is knowing your target.

A few months ago, we talked about your net worth, your financial baseline. That number tells you where you stand today. But real transformation begins when you decide where you want to go. Your values guide your reasons for wanting to build wealth. Your time reveals how you want to live your life. Now comes the piece that ties it together, the target that turns direction into destination.

What gets measured gets done. What gets defined gets achieved.

A Kid With a Notebook

When I was seventeen, I started tracking my net worth in a notebook. It was not impressive, a few thousand dollars and college tuition still ahead of me. But writing it down gave me something I did not have before: direction.

We did not grow up with much money, and I had one goal: to be financially rich. I had no grand plan, just motivation. Study hard, get into the best college I could, and move up from there. Over time, I learned something that has held up for thirty years: sustained grit is a superpower.

Tracking my net worth became the habit that shaped my financial direction. Every dollar saved, every loan paid off, every investment made became visible progress. Without that awareness, we drift, spending reactively with no eye toward the future. But when you measure something, you manage it. That notebook was the first step toward building my financial life on purpose instead of by accident.

A Quick Recap: Calculating Your Net Worth

If you have not done this yet, here’s the simple version. List your assets: cash, retirement and brokerage accounts, the market value of your home, rental properties, business assets, and your car at a realistic value. List your liabilities: mortgage, car loans, student loans, credit cards, and any business debt. Subtract the liabilities from the assets. That number is your net worth and the starting point for everything else in this post. We did a more in-depth walkthrough of how to calculate your own net worth a few months ago.

Why Most People Avoid Setting a Target

People fear financial clarity, not because they do not care, but because clarity forces accountability. They fear the number will be too big, so they never write it down. They fear it will be too small, so they avoid looking. They fear the change a real target demands, since new habits feel uncomfortable even when they are good for you. But that fear disappears once clarity shows up. Define your target, and the path becomes visible; once it is, action gets easier.

Write It Down

SMART goals, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-bound, are a useful framework, but they miss something essential: the physical act of writing your goal down on paper. Studies show that writing down your goals makes you roughly 42 percent more likely to achieve them. A written goal stops being wishful thinking and starts becoming part of your identity.

Start with a logical checkpoint: five or ten years from now, a milestone birthday, the year your kids leave for college, the moment you want to be work optional, the age you want to retire. Short-term goals build momentum; long-term goals create direction. You do not need a perfect plan from day one, just a clear destination and the willingness to take consistent steps toward it.

My first real target grew out of exactly this kind of thinking. At 21, with my net worth still sitting in the tens of thousands, I set out to hit seven figures by 27. The goal was SMART; it was on paper, and it sat in the background of my mind for the next six years. Some of that early growth came from a lucky win in the stock market, a small-cap stock that got bought out. But luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. If I had spent that first few thousand dollars on a nicer car instead of leaving it invested, I never would have been in a position to get lucky.

We started our building company around the same time I set that goal, just the two of us framing houses for other builders, sunup to sundown. Every hour I worked, I saw as another dollar I could invest. I lived cheaply, saved aggressively, and let the compounding take over. I still have the net worth statement from the day before my 27th birthday. I had hit my target exactly.

Did I go spend it all in celebration? Of course not. I probably ate pasta and Ragu that night and quietly set my next target instead. I knew bigger plans were ahead, and money only works for you if you let it keep compounding. Compound interest has been called the most powerful force in the universe for a reason.

Reverse Engineering Retirement

Start with a simple question: how much money will I need each year to live comfortably? A general rule of thumb is that you can safely withdraw about 4 percent of your investable assets each year. If you want 80,000 dollars a year beyond Social Security, you need roughly 2 million dollars saved, since 4 percent of 2 million is 80,000. That is your target, clear, measurable, specific.

Mapping the Plan

Once you have your number, the next question is how you actually get there, and this is where a lot of people stall out. Turning a target into a monthly action feels complicated, but it does not have to be.

Take your number, your timeline, and a reasonable expected return, and you can reverse-engineer exactly how much you need to save and invest each month to arrive on time. You do not need a financial model or a spreadsheet built from scratch. Open any AI tool and ask a version of this question: If I need $ 2 million in 20 years and I am starting from zero, how much do I need to invest monthly at an 8 percent average return to get there? You will have a real, specific number in seconds.

That number becomes your new habit. Not a wish, not a someday, a monthly action you can actually take starting this week.

Living the BOLD Life Financially

At this point, you have two pieces of clarity: your net worth, which is your starting line, and your financial goal, which is your finish line. When you know where you are and where you want to go, you can finally build the path between them. Financial wealth is not an accident. It is built with intention, clarity, and consistent action, and when you combine these with values and purpose, you create a life rich in money and meaning.

Your Turn

You do not need to share your number. Write it down for yourself and keep it somewhere you will see it.

But tell me this in the comments. What is your number for? Is it retirement? A life of freedom to work on your own terms? Paying for your kids’ college? Something else entirely?

Leave a comment

The number is just math. The why is what makes you actually chase it.

We build financial wealth not for status or scorekeeping, but to use it as a tool to fuel the areas of life that matter most. Family. Health. Growth. Generosity. Joy. That is what it means to build a life rich in both money and meaning.

Minor in money. Major in life.

A Favor

Thanks for reading The BOLD Life. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support the work.

If today’s post struck a chord, clicking the little heart or dropping a comment helps it reach more people, and it makes my day.

Share

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process. People who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the kind of life you’re building, you’re in the right place. If you’re new here, welcome. Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life to get a feel for the framework, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

P.S. You do not need the perfect plan today. You need a why. Start there.

Fourteen years ago, my twin boys were born on the Fourth of July. That day changed my life more dramatically than almost anything else, and it changed it in ways I am still discovering. If you want the full story of how Max and Mason came into the world, you can read about it here.

Fatherhood Changed How I Saw Everything

Becoming a father completely reordered how I saw the world. It also gave me a deeper appreciation for my own dad. And I shared my mom’s story last week. There is something about holding your own child that makes you understand your parents in a way you never could before.

Subscribe now

The Time Crunch Nobody Warns You About

When the boys were born, I was suddenly in a time crunch I had never experienced. I could not work all hours anymore. I wanted to be home with those two boys, and they required more of my time than anything ever had. Here is something nobody tells you about twins. When you have one baby, and that baby falls asleep, you get to sleep too. When you have two, what are the odds they both go down at the same time? Slim to none. I can remember standing up, rocking one of them, and literally falling asleep on my feet.

Every Yes Is a No to Something Else

Life is always a series of trades. I have written before about how time is your most valuable asset, and when our boys were born is when I truly started to appreciate this concept. Every time you say yes to one thing, you are saying no to something else. I realized almost immediately that I needed to work less. That meant I was done by 5:30 at the latest, no matter what was sitting on my desk. It meant I was done working weekends. As a business owner, you can work twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. I like to say that work will fill whatever time you allow it to fill. If you do not draw the line, nobody draws it for you.

We also realized television had to go. We canceled our TV service shortly after the boys were born, because we were dedicated to soaking up every minute with them. But before I get to that, I have to go back further, to the pregnancy itself.

When Jana was pregnant with the boys, we went in every week for ultrasounds, because there was a chance they had a condition that could have been fatal. That kind of news has a way of changing your perspective overnight. We had a friend who lost one of her twins during that same stretch of time, and after that, our entire pregnancy became a countdown. Take it easy. Keep those boys in there as long as possible. Jana threw up more times than I can count during those months, and she never once complained about it. She kept a smile on her face through all of it, because healthy boys were the only goal that mattered.

When they were finally born, the delivery itself was scarier than anything we had prepared for. But even in the middle of that fear, we found incredible joy. And when we got home with two newborns and zero sleep, we did not care about the sleepless nights, because we had healthy babies in our arms. Sometimes life throws you a curveball specifically to hand you perspective. You just have to be willing to catch it.

My wife had dreamed of being a mom her whole life, and when those boys arrived, she transformed into an incredible mother right in front of me. Her attitude through it all, the ultrasounds, the delivery, the diaper changes, was a masterclass in gratitude. I am a huge believer in growth and progress, in working to make tomorrow better than today. But I learned from Jana that you have to do that while also appreciating how fortunate you already are right now. I have written before about my dad’s forty year battle with MS, and that experience taught me never to take my own health for granted. Appreciate what you have while you have it.

You have a choice every single day in how you respond to what is in front of you. Is that blowout diaper truly a disaster, or is it the greatest gift in the world, the chance to change a diaper on a healthy child? Jana chose the second version every time, and it is a perspective that still sticks with me today. You cannot control the situation. You can only choose your reaction to it.

Less Time, More Money

Here is the part that surprised me most. Working fewer hours did not cost me income. It did the opposite. It forced me to make better business decisions, better trades between my time and my money, and to be far more purposeful with the hours I did have. I ended up making more money working less, not because I found a shortcut, but because scarcity made me sharper.

A Season of Milestones

These last few months have been full of milestones. I celebrated my 50th birthday. We passed the three year anniversary of my dad’s passing. I had a wonderful Father’s Day with my boys in Omaha, even though I wished more than anything my own dad could have been there too. And just a few days ago, those same boys turned fourteen. Milestones like these have a way of forcing you to reflect. Time keeps moving whether you pay attention to it or not.

I Am Not Off Cruise Control Either

Most people have their life on cruise control. I understand why. Cruise control is comfortable. But comfortable is not the same as intentional.

I am not writing this from some perfect vantage point where every hour of my day is optimized and every minute counts. I waste time too. There are still days I get to the end of and wonder where the hours went, days I let slip into the couch instead of into my life. We all do. Nobody gets off cruise control completely, and anyone who tells you they have is not being honest with you. The goal is not perfection. The goal is to keep those wasted days to a minimum, and to notice when you are drifting instead of letting the drift become the norm.

Change One Habit Today

It starts smaller than people think. It starts with one habit. Pick the thing that is keeping you stuck in neutral, whether that is an extra hour of television, scrolling your phone in bed, or whatever your version of autopilot looks like, and swap it for something that moves you forward. Trade the TV for a walk. Trade the scroll for ten minutes with your kid before bed. You do not need to overhaul your whole life today. You need to change one habit today, and let that be the thing that gets you off cruise control.

Get off of it. Disrupt the routine. Cherish what is in front of you, because it will not stay in front of you forever. Make the most of today.

Start Bold

1. Name the one habit that is keeping you stuck in neutral right now.

2. Pick one thing to replace it with this week, something small and specific.

3. Protect one hour this week, no matter what, for the people who matter most.

Your Turn

If you have kids, what is the moment that changed how you thought about time? I would love to hear it in the comments.

Leave a comment

Minor in money. Major in life.

A Favor

If this post struck a chord, would you consider sharing it with someone who needs to hear it today? And if you have a second, clicking the little heart below helps these posts reach more people. It also makes my day.

Share

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process. People who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the kind of life you’re building, you’re in the right place. If you’re new here, welcome. Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life to get a feel for the framework, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

P.S. Happy birthday to my boys. I wouldn't trade these 14 years of time to be with anyone else.

My mom just celebrated a milestone birthday. If you read about the purple balloons and the hot air balloon ride a few months back, you already know we don't do these things quietly in my family. I still won't put a number on her age here, partly because she would never forgive me, but mostly because she looks and moves and shows up with the energy of someone decades younger, and she'd rather you see that than do the math. A few months ago she did a Function Health panel, the kind that runs your blood work and biomarkers and spits out a biological age instead of a calendar one. Hers came back at 67. That's more than a decade younger than the number on her driver's license.

She still works a full schedule selling real estate. Not because she has to. She doesn’t need the money. She could have stopped twenty years ago and lived comfortably on what she’d already built. She has stayed in the game anyway, and she consistently ranks among the top producers in our entire region, going head to head with agents forty and fifty years younger than her.

I used to think she kept working out of habit, or maybe a fear of sitting still. I don’t think that anymore. I think she figured out something most people never do.

Subscribe now

What She’s Actually Buying With Her Time

Watch her for a week, and you’ll see it. Negotiating a contract keeps her mind sharp in a way crossword puzzles never could, because the stakes are real and the other side is trying to outmaneuver her. Showing houses keeps her on her feet and moving through the world instead of settling into a recliner. Taking a client to lunch after closing isn’t networking to her. It’s her social calendar. The work is not separate from her life. It has become one of the ways she stays connected, stays engaged, stays alive in the fullest sense of that word.

Meanwhile, people her age who retired with good intentions are watching their world get smaller. The structure that was used to organize their days is gone, and nothing has replaced it. Some have struggled with that more than they’d ever admit out loud. My mom never had that problem because she never stopped building. I’d argue the biological age test didn’t reveal something separate from that fact. It measured the fact itself.

There’s a guy in our local neighborhood named Bob who proves the same point from a completely different angle. Bob retired at sixty-five from a long career doing something else entirely. Within a few months, he was bored out of his mind. So he went back to school, in his sixties, and got a degree in personal training. He’s been doing one-on-one sessions for more than twenty-five years now. He’s in his nineties today, and he looks and moves like a man decades younger. No pill did that. No trick. Just a decision to build a second chapter instead of coasting through the one that was left, and the discipline to actually live inside that decision every day since.

This is not a story about working forever instead of retiring. Plenty of people retire well and build rich lives on the other side of a career. This is a story about what happens when you treat the decades after fifty as a chapter still being written instead of a slow walk to the credits.

The Trap of Peak Thinking

There’s an assumption that runs underneath a lot of midlife thinking, and it rarely gets said out loud because it sounds defeatist when you put it into words. The assumption goes something like this: the best chapters are probably already behind me. I had my run. Now I manage what I built, protect what I have, and try not to lose too much ground on the way down.

It’s easy to see how someone arrives there. By your forties or fifties, you’ve usually hit some real markers. Career, family, maybe a level of success you didn’t expect when you were twenty-five and broke. It’s tempting to look at that and think the climb is over, that what’s left is mostly maintenance.

But that’s not actually how it works, and it’s worth asking why we believe it anyway.

What You Have Now That You Didn’t Have Then

At twenty-five, I had energy and almost nothing else. No real capital, no network worth mentioning, no scar tissue from failure to teach me what actually matters versus what just feels urgent. I made up for all of that with hours. I worked constantly because I had nothing else to spend.

What I have now is different and, in most ways, better. I have clarity about what I actually want, rather than chasing whatever looks impressive. I have relationships built over decades, not contacts collected over a weekend. I have enough financial stability to make decisions based on what matters, not what’s desperate. And I have something twenty-five-year-old me could never have had: the lived experience of watching choices play out over enough years to know which ones were right.

The resources are different. The stakes, if you actually choose to use them, are higher. That combination should produce better decades, not lesser ones. The only thing standing in the way is the belief that it can’t.

Share

Best Days Ahead Isn’t a Slogan. It’s a Decision

I don’t say “your best days are ahead of you” because it sounds nice on a coffee mug. I say it because I’ve watched it be true in my mom’s life, in Bob’s, and in stretches of my own, and I’ve watched the opposite be just as true for people who simply assumed otherwise and built nothing to prove themselves wrong.

The Floater believes that, somewhere beneath the surface, the interesting part of his story has already happened. That belief becomes self-fulfilling. He stops reaching because reaching feels pointless if the outcome is already decided. And the moment you stop reaching is the moment you start managing decline instead of building toward anything.

My mom never decided her story was finished. Bob didn’t either, even after the first chapter ended completely. They both kept showing up, kept staying sharp, kept choosing to build because the alternative never appealed to them. They are, by every measure that matters, more alive in their seventies, eighties, and nineties than most people I know who are decades younger and coasting.

The question is not whether your best days are ahead of you. People half their age would tell you to ask my mom and Bob if that’s possible. The real question is whether you are building toward them on purpose or just waiting around to see what happens.

3 Bold Moves to Try This Week

• Name one thing you’ve written off as “probably done” for you- a goal, a skill, a relationship, a version of your health- and ask honestly whether that’s true or just a story you’ve been telling yourself.

• Find your version of my mom or Bob. Think of someone older than you who is still building, still sharp, still in the arena. Ask them one real question about how they think about this season of their life.

• Pick one decision this week that only makes sense if your best days are actually still ahead. Make it small enough to act on today.

What would you add? If you know someone who proved their best chapter came later, not earlier, I’d love to hear who they are and what they taught you.

If this one challenged you in a good way, consider clicking the 💚 or leaving a comment. It helps these ideas find the people who need them most.

Leave a comment

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process. People who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them. If that’s the kind of life you’re building, you’re in the right place. If you’re new here, welcome. Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life to get a feel for the framework, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

Subscribe now

Last week, North Carolina beat West Virginia to advance to the College World Series finals for the first time since 2007. I made a decision in about ten minutes. I would fly to Omaha with my sons for Father’s Day weekend.

It wasn’t a simple call. Last minute flights and hotel rooms aren’t cheap. My wife Jana isn’t a baseball fan, and her brother’s family was coming to town that same weekend, which meant the boys would miss time with their Czech cousins, and Jana would be hosting alone. But she’s heard me say it for years. Money is a tool, not a trophy. It exists to create moments you can’t get back. She told me to go. She said it would make for a great Father’s Day.

In thirteen years of family travel, my sons and I had never once flown anywhere without their mom. That alone made the trip feel different before we’d even left the ground. Add Father’s Day on top of it, and I knew this one would stay with us no matter what happened on the field.

I expected to watch some good baseball with my boys. I didn't expect to learn more about character from a group of twenty year olds than I've learned from most people three times their age.

A Season on the Line, Twice

North Carolina hasn’t won a national championship in baseball in program history, not in nearly eighty years of the College World Series. This was the program’s thirteenth trip to Omaha and third trip to the finals. In the best of three championship series against Oklahoma, the Tar Heels lost Game 1 badly. The Sooners simply out hit UNC. That meant Game 2, on Father’s Day, was win or go home.

UNC won that game 6-2, forcing a deciding Game 3 on Monday night. Three young men had already given me a weekend I wouldn’t forget, and a few lessons worth bringing home to you, whatever happened in that final game.

The Son Playing for a Father Who Isn’t There

UNC first baseman Erik Paulsen wears his father’s NYPD detective shield on a chain around his neck. His father, Erik Paulsen Sr., was a first responder in New York on September 11, 2001. He spent days at ground zero digging through the wreckage alongside thousands of other officers and firefighters, most of them without proper respiratory protection. Years later, he was diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer, a disease doctors have linked again and again to the toxic dust those first responders breathed in during the recovery effort. He died on July 4 of last year, just weeks before his son ever set foot on a UNC baseball field. He never got to see his son wear Carolina blue. You can read the whole story on Erik’s dad here.

Before Sunday’s game, while my boys stood in a crowd of kids waiting for Erik to sign autographs, I noticed an older woman standing quietly behind all of them. I asked if she’d like help getting up front for a picture with him. She said she would and added, “he’s my grandson.” When Erik looked up from signing a kid’s hat and saw his grandmother standing there, wanting a photo before the biggest game of his life, his whole face lit up.

A few hours later, that same young man would be standing alone in an empty dugout in tears. This past Sunday was Erik’s first Father’s Day without his dad alive to share it. Every father of every player on the UNC roster wore a button with Erik’s number on it that day, a quiet way of telling him he wasn’t carrying it alone. Erik didn’t know about the buttons until he saw one in the hotel lobby that morning. In a game his team needed to win simply to keep playing, he went three-for-five and scored a run, his best performance of the entire series. After the final out, while his teammates celebrated on the field, he stood there alone and told reporters afterward it was the first time he’d broken down in a while.

I think about that image: A son still finding a way to show up and perform at the highest level of his sport, carrying grief that never fully goes away, on the one day built to remind him of what he lost. That’s not a baseball story. That’s a life story that happened to take place on a baseball field.

The Walk-On Who Chose a Degree Over a Roster Spot

Right fielder Carter French wasn’t recruited to play baseball at UNC. The schools that wanted him for baseball weren’t academically where he wanted to be. So he chose Chapel Hill anyway and asked the coaching staff for a chance to walk on, with no scholarship and no guarantee. He earned a roster spot, then his first career start midway through his junior year, and by this season had become the team’s full-time starter in right field.

In Sunday’s must-win game, Carter made a highlight reel catch at the right field wall to save a potential home run, his second wall-saving catch in as many days, and reached base in all four of his plate appearances by drawing four walks, setting a new record for the most walks in a single game in College World Series finals history.

Carter is pre-med. He took his MCATs in the middle of this baseball season. He plans to attend medical school and is considering orthopedic surgery. My sons asked him to sign their hats “Dr. French.” He laughed, said it was the first time anyone had asked him that, and after signing the second hat, told them, “You have two of a kind.”

Carter chose education first and let baseball be the bonus, not the other way around. That’s a sequence most adults never quite get right. We tell ourselves we’ll get serious about the meaningful thing once the urgent thing is handled. Carter built it the other way. The degree came first. The baseball was the gift on top.

The Kid Who Should Still Be in High School

Pitcher Caden Glauber is eighteen years old. He should be finishing his senior year of high school. Instead, he’s one of the most dominant arms in college baseball. Before both Saturday’s and Sunday’s games, he spent more time than anyone else on the team signing autographs and taking pictures with kids outside the stadium.

When UNC’s starting pitcher left Sunday’s game with an injury at the start of the fifth inning, with the season hanging on every pitch, Caden came in and threw five scoreless innings against one of the hottest lineups in the country. He shut the door completely. When the game ended and his teammates made their way to the locker room to continue to celebrate, Caden walked the other direction, out to right field, and spent the next fifteen minutes signing every autograph and taking every photo the kids in the stands asked for. My guess is he remembers being that kid himself, not all that long ago.

Just Three of Many

Erik, Carter, and Caden are the three stories I happened to collect that weekend, but they were far from the only ones. Over three days at the team hotel, at warm-ups, and around the ballpark, my boys and I had countless interactions with players up and down that roster, and every single one of them was kind and courteous. Not polite in the rushed, obligatory way athletes sometimes are with fans. Genuinely present. They stopped. They looked our boys in the eye. They asked questions back.

In an era when college sports headlines are dominated by NIL deals and players treating programs like a stop on the way to the next paycheck, it was refreshing to spend a weekend around a team that didn’t carry any of that energy. These guys seemed grounded in something simpler: living in the moment they were in, and genuinely enjoying sharing it with the people around them, whether that was a teammate, a coach, or a kid asking for an autograph. You could tell they knew exactly how rare this stage was, and they weren’t going to let any of it pass by unnoticed.

What I’m Already Taking Home

I came to Omaha expecting good baseball. I’m leaving with something I didn’t expect, a reminder of what it looks like to show up fully for the moment in front of you, whatever that moment happens to be asking of you. Erik showed up for his father’s memory on the hardest day of the calendar to do it. Carter showed up for a future he planned years before anyone offered him a scholarship. Caden showed up for a kid in the stands who reminded him of himself not that many years ago.

Monday night, my boys and I sat in the stands at Charles Schwab Field and screamed for three hours straight. Oklahoma had a different plan for that game than the Tar Heels did. They jumped ahead early and never let up, and by the middle innings it was clear this one belonged to them. UNC lost 13-2. The national championship that has eluded this program for nearly eighty years is still out there, waiting for some future Carolina team to finally claim it.

I won’t pretend the walk out of that stadium didn’t sting. My boys were quiet for a while. So was I. But here’s the reason I write The BOLD Life. Minor in money. Major in life. That phrase means something specific to me. Money is a tool. It bought the last minute flights that got my sons and me here. It is not the scoreboard for a life well lived. The scoreboard for a life well lived looks a lot more like what we watched all weekend, win or lose. A young man carrying his father’s memory into the biggest moment of his life and still finding a way to play his best game. A walk on who chose the harder, smarter path toward becoming a doctor instead of chasing a roster spot that was never guaranteed. An eighteen year old who, after the biggest moment in his life, walked over to make sure no kid left the ballpark without an autograph.

That’s the whole philosophy in three young men, and it didn’t change one bit when the final score went up on the board. Build something that matters. Work for it honestly. Never let the achievement, or the loss, become bigger than the people and character behind it. UNC didn’t come home with a national championship. My sons and I came home with something I’d argue is harder to find. A Father’s Day none of us will forget, a flight we’ll talk about for years, and three names we’ll remember long after we’ve forgotten the final score. These Tar Heels are champions in the way that matters most, and Coach Scott Forbes and his staff should be proud of every single one of them.

I certainly am.

Start Bold

Three young men, three different ways of showing up. This week, ask yourself which one you needed to hear most.

Erik reminds you that showing up doesn't mean having it all together all the time, and that's okay. Carter reminds you that the boring, smart choice now is the one that builds the life you actually want later. Caden reminds you that the small moment with the person in front of you matters more than the big moment everyone's watching.

Which one hit you hardest? Drop a name, Erik, Carter, or Caden, in the comments and tell me why. I read every single one.

Leave a comment

If you liked what you read, consider clicking the heart below or sharing this with someone who needs a good story today. It genuinely helps these posts reach more people, and it makes my day every time.

Build Wealth. Protect What Matters. Live Fully.

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process. People who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them.

If that’s the kind of life you’re building, you’re in the right place.

If you’re new here, welcome. Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life to get a feel for the framework, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

But the remote starts making the decisions for him. It learns his patterns and begins fast-forwarding automatically. He wakes up one day and his kids are grown, his marriage is gone, and decades of his life have passed while he was somewhere else. He missed it all. Not because anyone took it from him. Because he checked out.

I think about that movie more than you might expect. Not as a horror story about a magic remote. As a dead-accurate portrait of how real life actually slips away.

The Man Mowing His Lawn at 5 pm on a Wednesday

You know the Floater. You might live next to him. You might be him.

He is the man who comes home, sits on the couch, and lets the evening pass. He mows his lawn on Saturday and again on Wednesday because it is something to do that feels productive without requiring anything from him. He tells the same stories at every gathering, the high school football glory days, the near-miss business idea, the one that got away. The stories are good. They just stopped being updated around 2009.

He is not a bad man. He is not lazy in the traditional sense. He works hard. He pays his bills. He shows up for the obligations. What he has quietly stopped doing is building anything, asking anything of himself, or expecting much from what remains of the time he has. I am not describing a stranger. I have been this man in different seasons of my life, in different areas, sometimes all at once. There were stretches where I was not reading, not learning, not growing. Stretches where I was eating whatever was in front of me and telling myself I was too busy to care. The out-of-shape moment I will share in a minute was real, but it was not the only version of drift I have lived through. I have just learned, slowly, that recognizing the drift is the first step out of it.

He is going through the motions. And here is what I want you to understand clearly: going through the motions is not neutral. It is a slow decline dressed up as a normal life.

Mark Twain famously said, “Most men are dead at 27, we just bury them at 72.” That is a hard sentence. It is also one of the truest things I have heard about what happens to men who stop growing.

Don’t be most men.

The Treadmill Nobody Asked You to Get On

Here is the thing about drift. It has momentum.

We tend to think of momentum as the force behind good things, the person who is improving every day, gaining strength, building toward something. But momentum works equally well in the other direction. The man doing the same things week after week, not growing, not pushing, not questioning, is also experiencing momentum. It is just carrying him somewhere he did not choose to go. And the longer it runs, the harder it is to interrupt.

I watched this in my own life. Through my twenties I was always in good shape. The gym, pickup games, team sports, staying active was just part of life without much thought. Then my thirties arrived, and that activity slowly declined. One skipped week became a pattern. Other priorities crowded in. By the time Max and Mason were born, I realized for the first time that I was genuinely out of shape. Not dramatically, but I felt it. My energy was different. Something had gone quiet.

I remember trying to run and wondering why it was so hard. That was a strange moment. Running had never been hard before. The answer was that I had let the drift run long enough that it became the new normal, and the new normal was smaller than the one I had accepted before.

Getting back took longer than losing it did. I started at a neighborhood gym, but the accountability was too loose. It was too easy to cut it short, to skip, to let the inertia win. So I switched to group exercise classes, which gave me something external to answer to. After a few months, I broke through. I could see the gains. I could feel them. And I wish I could tell you that from there it was a clean upward line. It was not. Growth rarely is. There were seasons where I was getting stronger every week, genuinely pressing forward. There were other seasons where I plateaued, where I was maintaining but not building, where I was going through the motions at the gym the same way the Floater goes through the motions everywhere else. The same has been true with reading, with learning, with eating well. I have had years where I was consuming books, pushing my thinking, feeding my mind. I have had other years where none of that happened and I barely noticed. Today you can find me at the gym five days a week, every week, and that has been true for the last 10+ years. But it was not easy, and it did not happen in a straight line.

What I have learned is that the best defense against a plateau becoming a permanent decline is habit. Not motivation, not willpower, not a particularly inspiring morning. Habit. When something becomes habitual, it stops requiring a decision. It becomes part of your identity, and identity is self-reinforcing in ways that motivation simply is not. People around me stopped offering me junk food because they knew the answer. “Chris doesn’t eat that stuff.” That one sentence, said by someone else, does more for consistency than any amount of internal resolve. When others identify you by your standards, you start living up to their version of you without having to fight for it every single day. That is how plateaus stop going the wrong direction. Not through heroic effort, but through showing up until showing up is just who you are.

What Gets Missed While You’re Floating

Our sons, Max and Mason, finished eighth grade last week. They are heading into high school in the fall, and I have been sitting with a number that I cannot stop turning over. If I am honest about how many summers remain before they move out, really move out, the number is smaller than I want it to be. Single digits.

The Floater does not think in those terms. He thinks in terms of what is coming up next weekend, maybe what is happening next month. The long view, the view that makes you feel the weight of time and use it accordingly, that view requires that you stay awake. It requires that you are actually here, not fast-forwarding through the slow parts hoping to land somewhere better.

Book the trip you keep saying you will book. Go to the game. Have the dinner. Call the person you have been meaning to call. Not because a motivational post told you to, but because you have done the math and you understand what it means to let another summer pass on autopilot.

The Floater’s deepest problem is not that he has wasted his past. It is that he is wasting his present by not treating it as something worth protecting.

The Exit

There is good news. Drift is not permanent. The Floater is not a fixed identity. He is a pattern, and patterns can be interrupted. But the interruption has to be intentional, because nothing about the drift will interrupt itself. The treadmill does not turn off on its own.

The way out does not require a dramatic life overhaul. It requires one decision made in a specific direction, followed by another one tomorrow. A workout you do not quit after fifteen minutes. A phone call you make instead of postpone. A summer you plan instead of let pass. Small things, repeated, are how momentum reverses.

Most men have more runway left than they realize. The question is whether they are going to spend it floating, or start building something with it.

Family fun at Valley Bear Resort, NC mountains. Zero regrets.
The trip you keep saying you will book? Book it.

3 Bold Moves to Try This Week

• Name the treadmill. Identify one area of your life where you have been doing the same thing on repeat without asking whether it is actually moving you forward. You do not have to fix it this week. Just see it clearly.

• Add accountability to something. The reason the group class worked when the solo gym did not was accountability, not motivation. Motivation fades. Having someone expect you there does not. Find one thing in your life where you can add that kind of structure.

• Do the summer math. If your kids are still at home, count the summers you have left before the dynamic changes significantly. Then look at your calendar and ask whether your plans reflect that number. Book what you keep postponing.

Share

What would you add to the Floater’s story? If you have found your way out of the drift, I want to hear what moved first.

If this one landed somewhere real for you, consider clicking the 💚 or leaving a comment. It helps these ideas reach the men who need them.

Leave a comment

Build Wealth. Protect What Matters. Live Fully.

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process. People who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them.

If that’s the kind of life you’re building, you’re in the right place.

If you’re new here, welcome. Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life to get a feel for the framework, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

My dad had MS for forty years.

By the end, the disease had taken almost everything. He hadn’t been able to walk for decades. For the last ten years of his life, his only real freedom was his right hand. That hand let him feed himself, control his motorized wheelchair, change the TV channel, and make a phone call. To most people, those are things you do without thinking. To my dad, they were everything.

Then he had a stroke. It wiped out the right side of his body, including the only part that still worked. After that, we knew his days were numbered. So we brought the fun to him in bed. Stories. Laughter. Time together. He lived nine more months, and those months were not empty. But I saw, up close, how health expands your capacity to engage with life, and how quickly that capacity can shrink.

There is a quote I have thought about ever since: “A healthy man has a thousand wishes. A sick man has only one.”

I did not fully understand that until I watched my dad.

Subscribe now

I want to be careful here, because some illnesses are completely outside our control. Genetics, disease, and tragedy can strike anyone. My dad did not choose MS. This is not about blaming the sick. It is about stewarding the choices we do control while we still have the chance. His disease profoundly shaped me. I cherish my health in a way I might not have otherwise. And it fuels my drive, because I know how fragile the whole thing is.

The Three Responsibilities That Determine Everything

We have spent several months in this newsletter talking about habits: physical energy, how you plan your days, how you learn and grow, and how you manage your money with consistency rather than chaos. The throughline in all of it has been this: drift is the enemy. Motivation fades. Calendars fill. Life quietly pulls you back toward the average unless you stay intentional.

But today I want to zoom out from the individual habits and look at the bigger picture, because there are three areas of life where drift does the most damage. Three areas where no amount of professional help, coaching, or expert advice can substitute for your own daily decisions. Three areas that are deeply interconnected and that together determine your capacity to live well.

They are your health, your relationships, and your money.

When all three are working, life expands. When one cracks, you feel the strain in the others. And here is what they all have in common: the daily ownership of each one falls entirely on you.

Health: The Foundation You Feel

You can hire a nutritionist, a personal trainer, and the best doctors available. Those professionals matter enormously. They guide, diagnose, and advise. But they do not make your daily decisions. They do not choose whether you move your body today. They do not decide what you eat when no one is watching. They do not control whether you prioritize sleep or squeeze in one more late night.

Health is deeply personal because discipline is deeply personal.

When you feel strong and energetic, life expands. You are more patient with your kids, more focused at work, and more optimistic about what is ahead. Small inconveniences feel small. When you are depleted, everything takes more effort. Joy feels distant. Perspective narrows.

I work out five days a week, and I work out hard. Yes, I want to get stronger, but what I really love is the energy and vitality it gives me the rest of the day. I try to eat well most of the time. I resist temptation more often than I give in. I see my doctors and get my lab work done, not because I am obsessed with it, but because I understand the stakes.

You can hire excellent help. The decisions are still yours to make.

Relationships: The Texture of Your Life

Life is not measured in transactions. It is measured in connection.

Your spouse, your kids, your close friends, the people you work alongside every day — every interaction adds texture to your experience. You can hire a therapist, read every book on communication, attend a marriage retreat, and do all the right things around relationships. All of that is valuable. But no one else can decide who you will be in a tense moment. No one can choose patience for you, apologize for you, or put your phone down at dinner for you.

Relationships compound just like money does. Small deposits build trust over time, and small withdrawals erode it quietly. If your relationships are strained, financial success feels hollow. If your relationships are strong, even ordinary days feel genuinely rich.

You cannot delegate character. You cannot delegate presence.

Money: From Stressor to Enhancer

Money works the same way. You can hire a financial planner, invest with professionals, and outsource tax strategy and portfolio construction. Those things matter. But your advisor does not live your daily money life. They do not decide whether your lifestyle quietly expands every time your income does. They do not control the small, consistent spending decisions that shape your future. They cannot align your money with your values because only you know what your values actually are.

Money typically exists in one of three states: a stressor, a neutral, or a life enhancer. Most people hover somewhere in the middle. Bills are paid. There is no crisis. But money is not being used intentionally to create freedom, margin, and opportunity. It is just background noise.

At The BOLD Life, I believe money is a tool. When you understand it well enough to make wise daily decisions, something shifts. It stops being background noise and starts becoming fuel for experiences, for generosity, for time with the people you love. But no advisor can make your everyday decisions for you.

That part belongs to you.

Where It All Comes Together

Health, relationships, and money are not separate categories. They are deeply interconnected, and they reinforce each other in both directions. Poor health strains relationships. Financial stress damages marriages. Strong relationships support better habits. Smart money decisions create space for both health and connection.

When you tend to all three, not perfectly but consistently, life starts to feel aligned. Not flashy. Not loud. Just aligned. And alignment is what most people are really searching for when they say they want a life that feels full.

A healthy man has a thousand wishes. If we are wise, we use our health to strengthen our relationships, our relationships to deepen our joy, and money as a tool to support both. A bold life in money, mindset, and meaning is built through small, consistent decisions that compound over time. No one is going to build it for you. That is not a burden. It is actually the best news there is.

3 Bold Moves to Try This Week

Pick one area and take one small step forward. That is all it takes to break the drift.

• In health: schedule the workout, book the doctor’s appointment you have been putting off, or choose one food decision today that your future self will thank you for.

• In relationships: initiate the conversation you have been avoiding, put your phone down at dinner, or reach out to someone you have been meaning to reconnect with.

• In money: sit down with your spending and ask honestly whether it reflects what you actually value.

Which of the three needs your attention most right now? Drop it in the comments.

Leave a comment

Build Wealth. Protect What Matters. Live Fully.

The BOLD Life is for people who want to build wealth without losing themselves in the process. People who want their success to strengthen their health, relationships, purpose, and freedom rather than compete with them.

If that’s the kind of life you’re building, you’re in the right place.

If you’re new here, welcome. Start with The Blueprint of a BOLD Life to get a feel for the framework, then read whatever draws your attention. Every post stands on its own.

Share