Reinventing Myself Without Fear, Or Giving Up My $3.5M+ Solo Business

Why I'm giving up my mid-six-figure solo business so I can help you build the life you always wanted.

You are the light of the world. I want you to shine your brightest and to taste true freedom.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” - Frank Herbert, Dune

I'm taking this opportunity to speak directly from my heart.

Why would I give up my business of 16 years - one that provides an incredible lifestyle for my family and me - to pursue something entirely new? What could be so important that I would risk ever-increasing growth in the business I sacrificed so much to build?

To explain this, I need to describe one of the main lenses through which I see the world.

At the core, it’s this:

• I believe every human has the potential to live an incredible life - one that provides them peace and joy and love and fulfillment. 

• I believe each human is a light, capable of shining brightly for themselves and for others to see. 

• I believe humans share in a collective light, making their own brighter when others around them do the same. 

• I believe the default human state is love, creativity, cooperation, innovation, hope, and joy - all manifestations of light.

• I believe all humans are linked, physically and spiritually - our lights shine collectively. 

I also believe in what we call darkness - the state of no light.

I say it this way, because “darkness” in and of itself is not a thing. There’s no molecular structure to darkness. We have flashlights that can illuminate a room, but we don’t have “darklights” that suck it away.

Darkness is simply the state of no light. It’s the default environmental state - what happens when nothing shows up to illuminate the room. 

In human terms, I believe this darkness sets the stage for fear. 

Fear is an emotionally-charged, reactionary state.

It fundamentally exists to help us react to immediate danger. In order to survive, we essentially flip the lights off temporarily. Gone are the thoughts of love, creativity, cooperation, innovation, hope, and joy. Our mind focuses specifically on what needs to be done at this moment to survive. 

If you’ve ever watched someone who is afraid of spiders smash one into oblivion with a maniacal look in their eyes, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

This has served us well over time. It’s partly to thank for how we’ve survived a very brutal natural world all these generations.

Today, though, fear takes on an entirely new presence in our lives. See, the key word from the above description is “temporary.” Fear’s function is to temporarily focus our mind on what is needed to survive. We process the fear and we move on. 

But, what happens when we let fear linger? What happens when we don’t quickly get back to shining our light?

Lingering fear manifests itself into greed, anger, dishonesty, theft, gossip, pessimism, cynicism, laziness, and hate. Instead of quickly switching off the light in a literal moment of life or death, we slowly dim our light, darkening ourselves and everything around us. We’re reducing our capacity for all of the “light” states of mind, allowing these negative states to take hold.

Remember, fear is an emotionally-charged, reactionary state. It’s the state of frenzy. Of outrage. Of exasperation. Of “I'm the center of the universe” thoughts. “I must act now!” It's nearly impossible to think clearly about anything else when you're in this state.

Alas, we arrive at the key point: You don’t think clearly in a state of fear.

You cannot leverage those states of light mentioned above. 

I can think of a few ways this mind state could be exploited by others. Plenty of powerful institutions have had decades or more time to think of countless ways.Namely, corporations and politicians. They’re implementing them every day in order to gain what they want. 

I have so much to say about this, and will use future articles to do so. Meanwhile, here’s a brief summary of how they leverage emotional states to gain what they want.

• Product/service corporations mostly leverage your desire to have status in your tribe. If you don’t buy the right things, you’re afraid your tribe will look down on you. Or, you’re afraid you’ll never gain access to a tribe you think is better. They trick you into believing that the things you buy are actually you. They also weave the threads of your mind into a fabric that tells you pleasure = happiness. If you don’t buy into the immediate pleasure, you won’t be happy. From there, they will manufacture any possible message that can pull at your emotional responses long enough to get you to buy before you come to your senses.

• Media corporations largely leverage a sense of worry. They want you to feel that there are big, important issues facing you every day. You must stay on top of the story, fully-informed, so that you know how to react. Humans love stories, especially thrilling stories with emotional significance. Moreso, they absolutely hate missing a key piece of a story everyone else knows. They’ll tune in every day and wait patiently past the corporate advertisements that fund these very media corporations. But, they only want to keep you informed out of the goodness of their hearts, right? More on this, right after the commercial break...

• Politicians literally leverage your fear of danger. It’s the most primal, base, disgusting form of leverage. They gain control over your mind by getting you to believe that your neighbor, the evil Republican/Democrat, is a threat to your survival, your kids’ survival, your country’s survival. They want to be seen as the only solution to this problem, defenders of the very fundamental fabric of all that you hold sacred. Join our team and root for us at all costs! Never mind that most of us get along perfectly well with others, and happily talk civilly and productively through different ideas when we’re not indoctrinated into their “us vs. them” paradigm. They have destroyed the very essence of leadership and replaced it with regressive, tribalistic, black-and-white thinking.

I see these institutions as the primary cultural drivers of darkness. They work collectively to cast a “spell” on you and me in order to achieve their aims. They cannot afford for your mind to shine brightly. If it does, you exist outside of a fear state - the reactive state they NEED you to be in if they’re going to get what they want. 

I’m determined to help you see the game these institutions are playing. I’m determined to help you understand how to combat these forces and how to focus on your default state of light, where creativity, collaboration, kindness, love, and all those other positives can live and thrive.

I’ll never tire of the joy I feel when I watch someone break the spell, seeing that it was just fear holding them back, and immediately begin making progress in their lives. Their mindset switches from emotional reactivity to conscious creativity. They think about possibilities, innovation, growth, abundance, and great depths of the human experience. 

Everyone deserves this opportunity. I’m focusing on helping as many people as I can. I’m so fortunate to have many people in my life who shine almost blinding lights. I am collecting their lessons so I can share them, as well.

Now, you know why I’m doing this.

When you shine brighter, we all shine brighter.