Couldn't sleep, so I've relaunched this freecolin.org site with the original 2006 design.
I seem to like shoring up the past. I think it reminds me that the present is better, and the future will be even moreso. It is up to me.
Sometimes in the middle of the night I wake up thinking about wether I’ve gone the right direction in life, wether I am going it now, and what changes I need to make. Last night hit me in a certain way. I grabbed my phone and started thinking back, taking stock, tapping out notes.
My 20s
Back when I wasn’t so sure what life was about, I took it more or less as it came. When good things happened, it was usually because of luck.
Marriage— As a kid I knew it was my destiny to be married; I longed for romance. After a series of short relationships, Kristen was the first girl to stay with me longer than six months. When you're 20, how do you decide when and whom to marry? When no one I asked had a good answer, we ran off to Vegas.
Divorce— We separated a year later. My parents and my church had suggested divorce in general shouldn't be, but I didn’t have another way to solve the problem of having married the wrong person. I began to wonder what other holes existed in the principles I was raised on.
Love, Lost— I met Sarah not long after, and dove in deep. I was in love. Completely entranced, but also utterly unprepared. The crash was hard. In September I left the duplex, with a lot of emotions stored up, to be processed later.
Care— Shortly after the breakup, and although knowingly in the final months of his life, Sarah's father sought me out, and made sure I knew that I would be OK. His specfic act of care opened my eyes to eastern values, changed my perspectives on family, and what it means to be a good person. He died shortly after. Even people who only knew him through brief interactions were deeply saddened by the news.
Found— After nine months of social seclusion I finally ventured back out one night, and I met Amy. I stayed at her apartment all summer, and in the fall we took walks in the park. She gave me a song, and she sang it to me. I began to heal.
Downtown— I had always wanted to live downtown, but I never made the move. One day Amy asked me “why not?” And when I couldn’t come up with the answer, I did.
Books— At some point it occurred to me that I was making a good wage but I still didn’t have any money to speak of. I went to the bookstore and quickly found a book called “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” which gave me several answers. That was the first of a few days that I re-learned about books.
Church— I was in my routine of being in the chapel one Sunday when I felt a sudden knock on the door of my conscious. Conviction came over me. Why was I standing there, half-aware, singing along to this music? What was my motive? Was I being faithful? It was my last time in regular attendance.
Dream Job— In the spring I was recruited by Wieden+Kennedy, the most prestigious ad agency in Portland. At 25 it thrilled me; it was an incredible place to land.
Failure— Although I did some great work, I also made some big mistakes, and I was more or less fired within a few months. It's really unfortunate that a lack of certain values and of specific direction in my life damaged a lot of the work I produced in my early career. Some people say they have “no regrets” but I do wish I could go back and make certain things right for the people who put their trust in me, and that I ultimately failed.
Friend— In the final moments of high school, I found myself in competition for the love of a beautiful girl. The other guy won— but since he was everything I had ever wanted to be, I couldn't be upset. He and I became close, and remained so for years— but over time, our paths diverged. He was the one that was supposed to end up in the penthouse but somehow I had ended up there instead. One night at drinks his frustration boiled over; we parted ways. In hindsight I empathize. He was a beautiful soul, but for some mysterious reason, held back in this lifetime.
Crossing Borders— I was invited to go to Asia one summer and then Italy several months later. To be in these places so different from home was as incredible as had imagined it would be. My life would never be the same.
High Life— On the train in Tuscany, in a fleeting moment, I met a girl named Ying-Yi. As fate would have it, I would end up later that year in Taipei for other reasons, and we reunited. For a few months we played some combination of fantasy lovers, business partners, and B-list celebrities. We crossed the Pacific to stay with each other; lived in the penthouse of a skyscraper in Taichung; curated the Museum of Modern Art, and threw a fashion show at the Palace Museum. But when the adventure of international romance started to turn to real life, we began to struggle in finding a common ground. On New Years Eve, our love ended on the floor, tipsy and in tears. As quickly as it came, it then went, and receded to memory.
Business— But I still wanted to be in Taiwan. Just before I was set to move there permanently, I casually threw a million-dollar proposal at a prospect, expecting a quick rejection from which I could move on— and they accepted. I suddenly had to decide if I wanted to stay and fulfill my dream of running a "real" business. I scrapped Taipei and opened PNDLM in Portland. A year later, I moved my team into a dream office space in the Pearl district.
Social— I hired Kim, and I guess she thought well enough of me to take me out to hang with the ABCs. I was floored. Everyone treated each other like family, and they lived all their moments together to the absolute fullest. It was life, totally magnified. I adapted as quickly as I could, and spent the final years of my 20s learning this social framework. My experiences during this time completely changed the game of life for me.
Slap— In my final moments of 29, surrounded by a circle of dozens of my best friends and a few exes, I let the most beautiful woman I had ever seen slap me in the face. Her smile and laughter was intoxicating; I gave her an enormous hug. And that was how I entered my 30s.
My early to mid 30s
When I discovered goal setting and gratitude, and my life started to be shaped by intention.
Slumps— In my very early career, a colleague of mine suggested that “enough clients just show up”. I never thought that idea was quite right, but I didn't have anything better to go off of, so I rolled with it. Eventually, our business had to part ways with our first client, which was also our biggest. We suddenly had a big void to fill. I tried to bring in new partners to help, but it proved mostly detrimental. It was a tough few years.
Goals— I got an invite from a friend to take a sales training course and learned goal setting, which turned out to be one of the absolute keys I have discovered about life. I bought some index cards from the Dollar Tree, wrote on a few and stuck them on the fridge, roughly: “Sell a business”, “Learn Chinese and live in Taiwan”, “Make a record”. Very soon after I was actually learning Chinese. It was completely revolutionary.
Realization— On a red-eye flight coming back from a very successful meeting, I considered the possibility that my dreams of selling a company might come true. But I also knew it could take years. Was I willing to put everything else on hold until that was done? I decided I wasn’t, and right there I started making plans again to move to Taiwan.
Gratitude— Meanwhile my business, which is what would enable me to move, was still hard. Five years in I was burnt out and depressed, looking for new answers. Somehow I found time here and there to read Tim Ferriss' email newsletter. In a great moment of need, I discovered Ryan Holiday's "Ego is the Enemy", and then Tony Robbins’ "Ultimate Edge". While stoicism would seep into me over years, the idea of gratitude changed me immediately and completely. I pushed hard into plans to change my life into what I really wanted, and I became a much better person in the process. Depression became a distant memory.
Arrival— Within nine months of my decision I had moved to Taiwan and within a year I had my own apartment in a beautiful part of town. Walking the streets, taking in the sights and sounds, it was obvious I had made the best decision of my life.
Stadiums— For a moment, through lucky circumstances, I ended up as the tour drummer for an ex-boy-band artist in Taiwan. I played to crowds that many of my musician friends back home had only ever dreamed of. It was wild.
Payoff— After many years of my business' credit line being my biggest burden, I sat in the lobby of a bank on New Years Eve and paid it down. It was one of the best moments of my life.
Solutions— In critical moments, through the invention of rAlert and the conception of the recycling business at the Business Mastery conference, I learned that I could always find a solution to a problem if I searched for it hard enough.
Blossoming Flower— At the end of it all, it comes back around to love. One afternoon, an old friend and I met up on a whim at an inner eastside café— but this time it was somehow different. She was single, and intuitively I knew what she was looking for. Everything I had learned over the past several years rushed forward, and that moment, followed by the rest of our lives, was made.
Beyond
Are there still things I have in remaining life to experience, to improve, to do and be? Absolutely. But what do I gain in worrying about them? As I have taken stock, it seems, maybe not so much. If I remain faithful to the pursuit of life, for myself and for those around me, I suspect that things may very well continue to pan out.
Blogs are usually theraputic to "the condition", but if you don't have anything to write, they become merely a worthless record of your failures.
The name of my website actually came from the image on this page, not vice versa. My friend and co-worker Chris Esterline created this and another poster for me on the day that I was laid off for the second time from the same dot-com.
He also said something along the lines of "Forget about this place, go to college."
I used to have this one rule that really sucked, where I wasn't allowed to change something I had posted on a blog once it had been written on the blog. Obviously that rule is over since I've changed/re-written this post at least a half dozen times since the site went up an hour ago.