Hi, everyone, Sophia Bush here. Welcome to Work in Progress, where I talk to people who inspire me about how they got to where they are and where they think they're still going. I'm so excited to introduce you all to my friend Sylvester McNutt the third today because it's an inspirational conversation that will definitely leave you feeling motivated. And I don't know about all of you, but I have a hunch that that's something we could all use right now. Sylvester is the author of care Package, Free Your Energy, and many other books. He has an incredible podcast and spends his time helping people understand how healing can be the key to success. We recorded this episode back in the beginning of April, but everything he says is us as relevant now. He opens up about his past, the impact of football in his life, and how a few teachers gave him opportunities that completely changed his trajectory. We also talk about the therapeutic benefits of writing and what it really takes to heal yourself enjoy. So that's they're of my friend, How are you? I'm so I'm so excited that you're here. I'm so glad we're finally going to have our conversation for the podcast. It's so nice to see your face, albeit at a technological distance. But we are in different states, so I guess we would have had to do it this way no matter what. I I really I'm so excited for the audience to get to know you. I think that there are plenty of people in my audience who who follow you. I love to post your work and your writing and um, and that's really how you and I met. I I don't even know how it happened, but I we found each other on the internet. UM. And I've always been so taken aback by the things that I read that you share. You know you are. You are a creator whose words often give me pause in a really beautiful way where I read something and I think, oh, let me sit with that, or or oh that really that causes such a feeling in me. I want to sit with that. And I guess I just want to say thank you for sharing yourself with the world the way you do. Man, I wasn't expecting to hear that. Thank you, Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Yeah, I think the sharing, man, it's it's been a journey, for sure, but I just feel like it's something I have to do. I just have so much that happens inside of my head, so many thoughts and so many observations, and I'm in a good habit of sharing, and I think that it helps me. It helps me understand what's going on with within my own self. But then through the years of doing it, it has, you know, helped thousands of other people. And one thing I never want to do is like I never want to tell people like this is how you need to think, or this is how you need to be, you know, because like I just believe in free will and free expression, but I think we all need help at different points of our lives to figure out how we're processing things or how we're thinking about things, you know, or or maybe it's like, hey, if I just if I just shift my perspective, maybe two per cent of this situation, I may be able to get like a thousand more benefits out of it, you know. And I think that's one of the things that drives me, is just to try to try to put out multiple perspectives just so people can can people can arrive at their own conclusion. You know. That's really. Yeah, that's it for me. That's like, okay, it's everyday thing for me. So I'm always curious because I I sit across from be It through a screener, you know, on the couch in the office, sit across from a lot of people whose perspectives, to your point, I really admire, and I'm always curious how they got this way because I've I've known you for the last couple of years. But were you were you like this when you were a little kid? You know, I wonder who was Sylvester at like eight or ten? I I know you grew up in Chicago, which makes me feel very nostalgic. I I I wonder where you introspective and curious and and into writing then? Or or how how did how did the journey begin? Let's go back all right? So first of all, our brains are like because this is the same question that kind of are people towards on my podcast, because I'm so curious, like I want to know like the genesis, I want to know the starting point, like you know, what were some of the factors. So this is this is just a great question to me. Uh So eight to ten um, I would have been in uh, northwest suburbs of Chicago. So I was living in Mount Prospect in Arlington Heights, Okay. And that's right around the age where you start having a lot of a lot of questions. You know. That's when you start asking questions like it's Santa Claus real, Like what do I have to go to church? Why do I have a bad time? You know, you start you start asking those questions to your parents. Um, you start liking girls in school, but you don't even know what that means. You know, you just have all this stuff going on. And what was going on is my parents were Okay. So my mom worked. She was an administrative assistant. She is a very like punctual. She pronounces every word she does not. She didn't allow any of us to speak slang. We had to be proper English. We couldn't say things like come on, man, or you know what I mean, like, none of that. It had to be all the time, precise words, precise language. And that was rooted in her being an avid reader. I mean she would read every single day. I remember seeing her read every single day. My dad, he was United States Military, so he's getting up at five am to get his work out in he's punctual. He's we can't be if if the show starts at nine, we can't get there at nine oh one, we can't be late. It's it was a very I lived in a very like disciplined household and it was also very disciplined from like an intellectual side where my mom had the readings. But my dad was really into cinema and film. So my dad when we would sit down, he will watch, we will watch films like we will watch Bruce Lee films. And he would and I know you could appreciate this, you know, working in working in TV and film. Like he would make me watch the scenes and he like every time that the camera would cut, he knew all the cuts, so he would tell me, but he'd like what type of cut is that? You know? Or when the audio like you do like a Jay Hookie, Like what what type of audio is that? Like? He would teach me everything about film. He would teach me about the acting side of it and like how they were taught to you know, hold emotions or to express emotions that they weren't even feeling, but they had to portray it. And then my mom was on the other side talking about the writing, like the actual writing side, and like she read um like Patricia Patterson, John Grisham, like she read. She would read these like huge novels. And at eight to ten, I would pick these up and try to read them. But I couldn't. Like I couldn't read, I couldn't comprehend what was going on. But I would try, and you know, I will open I would take I would go to a page and I would just give my mom the book and I would say, hey, read this to me, you know. Then she would just read like thirty pages to me out the book and I would just sit there, but I will close my eyes while she would read, and then I will visualize what she was reading and what ended up happening. And I didn't realize this then, but just talking about it now made me realize it. What what happened is I would see the words that she was saying. And then even when my dad was having me watch movies with him, I would be able to just see the words. I would be able to predict how the scenes we're gonna go. And it was like through those practices with them that I started to develop, uh, the ability to to write. I started to develop like the love for it. So then what happened with me was as I got just a little bit older. I'm gonna tell your story here. So I was very introverted. I never I never really was extroverted. I was very very introverted. Um before high school. I changed a little bit in high school. But before high school, I was very interested, introverted, very very quiet, very to myself, very observant. I mean I always had a lot of friends, always played with other kids, other boy is in the neighborhood. Like we always play sports, you know, football, basketball, soccer, We used to raise We used to ride bikes, I used to play. I used to have a bunch of friends. But I was always quiet. I was always quiet. And so in seventh grade, you know, you ride at the bus home from school, but you know, I'm living in the suburbs and it's very it's just not a good environment. A bunch of kids on the bus is you know, they're just wild. And I had a younger brother and sister. So I'm a person that at a young age I realized I needed alone time. I needed alone time in order for me to be my best self. Right, And so I have a younger brother and sister. At the house, I have mom and dad, so it's like if I'm at home, everybody else is home, so there's no alone time there. If I'm at school, I'm with all my classmates. I was smart enough to figure out that if I just walked home, I could be alone for about thirty minutes. So I just started walking to and from school, and I'm walking home by myself, and uh there was this girl. Her name was Leanne, and she walked up to me one day. I walked right outside the school and she's like, hey, I noticed that you walk home the same way I walk every day, so we're gonna walk together. And I was like, yeah, no, no, no, we're not. Actually we're not. Because she was a grade older than me. I think I was seventh grade. She was eighth grade. I think I think that was a grade and uh yeah, yeah, that was it. And I was like, no, we're not. Actually, you're gonna do what you've been doing and I'm going to continue on my way. I've never even met her, right, So she goes, no, no, no, we're gonna walk home together because we walked right by each other every single day. I've been seeing you for weeks, so I was like, okay, all right. Finally I was like, all right, I'll do it. So I walk her home a couple of times, so basically it would be like a quarter mile to her house and then my my house was like a mile. So I will walk her home and then I will continue on. So finally one day she's like, she's like, hey, you need to walk me up to my door today. And I'm like, why would I do that. I've never walked you up to your door. That doesn't like, what's it will be the point of doing that. And she's like, no, come on, you know, walk me to my door. And she's like giving me all these cues and these signals, and I'm like oblivious, I have no idea what she's doing. And I think I was seventh grade. I was. I was twelve and seventh grade, yeah, because I started high school when I was still thirteen, so I was I would have been, right, I think, yeah, so I would have. I was twelve years old and standing at her door, She's like, okay, I'm going in now, and I'm just like, okay, all right, see you later, and she just grabs me and she just like puts me like a bear hug, and she just starts making out with me. So this is the first time I ever kissed a girl. So I didn't know what I was doing. Like I felt her tongue in mind, so I was just like, Okay, I guess I'm supposed to do that. So I just put my tongue out, like I'm just clueless. So she goes in the house. And she lived in like a little like red brick apartment. It was like it was a flat. And she goes in the house and I started walking home and I'm just thinking, I'm like, why that was amazing, Like I just kissed the girl for the first time. So I walked the rest of that seven point five miles. I walked with the biggest smile on my face. And I get home and my mom is there, and my mom is a very she's a very entertaining person, to say the least. And she goes, what are you smiling about? Boy? She would always call me boy. She goes, what are you smiling about? Boy? And I'm like, you know nothing, no, no big deal, you know nothing. I feel I'm ready to tell you. She's like, no, no, no, what, What's what's going on? You never walk in like this, Why are you smiling? What's going on? And I'm like, uh, you know, well, you know, there's just a girl, Yain. I've been walking home with her, you know, and she kissed me behind the seven eleven. We made out. She kissed me, you know, the first time I ever kissed a girl. My mom immediately gets pissed. She's angry. Yeah, she's angry. Her exact words to his day. I'll never forget. She goes. I didn't give you any permission to kiss girls. She goes, you need to leave these girls alone and you need to focus on your school work. And it was like that was one of the most defining moments of my life because here I am, you know, twelve years old, having my first sexual experience, and it's met with Shane, it's met with with gilt, it's met with rejection, it's met with your doing something wrong. And that was like it was such a like painful thing for me to have something so powerful happened a girl kissing you, especially she's a year older than you, you know, amongst guys, when you're a young boy, that's like a big deal, Like you got an eight grader to kiss you when you're in seventh grade, like that's a big deal. So I'm thinking it was like this beautiful thing that happened, and I shared with my mom and she just like broke me down. And when she broke me down, I had all these like feelings came about, you know, and I didn't understand it. I didn't know what shame was killed, the rejection, the things that I have the awareness of now, I didn't know. So I just had all these feelings going on inside of me. So now I don't want to talk to Leanne because I feel like I can't. So I'm taking a different route home, you know. So it's just like all these emotions I had and I couldn't understand it. So I didn't have any extra money. My family, you know, middle class family. We weren't poor, we weren't rich. They had enough for us to get by, so I didn't want to ask for any money. But I knew I needed to kind of express what was going on, and my family, my family did, My immediate family did what most families do. When we get with our extended family, we kinda we don't tell the full truth, the full spectrum of what's going on. How is everything. Oh, yeah, everything's great. Yeah, the kids are good. You know. That's that's what my mom and dad would do. But that wasn't the truth. That wasn't the truth of what was going on. And this was a time period where they also started to kind of they started to become alcoholics. My mom, her her poison would be uh mg D Miller genuine draft. She would drink a six pack every night. My dad, his was Jack Daniels. He would he would drink it on the rocks. I don't know how people do that, but he would. He would drinking on the rocks. So here I am, and I'm watching what was like a perfect, like nuclear family where there was a lot of love, there was playing, We used to watch movies, we used to we used to do all types of stuff together. But it's like deteriorating, right, and then there's all these elements that are coming in, you know, with the shame and the guilt, um angered um abuse, physical abuse, uh you know, emotional abuse. And it wasn't just on me, it was everyone. It was the whole environment, you know. It was dad to mom, Mom to dad, them to me. And I'm just like watching this environment like deteriorate. So my saving grace and what what really helped me here was that same seven eleven that I would walk by, I went in there and I stole a notebook. You know, I didn't have any money, like I said, so I just went in there. I found a little like college ruled book, you know, something like this, and I just stole it. I just put in my book bag, walked out, and I stole the notebook. And you know, I know stealing is wrong, but also keeping those emotions on me would have been even worse for me. So I needed I needed some outlet. So what ended up happening was when I got home, after I stole the notebook, I just opened it up and I just started writing. I ended up writing like pages just about you know, my mom, my dad, what I was seeing, what I was feeling, what I was thinking. And then I started writing about ways that they could they could solve the way they were talking to each other, you know, because I was listening to like their tone of voice and how they were just talking, and like I was just trying to come up with certain ways, like man, if my mom would have just said this, or my dad would have just said this, and so really, you know when people see me now and they see like an author of eight books, and you know, I've traveled and talked to people about these things. That really started from that twelve year old kid who was completely confused about kissing a girl Like that's literally where it started from. So that's how I got started as a writer. That's so cool, did you because you know you talk about the way the dynamic in the family began shifting and and things so tragically for people can do that when substance abuse happens, when when the addiction gene turns on, and you know that image of you listening to your mom read and as a little boy, essentially becoming a reader through her, I can't imagine what it felt like to begin to lose that. Did you become a big reader as you got older, to kind of hold onto your love of books in that way, or or did that not happen until later. I was a big reader as a kid, I think now, if I compare the amount that I read now, I think I read more than the average person. But I don't read as much as I could because I spend more of my time writing. But if I wasn't writing as a profession, I would be a huge reader. I would read every day for an hour or two every single day. As a kid, I was a huge, huge reader. I would read every single day. I mean even in high school. You know, you have the stuff that they want you to read, but I would have my own books. I would go to the library. You get two weeks with a book, so I'll take a book, reading in two weeks, bring it back, check out another one, you know, even in high school. So I've always been a big reader. Um, I think, yeah, that is because because of my mom. I mean even to this day, she still has her stack of books, you know that she goes through. You know, she's a book quarter. So you know, I would not be I wouldn't be an author if it wasn't for my mom's reading. Uh. And my dad he was a writer too. He used to always write scripts. And that's the reason why he would have me sit down and watch the movies with him, is because he wanted to eventually get a script done. And I think my my love for writing just literally came from their hobbies. That's very cool. It's interesting because when you talk about the way your dad was breaking down movies with you. I think about what an incredible education and storytelling that is for a kid. You know, the way the scenes are cut and the way the actors are performing, in the way that things look and feel and sound, that's that's kind of incredible. That's the stuff that makes me wish I'd gone to film school. You know, where where did sports come in for you? Because I know there's a there's a whole world of athleticism in your story, So when when does all that begin? So sports for me has always been a safe haven, a way to just kind of escape what what I was, what I was dealing with. Uh, And like I said, it started just in the neighborhood, just running races. You know, you get a bunch of young boys together, they always want to figure out who's the strongest, who's the fastest, who's the smartest. That's what That's just what young boys were doing. And I know that I've always had like a group of guy friends at every age. You know, we moved a lot, but I always wanted to make new guy friends. And it's just that that masculine edge of masculine competitiveness that I feel like it's such a big part of you know, being socialized, just as from a boy to a man. So we were just you know, we didn't have you know, the cell phones and smartphones. We we'd be outside racing each other, like all right, who's the fastest zone? So we raised we see who could throw the football, the furthest we throw baseball, and it was just I mean, that's just what we did, you know. And then like WWF came about the wrestling, So then we started wrestling, like which that was not smart, but we started wrestling in the house and doing all these wrestling moves and it was just I mean, it was just such a good way to just bond, you know, just sports. So we ended up happening was I always will watch and growing up in Chicago, everyone's die hard Chicago Bear fan, die hard, Chicago's Cubs, Chicago Blackhawks, Chicago Bulls. Like we're die hard. It's just part of who we are, you know. Um, you know a lot of people these days, you know, you will argue politics. In Chicago, we talked about sports. We archie sports, you know, that's what we do. We talk about sports. And you know, just growing up, you know, every Sunday, the family and get together extended family, people go to the bars. Obviously I was too young for that, but I would still see it, people going to the bars, just tailgate and pregame and watching the games, watching football, Like I would watch football every Sunday. So of course we get a Super Nintendo and I'm playing uh or maybe it was a regular Nintendo. I started playing this game called Techno Super Bowl and it was a football game, and it was just like the best game ever. Like, the graphics are horrible, but it was amazing then. And my love for football came from, you know, watching my family watch how they would get so excited just seeing people out and about rocking the Bears jerseys watching it on TV, Like I just it was just such a glamorous thing, you know. I'm just like, oh man, I want to be one of those dudes. And what what sealed it for me is me and my dad were at a ark one time and it was just me and my dad and we were flying kites. And if you have you ever flown a kite before? Yeah, not a long time though. Flying a kite is one of the most frustrating things that you can do, because if you don't get like the right I don't know if it's drag or lift. I don't know the right turns. But if you don't get the right pocket of air under it, it doesn't go anywhere. And my dad's like he's like a mad scientist, like he would just he would just reel it out nice and slow at patients, and the kite would just get bigger and bigger and bigger, and it'd be like a hundred feet in the air, and mine is like ten feet on the ground, just flopping around, and I'm just like I would just get defeated and I would just start crying. And so we're at this park and I'm crying, flying trying to fly a kite. My dad's got his in the air. He's just looking up. And one of the football came flying at me and they just like bounced over to me. So I threw my kite and I picked up the ball and then I threw it back to to to the guy and they were like practicing football, and they had all their gear on and their helmets on, and you know, you're a little kid and you're looking up to bigger kids. I'm assuming these were like high school kids, you know, or maybe even pee week kids, but you you look up at them and they're like giants. And I just remember thinking like, oh, I want to be a giant, you know. And so I went and told my dad. I'm like, hey, I want to play football. Sign me up. And it was that day that when I went to the park and my mom and dad were like, nope, you're not playing football, and sports dangerous. People get hurt, people get concussions, and I just say, hey, I'm not gonna get hurt. Just sign me up, you know. So they wouldn't sign me up. So, uh, fifth grade, sixth grade, they wouldn't sign me up. So seventh grade, I'm like, hey, I'm bigger, I'm a stronger person. Now. I used to do push ups. I should do a hundred push ups every day because my dad told me. He was like, if you want to play football, you need to be strong. So I said, okay, what do I need to do? He says, you need to do push ups. You know. He says, I'm in the army. I used to do about five hundred a day, So can you do five hundred. I'm like, well, I don't know if I can do five hundred. So I just started doing him and I got up to like a hundred push ups today as a seventh grader. So I went to him. I'm like, hey, I could do a hundred push ups. I want to play football. So he got he was drinking too this time. This was this was in the summer. So he goes, all right, let me see, let me see your pushups. So I get down. It takes me a little while, but I do like a hundred push ups in front of and they're like little baby push ups, you know, seventh grader. And he was like, okay, I'll think about it. So I went from like a no to I'll think about it. So I left the house that day. I'll never forget this. And my friend his name was Adam McElroy, Irish guy, and he played for the Arlington Cowboys because we lived in Arlington Heights. Arlington Cowboys was the Peewee league. So I'm over at his house, his mom, his mom, and his his dad was a cop. His mom was there and we're just talking about football. They're like, hey, are you gonna play with us this year? And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. My dad said I could play this year, which my dad didn't say, but I lied It's like, my dad said I could play this year. So they had some type of registration later that night. So I'm like thinking, like, hey, if I just stayed with Adam, I'll be able to register for football. So I literally stayed at his house the whole day. I was supposed to go back home, but I just stayed at this house the whole day. We ended up going to the registration and then we got registered, and you know, you need you need permission. So I told his mom. I was like, yeah, my dad said I could play, so you know, you could just sign for him he's at work, which he wasn't, and so his mom signed for me. So I got registered for football that way. I went home. I told my parents. I was like, yeah, so I got registered for football. And then my dad was like, how did you get registered? You know? So he started doing the mental work and I was like, well, I'll be honest with you, I had two six you know, to forge your signature. He was pissed. He was he was pissed. My dad was pissed, but he kind of sat there for a second and he thought about it and he was just like Okay. He's like, if you're willing to do all of that to play football. We're gonna allow you to play football. So if you're if you're going, if you're willing to do all of that, you can play. And it was one of the best things. I played seventh grade, eighth grade, played in high school. Then I walked onto my college football team at Northern Illinois University, and then I ended up playing three years of arena football. So I got paid to play football for three years. So it was one of the I mean, it was one of the best things that happened to my life. For real. Why would you say that? Is it? Is it the discipline of sports? Is it the physical activity? What? What did you love so much about it? So in high school, also ran track, but I hated it, Okay, but football I loved. Football is hard. It is you are constantly having your mind challenged every single day. You know, people on people see it on TV and they think it's just pushing and running. It's a game of science. It's excess and olds. It's a it's a game of design, you know. So you have to have a certain level of awareness to be decent, to be good. It's a game of knowing how to preserve your energy. It's a game of knowing angles. Like we to have this drill call pursuit drill, pursuit drill break it down for someone who may not understand football. Essentially, if I'm a defender and I'm on like the far left side and the play goes to my right, the pursuit drill teaches you the exact angle you take to be able to make a tackle. You know, when you're looking at football and you see people get tackled so quick, it's not because they're big and fashion or strong. It's because they understand the angle of where to be. And there's just so many like analogies and like allegories that you can learn from football that just carry over into your real life and it just makes you. To me, it just makes you mentally strong. You know, the things that I went through and some of the things I went through in football, I just feel like the average person would have never went through in their life. Just like if you talk to a person who's who's been in the Army, you know, been in the Marines, people who have have run marathons. When you get to a level of physical exertion where now your exertion becomes reliant solely upon what your mind tells you is I just feel like you gained so much control of yourself, of your life, and so much power and self understanding. And I just feel like football track didn't give me that. Football gave me that for sure. That's so interesting. And And as we're talking about going through high school, what were you loving academically while while you were falling in love with sports? Was there a subject that was your favorite or or a teacher who really stands out that you think about from high school? Gym class m Gym class was my favorite. Um So, my school was a really good school. I went to Palatin High School and every year that I was there, they won the Blue Ribbon Excellence Award, which essentially goes to one of the top one high schools in the United States of America. What made us so great really wasn't our athletics. It was the academic programming. It was the teachers there, it was the counselors, it was you know, we had a choice. You're a freshman and sophomore year, you do your regular you know, the regular assignments. But then your junior and senior year, you actually have a choice of if you want to go language, or if you want to go arts, And so what I chose was arts. So I got to do class I have to do like drama, I got to do drawing, I got to do painting, I got to do poetry. I have to do a whole bunch of different classes in the arts, you know. And so if you would have went language, you would have you people who leave my high school, they leave knowing French obviously English, and then they leave with Spanish as well, because you get French and Spanish for your junior and senior year, so you leave there with two languages. So the summer of sophomore year, they asked me what do you want to do? Do you want to do you know the language, or do you want to do arts. I'm like, oh, well, I'm an artistic person. I want the arts. So you get these acting classes, you get speech classes, drawing, Like my favorite teacher, her name was Mislead, and she used to let me draw. I had her first period and it was so cool because you can just come in there. You can it's the only class you can wear headphones in, so you can wear your headphones, listen to music and you just draw for an hour, just draw, and you have a professional art teacher there and she's just teaching you. And as long as you tried your best, you pass. She's not gonna she's not gonna knock your art because it doesn't fit into her perspective of what art is supposed to be. She was so open to everyone's art. She will give us the guideline. She would say, Hey, for example, I remember we had to do a perspective photo. So perspective photo we see him all the time. Is when you see like a train track, or you see like a freeway a street, and you see maybe a building's buildings on the right side, and it kind of all leads to what's called a vanishing point. And I mean, to this day, I've never forgotten that because she was such a good teacher. So literally, you start those photos by drawing your vanishing point. Then you draw your horizon, and then you build your city in and you built the sky. And it was just an amazing experience to be taking art class, you know. So I remember her class. And then I had another teacher who I think his name was Mr Milfe Milford, Mr Milford, and I mean, this dude was amazing because he would see the potential that people had and he would never hold you back, like if you didn't he was you know how teachers will call on you if you don't want to raise your hand, Yeah, he was. He was never one of those teachers. He would only call on you if you wanted to be called on, and if you didn't want to be called on, he would talk to you on the side and he would just say, hey, what's going on. You know, I didn't want to I didn't want to embarrass you. You know, are you comfortable were talking? By the end of the everyone was participating in his class. He got the quietest people to participate because he was such a just like such a warm thinkers, like your grandfather that has cookies for you's got good stories. Like he was just such a warm person. And I remember when um, this song fifty cent came out. It was called Wanstein. Okay. I was in high school when fifty cent came out, and like, everyone's playing this song and I walked into class and he goes, hey, have you heard the new fifty cent song? And I was like, huh, fifty who? Like I didn't. I had never heard of him, So like my teacher introduced me the fifty cent He's like, he's like, hey, you should put it on because I was in the class first. He's like, you should put it on. It's a new song, so he like put it on. It's like it's pretty good, and I'm just like, well, how's my teacher who's like seventy introducing me to like rap music? Like this is? You know? So it was so cool. So I think my teachers were you know, and hold on, last thing about high school. I had an administrator named Mrs Schmidt, and uh, I'm gonna send this to it when it comes out, because she saved my life. You know, she literally saved my life. My freshman and sophomore year, I was actually gonna get expelled from school because I had behavior issues. So the stuff I mentioned to you about what was going on in the home, it only got worse. So high school, you know, your fourteen fifteen, your freshman sophomore year, and it got worse, you know the abut see, I ended up running away from home and it was really bad. It was really bad. I hated being at home. Oh it's all good. I'm in a good place now, you are, Yeah, and you know, I would just go to school and I would just act out. I would act out, I would lash out and had behavior issues. I was fighting, I was fighting class, I was fighting the lunch room, any anywhere I had a chance to. And you know, that's how people, people who have pain on them, that's how they behave. They want to get the pain off of them, and so they act out, you know. And for me, since my since the emotion that I was getting a lot of was anger, I was repeating the anger that I was getting because I wanted to get it off of me, and I would get in trouble. I think about it. I think about it like a like a pressurized container. And when people are suffering in households that are suffering, really it's like you add more and more pressure to that container. And when you think about like too much pressure being in pipes, like with water, they burst, they rupture, they spring, leaks, there's a leak in the wall. Then there's mold growing in the wall. Like we we can only contain so much. And so it doesn't surprise me, and it makes me feel so much for the little kid version of you, like all that pressure had to come out somewhere and That's why, you know, for me, I had too healthy coping they called coping mechanisms, which was football, the sports and writing. You know, if I didn't have those two things, I have no idea how my story may have turned out. But I had two things where I could express myself. So the problem in my situation is that my freshman and sophomore year, I actually was not playing football. I had to play my junior and senior The reason I was not able to play is because one of the times my parents divorce, which was the summer of freshman year, I was displaced. So when school started at last week of August, first week in September, I didn't start school till November, right because I was living with my grandmother while my parents figured things out on the South Side of Chicago. So I was living on the South Side of Chicago, and I wasn't going to school. I could have went to school there, but you know you've been in Chicago, I know you had you had worked there. CPS, Chicago Public School system, is not a good public school system. And for a person like me who is um you know, I was academically inclined. I did very good in school when I tried, and for a person like me, who was like very academically inclined, you put me in one of the worst, one of the worst school systems in the country. Plus I'm having behavior issues. It was it would have been a combination for a very bad situation. So I told especially with me growing up in the suburbs, I told my grandmother, I said, I'm not going. I'm not going. Um, the stuff that they're teaching I can learn right here. All I need to do is go to the library and I'll teach myself. So my first four months of my high school I taught myself school and then finally my mother and father decided that it was best for me to move back to the suburbs with my dad to finish my education there. I had my friends there, had been out there, so it just made more sense. This is one of the top one schools in the country. It makes sense to put your your kid there. So I moved back my freshman year and it was just me and dad at this point. So freshman year, my brother and sister are now gone who I grew up with there with mom, and I'm with dad. So that's part of the reason why I was, so I was just acting the way I was acting is Also none of this was explained to me, Like there was never a compassionate conversation as a family, like hey, we're gonna split up. It was just abrupt change, abrupt change. Even in seventh grade when we moved, the way we moved was my mom picked me up from school and we moved. I had no idea we were moving, like I never returned home, I ever got to say bye. So it was like traumatic experience over and over and over. And that's why I was acting out. So my sophomore year. The reason I couldn't play football sophomore years because I was ineligible because I missed half the year. So as I'm acting now and i'm acting now, I go to to Mr. Smidt, my administrator. I go to her office. By this time, I had forty eight total suspension days between my freshman and sophomore year, and I had a meeting. It was Ms. Schmidt, the superintendent of the school, the principal of the school, ME and my mother and this I got. I got in a fight during finals and my sophomore year, this kid called me an inward and I follow him. So Mr smith, the superintendent, the principal, and they said, they said to me, Sylvester, we want to expel you from our school. You're you're smart, and you're bright, and you have potential, but your behavior is just unacceptable. It's completely unacceptable. You know, you're fighting every twenty one day. As you're fighting somewhere, you know, the guy says, why are you fighting? And I think that's a you know, that's a pretty important question to ask someone why. I think, any any time and I used to send my work today, any time that we go through these spaces where our behavior is not optimal or our emotions are just off the wall, I think the question of why is the most important question because it helps you introspect, it helps you go within, it helps you reassess. And he says why, and I said, well, I'll tell you why, And then everything I just laid out. I told him. I told him that I hate not seeing my brother and sister. I says, I hate seeing my parents argue because I used to love each other and now they hate each other. You know, I said, I hate being in this school where I'm called the inn word all the time by by white kids. I don't like it. I don't like being in this school, and some of the black kids don't accept me because they say that I talked proper and so I'm not black enough. I said, I don't get it. I don't get any of this, you know. I said, it's just none of it exist to me. I said, I don't like being in this school, and you guys are teaching me things that don't make any sense at all, Like this school is I feel like beneath me, you know. And then I had I had a an issue with black history. You know, Black History Month. I have an issue with that. Why is black history not American history? Why is black history only taught in February. Why are they not teaching us full black history? Why are they only talking to us about Martin Luther King? There's other elements to black history. And if black history is so important, why is there not a black present meaning? Why are we not learning about what black people are doing in the present moment? You know? And I asked him this as as a high school student, I'm asking them these questions. And I said, I'm having issues with the curriculum. I'm having issues with my home, I'm having issues with peers and that's why I'm acting this way. I'm lashing out because of my world. And they started crying. Everyone's just like crying, you know, They're just like, so, you know, what do we do? How do we, you know, resolve this? And I was like, well, I can tell you how to resolve it because I had a solution. I said, I've been wanting to play football the whole time i've been here in this school, but you guys haven't allowed me to. You told me to play on the sophomore team, but I would be ineligible for the games. And I didn't think that was fair, so I chose not to. I want to play football, and I said, I've been training my whole life to play football. This team has a losing record. We haven't won any games since I've been in high school, literally oh and nine every year. And I just said it was like, you know, I know this is cocky to say, but I can help us win some games. Put me on the football team, put me in the position to make a difference, and I'll make a difference. And they were like, well, if you're gonna be in football, you have to get good grades. Right now. You have ces ds and fs I said, I have ces d S and S because I don't care. I said, I'm one of the smartest people in this school. Put me on the football team and I'll get a's. So they kind of just chuckled. They're just like okay. So they were ready to expel me, but Mr Smid, my administ administrator, she was like, no, we're not expelling him. We're keeping him. I see I see his I see his light, and we need to keep them. So they kept me. So I came back a week later, finished my finals. The next week, I started training for football. So I got up every single morning. This is all self imposed. I got up every single morning at five o'clock. I run three to five miles every every day. I run three or five miles every day. I do my hundred push ups, I do pull ups. I do everything I can because I wasn't lifting weights yet. So football, so you know, in high school, you know ends around mayor June. Football starts at the end of June. So at the end of June you get summer campus starts. So I go in there. I walk up to the coach, varsity coach. Very first day. His name is Bill the Page, and I said coachial page, I gotta tell you something, and it goes, what's up, and I go, you know, I know, this is my first day on the program, and you know, I see all these people on like the Wall of Aim and all these athletes who have came here, and I'm just letting you know that I'm about to make a difference. And he's like, you're gonna make a difference. I say, yeah, I'm gonna make a difference in this program and then the school and in thousands of people's lives you'll see. And he goes, well, that's kind of cocky, don't you think for someone who hasn't done anything. And I was like, no, I'm not talking about what I haven't done. I'm talking about the future for what I'm about to do you'll see. And he just looked at me like, who the hell is this dude? You know, so from there, because I had football, I just committed like I just I need it. And any any person who can hear this who's like going through some type of pain, you're going through some type of suffrage. You don't know what you're doing in life. You're clueless, like you need direction, like you gotta find something you can commit to something that you can commit to, because when you can commit, that's how you heal. You know, you have to find something that is worth your time. Maybe you can't do it every day, but often, you know, and it doesn't have to pay you. It doesn't have to give you money, but just something you can commit it to, you know. For me, I had journaling and football, and from there, with football, I got to get in the weight room and I got to train. I got to get around other people who had the same common goal of healing themselves, you know, maybe getting to college or whatever. But we stayed committed, you know, and it was the football. I swear the football saved my life. And the only reason I was able to play football in high school because of Miss Schmidt, because she believed in me. So I'm a fast forward because this this is one of the best stories. I haven't been able to tell this a long time. So my junior year, I played a little bit, will do okay, we win some games. My senior year, I play a lot. We win a lot more games. And it was like a big deal, like I made a big impact on my school. I won this award called the MSL on Song here on Song Hero, which was an award that goes to the unsung person. Like you know, um, I got a scholarship that Miss Schmidt created for me. It was called the most improved student in the state. So they still have that in Illinois. So every year you can win the scholarship that she created for me. You know, my junior and senior year, I had straight a's. My junior senior year, perfect attendance, perfect attendance, straight a's, And you know, it's like a success story that got turned around because I had an opportunity that Miss Schmidt looked out for. You know, Miss Schmidt was like, nope, I believe. I see his light and I believe in him. And to bring it full circle, you know, I travel around and I do shows and I do talks, and my last talk in Chicago, which was just past summer, then Schmidt she came. You know, I haven't seen her since high school and so she came and I got to give her a hug and like we just cried, and you know, it was one of those things where excuse me, if it wasn't for her, I wouldn't even I wouldn't even be here, like she she was like my saving grace when I was going through the worst, you know, and you know, she was just an administrator at her school. So that's why I was so grateful to be at that school, because if I wasn't at that school, like, I just don't know if I would have been able if I would have had an administrator like that who cared, and she really cared, She really really cared. That's so cool. I definitely have had some teachers like that in my life, just people who saw me before I knew how to see myself. And I think it can be such an incredible gift to a kid. You mentioned that you went to Northern Illinois University. Were you what were you studying there? And you and you were playing football there as well? Right, Yeah, so I played. I walked onto the college football team there. Originally my major was English because I wanted to, you know, write books and stuff. I already knew I wanted to do that, so I wanted to write. Those classes were hard. Those classes were hard because you're study. They make you study like I mean, you're studying writers from the eighteen hundreds and you're studying the way they used to write. And you're studying like Latin and just it was just it was honestly too much to to have the workload of football and college uch as well as as that. So I switched my community. I switched to communications, which was actually smart for me. Um. I feel like I got more out of that. I feel like that was better for me because I got to learn a lot about UH communication in like communication theory, communication model, how people actually communicate, listening, you know, I got to learn about active listening. We got to learn about actually had a class about gender studies, so I got to learn how different genders learn and how different genders UH listen and talk. And it was just like a communication was the best for me. If I would have stayed in English, I don't even I don't even know if I would be the writer I am now if I would have stayed with the English. I'm glad I switched to communications because I also got a lot of speech classes and that helped me with going on the road and speaking public, speaking in front of people and talking um. So I got a lot of speech classes, and the speech classes were fun because we never really knew what we were doing when we came in, so we would come in and the professor. I would say, Okay, today, you guys work at ESPN and you're doing play by plays or we have sometimes we have to narrate movies. So we will watch like silent movies from like the forties and we would narrate the characters. You know. So it was like that was one of the best classes in college. Wow, that's so cool. And so then what's the timeline because I know you played professional football for a bit after that, but yeah, so how do how do you go from that college doing comms and football into football, but then you've become a writer. How does how does it? How does it line up? Okay, so I was a writer the whole time, so I keep my notebooks. I'm writing the whole time. I'm writing poems, I'm writing stories. I'm writing love letters to my girlfriend, the girl I dated in college. We dated for like five years, three years if you ask her, but five to me, you know, because it took me a little longer to get over there. She was done in three. So uh so you know, we're like, I'm writing love letters and you know, I'm just I'm writing the whole time, but really just focusing on you know, communication and sport. So what ended up happening was I actually got dismissed from the university. I was academically dismissed by one, I mean by one little point of a grade. It was it was a very hard class that really it did me in, you know. Um, and so I got dismissed from the university. That ended up dismissing me from you know, the football program, because you do have to be a student to play football, right so um, So I ended up just rolling at the community college the the next semester to finish my associates degree and then go back to the college. So I ended up doing that. I finished Associates of Arts and then I go back to the college. But when I go back to the college, by this time I had new coaches, So the coaches who brought me in they were gone. So just getting back on the football program, it just it felt like it would have just been too much. Um. So I just made peace with it. I said, you know, I'm just gonna be done with um football, I'm just gonna be done with it. I'll just be a student. I like being a student at this college. I had some good friends, you know, I had a girlfriend that I liked, so it was good. And what ended up happening was just through the power of network. I got a phone call and someone was like, Hey, there's this arena football team about fifty miles from you in a place called Rockford, Illinois called the Rockford Raptors. And you know, I know, they're having like a tryout. I know the coach you should just go. So I was like, okay, cool, So I went to the tryout. They picked me up. They signed me um right then and there. So like, I'm in college, but I'm playing arena football and playing pro football. You make like three d and twenty bucks a game. The games are every Saturday, I believe. So to me, I'm like, oh, this is great. I would be in my junior year of you know, college football, but I'm playing arena football making a little bit of money. So you know, it worked out. So I did that my for three years. And what happened on the last year. I was in Billings, Montana, and I got cut from the team. This is my third team. I got cut from the team. My cousin Tara, she gave me forty dollars to get home on a Greyhound. So I wrote the Greyhound from Billings, Montana to Chicago, and it's like a twenty eight hour, thirty hour ride and it was tight. Man, those seats were small. My neck hurt, my back hurt, my butt hurt. But the whole time on the ride, I'm just thinking, like, all right, what do I want to do, because you know, at this point, I was done with college. I'm mentally done with football. It's time for me to kind of transition into like the next phase of my life, you know. And I got a job as a cook. I got a job. I was able to get a job as a cook. My dad was a chef, so I always knew like the culinary instinct was inside of me. So I just said, man, I just need to get some type of job. So I went on like Craigslist and I'm just looking for jobs. Ended up getting a job as a cook. And I'm still writing, but it's not a primary thing right now. I'm just thinking about survive, you know. I'm just trying to survive. So the years two thousand nine and we rolled to summer two thousand ten, my best friend he gets a job working at Verizon and he goes, hey, I'm working at Verizon. I'm doing sales, I'm making these commission checks. I'm killing it. You gotta get a job here. So I'm like, okay, I'm ana cook. I'm not killing anything. Like, I'll take I'll apply whatever. So, yeah, whatever I need to do. So he's like, okay, here, I'm gonna send you the link for the job. Apply for the job. So I'm living in Rockford, Illinois, Okay, and he sends me a link for the job, which is in Wheaton, Illinois. Okay, sixty miles away. Wow, Wheaton. Okay. So but hey, I mean, when you're making twenty bucks a day and your friend is telling you, hey, I just made five thousand as a commission you're you're You're like, oh, yeah, I have to apply. What's the worst thing. So I put together like the best resume. This is where my writing skills really helped me. So I put together the best resume I could put together. But at the time, I'm only, you know, a fresh college student who played football. Really that's really like my only professional experience. So I just write it the best that I could. Because resumes is really about how you frame it. So I as a writer, I'm like, man, I can do this. So they called me, and they called me. A guy named Jeremy calls me and he goes he has such a deep, like raspy voice. He's like, yeah, I'm looking to speak to us. So Lester mcnuh the third and I'm like, yeah, yeah, this is me. This is me. Yeah, this is me. You're not put my professional voice on. Yeah this is me. Yeah, it's me. And uh yeah, this is this is Jeremy Wallace. I'm calling from a Verizon wireless So, yeah, we wanna we want to bring you in for an interview. So I mute the phone. I just started screaming. I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, okay, I don't even have the job. I just got the interview. So I unneat the phone and he's like, excuse me, are you there? Are you there? I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'm here. I'm here. Yeah, I'll come in for an interview when you need me to come in. He's like, how about tomorrow. So I go in for the interview and the manager was Jennifer Celeski and Jeremy Wills. So I get in there and they are just two mean looking people. Jeremy's like six four, big dude. Uh, they're both brunette, both were in black, both were in their black names. I mean, they're just mean looking. They don't smile, they're just looking at me. And you know, we do the whole interview and we get to the end and they go, so, do you have anything else to say? And I say, yeah, you know, I'm gonna be honest with you. You guys might interview some people who are probably more qualified than me, who have better resumes than me, who are probably even better looking than me. You know, I try to make them laugh, like, who are probably even better looking than me? But no one is gonna come in here, and it's gonna work as hard as I'm gonna work. I'm gonna dedicate myself to this job. Right now. All I have going for me is a cook. I'm a cook and I'm barely making it. But I go in there every day and I burned myself just so I could survive. If you give me an opportunity to come in here, I'm gonna be your number one salesperson. It may not happen right away, but I'm going to become that so you won't waste taking a chance on me. And they were like, okay, all right, So they sent me on my way. Like three days later, HR called, you know in her name with Cheryl. She's like, okay, this is Cheryl Pickered with the Verizon Wireless. You know, we want to extend you an offer to work at Verizon. And I like just threw the phone across the room. I'm like, I'm just like screaming. This is like my first real job. The salary was twenty seven thousand dollars plus commission. So I'm just like yes, you know. And it felt like to me, it felt like that moment in high school. One. I had to tell them like, look, if you take a chance for me, I'm gonna come through for you, you you know. And I told those manners that you know, hey, if you guys take a chance on me, I'm gonna come through for you, Like I'm going to be your best salesperson. You just like you just gotta take a chance on me, you know. And they did. Jane and Jeremy they hired me. I was their best salesperson, you know. It was me and a guy named Michael George. We were the top two sales people for two years, number one and two for two years and you know, if they would have never took a chance on me, I would have never became a writer because I needed that job. Like Verizon was a great company to work for because they got me in. They got me in leadership training. They wanted me to be a manager, so they got me a management training. They started teaching me. Yeah, they got me in this program called Midwest Mobility, And what it was was it was sixty people in the Midwest, so Illinois, Wisconsin. It was the sixty people who had the most potential, you know, to become district managers down the road, which was a coveted position. So their teaching, I mean, you're it's it's a you had like business acumen, you had scheduling, you had managing conflicts. So I'm getting all this training and development on the job while being a top performer, you know. And I just I'm so grateful that I was able to get this job, you know, because now that's when I started like saving my emergency fund, I started paying back my student loans. I started to get financially okay, you know, whereas you're a chef, I wasn't making enough, you know too, And I wasn't even a chef. I was a cook, so I wasn't making enough to really do anything. I was just surviving. Now I'm in a position where I'm actually I'm living on my own, I got a car, I'm saving a little bit of money. And it was just I'm just so grateful for that opportunity, you know, to be able to work there with them. So because you started to have a cushion and some space, is that when you were working at that company, Is that when you were able to start thinking about your first book? Absolutely? That's If I didn't work there, I wouldn't have been able to see when Corona happened. I saw a lot of people tweeting, Oh, where you're gonna be at home? We should just write a book. Well, as a person who's written eight books, this is the worst time to write a book. You don't want to in my opinion, you don't want to write a book when you're in survival mode, when you're in desperation mode. That's that to me, is just not where the best inspiration and creativity is going to come from. And my and just in my opinion, you know, for me, I was able to pay my bills and have have Uh, you know, money for like Sunday Funday type stuff, things I had never done before. You know, I was able to get brunched. That comfort was what enabled me to start rewriting again, because when I was in survival mode, I wasn't thinking you're only thinking about art as a coping thing, you know. But when I when I got the job, now, art wasn't coping. It was just let me express freely. So you're creating from two different places. If you have to, I mean, you're you're you're an actress. So if you have to go for a job now at this point in your career because you need a sandwich, or you're doing it because you're genuinely inspired by the role or your action about working with the director, they're gonna your performances are going to be drastically different. What you said just hits me so hard, because real expression requires an energy of freedom in your body. Art is free expression. Art is flow, and and when you're in a state of anxiety or primal fear, it's really hard to flow. So that makes that makes a lot of sense. What was it like to begin that process? What was it like to begin sharing? Because I know that you know, you started getting It's like one of my favorite stories is that you started getting reactions to your writing and people were saying to you like, oh, what book is this from? Who wrote this? And you're like, no, no, I've I've wrote it. It's my It's going to be in my book. So what what was going on at the time? How did how did that kind of begin? So just to summarize the job tent ten to two thousand and twelve, I was I was at at my god at my job and top performer, top one percent in company, and sales I was working in sales. And sales is such an interesting Every company have sales. You know, it doesn't matter what you do. You have a sales component to your job. If you don't, you won't have a job. You won't. You know, if you're trying to put a movie out, you need people to sell it. You need people to market it. You know. Um In learning sales, I feel like it's the number one thing that artists need to do. You need to learn how to sell yourself. You need to learn how to sell your product, your merchandise, whatever it is you need to learn. Sales and sales is psychology. It is the psychology of what triggers people to buy or not to buy, to do or not to do it. It's only psychology. That is only what sales is. So I got to work at the time when the iPhone was first being launched. Now, the iPhone is one of the first, at least in my lifetime. It's one of the first items that I could think of that when quote unquote viral. Other other than that I could think of like the Tickle me Elmo dolls back in the nineties, like that was a viral product. The iPhones were like a viral product. So I'm working during the viral product launches of the iPhones and I'm selling the phones. So most people just do the job. They just collect the money and go home. But I'm I'm literally I would on my break, I would take notes about the psychology of the people, you know, and I would just be paying attention to everything. And I'm taking all these notes at work, and I started writing a book about how to be the most successful self person. And what I was gonna do was I was gonna sell it like I was gonna give it to my what's his name, His name is Chris Dietrich. He was the director of sales. I was gonna give it to him to see if he could sell it inside the company. That was my goal. I was like, hey, I'm top one percent in the company. I might as well tell everybody what I'm doing. Too. Was working, so I'm I started writing this book. I'm gonna give it to my director so he could sell it within the company. This was my mindset. So I just start working on the book. And then I'm at work and like I would just I would find myself taking my phone because i was writing the book on my phone, so I'm writing in my notes at work, I find myself going to the bathroom like ten eleven twelve bathroom breaks. No one actually uses the bathroom that much. I would just going there, locked the door and pull out my phone and start working on my book. So when I get to this obsessive point where I'm like working on my book, that's when I noticed like a shift in my happiness at work. That's when my because I was super happy at my job, then I started to not be happy because now my job is taking away from me working on my book. So the shift happened where I'm like I just started leaning towards my creativity. So the final straw for me was my best friend, my brother. You know, I was the best man at his wedding, you know, the guyfather his children. He came over my house one day and the stack of notebooks that I told you I've been writing in my whole life. He saw them. No one ever saw them. Me and him a roommates in college for four years, and he never saw them. So he saw these notebooks and he's like, hey, what's what are these notebooks? Just for Verizon? And you know, I'm hey, get away from there, get away from there. Don't, don't, don't, don't look at that stuff. Put that stuff down. He's like, well, what is it? And I'm like, man, it's just you know, some stuff I've been working on. So it's literally my entire life work since I was twelve. It's every single notebook I ever had. I kept them all. So he's looking and he's just like and he's a stoic. He's very stoic. He's very calm, and he's just like, dude, this is incredible, Like you wrote all of this and say, yeah, this is incredible. He's like, what are you doing at Verizon? It's like, what do you mean I'm doing out doing that Verizon like I'm killing it. He's like, no, no, no, no, no, you're selling yourself short. Do you see this stuff? You have to put this out. He's like, you have to put this out. His name is William and he goes, if you don't put your words out, you're doing yourself in the world a disservice. Wow, what a compliment. Yeah, he told me that. He told me that we were sitting in my part in a carol Stream, Illinois, and when he told me that, he said. Another thing he said to me that night was he said, he said, all your life, you've given a hundred to your high school, to Northern Illinois, to football, to Verizon. He goes, You've never given that much to yourself, though, and he says, what would happen if you just committed to yourself the way you commit to everybody else's ideas and everybody else's things. What would happen if you just committed to yourself? And I'm like, I don't know. He's like, I think you need to quit your job and you need to commit to yourself. And here I am, I'm like, quit my job? What are you talking about, dude, I was just a cook. They're they're paying me, you know, thirty thousand salary plus commission. You want me to quit on that, know myself? And he goes yes, he says, this is incredible. You need to put these books out immediately. And when he said that, that night he left and he left, I said in my computer and I just cried. I just cried. I just had I was just like overwhelmed with emotion. One because he never he never was that expressive. He's not a very expressive person. So for him to be that passionate about something and like again, to see my life before I saw it, I just was like, man like, it was just overwhelming. And it took me about a year and a half. But here's what I did. I used my job because I knew. I told Jeremy. I went to I went to Jeremy, my manager, and I said, hey, man, I think I'm gonna quit to become an author. And he goes, okay, that's cool, but I have some advice for you, and I said okay. He says, I don't want to discourage you because I know what you're capable of, but being an author might not work. So what you should do is you're killing it as seals your top one percent as a sales rep. You need to become a manager. You need to have manager on your resume so you can prove that you can duplicate this success as a manager. Because what happens if you go into your book stuff for a couple of years it doesn't work out. Well, now you're gonna come back and you're gonna be in your thirties and you don't want to start over the entry level. You will it would be better for you to be a manager because you might have kids by then. And like Jeremy, he just had this incredible foresight, and I'm like, I'm like, yeah, you know, you're right. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna quit because I was already mentally checked out. So I re engaged, recommitted to the job. And now my whole focus was I'm gonna move to l A. I'm gonna uh go out there, you know, be a writer out there, and I'm gonna transfer my job to Los Angeles. Uh. So I applied. I had I ended up having and it wasn't just l A. I just wanted somewhere warm, because the apocalyptic Winter of eleven destroyed my energy. We hit a blizzard out there, yeah, and it was it was awful. So once that happened, I'm like, I need somewhere warm. So I ended up having an interview in Fort Myers, I believe it was Florida. I think it was like Bakersfield, California, which is nowhere near l A. And then uh, Phoenix, Arizona. So I did a couple of the interviews I got offered on all of them. I talked to one in Phoenix, and I'm like, hey, that's a that's a city. I like cities right now. So I took the one in Phoenix, and that's how I got here to Phoenix. End up doing the job for another year and a half. By that final year and a half, I had my first book out. It was getting sales um and I quit my job and it was I was I was waiting ready to go all in. That was two thousand. That's so cool. And one of the things I love about your story, and I think it's got to be so good for people at home who are listening, is that you never gave up on the dream, but you also went about achieving it in ways that were practical and that had application to your life and that would take care of you. You know. I think that sometimes the internet makes it look like everyone's an overnight success story and like you can just go out there and be reckless and it'll work. And none of it works like that, And I think it's amazing to think about how you can work towards something that is your life's dream while you're also protecting your actual life. Agree with you, you know. I always see the advice from entrepreneurs online and they're just like, oh, just quit your job and you know, become a multimillionaire by just only using your phone. Look, I mean maybe that happened for you, but not most of us is not going to happen that way. So to me, quitting your job is because I don't believe you should create out of desperation. When you're creating out of desperation, it's just like, what are you creating? What value are you actually creating? When you're under the mindset of I want to create a business or I want to create a product, you have to get into to me, you have to get into the mindset of how is this going to help my customer, What value am I offering them? What benefits are they getting? How are they going to get the best experience. So when you think about a customer, now your customer is your reader. So through your writing and all of your speaking, because as you mentioned, you know, you travel around, you speak, you do these incredible engagements all over the place. What do you hear from people? What do you hear from your readers and your listeners the most? Yeah, I mean the first I mean, first thing is just gratitude, Like people are just very grateful, you know that I've just followed my own path, you know, and then people get a lot of things, you know. I think I empower the creative person, you know, because I believe in art, and I believe in creativity, and I just believe that it's a path to happiness, even if we're not doing it as a job, but we're just expressing ourselves, whether it's dancing, singing, just playing, just being creative, painting things of that nature. I believe that that is one of the paths to healing and happiness. So I think that you know, you have that person who's just really empowered because through my work, they've been able to just uh, recaptivate parts of their childhood that they loved, even things like getting on a bike. You know, I had a podcast about getting on a bicycle, and someone sent me a message saying, Hey, I loved it. I'm on my bike again, all because of you. You know. It's like and then there's another part of my work where there's like a deep introspective part where it's focused on let me figure out what's going on inside of me, let me self heal or self navigate or self empower. And then there's another side of my work where, you know, like with my mom and my dad, where I try to look at situations and see where those pain points are or where where we can learn or shift while things are happening. And so I think that mostly people just have gratitude when they talk to me. They're just they're just grateful because I feel like my work kind of hit different different spaces depending on where you are. And I think especially getting comfortable talking about those pain points, talking about ways that we need to look inward at those things in order to metabolize them, in order to digest those experiences in or to get those things out of our bodies. I'm always so grateful to the men that I know who are willing to have these conversations in the way that you are, because men for so long have been cultured that they're only the only emotional outlet they have is anger. And in order to shift society, we have to shift how we deal with pains so that we put less anger out into the world. And I think that that's something that's really really profound, So thank you for that. I've experienced that. You know, you asked me what kind of some type of like the negative feedback I've got. Well, I've gotten that from different guys before, like, oh man, what type of you know? What is this? This is? You know? But the thing is is like if you knew, you know, I don't say this to them because I just don't respond to negativity. But I mean, if you do the whole story like one, I could fight. So it's like, you know, I can fight. I've done all the masculine stuff. I've played all the football games, like, I've lifted all the weights. I've been in weight room screaming with a bunch of guys, got been in country fields doing people stuff, people doing the country So it's like the stuff that we stereotypically think as masculine. I've done all of that. So you're not going to discredit something like my writing or my speaking because you think it's not it's not mainly enough. I don't. I don't. I don't agree with you guys, like you're you're wrong. You know. Oh, so you know you think that writing about an emotional thing or writing about emotions is weak or you think that's a feminine thing. I don't think so. You look at any any poet, you know, throughout the history of time, poets, poets have all been men for the most part, and it's all been men talking about you know, this love he has for his woman or a woman he wants to get where. They calling that, you know, soft and weak back then, I don't think so. I don't think so at all. So it's like I think because of my background of being an athlete and doing all those things that I just I don't allow the negativity to touch me whatsoever. I'll see it if it comes, and it doesn't come much anymore. But when I first started, it came there. Like all you need to be doing something tougher than this, like what working out. Everybody works out you can work out on the internet. That's what everybody's doing. I have something different to all, and I would argue even tougher. It's much harder to be with your feelings and learn to communicate them than it is to distract yourself by going on a run or lifting a heavy thing, you know. And I think that the truth of the matter is that we can all overthink things, you know, when we get into our feelings, when we're trying to navigate a situation, we can all get stuck on that inner hamster wheel. Are are there ways that you are there tools you've developed to stop doing that? And where did those Yeah? Where do those kinds of things stem from? Do you think? Yeah? I mean as a as an artist, and I think you probably can relate to this at different points in your story too. Is like, I feel like overthinking is something that all artists do at some point or another, and I think there is a path to get through that. So I've actually developed a course called how to Stop Overthinking, and it's something that I talk about in my book Free Your Energy. And with the Free your Energy thing, you know, it's really what you were just talking about, just allowing yourself to be free. You know, you can't create from a from a place where you're restricted. You know, Like you think about yoga for a second. When you do yoga, what's the point. The point of doing yoga is to breathe, to become one with your breath. Right, But we can attach different styles to yoga where you have uh, you know, different assignas that you have your different practices where you can hold like you have a yin yoga where you're holding it for five minutes. Like the point of doing that is to loosen up your body, to free your body, to free your spirit, to free your energy, to free yourself. Right, And when you're able to free yourself, there's no overthinking, right because when you're free, you have confidence, Like freedom gives you confidence. Part of overthinking is because of a lack of confidence, right, Like, I don't know what to choose. I'm not confident in either choice. Well, if you free yourself and you allow yourself to have just free thought and you allow your emotions to just flow freely, the answer will come to you. And even if you pick wrong, that's okay because who has who hits at a hundred percent in life? You know, nobody Michael Jordan wants six championships. Shooting from the field, he missed half the shots. So you know, you don't have to be right all the time. So my practice is I have a practice every morning. I'm more. I have a morning routine that I go through and it's about a two hour routine pretty much do the same stuff. Um. I have a hot, facetile wash. I wash my face every morning, every single morning. And when I do that, I say affirmations to myself. So this morning, this morning, my affirmations were give so Fia good stories, Give so Fia good stories. That was this morning. So it was me, you know, trying to predict what I wanted to do or like, you know, put myself into space where I could do what I need to do for you know, this moment where we're creating, you know. But it could be something that simple as simplify your life today or you know, just be good today. I always every single morning, I tell myself how I want to feel, you know. Um then from there I write our journal. I get out my journal and I just journal. Could be quick to do list, it could be a long thought, It could be emotions, It could be a poem, it could be a lyric. It is just whatever comes to me. I just jown a little bit, and then depending on the day, I may either go for a run, go for a row, walk, uh, stretch, just kind of wake my body up, take my multi vitamins. Literally, like every morning, I do the same thing to reboot you know, you know my system. And one of the things that I talked about in my course is the reason people overthink is because they're making too many decisions per day, because we have such thing as decision fatigue. So if you can cultivate part of your day to be automatic to where there is no thinking, to where there is no decisions, then your channel capacity for making decisions gets the you have a longer duration of it. See, I'm not making this. Let's say I get up at nine and less say I go to sleep at nine. Because of my morning routine, I'm not making decisions from nine to nine. I'm only making decisions from like one to nine because the majority of my day is set. Also, I mel prep so every single morning I eat the same thing. I just mail prep on Sunday, so my food is done so I don't have to think about what am I gonna eat. Also, what I do is I wear the same clothes. You know. Now, I have some stuff that you know, if if I'm going out or something, you know, you know, we got those clothes. But for the most part, I wear a black T shirt. If I'm doing something where you know, I have a meeting, I wear a collar. But I pretty much wear the same thing. So the first four hours of my day, there's no thinking. It's it's routine, and it's a routine that allows me to heal and to cultivate my power. As soon as I wake up, I don't touch my phone. I don't I don't do social media. Like if you look, my social media post go up at six in the morning. But I have a scheduler. So what I do is I load my social media post the night before and then it posts in the morning, so I'm not on social media when I wake up, I don't see my phone till one o'clock in the afternoon. Wow, that's incredible. These feel like such major steps, honestly, to even more than just taking care of ourselves to love ourselves better. I really really like that. How do you think because you talk about your journaling practice, and this is something that's been coming up a lot in conversation recently. I think so many of us are doing a lot of reflection right now, and I know that myself included. There's so many people who want to start a journaling practice. It is there a kind of jumping off point that you recommend to people, yes, for sure, who want to do that. So the very first thing is you have to steal a journal from seven eleven. Okay, that's that's first and foremost. Okay, if you don't steal the journal, you don't really want it. Okay, No, please don't steal. Please. That was just my childhood thing. Yeah, sarcasm, Please don't steal. That was a joke. Look, I think you gotta go into it freely. I think if you go into it saying I'm going to control what it's gonna be, I think you don't allow yourself to be free. You know, if you look at some of my old journals when I was playing football, I would be drawing football plays. I would be drawing like star Trak stuff writing and then would just all be in this journal. And that's how your mind is, that's how your emotions are. Everything is flowing. Right. I saw a paper the other day was saying that it was saying that on average, what was it saying. It was saying that we have anywhere from like sixty five thou and eighty thousand thoughts today. So if that's true, you know, you can't go into it saying, hey, I'm going to control what I'm gonna write down. Have to just let it flow. You know, your moods, your emotions, you just let it flow. You know, if I if I wrote right now, I'm happy, I'm not I'm not hungry, I'm not hot, like my emotions. Where I feel right now is a very high vibrational you know, talking with you, we're talking about creativity and we're just diving into so many things. So I'm feeling really good right now. So if I journal, it would be a very positive, like uplifting thing. But if I journal the first thing in the morning, maybe before I brush my teeth, before I washed my face, you know, it might not be that good. You know, it might be something, it might be different, but they're both okay, They're both acceptable. So if you're looking to get into a journal practice, just go into it with the mindset of the purpose of me journaling is for my own freedom. It's not for any desired outcome. And then the last thing is, don't have an expectation of the length. One sentence might be all you do. Hell, there's been times in my journal where I have just written one word. So it may be one word, It maybe one sentence. It may flow in it. You may have this long poem like the Odyssey. Don't have any expectation on the outcome. I love that the purpose of my journaling is for my own freedom. Mm hmm. Is there. I have two more questions for you, and thank you so much for your time. Is there a piece of writing, a phrase or a little paragraph or something just based on to your point this kind of energetic space that we have found ourselves in that you want to share with people at home listening. Yeah, I got my care packaged book. This is been um, my best selling book has been my care packaged book. People really, they really love this book. So on page two thirty four, there's this quote that says a lot can happen in a year, and it's it's when I remember writing, and it's as a lot can happen in a year. People die, You outgrow old friends and get tired of mundane jobs, new careers, calm, new friends, find your soul. But no matter what you grow, you lose your mind a little bit. Most importantly, you get a little wiser. Your circle gets smaller because you get stricter with your energy and time. And if you're really lucky, you'll find love inside of yourself, inside of friends and family, and just maybe the universe will bless you with the lover who laughs at your lame jokes. And yeah, that's one of my favorite ones. A lot can happen in a year. Mm hmm, that feels very aproposed right now. Okay, my friend, My favorite thing to ask everyone who comes on this podcast because it is called work in progress and I'm curious when you here the phrase, whether it's something personal or professional, what feels like a work in progress in your life right now? May I give both? Yes? Please, let's go with professional first and then I can end on personal. So professional, this year has been so you go from a space where you know you're working at your corporation and you're moving into entrepreneurship. You've been in entrepreneurship for seven eight years. What happens is you do you end up doing too much? You end up overworking, end up working fifty sixty hours, you end up not having balance. And it's a good thing, and I believe in duality. It's a good thing because there's a reward for committing yourself to that type of work that often to that frequency. But it's not a good thing because, like I said, you don't have the balance right. And so this year, coming into this year, my whole goal was to teach myself how to balance. So I was able to hire new people, so you know, hire new employees, expand my team. I was able to get some of the things off my plate that I'm not good at, like email and things like that. I'm not good at email and responding. I'm really not good at that. Like my bread and butter is creating. You know, I gotta spend my time creating. And what was happening is my business was growing so much that I was spending time. There will be day, there will be weeks where I wasn't writing at all because all I'm doing is just you know, editing videos or doing emails, setting up podcasts, traveling. Like Lebron James says it best, you gotta keep the main thing, the main thing the main thing for me is writing books. So I had to kind of reverse engineer, you know, my how it was set up so I could get some balance in my life because I believe in balance. I believe in it. You know even our body, and our body is called homeostasis. You know, our body is consistently looking for balance. So Corona actually help me with that balance, because Corona has actually taken some things off of my plate from a business perspective that I didn't have, that I probably wouldn't have done myself, and it's helped me get a new balance. So when when when we go to quote unquote normal, there are certain things that I'm going to have to have a healthy boundary with and say no, like I can't do this because it's going to disrupt my balance that I've learned through the coronavirus. So I'm very very grateful for where I am personally, like pre professionally, I should say, because I finally have balance, I'm able to work work hard, work smart, and working smart is more important than working hard. That's what I've realized. It's so much more important to work smart. And I finally realized that I need to work smart and not hard. I needed to work hard at different times in my life. But moving forward, I want to work smart, I want to work efficient. I want to make sure I have routine. I want to make sure I'm optimizing my time. And then also I need my personal time. The reason don't need my personal time and the reason I'm working progress in the personal spaces because I'm a new father. Al Right. So my son his name is Mason, and being a father is something that I don't know what I'm doing. I have no clue whatsoever. So it's a completely new space where every day I'm learning and I'm trying to figure out. Like I made him cry the other day because I was mocking him. He was like screaming, you know, he was like yeah, yeah, yeah, So I like I tried to do it back to him, like yeah, and he started crying. And so I felt so bad because I felt like I made him cry. And then like I apologize to him and I'm like, hey, man, I'm sorry, I was just mocking you. I thought it was fun, you know, And then he started laughing at me, and I'm like, you know, he forgave me. So being a father is something where it's like I don't know what I'm doing, you know, and so I'm trying to figure it out. I'm trying to help the mother because she's amazing and she she's doing everything to make sure he survives. And uh, it's just it's it's a crazy experience to go from like not like like even a year ago, like like the quote says, like a year ago, I didn't have a kid. Now I have a kid, and it's like your mind just shifts like a new space. You know. We're like four or four in the morning. Yes, So I woke up because I heard him scream in the middle of the night. So I woke up, and I'm like investigating, like I'm thinking somebody's in the house, somebody's kidnapping him. But he was just hungry, you know. So you know, yeah, I'm just suggesting to being a new father. And that is another reason why I wanted to balance, you know, I didn't want to be someone who it's overworking when you know, I got a kid at home. Because fatherhood is very important to me. That's one of the things that I want to do great at you know, I want my next book to do great. I want my fatherhood to be great. You know, I want my course to do great. I want my life to be great. I want I want to just have complete abundance and all pillars of my life, you know, and I need that balance to do that. I can't I can't be over balanced. I gotta make sure everything is getting enough of me that's inspiring. That's certainly something I know I'm working on is figuring out how to reduce a little bit so that it's only the really, really good stuff that remains. You know, it's hard, man, It's hard, especially when you when what you do impact so many other people. Then it's like, well, man, if I get rid of this, well, now this person is not gonna eat or they're not gonna make the money that they're making off of me. It's like that's the hard thing is when you're when you kind of become like a little quote unquote empire and you have people who are depending on your success, it's hard to think of, oh, well I don't need to grow. Especially we both work in business where they say you need growth, you need new customers, you need to keep expanding. Well, it's like, well do I really? It's like, it's it's tough. It's a tough thing to figure out, But onward Do we Go? Where we Go? This show is executive produced by Me, Sophia Bush and sim Sarna. Our supervising producer is Alison Bresnick. Our associate producer is Kate Linley. Our editor is Josh Wendish, and our music was written by Jack Garrett and produced by Mark Foster. This show is brought to you by a Brilliant Anatomy