The cornerstone of this blog is the Redirect Anxiety Habit, a complete instructional course to walk you through the plan I’ve created for overcoming anxiety. Trust me, it’s worth every penny.
In this blog, I offer practical advice to living a happier life, free from anxiety. I explore our natural tendency to do the opposite of what makes us happy – and offer plans to beat human nature.
The thesis of this Blog is that our minds are not naturally set up very well to lead us to an anxiety-free life in the day and age in which we live. For an in-depth explanation of this, check out my first post here.
Today, I live in Dubai, UAE, with my incredible wife, Cherise. She is my soulmate. Over the past several years, we’ve shared a series of unforgettable adventures together – from hiking through leech-infested jungles in central Thailand, to exploring glaciers in Alaska and even starting our own Event Management company together. In February 2015, we were married with family and friends at on the Palm Jumeirah, not far from where we now live.
It’s been a long, and amazing, journey to get to where I am today.
While I was born in California, I grew up with my mother (Liz), two brothers (Pat and Greg) and sister (Sarah) in the small town of Sterling, Alaska. The town’s highlights were an elementary school, gas station, tool rental shop and several fishing guides. Our family was very close. We regularly ventured out into the wild, on week-long hiking and camping excursions or even longer road trips to the northern stretches of Alaska and Canada.
In high school, I experienced Maui, Hawaii for the first time. For me, it was an amazing, and life-altering, experience. Back in Alaska, I made it my mission to spend the summer before I started university in Maui. Quite a few people thought I wasn’t going to actually do it, but I bought a plane ticket using nearly everything in my bank account and set off on my first adventure. I may go into depth on how this trip panned out in a future blog post, but for now I’ll just say that it worked out perfectly. I ended up working at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., right on the beach. Within walking distance, I staying in a 3-bedroom open-air villa, sharing with two other guys that I’m fairly certain just surfed and hung out all day (It’s not entirely clear how they paid rent).
The success of this trip led me to undertake even bigger leaps into the unknown. After my first year at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, I bought a plane ticket to Venice. After a week, I ended up working at a hostel in Rome. From there, I spent the last of my Euros to get to the legendary ‘Pink Palace’ hostel on the island of Corfu, Greece. I asked for a job, and they didn’t have anything open. I asked again. And again. And, after sleeping in front of the door to the owner’s office, I finally got a job as a Busboy.
This job in Greece was a major eye-opener for me. I was making about 7 Euros a day. Fortunately, we were given free accommodation (far from luxury but it kept most of the rain out of our beds) and three meals a day. From our paychecks, we typically bought a small pack of chips, a couple of beers and, by the time 3 AM came around, an Magnum ice cream cone. We ‘worked’ about 10 hours a day. Throughout the summer, I was incredibly happy. Through this experience, I had proven to myself completely that happiness is not the result of being rich or working less. It is decidedly more complex than that, but certainly within reach for anybody who wants to pursue it.
This same sprit of adventure and my perspective on life and happiness has led me through dozens of countries and eventually to my life in Dubai. I’ve spent seven years in this country now, and have spent a significant portion of that time working for several Abu Dhabi government agencies. I now lead communications for Masdar Institute, a graduate level university created jointly between Abu Dhabi’s Masdar Initiative and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Cherise and I spend our weekends as a series of mini-adventures, exploring the desert through camping trips or new restaurants on date night. We live a happy and satisfied life. Over the years, I’ve offered my advice on life, happiness and perspective to friends and family members. To my surprise, many of them were very receptive of this and saw positive results in their lives as a result of these discussions. Based on these discussions, I now use this website to share what I know and have learned about happiness and anxiety-free living with the world.