That’s been the reaction to most of my life.
High school dropout. World-famous DJ. Got banned from the US. Went bankrupt. Built a multi-million dollar tech company. Hypnotized 5000+ people on stage. Wrote 4 books. Took on climate change because why the hell not.
Now? I’m chasing serendipity instead of goals. Waiting to be in the room when something impossible becomes inevitable.
350+ articles and 7 years of figuring this out in public are here if you want them. So is my story.
A month ago I wrote about how I had unintentionally been creating too much freedom in my life, cut, cut, cutting things away so I could remain in a hyper-vigilant state in support of my family. I knew the pendulum had swung too far. My answer was to immediately do something I enjoy – put myself on a stage and challenge myself in creating something new. I used the resources I had, which in this...
One of the best side-benefits of claiming an easily communicated impossible goal for me is the amount of connection it has created with new people. People are intrigued. People want to talk to me. People approach me. People want to help me. The conversation that follows is easy, because I get to share my story of how and why I got here. It’s easy to tell, because it’s my story. People want to...
Because an impossible goal is exactly that, impossible, you can’t lose. It’s liberating in a counter-intuitive way. Conventional goals have their place, and I’ve used them plenty in my life. Most of us come up with conventional goals, and feel tremendous pressure to complete them, or feel bad when we don’t. Or if we come up short, we still accomplished more in that failure...
Imagine the shifts to your impact, income, and life by declaring a truly impossible goal! On Monday September 25, 2023 I’m going to host a Zoom to help YOU unlock YOUR IMPOSSIBLE GOAL. This is exclusively for Frolic 100 members. I’m going to teach the 5 necessary parts of every impossible goal. I’ll work with some people live on the call to help unlock and up-level (and make it truly impossible!)...
“Freedom” is a huge value of mine. For my entire life I’ve lived a life of freedom and possibility. I haven’t had a “job” since I was 20 years old. Since then, I’ve worked for myself, doing what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. Part of what motivated me was that I needed to make a living. I just happened to choose things that I was extremely passionate about. I lived on the edge and forced...
Frolic 100 member Tim asked me about my referencing my “Hierarchy of Needs” in some recent articles. I decided to answer his question for everyone, and also clarify my understanding of it. This information is easily searchable on Google, but there’s only a single place on the entire internet which is my explanation of it. Right here. When I refer to a Hierarchy of Needs...
The first weekend of August in Canada is a long weekend: three days during the height of summer. It’s a nice midway peak to the summer holiday and also serves as a permanent reminder of one of the most depressing moments in my life and how far I’ve come since. Exactly 15 years ago, I was a struggling comedy hypnotist, facing a precarious financial situation due to having gone through bankruptcy a...
“Enough” is an interesting word. A quick dictionary definition is: “As much or as many as required.” I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how much is enough for me. I’m probably the first human in my family line to ever consider this question. For all but the most recent human history, our ancestors never had enough. Not enough food, not enough comfort, not enough resources, not enough...
I have two teenage kids in high school and they drive me crazy at times with how little effort they seem to put into their school work. This is a song as old as time. I do my best not to “tiger parent” them, and at the same time I know what they’re capable of. It drives me absolutely nuts. And then I look at the paralysis I can find myself in at times, where my pendulum can swing so far the other...
I got myself banned from entering the US way back in the year 2000 (working as a DJ without a visa). Last year, after 22 years, I decided to try and re-enter. I had been invited to a leadership conference, and thought it was as good a moment as any to try. A few different people stepped forward with offers of helping me by connecting me with lawyers, and I thought “Great! This is how it’s...
A little over a month ago Covid showed up in my home for the second time. The first time it showed up (from my oldest bringing it home from school), it wasn’t a big deal. This most recent time (my youngest bringing it home from school) was far more difficult. I was testing positive for almost 2 weeks, and dealing with flu symptoms which laid me out. My wife got it worse, with their symptoms...
I’ve been given a gift. A way of sending a message to a younger version of me. This is what I’ve decided to send to a version of me that was really struggling, around 6 years ago in 2017. Dear Chris, it’s Chris, from the future. Probably best if you don’t ask questions about how this is possible. Simply listen to me. I have this opportunity to tell you some things you’re going...
Except for very recent human history, almost all of humanity was spent in scarcity. Literal starvation, famine, war, struggle. I have Ukranian ancestry, my grandmother was born there in 1922. She grew up under Stalin’s Soviet Union, and a man-made famine where the food of Ukraine was stolen (this current war is like history repeating itself). My grandmother became an orphan at 6, and all of her...
A guest speaker at a function I was attending this past year reviewed my website and told me frankly, “You’d be an incredibly fascinating dinner guest.” His comment made me feel seen and reminded me of how far I’ve come. As recently as 2019, I was a guest at a friend of my wife’s house who was celebrating receiving tenure as a college professor. The house was filled with academics. I was as quiet...
The leadership group that I’m a part of reached out to Stacey Abrams, the politician, voting rights activist, and governor candidate for the state of Georgia, about being a guest speaker. She is so singularly focused on her mission for political change in her state, she applies a simple question to everything she does: Will this get me votes? She ended up not speaking for our group. When I heard...
I used a phrase in my last article, calling myself a “lifestyle entrepreneur”. I intentionally stated it, because I could feel the twinge of not wanting to. The most common definition of lifestyle entrepreneur is someone who creates the life they want first, and then a business to serve that. As opposed to most traditional businesses, where the business consumes everything (often at...
I have a memory from around 25 years ago, it was the middle of the afternoon in the middle of the week. I was sitting on my sofa playing video games and a good friend of mine remarked “You’re successfully underemployed”. I tell people who talk to me in recent times that money didn’t make the life I live today possible. I’ve always lived with a freedom in my life to...
My road to “success” (however you want to define that) was never a straight line. There were times of tremendous struggle. It’s well documented in my DJ memoir that despite the surface successes, I never figured out the financial part during that time of my life. I slept on the floor of my office for 2 years (I realize now that qualified me as literally “homeless”), but even after things started...
TLDR; My wife just got their (Robin is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns) dream job as a full-time cancer researcher at a top university cancer lab by back-dooring their way in with no formal education. Full pay and benefits! Longer version: It was only a few years ago, less than that, when one night I woke up at 3am and Robin was up in bed and we started talking. During that talk Robin...
Here is a capture of my Ask Me Anything I hosted on Feb 27, 2023. I really enjoy this as a format, it’s an intersection of me being helpful to others, creating my own hotseat to test myself on, me being creative in the moment in any way I wish, and there’s a “performance” aspect, of being entertaining, and lighting up an audience. Instead of spinning records, or doing a...
For years I wrestled with a simple question: What’s Next? It served me in the past, and I easily answered it. I did new things, took on new challenges, reinvented myself, found more and more success. I wrote about it here on my website and created tools around it to help others. The problem was, it wasn’t helping me anymore. I was stuck. From this stuck place I took some much needed time for...
As someone who has wrestled with imposter syndrome for many years, and reached a crisis with it, I’ve become very attuned to when I see others dealing with it. The reality is that it’s almost everyone. The biggest tell for me is when I hear people dismiss amazing things they’ve done from their past. Everyone has an incredible story, if they saw it that way. I’m a strong believer that everyone has...
What’s the question that fills you with fear to even think about asking? What about my story do you find fascinating and want to know more about? What would I do if I were you? What clarity can I bring to your mission and road ahead? What one tool or strategy would I recommend that will change your business? What’s the one thing you need to hear that everyone else is afraid to tell...
Answer these 3 powerful questions: What are your superpowers? What is it that you do greater than anyone else you know? The insidious thing about answering this question is often your greatest superpowers are so close to you that you don’t even see them. You do them with such ease and effortlessness you don’t even value them. You might even be ashamed of them. They can take a while to identify...
Wow, time flies. My very first blog post was January 7, 2018. I vividly remember it, because I vividly remember the state of crisis I was in during that time in my life. I was extremely unhappy, my imposter syndrome was at critical levels, and I was hiding from the world. I took the smallest single act of courage I could muster at that moment – I installed a WordPress on my website, which...