The Ascend Archives

Welcome to the first edition of my newsletter, the Ascend Archives. To be honest, starting this newsletter is primarily a selfish decision based on two main reasons:

1. I enjoy writing and get fulfilment from it

2. I want to document my thoughts, lessons learned, successes, and failures so that I can look back on them some day in the future

I want to share this publicly because I believe everyone regardless of their situation (age, race, gender, background, etc.) is working through the same fundamental questions in life so if my journey can inspire or positively impact someone out there, then I’d love to help make that happen.

I will not be teaching anything or giving advice in this newsletter. It will purely be a discussion around my weekly thoughts, challenges I’m facing in my personal and business life, and takeaways from my favorite thought leaders as I pursue my theme for 2024: Building my Life by Design.

Alright time to dig in and get back to my high school newspaper editor in chief roots. Thanks for following along on my journey. Please reach out to me with questions, comments, and feedback!

Don’t just set New Years resolutions, reflect on the previous year

I’m going to kick this off with my lessons learned from 2023.

I initially got the idea from Syed Balkhi, a 33 year old entrepreneur that has built software companies that power 25+ million websites. He writes an annual blog that recaps his previous year with the following categories:

1. Personal Highlights

2. Business Highlights

3. Acquisitions & Investments

4. Lessons Learned

5. Favorite Reads of 2023

6. My Goals for 2024

Check out his recap here.

I completed a similar exercise this year towards the end of my backpacking trip when I had a few days to myself in a quaint costal town called Whangarei in New Zealand.

I’m not going to share the full recap here but I will say it was an incredibly valuable and fun exercise. Especially the personal highlights part. I grabbed my camera roll and started scrolling through to remind myself what I did this past year and it was CRAZY how many places I went, people I connected with, and things I accomplished. All it takes is that random picture of a ping pong bar to remind you of a fun weekend with your mom and sister that might have otherwise not been top of mind.

Personal Highlights Quick Summary: Traveled 14+ weeks (6 countries), spent meaningful time with family and all my close friends, made lots of new friends, completed 2 half marathons and a triathlon, lived in 2 different cities, and quit 2 jobs.

Lessons Learned

1. Invest in Yourself

The start of the year was big for me because that is when I decided to join the Gobunance Emerge mastermind. I was sitting in the airport at the end of Dec waiting to board my flight from ATL to Santiago and I listened to a podcast by Jamie Gruber on Tribe of MIllionaires. There was a special offer to sign up by the end of the year for $1,500 for a two month intro course. I had never spent that amount of money on any sort of personal development before. Long story short, I got so much value in those first two months that I paid another $4,500 in March for the annual membership and just re-upped for 2024!

2. Live Life with Urgency

There was one video I watched on my flight back to Miami to NYE with my friend Ethan that changed my life. It was Jesse Itzler talking about his year defining Misogi and 6 yearly Mini Adventures that he completes each year. He also has the slogan “Live Life with Urgency” which is a mentality I have adopted. That inspired me to implement this in my own life and led to me doing some amazing stuff this year.

He defines a Misogi as some sort of year defining thing that is challenging and scary but that you are proud of. For me in 2023 it was quitting my corporate job. When I look back on 2023 in 10 years, I will remember that was time I took action that differed from the status quo and changed the trajectory of my life.

He also talks about every other month taking a day to do “mini adventure”. Its something you normally wouldn’t do but that interests you like a cooking class or driving an hour and a half to go for a hike or trying new food. I did way more than 6 of these this year. See below for a few of my favorites:

• Tried raw sushi at Soto in Austin

• Puerto Rico cliff jumping with Cam

• Quinn 92 concert solo

• Punta Cana trip with the Fam

• Michigan football game with Lutz, Tom, Luis, and Marley vs Rutgers 

• Drove a 4WD on K’gari island 

• Cricket game in Melbourne 

• Eat an entire 8 course tasting menu with chopsticks

• Rent a car in Mallorca and drive around the island hiking solo

• Book a flight to Italy a week out and hike Cinque Terre with Tim and Joanna

• Mt joy concert in Dallas with Jamie

• Spent the ultimate day in Queenstown with Marko (Canyoning, Hang Gliding, dinner at Botswana Butchery)

3. Complete this Fear Setting Exercise when facing a tough decision

Ask yourself: What is the worst that can happen?

Learned this from Tim Ferris and I applied it to my decision to leave EY. Write down the worst possible situation if everything were to go horribly wrong, where would I be? After you do this you realize its really not that bad. Yes I lost out on $50k bonus from EY and now I have a gap in my resume, but so what? It’s been 6 months since I quit and I’ve already quit another job since then and I’m writing this after traveling the world for 2 months. I can always go back and get a normal stable job again if I needed to.

4. Success can be measured in the number of uncomfortable conversations you are willing to have

This is one that I really learned the year before with my ex-fiancé but it applied again this year when I was quitting both of my jobs. Those conversations with my boss at EY and the entrepreneur (Wally) I worked for in Dallas were very uncomfortable. Especially the second one with after my boss really wanted me to stay and it wasn’t like I was leaving for another opportunity. Most people just stay on their trajectory because its easy and comfortable. They don’t want to have the difficult conversations with a boss or loved one because things are “good enough”. Good enough is not enough and it takes having difficult conversations and making difficult decisions to find greatness. 

5. Ask, Act, Acquire

I learned this one from Jamie Gruber (founder of Emerge Gobundance). I applied it and it got me the job in Dallas. The first part ask if referring to asking smart, thoughtful questions to mentors or people you are seeking advice from. Then Act means you take action on the advice they gave you or something you learned from talking with them. Finally acquire means that you acquire a relationship with that person once you prove that you do what you say and follow through on someone’s advice. 

How I implemented this this year was I saw Matt King (CEO of Gobundance) was going to be giving feedback on OneSheets in my Emerge Mastermind. A One Sheet is a place where you list all of your most important information (income, expenses, net worth, debt, weight, goals for the year, items you are struggling with, etc.). Matt lives in Austin and he is someone I look up to as we have similar characteristics of being an integrator (someone who great at execution in a business). So I presented my One Sheet, shared all my personal info and then at the end I said I was looking for a visionary who I could learn from. He then introduced me to my future boss via text. I followed through and had several calls with both of them until I was offered the job and took it. Now I am seen as someone who takes action and I have built rapport with Wally, Matt, and Jamie.

6. Run Towards Fear

I did that with quitting both my jobs. The best things in life are on the other side of fear. (so far so good one this one, but I will have to keep you posted!)

7. Action creates confidence

I learned this by rereading Atomic Habits and put it to use while dating this year. I went on my first date in January and I remember being scared shitless. It was a girl I connected with on Hinge and we setup a time to grab drinks at a spot downtown in Austin. I remember walking there sweating my ass off scared about what to say and how to act. But I got myself there and after a few minutes the conversation just started to flow. The first several were like that but eventually I became more confident in my ability to talk with girls and navigate the nuances of the awkward first/second/third dates. Now going into 2024, I not only have refined what I’m looking for in someone but have more confidence putting myself out there to find them. 

8. Build your life resume

Another Jesse Itzler quote but this one from his book living with the Monks. Experiences and memories are so much more powerful than just networking events, coffee chats, and phone calls with people. All of the cool shit and trips I took this year are so much more memorable then just going to the bar with friends where I live and allowed me to make deeper connections to the people I did them with. This has inspired me to pursue creating experiences for people as a business idea. 

9. Focus on your wants, not needs. Become a wanter, not a needer

This is a Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy concept from Gap & Gain and 10x is Easier than 2x. Big mindset shift that I started to implement towards the end of the year but is going to be huge for me in 2024. My whole theme of 2024 revolves around this concept.  Focusing on your wants creates an abundant mindset. Its about what can I build, create, accomplish and not what I should do or need to do because of external pressures. I should not have to justify any of my wants. I can just want something because I want it. My first step of this was flying to Italy and Spain and booking the 7 week trip to Australia / NZ. I love to travel and do adventures so thats what I did. I wanted to move back to Austin because I enjoy it here. I’m going to keep following this intuition.

10. The Stoic idea around the power of perception. You get to choose how you view a situation

I was “dating” this girl in Dallas. Nothing official but we were seeing each other at least once a week for a few months. I was having a lot of self doubt and struggled throughout the entire experience about if I was “doing the right things” and not moving fast enough romantically and questioning if she was interested in me. But then I started to frame the situation differently. I started to think “ I am who I am” and there is no right way to date or right timeline to date. Because of my history, I needed to take things slower and thats totally ok. We ended up breaking it off but had a very open and honest conversation that we were just at different points in our dating life and what we were looking for but we both really liked and respected one another. That was a learning experience for me by being an opportunity to gain confidence through action and to lean into being my authentic self.

11. Be so good they can’t ignore you

This is a concept I learned several years ago from Cal Newport but I really saw it come into fruition this year when leaving my job at EY. Over the past 4 years and specifically 2ish years in the Corporate Real Estate group, I established myself as a top performer and someone who my bosses could depend on to provide high quality work for our clients. I was selected to join a high profile project and over the course of a year was early promoted to Manager, asked to lead a team of 3 people, and was being asked for specifically by several clients to help them with their workstreams. By being “so good”, this gave me leverage to making more money, having more flexibility and autonomy over my work and which assignments I wanted to work on. Then, when I decided to leave it resulted in the head of my department Doug offering me more money and more flexibility to stay at the company. When I turned him down, he even left me saying if I ever wanted to come back to just give him a call and I’d have a job (which he recently just offered again). To summarize, becoming valuable will open up many doors for you.

12. Happiness is a choice. You will find happiness in helping others find happiness.

This concept has come up in a lot of what I have read and worked on in the past year. The first quote came from the Happiness Equation book I listened to while driving up the coast in Australia. My cousin Josh recommended it to me a while ago but didnt read it until recently. Its a misconception that you will be happy when you get the raise, buy the house, marry the girl, etc. If you are not happy now then you wont be happy then. Its important to be intentional on a daily basis about doing things you enjoy doing and finding meaning in your work.

The second quote is from Outwitting the Devil, which I read in June. But this concept was something I started digging into early in the year when I was developing my vision and my “why” during my Emerge onboarding in Jan/Feb. I was struggling with figuring out why I wanted to grow my net worth, make a lot of money, and set all of these goals. It used to be because I wanted to create a rich life for me and my ex-fiancé and eventually our kids. Given that was no longer the case, I was struggling with what is that thing that will keep me motivated when things get tough. Its difficult to keep saying, I’m doing all this for when I eventually find someone and eventually have kids, etc.

So when I flew home on a whim in Feb, I sat down with my Aunt and Uncle to ask them about their whys. And at the end of the day it came down to helping others. The fulfilment you get when you are able to positively impact the people around you. And I heard it over and over from successful people that I look up to that the reason for doing all these hard things is to help others, but at the same time its inherently selfish because we are doing it for that gratifying feeling we get once we do the thing and help those people. Now that I understand that I’m going to pursue the hell out of finding how to incorporate helping others into my business and daily life in 2024.

13. Be intentional

Simple one but its so true in so many ways. Napoleon Hill says to be definite and intentional. It really works. I set a bunch of goals for 2023 and my theme of the year was Adventure - Live life with urgency. I didn’t hit all my goals but I sure did hit a lot of them. And as I mentioned above, I had quite the adventurous year, maybe the most adventurous year of my life. Define your target and the world gravitates to help you make it happen. I will caveat that nothing is set in stone and you need to be adaptable. I wrote on my goal sheet in Jan to quit my corporate job and buy another real estate property in Austin. I had to adjust once I quit my job and moved to Dallas, it just didn’t make sense anymore to buy another property. And who knew that would lead me to quitting a second job and fully leaning into adventure by flying across the world. You can’t plan for everything but if you start the year with intention, it will help direct you throughout your journey.

14. It’s important to find solitude (which is different from loneliness)

I learned about this concept from Jay Shetty in his book 8 Rules of Love. Solitude is the positive side of being alone while loneliness is the negative side. Solitude gives us space and time for introspection and cultivates a deeper understanding of who we are. Its important to have activities and be able to do things on your own. Finding a partner to do everything with will not solve all your problems. I have found my ways to practice solitude whether its training for an upcoming race, hitting golf balls at the driving range, or my miracle morning routine. I have found things I enjoy doing alone. This will be incredibly important when I do find someone to share life with and start doing all the other activities together like cooking, traveling, going for walks, etc.

15. I can use data to stay organized and hold people accountable

Learned this through my coaching sessions with Matt King and throughout my experiences with Wally. In the entrepreneurial world there are hundreds of moving parts between all the different people, projects, and ideas flowing its tough to keep up with it all. Matt shared his “Play calling sheet” which is a one pager that has everything he is working on for the week on it. He carries it around with him everywhere. This helped me tremendously keep track of everything I was managing for Wally and make sure nothing slipped through the cracks. It was also the tool I used to hold people accountable to what they said they would do. I learned that I need to find my way to influence and gain respect from people and there are different ways to do it. Wally and his other executive assistant Kaleb were both strong personalities and used their verbal strength to assert power. For me however, that is not who I am. Instead, I own the facts by taking good notes in meetings, being organized with due dates and deadlines, and use that to make sure people don’t BS me or do what they say they are going to do. 

16. Make people do their jobs without doing it for them

One of my biggest takeaways from working with Wally. At first I wanted to do everything myself because I trusted that I would do it the right way and do it well. However, that quickly led to signing myself up for too much work and I got overwhelmed and couldn’t handle it all. That is where delegation comes in. The problem with that is not all other people do things to the same standard as me and are not reliable to get things done on time. I needed to use what I learned in the previous lesson around managing the data to stay on top of everyone to get their stuff done and implement checks and balances to make sure stuff is done effectively. 

17. The people you surround yourself with is one of the most important decisions you can make

This holds true in all aspects of life from business to friends to significant others and all other relationships in between. There are so many reasons to point to but the big ones that come to mind are:

1. You need to trust the people you work with or else it will lead to issues

2. You are the average of the 5 people closest to you in all aspects of life from fitness to wealth to daily habits

3. You need to enjoy being around the people you work with or else you wont be motivated to do a good job

4. You are going to become like your mentors so surround yourself and learn from people you respect and want to take after

18. Its ok to copy other people and use their ideas/processes. The key is implementation of those ideas using your own spin

This is a concept I learned about through a few different mediums but where it was most applicable this year was from Alex Hormozi. He took off in the past couple years on the business influencer scene by starting to share his methods to grow multiple 9 figure companies. I listened to his book $100M offers and it was a very tactical guide to crafting an offer for your company that people would be stupid to say no to. Then he recently came out with $100M Leads which goes through the next phase of the process after you craft the offer.

My takeaway from all of his content is that it is simple but not easy to build a business that generates say $10k a month using what he teaches. It will require hard work, lots of hours and iterations and doing uncomfortable stuff like cold calling. But at the end of the day it works if you stick to it long enough. Nobody implements which is why there are so many people struggling. If you take action and you implement then you will be successful. Wally and Brian Lueben (founder of Action Academy) both preach that in their respective niches and it can be applied to anything.

19. It is impossible to know what you like until you try it

Again, this seems so simple but its something I at least forget. Take food for example. I used to be a picky eater. I don’t know why it started or where it came from but I was always scared to try new foods. Maybe it smelled or I had a bad version of it in the past or I just assumed I wouldn’t like it. But there were a lot of foods that I wouldn’t eat even though I had never actually tried it. The biggest one was raw fish in sushi. I can’t recall a time I ever tried it but I just assumed I wouldn’t like it. Over the past couple years I’ve gotten better at trying new things and just eating dishes as they are served instead of picking out the onions or wiping off the mayo. 

Then, finally this year I decided to get over my unknown fear of sushi and I loved it! I had just gotten back to Austin after traveling for work and I had a $75 stipend from work for dinner. So I walked across the street from my apartment to the popular Sushi spot called Soto and sat at the bar. I told the bartender it was my first time trying Sushi and to just give me 3 or 4 of his favorites. Now there were some I liked more than others like the Tuna and Yellowtail but I couldn’t have possibly known that until I tried it.

Now, as I figure out what business I want to get into and what industry or niche to select, I’m going to apply the same logic. I enjoy strategy and operations, I enjoy real estate, and I enjoy travel and adventure. Would I like running a business in each of these areas? Possibly? But there is only one way to find out and that is to actually do the thing and try it out. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

20. Authenticity is when what you think, say, and do are all aligned.

This is a big one. I had authenticity down as one of my values but I never really had a good definition of it until I came across this in the happiness equation. Yes, being your authentic self is just being you and not pretending to be something your not but what does that actually mean. This sums it up nicely. 

A recent example of this happened to me in Australia. I believe that I’m an adventurous person who likes to meet new people and try new experiences. When I left for Australia, I got the question a lot from people asking how could I spend all that time alone, how would I meet people? And my answer was that I was purposely going to stay in hostels because it fosters a friendly environment to connect and meet people.

So it was towards the end of my time in Australia, I had just changed all my travel plans around due to a cyclone and I had just arrived in Melbourne. I was tired and just finished up a 3 day tour where I met a lot of cool people but was a lot. It was a Tuesday night and the hostel was hosting a trivia night. Should I show up to the trivia night alone, be a bit awkward, and try to small talk my way into finding a team and meeting people or should I just grab dinner alone and have an early night? I thought to myself that I came here for experiences and to meet people…I told my friends and family that is what I planned on doing when I got here…So even though staying in alone would’ve been easy and no big deal, the fact that I was contemplating it made me realize I needed to act in alignment with what I thought and said.

I went to Trivia, met some cool people from around the world (Netherlands, UK, South Africa, Germany, Canada), ended up staying out until 3 AM at the bars, and went to a cricket game the next day with a few people I met. By sticking to my authentic self I had a blast and created fun memories 10x better than if I just stayed in.