Learn from my mistakes
I have been divorced. I have blown up businesses that were working. I have trained through injuries until they became surgeries. I have been so busy building a life that I missed years of my sons growing up inside it.
I already made the mistakes. You don't have to.
That is the whole idea. Every book in this series takes one part of your life, names the five things that are quietly wrecking it, and tells you what to do instead. Not theory. Not a study. The five specific things I got wrong, what they cost me, and what I would do differently if I could go back.
Most advice tells you what to add. Add this habit, add this supplement, add this morning routine. It rarely works, because the problem is almost never the thing you are missing. It is the thing you are already doing that you cannot see.
That is what these books are for. Five blind spots at a time.
Where the series comes from
Before the books, there were these. Five things I did wrong for long enough that they stopped being events and became lessons. Everything I write comes out of one of them.
Cost: about six years
Ready is a feeling that arrives after you start, not before. I spent years preparing for things I could have simply begun, and I told myself that preparation was progress. It was fear wearing a work shirt.
Cost: money, and one friendship I still miss
I confused being liked with being safe. What I learned is that trust is not a feeling you have about someone, it is a conclusion you reach after watching them under pressure. I stopped watching. It got expensive.
Cost: two rebuilds I did not need to do
Sometimes you do have to clear the dead wood. But I learned to tell the difference between a fire that creates room and a fire I set because I was bored, restless, or unwilling to sit through the boring middle of something good.
Cost: most of my thirties
I was told I was too intense, too direct, too much. So I sanded myself down to fit rooms I did not even want to be in. The people who wanted me quieter were never going to be happy with me anyway.
Cost: the years I would most like back
Every time something got easy I assumed I had won. Comfort is not the finish line. It is the place people stop, and stopping is what the rest of your life gets built on top of.
Every one of those took me years to see and cost me something real. You can read about them in an afternoon.
The series
Every book has the same shape. One area of your life, five mistakes, one fix for each, and a thirty day plan to start on Monday. Read one in an evening. Work it for a month.
Marriage out first
In progress
Planned
Planned
Book one
She has probably already told you what is wrong. The problem is she told you in a language you were not listening in.
This one is first because it is the one I got most expensively wrong, and because almost every man I have coached who was falling apart at work turned out to be falling apart at home first.
The list
One email when a book comes out, plus the occasional thing I have learned the hard way and think you should know before you learn it the same way. No daily nonsense.
Who is writing this
I am not a researcher and I am not a therapist. I am a guy who has built businesses, raced Ironman, raised sons, wrecked things, and rebuilt them, and who has spent the last stretch of his life coaching other people through the same wreckage.
Everything in these books was paid for. Some of it twice, because I am stubborn and needed the lesson delivered a second time before it landed.
If reading it saves you one of the five, the book did its job.