Word: Awe

“It was here in Big Sur that I first learned to say amen.”

— Henry Miller

Long before I ever saw Big Sur, I read Henry Miller’s Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, along with nearly everything else he wrote.

The title alone felt like a portal. It sounded less like a travel memoir than a fever dream assembled by a mystic, a poet, and a runaway monk sharing the same typewriter. Miller arrived in Big Sur in 1944 and remained there for nearly two decades, treating the place less like a destination than a form of salvation. He wrote about it with a reverence usually reserved for scripture. The cliffs. The redwoods. The Pacific. The isolation. He described Big Sur as “the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look.” Elsewhere he wrote that it was there he first learned to say amen.

At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant. How different could one stretch of California coastline be from another? I had grown up in Southern California surrounded by beaches, cliffs, surf, sunshine, and the mythology of endless summer. California was California, or so I thought.

As it turns out, Big Sur belongs to an entirely different kingdom. The Central Coast feels less like an extension of Southern California than a separate country sharing the same map. The pace slows. The scale expands. The mountains plunge directly into the sea. The coastline remains largely untamed. Southern California often feels designed around human ambition. Big Sur feels indifferent to it. The land has not been conquered so much as negotiated with. Standing there, you begin to understand why Miller spent twenty years trying to describe it and still seemed convinced that language was inadequate to the task.

I understood the words. I admired the sentences. Miller possessed that rare ability to make landscape feel alive, as if the terrain itself were participating in the story. Yet there remained a distance between his experience and my understanding. I had read the book, but I had not yet stood where he stood. I had not yet watched the Pacific hurl itself against those cliffs or listened to the silence that seemed to exist underneath the wind.

Years later, I left Monterey on a bicycle and headed south.

The route began innocently enough. The manicured perfection of Pebble Beach gave way to Carmel, where tourists drifted between galleries, cafés, and courtyards overflowing with bougainvillea. The roads still belonged to the familiar world. Civilization remained close at hand. Then, at the southern edge of town, I made the right turn onto Highway 1 and everything began to change.

The houses vanished and the horizon widened until the Pacific occupied the entire western edge of my vision. Even the smell changed. The air carried salt, kelp, cypress, and something harder to name, a scent that felt less like the ocean and more like the threshold of another world.

Almost immediately Point Lobos appeared ahead, its rocky coves and wind-sculpted cypress trees jutting away from the sea like fragments of some older California that had somehow escaped modernity. Beyond Lobos, the road began tracing the edge of the continent itself. Carmel Highlands emerged from the cliffs, suspended improbably between mountain and ocean. Every mile seemed to peel away another layer of ordinary life.

The morning could not have been scripted more perfectly.

The Pacific carried streaks of impossible blue. Not the steel-gray palette often associated with Northern California, but something brighter, almost tropical in places, as though fragments of the Bahamas had drifted north on the current. Whitecaps softly stitched themselves across the surface beneath a gentle onshore breeze. Kelp forests floated offshore like dark brushstrokes painted onto glass. The cypress trees leaned inland, shaped by decades of negotiation with wind and salt.

The road rose steadily toward Hurricane Point.

There the coastline suddenly revealed itself in full scale.

The view opened like a curtain.

To the north stood Point Lobos and Carmel fading into the distance. Ahead, Bixby Creek Bridge stretched across its canyon in a graceful concrete arc, one of the most photographed structures in America and somehow still incapable of being captured accurately by photographs. Beyond it, the coastline folded endlessly into itself, ridge after ridge dissolving into atmospheric blue. The Pacific stretched westward beyond imagination. The Santa Lucia Mountains rose sharply behind me. Standing there felt less like observing a landscape than entering one.

I continued south.

Across Bixby Bridge.

Past Rocky Creek.

Past the sea caves and hidden coves beneath the cliffs.

Past Garrapata’s rugged slopes spilling toward the water.

Past the long succession of ridges, canyons, and overlooks that have convinced generations of writers, artists, photographers, surfers, wanderers, and seekers that geography itself can possess spiritual properties.

The miles rolled beneath my wheels.

The road climbed and descended in long rhythmic arcs. The ocean remained to my right. The mountains remained to my left. Somewhere beyond the next rise stood Nepenthe, perched high above the Pacific like a refuge suspended between earth and sky. Farther south, the road entered the heart of Big Sur itself. Redwoods gathered along the Big Sur River. Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park appeared beneath their canopy. The famous Pfeiffer Beach lay hidden beyond the ridges, its purple sand and sea arches concealed from passing travelers. Miller’s country was now all around me.

Every turn revealed another version of the impossible.

As the ride unfolded, something curious began happening.

The ordinary machinery of self-concern slowly loosened its grip.

The constant narration that normally accompanies modern life began fading into the background. The running inventory of obligations. The unfinished conversations. The deadlines. The anxieties. The invisible negotiations between past regrets and future uncertainties. None of those concerns vanished entirely. They simply stopped occupying center stage.

The landscape had become too large.

Nothing had been solved.

Nothing had fundamentally changed.

Yet something inside me had shifted.

I felt smaller.

And strangely, better.

Miller once wrote that Big Sur engendered a humility and reverence not frequently encountered in Americans. Looking back now, I think that was precisely what I was experiencing. Not humiliation. Not insignificance. Something far more nourishing.

Perspective.

The cliffs did not care who I was.

The ocean did not care what I had accomplished.

The redwoods had been standing there for centuries before my arrival and would likely remain centuries after my departure.

For reasons I could not have articulated at the time, this realization felt liberating rather than threatening.

The modern world spends enormous energy convincing us that we are the center of the story. Big Sur suggested otherwise. The coastline did not diminish me. It relieved me of the exhausting responsibility of being the main character.

For a few hours I became part of something much larger than myself.

And together we will float into the mystic.

— Van Morrison

Years later, I would discover that a social psychologist at my alma mater, UC Irvine, named Paul Piff had spent much of his career trying to understand exactly this feeling.

For years I simply carried that ride with me.

I never thought of it as a psychological phenomenon. I didn’t analyze it or attempt to explain it. I filed it alongside a handful of experiences that felt important without fully understanding why. Certain surf sessions. Certain runs. Certain concerts. Certain conversations. Those rare moments when life suddenly appears more vivid than usual and the world seems to reveal an additional layer of itself.

Years later, I found myself reading the work of Dr. Paul Piff, a social psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, my alma mater. Piff had devoted much of his career to studying a feeling that poets, philosophers, mystics, artists, and religious traditions had described for centuries but that modern science had only recently begun examining seriously.

The feeling was awe.

Piff defines awe as the emotional response that occurs when we encounter something so vast that it exceeds our existing mental framework. Something about the experience resists easy categorization. The mind is forced to expand its understanding in order to accommodate what it has encountered. The trigger can be natural, artistic, spiritual, intellectual, or even interpersonal. A mountain range. A star-filled sky. The birth of a child. A symphony. A great work of art. The ocean stretching beyond the horizon. Big Sur.

What fascinated Piff was not simply that awe feels pleasant. Scientists have spent decades cataloging positive emotions. Awe appeared to be doing something deeper. It seemed capable of altering the relationship between the self and the world.

In study after study, Piff and his colleagues found that people who experienced awe often became more generous, more cooperative, more connected to others, and less consumed by their own immediate concerns. They became more willing to help strangers. More willing to contribute to a collective good. More aware that they belonged to something larger than themselves.

Among his most intriguing findings was a concept he called the “small self.”

At first glance the phrase sounds almost insulting, as though the individual is somehow diminished. Piff meant something entirely different. Participants who experienced awe frequently reported feeling smaller in relation to the world around them, yet they did not feel weakened. They did not feel insignificant. Quite the opposite. Many reported feeling more connected, more grounded, more alive, and more meaningfully situated within a larger reality.

That description stopped me cold.

It sounded remarkably familiar.

It sounded like Hurricane Point.

It sounded like standing above the Pacific while the coastline folded endlessly into the distance and ridge after ridge disappeared into the blue horizon. It sounded like the moment the landscape became too vast for my concerns to remain at the center of the story.

The modern world often encourages us to pursue fulfillment through self-expansion. We are told to build our profile, increase our visibility, amplify our voice, strengthen our identity, and curate a personal narrative. Yet Piff’s work suggested that some of our most meaningful experiences arise through an entirely different mechanism. They arrive not by enlarging the self but by temporarily loosening its grip.

The distinction feels important.

Awe does not erase individuality. It recalibrates it.

For a brief period, the self stops occupying the center of the universe and becomes part of a larger field of relationships. The mountain remains a mountain. The ocean remains an ocean. The stars remain unimaginably distant. What changes is our perspective. We remember our place within the larger arrangement.

Reading Piff’s research, I kept returning to Henry Miller.

Decades before psychologists began measuring awe in laboratories and field studies, Miller had already arrived at a similar conclusion through experience. He spent nearly twenty years among the cliffs, rivers, redwoods, and solitude of Big Sur trying to articulate what the place was doing to him. Eventually he settled on a remarkably simple observation. Big Sur had taught him to say amen.

Years before Paul Piff would call it awe, Henry Miller simply called it amen.

The poet experienced it. The scientist measured it. Both were pointing toward the same mystery. Certain encounters with the world have the power to shrink us in exactly the way we need to be shrunk. Not toward insignificance, but toward perspective. Not toward disappearance, but toward belonging.

As I read deeper into Piff’s work, I began recognizing traces of this phenomenon throughout the lives of many people who had already appeared in these pages. Steve Prefontaine found something like it in total expenditure and complete commitment to the race unfolding beneath him. Bill Walton discovered it through gratitude, teamwork, and his lifelong devotion to something larger than individual achievement. Mark Allen found it through surrender, through releasing his attachment to struggle and entering a deeper rhythm. Colin Finlay found it through witnessing the lives of others and learning how attention itself can become a form of reverence.

Different lives. Different disciplines. Different circumstances.

Yet each, in his own way, stepped beyond the confines of the isolated self and entered something larger.

The question that follows is unavoidable.

Once we experience that larger belonging, what do we do with it? Once the self is no longer the sole object of our concern, where does our attention go next? What deserves our commitment? What deserves our service? What deserves our devotion?

Those questions lead directly into the next act of this story…

This is an interlude chapter of my book entitled The Space Between.

#TheSpaceBetween #BigSur #HenryMiller #PaulPiff #Awe

There are moments in a life when the body understands something the mind has not yet learned how to say.

Not as language. Not as philosophy. Not as a line you can offer someone across a table and have it land cleanly. It arrives earlier than that, deeper than that, in the place where sensation becomes instruction. A tightening in the chest. A shallowing of breath. A signal that something has changed in the atmosphere, whether or not you can name it.

Asthma does this early. It removes the luxury of abstraction. Breath becomes an event. You notice it. You negotiate it. You learn, without asking to learn, that continuity is not guaranteed. And still, you move. Not because you have a theory of resilience, but because stillness is not a viable strategy for oxygen. The body leans forward before the mind has assembled an argument.

That leaning, as awkward, incomplete, unblessed by certainty as it is, becomes the first form of belief most of us ever practice.

We don’t recognize it as such. We call it necessity. We call it instinct. We call it getting through the day. But underneath those labels is a structure that will repeat, in larger and more consequential ways, across the rest of a life. Movement before agreement. Action before understanding. Behavior before belief.

Later, we are taught to invert it.

We are taught that belief should come first. That we should wait for clarity, for confidence, for the map to stop shifting before we commit to a direction. We are told, often by people who love us, that it is wiser to measure twice and cut once, that caution is a form of intelligence, that readiness is something we can feel our way into if we are patient enough.

It sounds right. It sounds mature.

It also collapses under pressure.

Because the situations that actually matter, the ones that define a life rather than decorate it, rarely arrive with clarity attached. They arrive in pieces. In fragments. In a kind of atmospheric uncertainty that does not resolve itself in advance. And if you wait for it to do so, you wait indefinitely.

When I stood on that TEDx stage and said that belief is a thought you keep thinking, I was trying to point at the mechanism from one angle. A repeated thought does begin to shape perception. It does begin to bias attention. It can tilt the mind toward possibility or toward threat. But what I have come to understand since is that thought alone is not enough to carry belief through adversity.

Thought can introduce a story.

Only action can test it.

Only repetition can stabilize it.

Only lived evidence can convince the body to participate.

The sequence, in practice, runs the other way.

You act.
You gather evidence.
You adjust the story.
And over time, what remains from that cycle is what we call belief.

Not because it was present at the beginning.

Because it was built.

This is where placebo and nocebo, ideas I return to later in far greater depth, stop belonging only to the lab and start walking around in our daily lives. In a clinical setting, we marvel that an inert pill can still produce a measurable response if the person receiving it believes something is happening. But outside those controlled rooms, we are conducting the same experiment on ourselves all the time, swallowing stories instead of sugar pills, letting expectation, fear, memory, and hope alter the chemistry of the day.

Tell the body it is under threat often enough, and it begins to build a life around defense. The heart rate lifts. Sleep splinters. Attention narrows to the perimeter, scanning for the next breach. But tell the body there is still a path, however narrow or uncertain, and something else begins to happen. Slowly, imperfectly, the system starts orienting toward movement. Not because the story is proven true, but because it has been repeated long enough to become instruction.

The body, in this sense, is literal.

It does not debate.

It responds.

I learned this not as theory, but as consequence.

The collapse did not announce itself as a single event. It arrived in increments. A partner stealing from the business, then from the edges of the business, then from places that had nothing to do with the business at all. Numbers that didn’t reconcile. Conversations that didn’t hold. A slow dawning that something foundational had been compromised.

You can explain that part cleanly. You can put it into a sentence.

What is harder to explain is what followed.

Because the real damage was not the loss. It was the narrative that grew around it. Trust became provisional. Stability felt rented. The ground, which had once held without question, began to feel like something that could give way without warning. And the body, which is built to detect and respond to threat, did exactly what it was designed to do.

It prepared.

Continuously. Daily. Hourly. Until it lives in the minutes themselves, and anxiety stops feeling like a response and starts behaving like a default.

Sleep left first, or at least changed shape so completely it no longer felt like sleep. Appetite followed. Then the nervous system tightened its grip and anxiety moved in, not as a visitor, but as a landlord with keys. It scanned, rehearsed, projected, and kept finding new corners of the day to occupy. Every room became a possible breach. Every decision carried the smell of consequence. Every trip to the mailbox came with a small dose of dread. Every phone call seemed to arrive with bad news already breathing on the other end.

And then something quieter happened.

I stopped riding.

That detail is small enough to be overlooked and large enough to explain everything. Because the bike, for me, has never been about fitness. It has been a place where the noise of the world gets metabolized. Where effort translates into clarity. Where the body and mind renegotiate their relationship under load. When that went quiet, it wasn’t convenience.

It was a signal.

The system had shifted from engagement to protection.

And in that shift, the loop took hold.

The more I rehearsed what could go wrong, the more the body organized around that rehearsal. The more it organized, the more evidence it seemed to find to support the story. Not because the world had changed in some absolute way, but because attention had. The lens narrowed. The perimeter thickened.

That is the nocebo effect in its most persuasive form.

Not a trick.

A system.

The story becomes chemical. The chemical becomes behavior. The behavior reinforces the story.

And the loop tightens.

For a while, I mistook that loop for reality. Then, almost by accident, I interrupted it. Not with a new belief. Not with a better argument. Not with a clean reframe that dissolved the problem into something manageable.

With action.

A page written when the page felt pointless. A short ride when the idea of riding three hundred miles a week felt like a story from another life. A call returned. A conversation entered. Not because I felt ready. Because stillness had begun to feel like a kind of surrender.

There is a line I’ve heard repeatedly from Scott Galloway, which lands with a bluntness I have come to trust: action absorbs anxiety.

At first, it feels reductive. Too simple to account for something as complex as a nervous system in distress.

Then you test it.

And something shifts.

Not completely. Not permanently. But measurably.

The same energy that had been looping through imagined futures begins to find a place in the present. It gets recruited. It becomes useful. The act itself demands enough attention that the rehearsal loses some of its volume. You are not free of anxiety. You are engaged despite it.

And that distinction is critical.

Because engagement changes the system.

The more you do, the more you do.
The more you move, the more movement becomes available.
The more you act, the more evidence you generate that you can.

Momentum is medicinal.

Not as a metaphor.

As a process.

Over time, the body begins to recognize a different pattern. Not that the world has become safe, but that you are capable of meeting it as it is. That capacity, repeated, begins to feel like something we are comfortable calling belief.

But it did not arrive at the beginning.

It arrived in the aftermath.

This is the alchemy of action.

The strange and stubborn process by which motion alters chemistry, chemistry alters perception, perception alters behavior, and behavior, sustained long enough, leaves behind something that feels stable enough to stand on.

Belief, in this sense, is not a prerequisite.

It is a residue.

And this is where the psychic from my TEDx talk returns to the room, not as proof of anything mystical necessarily, but as one of the great permissions of my life. She had not simply told me things would work out. She had suggested they would become great, almost absurdly so, if I stayed open enough to meet what was coming. At the time, her words sounded improbable, maybe even ridiculous. But they gave me something I did not know I needed. They gave me a story large enough to walk toward. And once I began walking toward it, my behavior changed. I entered rooms differently. I took different risks. I moved as if possibility had not merely survived, but was waiting for me to meet it. Action became directionally correct.

That was the gift. Not prediction. Permission. A belief strong enough to alter posture.

And then, in the aftermath of the crime, I forgot it. Or perhaps I abandoned it by degrees, the way we often abandon what once saved us, not in one dramatic renunciation, but through fatigue, fear, and the daily seduction of darker evidence. I let betrayal become a stronger narrator than possibility. I stopped acting as if the future might still be generous and began acting as if the next breach was already on its way. That was the nocebo in its purest, ugliest form: a story repeated until the body started obeying it.

You see this pattern in the lives of the people who have shaped me, once you stop trying to turn them into abstractions and let them remain human.

Steve Prefontaine did not wait for internal alignment before taking the front. He took it, repeatedly, regardless of consequence, until the position itself became a statement. Effort was not something he deployed strategically. It was how he existed. He did not argue for belief. He enacted it.

Mark Allen arrived at the same structure from the opposite direction. Where Pre burned, Mark listened. Where Pre surged, Mark settled into something quieter, more controlled, more deliberate. He trained himself to operate just below panic, trusting that if he stayed there long enough, the race would reveal itself. That is belief without spectacle. A long agreement between behavior and possibility.

Shaun Tomson made it explicit. “I will.” Twelve times. Not as affirmation, but as contract. Language that demands embodiment. Words that require you to either align with them or abandon them. He chose alignment, repeatedly, until the distance between language and life collapsed.

Rodney Mullen understood it through the body. You do not invent a new trick by thinking about it. You invent it by falling into it, again and again, allowing the system to gather information that the mind cannot predict in advance. Failure, in that context, is not a verdict. It is data.

Jamie Brisick encountered the same mechanism under conditions that stripped away abstraction entirely. When his wife died, When the fire came, when the archive of a life was reduced to ash, belief did not arrive as clarity. It arrived as continuation. The next sentence. The next act. The refusal to let stillness become final.

Colin Finlay carried it into places most of us would avoid. War zones. Environmental collapse. Human suffering stripped of its usual buffers. He did not show up because outcomes were guaranteed. He showed up because presence mattered. The act of witnessing became its own form of belief.

Stanley Moss gave it language. Meaning is not discovered, he would say. It is assigned. And once assigned, it organizes behavior. A brand without a point of view drifts. A person without an internal narrative does the same.

Bill Walton lived this truth in a body that refused to cooperate. Pain was not an interruption for him. It was a constant. Surgeries stacked. Seasons lost. A body that kept breaking in public and in private. And still, he chose something that did not make immediate sense from the outside. Joy. Not the easy kind, not the circumstantial kind, but a practiced, deliberate form of it. He outpraised the pain, not to deny it, but to keep it from writing the whole story. He did not wait to feel good to live well. He behaved his way into a different relationship with what hurt. That is belief under pressure. Not the absence of suffering, but the refusal to let suffering become the only truth.

Different lives.

Same pattern.

Behavior first.

Belief later.

There is a line that has survived long enough to become almost invisible in its familiarity:

“You can’t always get what you want…”

It is the next line that carries the weight.

“But if you try sometimes…”

Try.

Not once.

Repeatedly.

Behavior.

The bike has always been the cleanest metaphor I know because it refuses passivity. You do not balance a bicycle by standing still. You balance it by moving, by committing to forward motion before the system has stabilized. You pedal to stay upright. You apply force to find balance. The act creates the condition.

Climbing reveals something else. Progress is expensive. The flats flatter the ego, but the climb exposes your relationship with discomfort. Patience. Breath. The willingness to stay with something that is asking more than you would prefer to give.

Descending demands another kind of intelligence. Not bravado. Not panic. A conversation between trust and attention. You stay loose. You look ahead. You commit without surrendering awareness.

“It’s always windy,” cyclists say. “And it’s always uphill.”

Half joke.

Half-truth.

Because resistance is not an interruption of the ride.

It is the ride.

And belief, in the form that matters, is not something you carry into that terrain fully formed.

It is something that emerges from it.

DOUBT

Cross Out the Part That Freezes You

Doubt is not the problem. Obedience is. That distinction matters because doubt, in its cleanest form, has never been my enemy. I do not want a life without doubt any more than I want a body without nerves. Doubt is part of the sensing apparatus. It tells us when something deserves examination. It interrupts cheap certainty. It asks whether the thing we are about to trust can actually bear weight. Without it, we become gullible, reckless, easily seduced by whatever arrives with confidence and good lighting.

The problem begins when doubt stops asking questions and starts issuing commands. That is when the helpful tremor becomes the jailer. It no longer says, look carefully. It says, do not move. It no longer sharpens perception. It colonizes momentum. It rehearses the same small prosecution in the mind until caution begins to feel like wisdom and delay begins to feel like discernment. A person can spend years in that state, wearing the costume of intelligence while quietly refusing the risk of becoming.

That is why the word still matters to me visually, almost physically: DOUBT. Not because I want to erase doubt entirely (just part of it). That would be adolescent and impossible. I want to cross out the part that freezes me. I want to keep the part that refines me. The letter left standing is not an accident. D remains: doing, direction, discernment, decision, devotion, discipline. All the words that begin in the same mouth but walk toward a different life.

In the earlier chapter, I argued that belief is not something we wait to feel. It is something action builds in the body over time. This is the companion truth: doubt is not something we defeat by thinking harder. It is something we demote by moving. Before action, doubt speaks in absolutes. It has a booming theatrical voice and a taste for totalizing language: this will never work, you are not ready, you do not have enough, you are too late, you are too damaged, you are foolish for wanting this much from life. But after action, something happens. Doubt becomes more specific. Less godlike. Less drunk on its own authority. It no longer says, you cannot. It says, that did not work. It says, adjust here. It says, try again, but with better information. One version paralyzes. The other teaches.

That transition is not insight. It is movement. Rodney Mullen did not think his way beyond doubt. He fell past it. Again and again, the body gathering data the mind could never have acquired from the safe distance of speculation. Jamie Brisick did not resolve grief before continuing. He continued while grief was still in the room, because the sentence, the work, the witnessing, the next small act of salvage became the only available bridge. Bill Walton did not wait for pain to exit before choosing joy. He chose joy with pain still sitting at the table, which is why it never felt cheap. It felt earned. Colin Finlay entered rooms and countries and suffering most people would avoid, and the camera did not eliminate uncertainty. It gave him a way to stand inside it with purpose.

That is the deeper pattern running through this book. The people who shaped me were not people without doubt. They were people who learned how to keep doubt from becoming sovereign. They let it question the work, refine the line, test the method, sharpen the ethic. But they did not let it close the door on the act itself. They understood, in their own mediums, that stillness amplifies doubt while movement interrogates it.

There is a reason the dumbest-seeming lyrics sometimes survive the longest. I get knocked down, but I get up again is not elegant, but it is durable because it contains a system. Fall, rise, repeat. It is almost embarrassingly plain, which may be why it works. The mind loves complexity because complexity gives it somewhere to hide. The body prefers instructions it can use.

So this is the instruction: cross out the part that freezes you. Keep the part that cuts cleanly. Doubt can still ride with you, but it cannot steer. It can sit in the room, but it cannot chair the meeting. It can offer counsel, but it no longer holds veto power over the life still asking to be lived.

That is the passageway into Flow. Not certainty. Not polished confidence. Not some grand spiritual arrival where the self finally becomes pure enough to enter the state. Flow begins when the static is quieted by participation, when attention has something real to hold, when action and awareness begin to speak the same language. You do not think your way there. You move your way there. And if you move long enough, honestly enough, near enough to the edge of your capacity, the old commentary thins. Doubt loses the microphone. The act takes over.

That is where we go next. After all, I’m in love with everything that breaks the grip of doubt on our getting up and leaving for a brighter day.

#WritingLife
#OnBelief
#DoubtAndDoing
#TheAlchemyOfAction
#CreativeProcess
#PersonalGrowth
#StoryAndSelf
#Becoming
#WritersOfSubstack
#LongForm

The lights go down, though not all the way. They never do in places like that. An arena is its own kind of weather system, half electricity, half appetite, a man-made storm of anticipation and sugar and stale beer and scoreboard glow. The music pounds. A camera skates across faces looking for life. The crowd, not yet convinced of itself, sits there in pockets, contained, polite, withholding. Twenty thousand private hesitations under one roof. And then somewhere in the middle of it, usually before anyone sensible would advise it, Cameron Hughes gets up.

That is how I see him, even now. Not as a brand. Not as a novelty. Not as the internet version of himself, all shirts and motion and glorious dad-dancing abandon. I see him as a man standing up inside a room that has not yet decided to believe in its own pulse. That, in the end, is his life. Not cheering exactly. Not entertainment, even. Getting up. Rising before the room gives permission. Moving before certainty arrives. Offering energy before there is any guarantee it will come back. Which is to say, he built his life out of the same rough timber this book keeps returning to again and again: motion before proof, contribution before recognition, belief not as doctrine but as action.

Cameron Hughes made a life out of getting up.

On the surface, the public story has all the right cinematic nonsense. The world’s only professional crowd igniter. The King of Cheer. Olympics. NBA Finals. NHL arenas. The US Open. Giant stages. Giant screens. A man who somehow turned what looked like public foolishness into a profession and then into an art form. He is the one in the aisle moving like embarrassment has been outlawed, tossing shirts, teasing the crowd, breaking the seal of inhibition one section at a time. He looks like pure exuberance. He looks like a man born to the spotlight. He looks, if you do not pay attention, like the easiest story in the world to misunderstand.

Because the real story starts much earlier, in a quieter room, with a boy and a wound.

Before the arenas and the flights and the hotel doors closing behind him after the noise, Cameron was a kid in Ottawa with a strange and useful instinct. Even then, he says, he was “really good at bringing everyone together.” He could see what people had in them. He could find their voice, find what they were good at, help pull it out of hiding. It sounds almost too neat when written plainly like that, the kind of retrospective polish people apply to childhood once adulthood has yielded a visible shape. But in Cameron’s case it feels less like revision and more like premonition. He was already reading rooms. Already sensing the human weather. Already drawn to the places where energy got trapped and needed help getting free.

Then came the cut.

He did not make the high school basketball team. In the grand taxonomy of adolescent pain, that may sound ordinary enough. Plenty of boys get cut. Plenty of young athletes discover that talent, timing, politics, and luck do not always point in the same direction. But life, in its usual indifference to proportion, laid that disappointment beside something much larger. Around the same time, Cameron’s mother died. Those two facts do not sit next to each other accidentally in his story. They fused. The rejection and the grief entered the same bloodstream. He was a boy losing the team and losing the person who most believed in him at nearly the same time.

And before she was gone, she gave him the sentence that would outlive almost everything else.

There are other ways to contribute to the team.

Not consolation. Not pity. Instruction.

That sentence became the underground river of his life. He still speaks from inside it. He says it gave him “this sense of confidence that bringing people together, being myself, and creating a place where people could express themselves made you come alive.” There is an entire worldview in that line. Not achievement, but aliveness. Not the official role, but the living contribution. Most people, when denied the obvious place on the court, interpret the denial as verdict. Cameron eventually interpreted it as rerouting.

The scene is easy enough to imagine. A gym. Hardwood. Rubber soles squeaking. The flat metallic echo of a high school game. A few banners. A few bored parents. Maybe the smell of popcorn or wet coats or old varnish. Cameron, cut from the team, still goes. “Not to cheer them on,” he says, “but to support them.” That distinction matters. Support is not decorative. Support is structural. He saw that they needed energy, encouragement, spirit, and he was the only one from his school there to provide it. So, he started. Then he kept starting. He did it at pep rallies. He did it for the women’s team. He did it for the men’s team. He did it anywhere he could help generate life where there had been passivity. “I saw the power of community and everyone coming together,” he said. That was the first draft of the whole career. Not spectacle. Service.

I am struck, over and over, by how often a life changes not when a person is given the role he wants, but when he is denied it and has to invent another way to matter. Cameron did not get onto the team, so he found another entrance into the same human need. Belonging. Contribution. Uplift. Meaning. The doorway closed, but the building remained. He simply found a side entrance and, in time, made it his own.

By the time January 8, 1994 arrived, the public myth was ready to begin. The Ottawa Senators game. The origin story. The night the thing became undeniable enough that the world could no longer dismiss it as eccentricity. But the lived version is better than the myth. He remembers “anger, disappointment, and frustration.” He remembers having “the perfect seat in the middle of the arena.” He remembers being “stone-cold sober,” which I love because it strips away any lazy idea that this was some drunken lark. No. He was painfully present. Two periods had gone by. The place was flat. The crowd, in his view, was failing its own opportunity. “Why aren’t we getting behind this team? Why aren’t we having fun?” he remembered thinking.

Then came the pivot.

“Let’s do this.”

He called it a “what-the-heck moment.” His friend Elliot laughed and warned him not to do it. Then Cameron did it and Elliot immediately switched sides: “Oh my God, I’m so glad you did it.”

There is a whole social theology in that tiny exchange. First people laugh at the person who stands up. Then, once he has liberated something they wanted but were too careful to claim, they thank him. Cameron understands this better than almost anyone. He says it happens everywhere. Weddings. Birthdays. Corporate events. Arenas. Somebody goes first, and everybody else gets to pretend they were waiting for precisely that permission all along.

What he discovered, eventually, was that this was not about sports. Sports were just the theater. The deeper thing was human. Crowds want to be invited into themselves. People want permission to loosen. They want someone to break the membrane of self-consciousness first. They want a sacrificial fool. A willing jester. A catalyst who will risk looking ridiculous so that everyone else can feel less trapped inside their own carefully managed image.

Cameron became that person.

Not overnight. Not without cost. Not without a lot of awkward early proving. But the pattern emerged. Ottawa paid him a little money. Then came T-shirts. Then bigger rooms. Then Buffalo. Then booking agents. Then the dawning realization that the thing he had stumbled into in one arena was portable. Scalable. Universal. “I was like, what?” he said when someone first suggested he might make a living doing it. Of course he was. There was no existing lane for this. No respectable category. No guidance counselor handing out pamphlets on the vocational future of strategic public absurdity. There was just evidence, stacking up, that people in rooms needed what he had learned how to offer.

And what he had learned to offer was not attention.

He is explicit about that. “I did not become the King of Cheer because I loved attention. I became it because I’ve never stopped believing in myself and knowing that I can bring a lot of smiles to the world.” Better still: “I’m addicted to connection. I’m not addicted to attention.”

That is the hinge. The whole story swings on it.

Attention is extraction. Connection is exchange.

Attention asks the room to feed you. Connection feeds the room first.

Cameron’s whole career rests on that difference. He walks into places where energy has gone static and offers his own body as the jumper cable. He gives first. He risks first. He makes fun of himself first. “You’ve got to make fun of yourself first,” he says, if you want a crowd to trust you. Exactly. You cannot ask other people to loosen while staying protected yourself. You cannot command vulnerability from behind glass. He knows that. “You’ve got to be willing to go there and ask, ‘You want to come with me?’”

That line feels to me like the whole chapter in miniature.

Not come watch me.

Come with me.

There is something almost priestly in that invitation, though Cameron would likely laugh at the comparison and then dance harder just to break the seriousness of it. Still, the function is similar. He enters a room that is not yet alive to itself and coaxes it toward participation. He alters the emotional climate. He changes the barometric pressure inside a building. He makes passivity feel less inevitable.

But there is craft here too, and not enough people understand that. They think what he does is raw personality, improvisation, unfiltered energy. He will be the first to tell you otherwise. “I believe I’ve worked magically on the timing,” he said, one of those Cameron lines that sounds half mystical, half showbiz, and is dead right on both counts. Timing is the hidden machinery. When does the room need a spark? When does the DJ need to switch the song? When does the speech need to lift or soften? What is the audience telling you right now, not verbally but energetically? He learned how to feel the moment where inhibition can be broken without shattering trust. That is not chaos. That is musicianship of a different kind. Conducting. Pulse reading. Live emotional architecture.

And like every art that looks effortless when done well, it cost him.

“There were definitely costs,” he told me. Early on he had “zero patience.” He knew the thing was real. Knew it was working. Knew there was value in it. But he did not yet know how to let the world catch up at its own pace. “I was trying too hard.” He ties much of that to ADHD, to the perfectionist edge in him, the restlessness, the craving to make it all happen now. He has a phrase for the hard-earned correction: “be impatiently patient.” That is the kind of line only someone with scar tissue can earn. Push, but breathe. Hurry, but endure. Believe without trying to throttle reality into validating you before its time.

His ADHD belongs near the center of the story, not off to the side as diagnosis or ornament. “The ADHD thing is real,” he said. As a child he had been a math champion. Then his mother got sick. Then his parents divorced. Then his father’s alcoholism cast its long wrecking shadow across the house. “You can kind of see the linear trajectory of my academics fall off pretty hard.” Exactly. Lives are not built in compartments. The wound and the gift are almost never as separate as people want them to be. The crowd, he says, is “a perfect dopamine hit.” His editor once told him, “You are the greatest dopamine-hit expert I’ve ever witnessed in my life.” Cameron says it laughing, but he knows the deeper truth. The thing he became brilliant at is also the thing that fit his wiring, fed it, amplified it, soothed it, and sometimes probably endangered it too.

Because after the arena comes the hotel room.

After the music comes the silence.

After the crowd comes the door shutting.

And when it does, the crash is real.

He described it with painful precision. The loneliest part is when “the music stops and all you want to do is get back to your room and breathe.” Then, half an hour later, you either want to “go out and party all night or hide underneath your sheets and never be seen again.” That line should remain almost untouched because it contains the exact loneliness of performance, the physiological whiplash of giving enormous amounts of energy outward and then being left alone with the nervous system while it tries to remember what silence is for. Anyone who has performed knows that hotel door, he says. The room still buzzing in your muscles. The ears ringing. The body flooded and then suddenly abandoned. The crash can take hours. Sometimes the real emotional bill does not arrive until the next day, when the adrenaline drains and quiet comes back to collect.

Which is why I resist the temptation to write Cameron as novelty. Novelty is the least interesting thing about him. The real material is older and sadder and more durable. Grief. Rejection. Service. Aliveness. Permission. The long conversion of private ache into public generosity. He once said, “The cheer you give is the cheer you get.” That line sounds simple enough to breeze past, but I think it is one of the best things he says. Energy returns in the shape you offer it. If you give yourself honestly, vulnerably, exuberantly, the room often answers in kind. If you stay guarded, transactional, half-invested, it does too. Cameron built his whole life on generosity of energy. He gave first. And because he did, it came back.

Not always cleanly. Not always immediately. But enough. Enough to turn the weird thing into a profession. Enough to make the profession into a philosophy.

There was, he admits, a period when he felt like he was the man. Good. Every honest person has one. You do not spend years igniting arenas without occasionally inhaling some of your own smoke. But he also learned to distrust that version of things. Someone told him when he moved to Los Angeles, “Don’t believe your hype.” That stayed with him. Over time he began to notice that the best photographs and videos from his career were not really about him at all. “It’s really about the crowd,” he said. That marks the true maturation of the work. The room becomes the star. The point is no longer Cameron being seen. The point is Cameron helping other people become visible to themselves.

That is why the Malcolm story has to sit near the heart of the chapter.

Malcolm, a boy with Down syndrome, got the shirts, the spotlight, the moment. Cameron stepped aside. Malcolm brought a huge crowd to its feet. Cameron said it “perfectly encapsulated the reason I do what I do.” Of course it did. The highest form of his gift is not domination. It is transference. He gives people access to their own voltage. He lets the room discover itself through someone else’s joy. That is not hype. That is distribution of courage.

Watching greatness in other forms taught him similar things. Roger Federer. Novak Djokovic. Cameron says those encounters showed him “how present greatness can be.” I love that phrase because it rescues greatness from the childish fantasy of invulnerability. Greatness is often simply radical presence. Full availability to the moment. Cameron recognized it because presence is also what he asks of crowds. He says, “A crowd is a crowd is a crowd.” Prince George, British Columbia is not fundamentally different from Belfast or Minnesota or a major tennis final in the dimension that matters most. The scale changes. The cameras change. The need does not. People want to come alive. They want to stop watching their own lives from one step outside them.

Which leads to perhaps the best line in all his answers: “The real cheer is not noise. It is believing in yourself and letting everyone hear it.”

There it is.

Not noise. Not spectacle. Not volume. Belief made communal.

That line reaches beyond sports and beyond Cameron and lands squarely in the deeper current of this book. Because that is what belief often is when stripped of decoration. Not certainty. Not polished confidence. Not the performance of fearlessness. It is the decision to rise, to put your spirit in the room, to let your energy become legible enough that others can borrow some of it. Cameron says it plainly in his mantra: “Just get up.” Then he explains what that really means. “You decide to get up, you decide to put yourself out there, and that means stripping down this layer of vulnerability and giving access to your spirit, your heart, your smile, your energy.” That is not a slogan anymore. That is a life instruction.

Even the odd side stories around him carry that same cinematic charge. The Joan Rivers plane ride where we met. Joan in first row savaging her assistant. Cameron and I in the row behind. He barely remembers the exact ugliness of her treatment, but he remembers the collision itself as “cosmic magic.” He had spent the extra fifty bucks for the upgrade because he had just had a great show and was feeling alive. Then we were seated together. He says those moments are “meant to happen and should be appreciated.” Maybe that is true. Or maybe living as Cameron does simply makes one more alert to the possibility that the weird moments are not weird at all, only undisguised. Two people in adjacent seats. A life nudged slightly. A friendship beginning in the margin of somebody else’s bad behavior. Cosmic magic will do as an explanation. It is at least as good as any other.

What stays with me most, though, is the seriousness inside all his brightness. Cameron Hughes turned exclusion into contribution. He turned grief into generosity, embarrassment into courage, motion into ministry. He became a specialist in permission. He walks into rooms full of withheld life and helps return that life to circulation. He reminds people that there are, indeed, other ways to contribute to the team.

The title the world gave him is King of Cheer, and fair enough. It fits the public silhouette. But under the crown is something more human and more earned. A boy cut from one role found another. A grieving son carried one sentence from his mother all the way into arenas around the world. A man learned that the cheer you give is the cheer you get. Then he spent a lifetime proving it.

He says he became who he became because he never stopped believing in himself and in his ability to “bring a lot of smiles to the world.” That line only works because of the darkness it had to survive. Otherwise, it would be greeting-card material. In Cameron’s life it is something else. It is hard-won. It is lit from underneath by loss. It is not optimism. It is practice.

And maybe that is what belief looks like more often than not. Not certainty. Not doctrine. Not the smooth confidence of people who have never been bruised. Maybe belief is simply the act of getting up, of giving the room access to your spirit before you know whether the room deserves it, of moving first and trusting that meaning may catch up later.

Cameron got up.

Then he kept getting up.

The rest of his life followed.

Before Covid changed everything, I was asked to deliver the keynote address at the Icon Health & Fitness Summit, and for ninety minutes I walked an auditorium of people through an idea that has haunted and helped me for years: what happens when the usual barriers come down. That talk did not end when I stepped off the stage. It led to additional consulting work for me around culture curation, company communications, and the creative calculations required to foster real cross-functional coordination. I’m not taking about performative coordination… the kind where everyone is cc’d and nobody is heard. This is about a real thing. The kind that allows an organization to think more like a living system (a scientist exploring altered states of consciousness) and less like a stack of locked cabinets. That through-line is all over my original keynote notes and presentation language, where LSD was used as both a literal and metaphorical touch point for transformation, comfort-zone expansion, and the unlocking of unusual pathways inside dysfunctional organizations.

Let me say this plainly before anyone mistakes the spark for the fire. I am not advocating for design by committee. That is usually where sharp ideas go to be filed down until nobody can get hurt, or inspired. Nor am I prescribing psychedelics as some kind of corporate operating system. My position here is metaphorical. Yes, I have had profound experiences on LSD. They are part of my life, part of my story, and part of what gave this keynote its charge. I ran the 100th running of the Boston Marathon on two hits of acid, which made it the most unique of my 45 marathons. I gave the best keynote speech of my life at the Waterman’s Ball, a black-tie affair, in front of 1,500 people, and felt more articulate than I have ever felt on a stage. I have surfed heavy waves and moved through moments of unusual clarity while under its influence. I even won a triathlon while indulging. (I don’t believe LSD is a banned PED). Those experiences are mine. But the larger point of this article is not pharmacological. It is organizational. It is about what the metaphor reveals.

What makes the metaphor useful is that the science is not merely campfire folklore. Research from the Beckley Foundation and Imperial College London found that LSD appears to reduce the usual dominance of the default mode network while increasing communication between brain regions that are normally more segregated, producing a more integrated pattern of connectivity across the brain. Related published research has described LSD as expanding global connectivity and loosening the brain’s more modular organization.

And this is the point.

Because the most interesting thing about LSD, in this context, is not rebellion. It is connectivity.

The brain, left to its ordinary habits, protects itself by routing traffic along familiar tributaries. Of course, it is useful. Necessary, even. We do not survive long without those guardrails. Companies do the same thing. Departments become mental neighborhoods with private security. Marketing talks to marketing. Product talks to product. Finance speaks fluent caution. Sales promises the moon. Customer service, which is often sitting on the purest truth in the entire building, is treated like a janitor of consequences instead of a source of strategic intelligence. The organization functions, yes, but often with the imaginative range of office carpeting.

This has only become more pronounced in the era of remote work. Once upon a time, useful accidents still happened. Someone overheard something in a hallway. Somebody from design drifted into a conversation with ops at the water cooler. A passing sentence became a campaign line, a product fix, a strategic pivot, or a better answer to a question the company did not yet know it was asking. Remote work has many advantages, but it has also vaporized the collision points where unexpected intelligence used to appear. What remains can look efficient while being spiritually and creatively malnourished.

That was the spine of my keynote. Not that companies should drop acid. That would be fun, albeit absurd. But that organizations can learn from one feature of the metaphor: when more of the system talks to more of the system, new possibilities emerge. My original notes made that exact case, arguing that increased cross-talk between different brain regions opens the mind to new experiences, and that increased cross-talk between different departments can open the collective mind to new creativity while integrating the individual more fully with the company. The presentation also asked, very directly, what if we could light up our organization’s brain power legally and create a more collaborative workplace that limits doubt, especially self-doubt.

That does not mean flattening expertise. It does not mean every opinion earns veto power, or that every room needs twenty voices and no author. It means building a culture and a communication architecture in which underused perspectives can travel farther, where insight is not imprisoned by title or department, and where someone from an unlikely corner of the business can alter an outcome before it hardens into policy, product, or regret. Wide signal. Clear authorship. That is the balance. Not democracy of taste. Not creative chowder. Not AI slop ladled into the middle of the table. And it also requires something rare from leadership, especially from the highest-paid person in the room: restraint. The wisdom to stay present without seizing the mic. To encourage the dialogue without prematurely declaring the answer. To create enough safety for real thought to surface, without smothering it beneath authority before it has had the chance to breathe.

History, sport, science, and art all offer strange little flares that support the larger intuition. In baseball lore, Dock Ellis maintained that he threw his 1970 no-hitter while under the influence of LSD, a claim he never backed away from and that remains part of the official public story around his career. In surfing, Shane Beschen’s legendary perfect 30 at Kirra, three straight perfect 10s in a single heat, stands as a reminder that extraordinary performances sometimes arrive when an athlete seems to slip beyond ordinary mental traffic and into a rarer channel altogether. In broader athlete culture, current writing on psychedelics often circles around ideas like flow, focus, psychological flexibility, and fear recalibration, even while the research base remains emerging rather than settled.

Because the best breakthroughs rarely arrive on command. More often they emerge when ego loosens its grip, hierarchy softens just enough, and the system becomes open enough for an unexpected signal to get through. This pattern is not confined to companies. It shows up wherever performance, perception, and possibility suddenly exceed their usual limits.

And science has its own legends. Kary Mullis, the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of PCR, has long linked psychedelic experience to the kind of nonlinear thinking that helped him conceptualize one of the most important breakthroughs in molecular biology. Whether every story in this realm is tidy, provable, or free of embellishment is almost beside the point. The enduring pattern is the pattern that matters: breakthroughs often show up when the normal partitions loosen and different elements of a system are suddenly able to communicate in unexpected ways. When the walls come down.

That is why this metaphor still resonates.

Most organizations are overprotective of their own internal borders. They confuse order with intelligence. They confuse procedure with creativity. They build routines because routines once saved them, and then those same routines become a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety, never realizing the raft has drifted nowhere. My own presentation touched this nerve too, arguing that people and brands alike fall into routines that inhibit the breadth of experience and the potential for achievement that only supported movement outside our comfort zones can manifest. It also pushed the idea that unusualness, especially the structural and organic connection of often-disengaged stakeholders, can be the difference between a morally or fiscally bankrupt entity and one that actually thrives.

That phrase, supported movement outside our comfort zones, is super important. Because I am not romanticizing chaos. As Timothy Leary professed “Set and setting” exists for a reason in psychedelics, and the same is true in organizations. Openness without trust is noise. Cross-functional inclusion without clarity is traffic. A culture has to be supportive and open enough that people can speak honestly, hear other functions clearly, and participate without fearing social or political punishment. Then the real work begins. Then the signal can move.

The companies that will win in this era will not necessarily be the companies with the flashiest leadership slogans or the noisiest Slack channels. They will be the ones that create an omni-directional communication network sturdy enough to carry ideas across departments without losing them to ego, territoriality, or process molasses. They will be the ones able to unite misaligned departments operating in silos of inefficiency or ignorance and allow them to blossom into well-connected transmitters of intelligent ideas. Maybe we can even get Sales to quit hating Marketing. That language came right out of my materials because it still feels true to me. A healthy company should not feel like a bunker system. It should feel like an alert brain lit up with firing synapses.

I have seen enough brands, events, teams, and leadership cultures to know this much: the best outcomes rarely come from keeping everyone in their lane forever. They come from creating the right moments for lanes to blur without causing a pileup. They come when product hears the customer before the complaint becomes a crater. They come when marketing hears product development before a promise becomes a lie. They come when finance understands culture is not decoration but fuel. They come when leadership stops treating communication as distribution and starts treating it as circulation.

That was the real subject of the keynote at Icon. It just happened to be wrapped in a metaphor sharp enough to wake people up. I know I freaked out a few people, but intrigued many more.

The metaphor worked because people could feel its truth in their own organizations. Most companies are under-communicated, over-defended, and too structurally rigid to access their own hidden brilliance. They do not need chemical intervention. They need connective intervention. They need cultures that allow more of the organism to communicate with itself. They need leaders confident enough to invite signal from unlikely places. They need permission structures that reward curiosity instead of punishing deviation. They need to understand that collaboration and committee are not the same word, not the same shape, and certainly not the same outcome.

I am not suggesting that acid belongs in the boardroom. I am suggesting that the metaphor belongs in the strategy.

Because when disconnected things begin to connect, epiphanies happen.

In a brain. In a company. In a life.

And sometimes the difference between stagnation and breakthrough is nothing more, and nothing less, than whether the system is brave enough to let itself talk… and listen.

#SetAndSetting #CompanyCulture #CreativeLeadership #Communication #CrossFunctional #Innovation #RemoteWork #BreakthroughIdeas #FutureOfWork #LSD

I’ve been involved with football (soccer) much longer than I have with business. I played through college. Our kids have done the same and they started at age 4. But, my wife, who has never played soccer is more astute and more of a rapid fan than all of us. She often ponders about the job security of Liverpool’s Arne Slot. Her cogitations have got me thinking about all the brands I’ve either turned around or watched fail from the VIP seats.

And, I should note, it was announced today, to Arne’s delight, that the club has no intention of removing him, but that is what really got me thinking.

A club loses three in a row, looks lifeless doing it, and by Monday morning the manager is cleaning out his office while pundits nod into microphones and supporters argue over whether the sack came too late or too soon. It is ruthless, yes, but it is also honest. The table speaks. The performance is visible. The chemistry, or lack of it, is there for everyone to see.

Business rarely works that way.

A brand can play terrible football for years and still convince itself it is only one strategic reset, one organizational shuffle, one new deck, or one round of “alignment” away from turning the season around. In football, losing smells like smoke. In business, it too often smells like fresh toner.

That is what fascinates me about the comparison between a struggling Premier League side and a struggling brand. On the surface, they seem to live in different universes. One performs under floodlights, in stadiums, in front of supporters, cameras, and league tables. The other performs in boardrooms, product meetings, sales calls, earnings reviews, and endless internal presentations. One has managers, captains, transfer windows, and dressing rooms. The other has CEOs, executive teams, reorgs, and org charts.

But underneath, they are built on many of the same things: leadership, chemistry, belief, talent, fit, accountability, momentum, and culture.

And when either one starts losing, the most important question is never simply who failed. It is who gets to decide what happens next.

In football, when results collapse, the manager is usually the first one to go. Sometimes that is fair. Sometimes it is lazy. Sometimes the manager inherited the wrong squad, or lost key players, or was undermined by poor recruitment long before he arrived. But still, the mechanism is visible. Everyone understands that leadership must answer for performance. The table does not flatter anyone for long. If the team looks disjointed, uninspired, tactically confused, or no longer committed to the cause, the club acts.

That does not mean football always gets it right. Far from it. But it does mean football understands something business often avoids: poor performance is not merely a mood. It is a condition. It shows up in patterns. It leaves fingerprints. It eventually becomes undeniable.

Brands, on the other hand, are often granted the luxury of disguise.

A brand can drift for years while speaking fluently about opportunity. Sales soften and it is blamed on headwinds. Product loses relevance and it is blamed on timing. Culture starts to fray and it gets renamed as transformation. Confidence erodes, good people leave, energy fades, customers begin to feel the loss of coherence, and yet internally the language often gets cleaner as the reality gets messier.

That is where the analogy becomes especially useful.

Imagine a football club in terrible form deciding that the manager and the same underperforming squad should collectively determine which players need to be sold, which academy prospects should be cut loose, and who ought to be brought in to fix the future. No serious club would think that was a wise way to rebuild. Why? Because the people inside a failing system are often the least qualified to diagnose it honestly, especially when their own position depends on protecting certain stories.

And yet this is exactly what happens in business all the time.

A CEO and executive team preside over decline, then when pressure arrives, they are allowed to orchestrate the reorganization. They decide who stays. They decide who goes. They decide which roles matter, which voices are “difficult,” which functions are “redundant,” and which people should bear the cost of change. In other words, the very people most responsible for the drift, the confusion, the political behavior, the weak hiring, or the lack of vision are often given the authority to redraw the roster.

That is not reform. That is self-preservation dressed up as leadership.

And too often, the wrong people are the ones shown the door.

Not necessarily the least productive. Not necessarily the least talented. Not necessarily the ones doing the least. More often it is the people with less political insulation. The people who still care enough to tell the truth. The ones who challenge complacency. The ones carrying culture without a grand title. The ones producing real value rather than narrating the appearance of it. The people who still make others better. In sporting terms, they are the teammates who cover ground, create space, steady the match, and quietly hold standards together, even when the scoreboard is turning ugly.

They are often the first to go.

Meanwhile, the people most skilled at managing upward, avoiding accountability, and surviving internal weather systems stay put. They speak the language of process. They know how to blur the edges of failure. They can explain anything except why the brand no longer feels dangerous, relevant, or alive.

So the company does not really reorganize. It simply redistributes the dysfunction.

Football has one great advantage over business: it tells the truth faster.

By autumn, the warning signs are obvious. By winter, the mood darkens. By spring, the table reads like a confession. Brands can postpone that reckoning. A bad season in football is hard to hide. A bad three years in business can still be narrated as transition, recalibration, or external pressure. The scoreboard in sport is immediate. In brands, the scoreboard is often delayed by language.

But delay does not change the truth.

A team either has chemistry or it does not. A brand either has coherence or it does not. A manager either has the dressing room or he does not. A CEO either has the trust, clarity, and conviction of the organization, or he does not. Talent matters, of course. Strategy matters. But neither means much if the system itself is fractured. If the people are pulling in different directions, if the standards are inconsistent, if nobody really knows what the brand stands for anymore, then all you have is motion without momentum.

That is why culture matters so much in both worlds.

A great football team is not merely a collection of skilled players. It is an organism. Roles are clear. Standards are shared. Trust exists. Accountability is real. The style of play is visible. The best brands work the same way. They are not merely businesses with products and departments. At their best, they are systems of belief. People know what the brand stands for. They know how decisions get made. They know what matters. Product, marketing, sales, operations, leadership, all moving with some shared sense of purpose instead of operating like rival fiefdoms forced to share a crest.

When that shared purpose disappears, the decline begins long before the numbers make it official.

And yes, sometimes the founding CEO has to come back.

Not because nostalgia is a strategy, but because some founders are more than former executives. They are the original standard. The compass. The person who knew what the thing felt like when it was healthy, hungry, coherent, and dangerous. Steve Jobs remains the most familiar example because it is so dramatic and so instructive. Sometimes what leaves with a founder is not merely a leadership style but the internal logic of the brand itself. The taste. The urgency. The discernment. The refusal to let mediocrity dress itself as progress.

A company can remain operationally alive while becoming spiritually unrecognizable.

That is a fate many brands know well.

Because strong brands do not merely sell product. They sell meaning. Identity. Aspiration. Belonging. Utility, yes, but also energy. Emotion. A reason to care. And once leadership loses touch with that deeper current, the decline is almost always cultural before it becomes financial. By the time the losses are undeniable on a spreadsheet, the soul has often been gone for a while.

Which brings us back to reorganization.

The issue is not whether change is needed. Of course it is. The issue is who is qualified to lead it. If the people who normalized the decline are given full authority to design the recovery, the odds are high that they will protect the familiar, punish the inconvenient, and repeat the same mistakes under shinier titles.

A football club does not recover by letting the losing locker room design the future in its own image.

Neither does a brand.

That is the trap. Too many reorganizations are not really about fixing the system. They are about allowing the system to defend itself. They keep the politics of the present intact while pretending to build the performance of the future. They call it discipline. They call it efficiency. They call it necessary change. But often it is little more than a controlled demolition of the wrong people by the wrong leaders for the wrong reasons.

The league table is merciless, but at least it is honest.

Brands would do well to borrow some of that honesty.

Because when performance is failing, the most dangerous thing you can do is let the people most invested in the failure define the rescue. That is not leadership. That is camouflage.

In sport, failure gets sacked.

In business, it often gets to run the meeting.

#leadership #organizationalchange #reorganization #brandstrategy #culture #businessstrategy #turnaround #executiveleadership #management #teamculture #performance #accountability #brandbuilding #corporatestrategy #football #soccer #premierleague #decisionmaking #companyculture #leadershipmatters

That is what fascinates me about belief. Not merely whether a belief is right or wrong, true or false, noble or absurd. What fascinates me is how thoroughly belief can shape the life that follows. It informs not only what we think, but what we notice, what we attempt, what we avoid, what we endure, how we interpret resistance, and what kind of future we can even imagine for ourselves.[1]

Most people like to think they are making choices from reason. Clean, deliberate, adult choices. But reason, in my experience, is often just the publicist. Belief is the engine. Belief gets there first. It lays track before the locomotive arrives. It decides whether the world looks full of openings or full of warnings. It determines whether pain feels like proof you are on the wrong road, or simply the toll charged for passage.[2]

The strange thing is that many of our deepest beliefs were not chosen. They were absorbed. Repeated. Inherited. Inculcated into us through tone, ritual, emotion, and repetition. Psychology has shown that repetition itself can increase perceived truth, a phenomenon called the illusory truth effect. Something said often enough begins to feel real, not because we carefully examined it, but because familiarity acquires the perfume of fact.[3] That means many of the convictions steering a life are not the ones we reasoned our way into. They are the ones that had the longest residency.

This is one reason so many lives become self-fulfilling works of private fiction.

Tell a child he is trouble and he may become exquisitely fluent in causing it. Tell a person she is fragile and she may begin organizing her world around avoiding fracture. Tell an athlete he is a closer, a killer, a natural, and watch what posture does to performance. Tell a musician he has the room and he may walk onstage as if the song already belongs to him. Tell a rider he is made for the long breakaway and suddenly the road opens a little. Tell someone, over and over, that she is not the sort of person who belongs in a certain room, and watch her hesitate at the threshold, then call the hesitation realism.[4]

All of this reminds me of a beautiful song called “Good Boy,” by Barenaked Ladies (a band I once got up on stage with and performed). The song understands that the first names we are given are not always names at all, but assignments. Good boy. Smart boy. Strong boy. Good girl. Smart girl. Pretty girl. These sound like blessings, and sometimes they are, but they are also scripts, little costumes laid out for us before we have even learned to walk. The song captures the quiet violence hidden inside those labels, the way praise can become pressure and identity can become obligation. We are told who we are before we have had the chance to discover it for ourselves, and then we spend years either performing that role or trying to crawl out from underneath it.

That is why the song’s image of “chains that hang around our necks” feels so precise. Commentary does not always bruise like a punch. Sometimes it settles more softly, then hardens. A child hears something once and it is a moment. A child hears it a hundred times and it becomes a mirror. A thousand times and it becomes a map. Eventually, the label stops sounding like someone else’s opinion and starts sounding like the voice of truth. The “good boy” becomes terrified of disappointing. The “pretty girl” learns that being seen may matter more than being known. The “smart one” begins to fear any failure that might crack the façade. Even positive labels can become chains when they narrow the range of a life.

And then there is the darker script, the one I think of as the “bad boy” phenomenon. Tell someone often enough that he is difficult, reckless, too much, the problem, the screw-up, the one who will never quite get it right, and those words do not simply describe him. They begin to recruit him. Negative commentary, repeated over time, becomes a kind of prophecy. It can turn rebellion into identity, self-destruction into performance, and failure into home turf. Better, sometimes, to become exquisitely fluent in the part you were assigned than to endure the uncertainty of becoming someone new. The label starts as accusation, but over time it becomes shelter, then destiny.

That is the real heartbreak in songs like “Good Boy,” and in so many lives. We are named before we are known. Praised before we are understood. Condemned before we have even chosen. Then we spend years mistaking those inherited descriptions for our actual selves. This is how belief takes root. Not always through grand ideology or conscious conviction, but through repetition, tone, and the slow accumulation of commentary. We become, in part, the stories spoken over us. The good news is that these stories can be rewritten. The bad news is that they are often written early, and in a hand so familiar we mistake it for our own.

When I was born, they looked at me and said

What a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy

And when you were born, they looked at you and said

What a good girl, what a what a smart girl, what a pretty girl

Weve got these chains that hang around our necks

People want to strangle us with them before we take our first breath

Afraid of change, afraid of staying the same

When temptation calls, we just look away

This name is the hairshirt I wear

And this hairshirt is woven from your brown hair

This song is the cross that I bear

Bear it with me, bear with me, bear with me

Be with me tonight

I know that it isn’t right, but be

I go to school, I write exams

If I pass, if I fail, if I drop out

Does anyone give a damn?

And if they do, they’ll soon forget ‘cause it won’t take much for me

To show my life ain′t over yet

I wake up scared, I wake up strange

I wake up wondering if anything in my life is ever going to change

I wake up scared, I wake up strange

And everything around me stays the same

This name is the hairshirt I wear

And this hairshirt is woven from your brown hair

This song is the cross that I bear

Bear it with me, bear with me, bear with me

Be with me tonight

I know that it isn′t right, but be with me tonight

I couldn’t tell you that I was wrong

Chickened out, grabbed a pen and paper, sat down and I wrote this song

I couldn′t tell you that you were right

So instead I looked in the mirror

Watched TV, laid awake all night

We’ve got these chains, hang ′round our necks

People want to strangle us with them before we take our first breath

Afraid of change, afraid of staying the same when temptation calls

This name is the hairshirt I wear

And this hairshirt is woven from your brown hair

This song is the cross that I bear

Bear it with me, bear with me, bear with me

Be with me tonight

I know that it isn’t right, but be with me tonight

When I was born, they looked at me and said

What a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy

And when you were born, they looked at you and said

What a good girl, what a smart girl, what a pretty girl, hey

Belief is not just cognitive wallpaper. It is behavioral architecture. Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy remains useful here because it names something every athlete, entrepreneur, artist, and survivor eventually finds in the vast tributaries of their brain, what you believe about your own capacity influences whether you begin, how hard you push, and how long you persist once the romance is gone and the real work starts.[5] Talent matters, yes. Circumstance matters too. So does luck, timing, class, health, geography, and all the other gods that pretend not to exist. But belief affects whether you stay in the fight long enough for those other factors to meet your effort. In many lives, that is the hinge.

I have seen this in sports, business, brand building, and art. The people who become something are not always the most gifted. Often they are the ones who came into possession of a directionally correct belief. Not certainty. Not delusion. Not the chrome-plated confidence of frauds and motivational barkers. Just enough faith in their ability, or in the value of the pursuit, to keep moving while the evidence was still incomplete.

That incompleteness matters because life almost never hands us perfect information before demanding a decision. You start before you are ready. You launch before the market votes. You race before the body has made any promises. You fall in love before guarantees. You raise children without a manual. You build a company while half the room thinks you are hallucinating. You walk on stage before the first note has forgiven your nerves. You drop into a wave before you know whether it will hold or pitch. You tip a bike into a corner before the tire has voted. Belief is what helps a person act under those conditions. It is the bridge between uncertainty and effort.[6]

For much of the twentieth century, psychology concerned itself chiefly with what was broken. The great project was pathology: dysfunction, trauma, disorder, damage. Why do we suffer? Why do we fracture? Why are we so often haunted by ourselves? Those are vital questions. But near the end of the century, Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi helped formalize a complementary line of inquiry: what makes life worth living, what helps people flourish, what produces meaning, engagement, strength, and optimal human functioning. Their 2000 introduction to positive psychology explicitly argued that psychology had become too preoccupied with repairing damage and had neglected the study of what makes people thrive.

There is a story, probably apocryphal, that positive psychology was born in the surf, in Hawaii, with one man caught in a rip and another helping pull him back toward shore. I cannot verify that as history, so I will leave it where it belongs, somewhere between folklore and metaphor. But it is still a beautiful image, because the ocean does teach what positive psychology later gave language to. You cannot control the swell. You cannot command the wind. You do not negotiate with currents. What you can control is your response. Your attention. Your attitude. Your willingness to paddle back out after a heavy wipeout. And that may be the whole bloody lesson of flourishing. Not control of conditions, but mastery of engagement.

Long before I heard the phrase positive psychology, I knew its rougher, saltier cousin.

I learned it in the ocean. I learned it on a bike. I learned it on stages where the first thirty seconds can feel like standing naked in weather.

When you focus on fear, you tighten. When you focus on flow, you loosen into the thing itself.

Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow described a state of deep absorption, engagement, and optimal functioning, the kind of full-presence state in which skill and challenge meet each other like matched blades. He became widely known as the father of flow, and his work became one of the pillars beneath positive psychology’s emphasis on flourishing rather than mere symptom reduction.

My friend Steven Kotler has done as much as anyone in recent years to drag flow out of the incense fog and into the bright, hard light of performance science. Through books like The Rise of Superman, where he explored how extreme athletes access altered states of consciousness in moments of enormous consequence, Stealing Fire, which widened the lens to show how peak states are being pursued in sport, business, and culture, and The Art of Impossible, where he translated flow research into a more practical blueprint for motivation and high performance, Steven helped make flow feel less like mystical accident and more like a trainable doorway into heightened human capability. On his own site, he describes The Rise of Superman, The Art of Impossible, and even Gnar Country as foundational texts in performance neuroscience, and his broader work through the Flow Research Collective has centered on decoding how flow sharpens focus, accelerates learning, and boosts performance.

What makes flow so compelling, at least to me, is that it does more than improve output. It changes the texture of consciousness. In flow, the noisy little committee in the skull goes quiet. Time can stretch or collapse. Self-consciousness thins. Action and awareness begin moving together like two musicians who have stopped looking at the sheet music and finally found the groove. A wave stops being something you are trying to conquer and becomes something you are conversing with. A bike stops feeling like a machine beneath you and starts to feel like a second nervous system. A stage stops looking like a tribunal and starts feeling like home. The state can manifest inside us as heightened pattern recognition, greater confidence, deeper immersion, reduced fear, and a strange, almost holy sense that one is no longer forcing the moment but entering into partnership with it. That may be why flow is so addictive to surfers, riders, artists, founders, and athletes alike. It is not merely that we perform better there. It is that, for brief and luminous stretches, we become more fully ourselves.

That word, flow, is almost too gentle for some of the places it appears.

A surfer sliding into the barrel is not floating through lavender mist. He is negotiating speed, balance, risk, intuition, and consequence in fractions of seconds. A cyclist descending loose gravel at speed is not meditating on a cloud. She is inside a ferocious conversation among instinct, skill, momentum, and trust. A musician on stage in the right moment stops thinking about performance and becomes performance. The self thins out. The chatter disappears. Time does a strange little dance. You are no longer outside the act evaluating it. You are in it, and it is in you.

That is not just poetry. That is psychology with perspiration, sea spray, and grit on it.

And maybe that is one of the most redemptive things about flow: for a few rare moments, it can free us from the tyranny of the imposed name. The “good boy,” the “bad boy,” the “pretty girl,” the “smart one,” the “problem,” the “closer,” the “fraud” all go strangely silent there. Flow does not care much about the labels hung around our necks. It cares about presence. About the clean meeting of attention and action. About whether we are fully inside the task, the ride, the song, the wave, the conversation. In that sense, flow can become a kind of liberation from inherited identity. It interrupts the old commentary long enough for us to experience ourselves not as someone’s opinion, not as a role we have been performing, but as a living intelligence in motion. And that can be transformative, because once you have felt yourself outside the script, even briefly, it becomes harder to believe the script was ever the whole story.

This is where the placebo effect becomes far more interesting than the casual use of the word would suggest. In ordinary conversation, placebo is used as a sneer. Fake. Imaginary. Sugar pill. All in your head. But the science is much more provocative. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health describes the placebo effect as a beneficial health outcome resulting from a person’s anticipation that an intervention will help. That is not nothing. That is the body responding to meaning, expectation, context, and ritual. The head, it turns out, is not some irrelevant sidecar to the rest of the organism. It is part of the machine.

This is where the placebo effect becomes far more interesting than the casual use of the word would suggest. In ordinary conversation, placebo is used as a sneer. Fake. Imaginary. Sugar pill. All in your head. But the science is much more provocative. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health describes the placebo effect as a beneficial health outcome resulting from a person’s anticipation that an intervention will help. That is not some minor footnote. That is the body answering belief. The mind is not perched above the body like a smug little commentator. It is in the scrum. For decades, people have tossed around the idea that placebos work about 30 percent of the time, a number rooted in Henry Beecher’s old claim that roughly 35 percent of patients improved on placebo alone. But that number, while famous, is more mythic than precise. Later analyses showed that placebo effects are real but far less uniform than the legend suggests. They do not heal everything. They are strongest in the lived terrain of symptoms, especially pain and perception, where expectation and meaning can genuinely change experience. So, placebo is neither miracle nor fraud. It is one more piece of evidence that belief does not merely decorate reality. Sometimes it helps shape the way reality is felt. t version is more manuscript-clean. The second has a little more marrow.

Placebo research does not say belief can do anything. It does not suggest that tumors vanish because a person thinks happy thoughts or that all suffering is merely a mindset problem. That kind of flattening belongs to the grinning theology of cheap self-help. What the science does suggest is more subtle and, to me, more beautiful. Expectation can influence experience. Conditioning can influence symptoms. Social context, trust, ritual, and meaning can alter how a person perceives pain and responds to care.[7]

That matters because most of us have been trained to imagine reality as something hard and sealed, while belief floats above it like a decorative balloon. But the brain is not a neutral stenographer. In placebo analgesia research, scholars have argued that the brain actively generates expectations and interprets incoming signals through prior experience and prediction. In that view, the mind is not merely recording the world. It is constantly inferring it, betting on it, composing it in real time.[8]

Less camera, more composer. Less filing clerk, more forger of experience.

Once you understand that, you start seeing belief everywhere. You start seeing how a person who expects relief may actually feel less pain. How someone who believes exercise is meaningful may engage it differently than someone who experiences the same motions as drudgery. How trust in a healer, coach, doctor, bandleader, director, or system can amplify what follows. How ritual, even when pharmacologically inert, can still carry force because the body is not responding only to molecules. It is responding to interpretation.[9]

One of the most astonishing wrinkles in this literature is the research on open-label placebos, where people are told outright that they are receiving a placebo and still sometimes show improvement. Ted Kaptchuk and colleagues reported in 2010 that placebos administered without deception improved symptoms in a randomized controlled trial of irritable bowel syndrome. That finding does not mean all placebos work, or that they work for every person or condition. But it does suggest something astonishing: belief does not always require concealment. Sometimes the ritual, the frame, the expectancy, and the story are enough to recruit a response.

Even honesty, it seems, can still leave room for healing theater.

This is where positive psychology becomes especially useful, not as cheerleading, but as a discipline of orientation. Seligman later described the field as an effort to understand and build the conditions of flourishing rather than merely repair what is damaged. He has also acknowledged that positive psychology had antecedents in earlier traditions, especially Maslow and humanistic psychology. In other words, this was never about denying pain. It was about refusing to let pain have exclusive naming rights over the whole human story.

That feels true to the ocean. It feels true to endurance sport. It feels true to music. It feels true to leadership.

You do not flourish by pretending there are no riptides. You flourish by learning what to do when one grabs your ankle.

You do not become a better rider because gravel stops being loose. You become better because your body and mind learn a more skillful conversation with instability.

You do not become a better performer because fear vanishes backstage. You become better because fear loses its casting vote.

And then there is the darker twin, nocebo.

If positive expectation can improve experience, negative expectation can worsen it. Reviews of nocebo effects show that negative expectations can contribute to adverse outcomes, symptoms, and treatment side effects.[10] Dread becomes physiological. Anxiety starts recruiting the body into its choir. The expected ache arrives on schedule. A person warned vividly enough about certain symptoms may be more likely to feel them. The forecast becomes part of the weather.

It brings me back again to “Good Boy,” and its darker companion: bad boy. If “good boy” can become a chain of expectation, then “bad boy” can become a curse disguised as identity. Tell someone often enough that he is the problem, the screw-up, the rebel, the dangerous one, and the label begins to do more than describe. It recruits. It becomes posture, performance, prophecy. In that sense, “bad boy” is a kind of nocebo, a negative belief spoken over a life until the life begins to answer to it.

This should sober anyone tempted to treat belief as harmless abstraction.

Because doubt is not always neutral either.

We speak of doubt as if it were automatically intelligent. Mature. Responsible. A little grim perhaps, but sensible. Sometimes it is. Sometimes doubt protects us from fantasy, fraud, and unnecessary wreckage. But often doubt is merely another belief system with better tailoring. It predicts failure and calls itself realism. It predicts humiliation and calls itself caution. It predicts abandonment and calls itself wisdom. Yet beneath the nice jacket it is still a forecast.[11]

What makes doubt so cunning is that it often prevents the very evidence that could disprove it. If I never start, I never discover whether I could have finished. If I never ask, I never discover whether the answer might have been yes. If I never risk, I never gather contrary proof. My fear remains undefeated because I have arranged never to test it.

Whole lives shrink this way.

Not through catastrophe, but through preemptive surrender.

This is one reason expectancy-value theory feels so human to me. In simple terms, people are more likely to act when they expect they can succeed and when the goal feels worth the effort.[12] Obvious? Maybe. But obvious things run the world. It is one thing to want something. It is another to believe it is both possible and meaningful. That combination ignites effort. When one half is missing, people stall. A person may believe deeply in the value of a pursuit and still never begin because success feels inaccessible. Or he may feel capable but unmoved because the goal has no marrow. But when expectancy and value clasp hands, action becomes far more likely.

This is why belief is not merely optimism. It is orientation.

It helps answer two brutal questions life keeps asking:

Can this be done? And why does it matter enough to do?

Get those two answers aligned and people become dangerous in the best sense. They start enduring more. Learning faster. Persisting longer. Interpreting setbacks less catastrophically. They stop asking every obstacle for permission to continue.

Mindset research reaches into this territory as well. Alia Crum and colleagues have argued that mindsets, the lenses through which we interpret experience, can shape how we feel and act, with meaningful consequences for health and well-being. Not because thought is omnipotent, but because interpretation affects physiology, behavior, and engagement. A stressor framed as damage lands differently than a stressor framed as challenge. Effort framed as pointless suffering lands differently than effort framed as adaptation. The body does not just react to events. It reacts to meanings.

That idea has profound consequences for everything from sport to illness to reinvention. A person who regards effort as evidence of inadequacy will often stop sooner than someone who regards effort as the price of growth. A person who sees symptoms as catastrophic may spiral differently than someone taught to understand them with more nuance. A founder who interprets rejection as verdict behaves differently from one who interprets it as sorting. A patient who believes recovery is possible may adhere differently to the dull mechanics of rehabilitation than one who has already decided the story is over.

Positive psychology speaks about strengths, meaning, engagement, and flourishing as measurable drivers of well-being and performance. In the water, on the road, or under stage lights, I learned the same truth in a rougher dialect: when you focus on fear, you freeze. When you focus on flow, you are freed.

That does not mean you become invincible.
It means you become available.

Available to the moment.
Available to skill.
Available to adaptation.
Available to purpose.

As a young surfer chasing waves or marathoner chasing records, and later as someone chasing other kinds of weather in business, sport, and life, I came to understand that the people who thrive are rarely the ones with the easiest conditions. They are the ones who learn to locate meaning within the experience itself. They find purpose not only in the outcome, but in the participation. They stop treating adversity as disqualification and start treating it as native terrain.

That may be why the science of flourishing feels less like something invented than something recognized. Positive psychology gave measurement and framework to ideas that the ocean, the bike, and the stage had long been teaching in their own unforgiving accents. Strength matters. Meaning matters. Engagement matters. Service matters. Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi helped bring that into formal psychological focus, but the old elements had been whispering it long before the journals arrived.

Of course, not every belief deserves our loyalty. Some beliefs are toxins. Some are inherited wounds dressed up as principles. Some are the voice of a scared parent still echoing in the cave of our skull. Some are conclusions drawn in pain and never revisited when the pain passed. Some are just lies that learned to speak in first person.

That is why adulthood, at least in part, is the long work of auditing your beliefs.

Which ones are actually yours?

Which ones were handed to you by frightened people who mistook their limits for yours?

Which ones help you build?

Which ones keep you kneeling before old ghosts?

This is also why the chapter cannot become an argument for blind positivity. There are realities no belief can simply abolish. Structural forces are real. Injustice is real. Disease is real. Loss is real. Mortality remains gloriously unimpressed by our affirmations. The science on placebo itself is nuanced. Effects are often stronger for subjective symptoms such as pain and experience than for objective disease processes.[13] That nuance is not a weakness. It is what keeps the conversation honest.

But honesty need not flatten wonder.

The usable truth is that belief influences the organism that meets reality. It shapes the posture, the persistence, the stress response, the willingness, the interpretation, the attention, the endurance, the meaning. It changes how a person enters the arena. And how you enter often affects what happens there.

To me, that is the heart of it.

Human beings do not live by facts alone. We live by interpretations. By expectations. By practiced identities. By what we have decided suffering means. By the private stories escorting us into effort. Belief is not always a grand banner. Sometimes it is a quiet choice you make again and again, a refusal to let doubt become your sole narrator, a decision to proceed while certainty remains unavailable.

That may be the real art of doing.

Not certainty.
Not bravado.
Not denial.
Not magical thinking in sequins.

Just the disciplined, defiant, deeply human act of choosing beliefs that enlarge your capacity to act, endure, and become.

The science may call it flourishing. I call it riding with purpose.

And that, to me, is a state of flow worth experiencing.

Endnotes

[1] Beliefs and expectations can shape behavior and outcomes across social, medical, and psychological domains, including through self-fulfilling processes.

[2] In placebo and mindset research, expectations and interpretations are treated as active components affecting experience and behavior rather than passive background thoughts.

[3] Repetition can increase perceived truth, a finding associated with the illusory truth effect.

[4] Social expectations can influence real-world outcomes, including through self-fulfilling prophecy effects and socially created realities.

[5] Self-efficacy has been associated with the adoption of and engagement in many health behaviors and is widely studied as a predictor of behavioral change.

[6] Expectancy-value theory holds that motivation and action are shaped by expectations of success and the perceived value of the task or goal.

[7] NCCIH describes the placebo effect as a beneficial health outcome resulting from a person’s anticipation that an intervention will help.

[8] Büchel and colleagues argue that placebo analgesia can be understood through predictive coding, in which the brain actively makes inferences based on expectations and prior experience.

[9] Mindsets and placebo-related expectations can shape how people feel and act, with consequences for health and well-being.

[10] Reviews of nocebo effects describe negative expectations as contributors to adverse symptoms and poorer treatment experiences.

[11] Nocebo work and mindset research together support the idea that negative expectations can shape perceived and lived outcomes.

[12] Expectancy-value theory links action to both expected success and perceived value.

[13] Placebo effects are often most evident in symptom experience and pain-related outcomes rather than as a universal mechanism for all diseases or disease processes.

Selected Bibliography

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Widely associated with the concept of flow and later linked to the positive psychology movement.

Kaptchuk, Ted J., et al. “Placebos Without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome.” PLoS ONE, 2010.

Magyar-Moe, Jeanne L. “Positive Psychological Interventions in Counseling.” American Psychological Association continuing education material summarizing Seligman’s 1998 call to reorient applied psychology toward strengths and flourishing.

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Materials describing placebo effects and expectation-related health outcomes.

Seligman, Martin E. P. “Positive Psychology: A Personal History.” Reflection on the field’s development and its relationship to earlier traditions including Maslow and humanistic psychology.

Seligman, Martin E. P., and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. “Positive Psychology: An Introduction.” American Psychologist, 2000. Foundational statement of the field’s shift toward studying strengths, meaning, and flourishing.

In the early days of Covid, time did something weird. It didn’t just slow down. It bent. Things got weird. The world went quiet in all the loud places, and loud in all the quiet ones. People baked bread like it was a religion. They learned guitar from YouTube. They reorganized garages, reopened old photo albums, rewatched every movie they claimed they “never have time for,” and poured that second drink a little earlier than usual because… well, because everything. We tried to learn Spanish. We tried to become the kind of person who stretches. We tried to reorganize closets like that would somehow reorganize our nervous systems.

And in the middle of that pandemic fog, a little challenge started floating around social media: Post your most important albums. Explain why.

Not your “best” albums. Not your critic-approved albums. Not the ones you should love if you want to look cool at a dinner party full of people who say things like “vinyl warmth” without irony. Your real ones.

The records that shaped your wiring. The ones that crawled into your bloodstream and rewired your brain. The ones that taught you rhythm, rebellion, tenderness, courage. The ones that showed up when you were becoming who you’d become. The ones that taught you how to feel. Or how to survive. Or how to love something hard without needing to explain it.

Because the truth is: The music we return to again and again is rarely accidental.

It’s not just background noise. It’s biography… or maybe just the kind of nostalgia that still has teeth.

I’ve always believed the music we return to most, and the strange diversity of it, is a kind of autobiography without the ego. It reveals how you move through the world. What you value. Where you go when you need solace, hope, heat, humor, or simply a place to put your feelings so they stop pacing the room.

The diversity of what you listen to, and what you need to listen to, says more about your values than most of the things you claim to believe. It reveals what kind of beauty you trust. What kind of chaos you can tolerate. Where you go when you’re lost. What you do when you’re hopeful. What you do when you’re not.

Some people find solace in religion. Others find it in therapy. Or the ocean. Or in the miles. And some of us… find it in an album that never really leaves the CD player, even when the CD player itself is long dead.

Music does that thing no other art form quite does: it reaches right past your logic, grabs the hidden lever, and changes your inner weather.

I wrote these album notes during Covid, one at a time, like little sonic postcards from the inside of a strange era. And now, nearly six years later, I’ve reread them with fresh eyes and a slightly different heart.

Some things have changed. Our son, Jahan, isn’t 18 anymore. He’s 23. Our daughter is 21. The world has shifted. I’ve shifted. They’ve shifted.

But the list? I wouldn’t replace a single one.

Below is the full COVID collection of 24 albums…

1. Burt Bacharach – Reach Out

First up, I’m taken back to mom’s car radio with Burt Bacharach’s second album, Reach Out. “Reach out” is the phrase, the command, the plea, the hand on your shoulder, the hand extended in the dark. What the world needs now is love, sweet love. Not the Hallmark kind. The stubborn kind. The kind that still shows up when people are acting like lunatics.

Bacharach was one of the first artists I ever heard who made sadness feel… sophisticated. Not tragic. Not dramatic. Sophisticated. Like melancholy could still hold its posture. Like heartbreak could still comb its hair and put on a clean shirt.

He taught me something early: elegance can be muscular. Arrangement can be athletic. Melancholy can still wear a tailored suit. His songs feel like sunlight that learned how to behave in public.

And when you’re a kid in the passenger seat, watching the world through glass, that kind of music becomes more than nostalgia. It becomes a map. A standard. A quiet compass for how a life might sound if you don’t ruin it with your own noise.

Even now, decades later, I hear Bacharach and I’m reminded: beauty doesn’t have to shout to win. Sometimes it just reaches out… and waits.

2. Herbie Hancock – Head Hunters

Here is the second installment of albums that informed my life with Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters, which is perhaps the genesis of the jazz-funk style.

This album doesn’t ease into your life. It kicks the door in… politely, with perfect timing.

Harvey Mason’s 16th notes on the hi-hat, and the snare hit every three, plus a bassline that packs an incredible amount of music into just two bars, give “Chameleon” an instantly recognizable intro that belies the crazy-ass extended solos to come. It’s one of those openings where your body understands what’s happening before your brain catches up. You don’t decide to nod your head. Your head decides for you.

This album made jazz listeners out of R&B fans, and R&B fans out of jazz listeners.

Whatever. I like the funk.

But what’s funny is how this record kept growing on me as I grew. When I first heard it, I loved it for the obvious reasons: the groove, the swagger, the heat. It felt like the coolest room in the house.

And then as my drumming interests expanded, so did my appreciation of Herbie and all the players he had with him.

Because Head Hunters isn’t just a vibe. It’s a masterclass in how a band can be loose and impossibly tight at the same time. It’s the sound of musicians with absurd skill choosing restraint. Choosing feel. Choosing the pocket over the ego.

The more I listened, the more I realized: this isn’t just “funky jazz.” This is jazz that learned how to speak street. This is funk that learned how to think. And that’s the magic of it.

Deeper than anything, Head Hunters is permission. Permission to stretch. Permission to stay in the pocket and still take risks. Permission to let a groove be the spine while the mind goes wandering. It’s the sound of virtuosity with swagger.

And it planted that early seed in me that rhythm is not just timekeeping. Rhythm is identity. Rhythm is how you tell the truth without saying a word.

It’s how you say: I’m here. I’m alive. I’m listening. And I’m not afraid to go somewhere new as long as the groove stays honest.

3. Peter Frampton – Frampton Comes Alive!

Here is the third installment of albums that informed my life with Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive!, which was the first album I ever owned, the best-selling album of that year, and voted “Album of the Year.”

And that sentence almost undersells it.

Because Frampton Comes Alive! wasn’t just a successful record. It was a cultural event. It was one of those albums that didn’t merely sit in people’s homes, it lived there. It became furniture. It became a soundtrack that seeped into the walls. It wasn’t just popular, it was inescapable.

And it wasn’t hype. It earned it.

In the history of rock music, there are only a handful of records that can honestly claim they changed the game. This is one of them. This album basically reintroduced the world to the idea that a live record could be the definitive statement. Not a footnote. Not a souvenir. Not a contractual obligation.

The statement. And it did it as a double LP.

Think about that for a second. A double live album. In an era when people had the attention span for three minutes and a chorus. Somehow, Frampton made a sprawling, arena-sized live document become the album everyone owned. Everyone. It was the record that turned living rooms into stadiums and bedrooms into backstage passes.

It all flourished brilliantly… but only for a fleeting moment in time. Then it was over.

And that’s part of what makes it mythic. Frampton’s moment was a comet. A bright, blinding streak across the sky. You didn’t have to be a music critic to feel it. You just had to be alive in the mid-’70s with a stereo and a pulse.

Nonetheless, I wore out a tennis racket as a guitar, and I got my first drums as a result of this double live LP. Because this record didn’t just make you want to listen. It made you want to participate.

There’s something about a live record when you’re young. It feels like you’re being invited into a secret society of sound. Like the curtain has been pulled back and you’re allowed to see the electricity behind the wall. It’s not just the songs. It’s the crowd. The roar. The space between notes where adrenaline lives. The sense that music is not a product, it’s a moment you can actually step into. And amazingly, many of the songs on this album were way better than their original studio versions.

Frampton wasn’t just songs. He was theater. He was volume. He was the moment you realize music can be a whole other life you step into, one where you are louder, braver, and somehow more yourself.

And if you want to talk about influence? This album taught an entire generation of kids that rock wasn’t just something you listened to. It was something you became. It made guitars feel attainable. It made drums feel necessary. It made the stage feel like a place you might someday belong.

And it also set the standard.

When people argue about the greatest double live album of all time, the conversation always comes back here. Not because it’s the most technically perfect performance ever recorded. Not because it’s the deepest or the most “serious.” But because it’s the rare live album that captured lightning, bottled it, and then somehow shipped it to the entire planet.

It’s joy. It’s swagger. It’s spectacle. It’s a band on fire and a crowd that knows it. And for me, it’s the beginning of everything.

The first record I owned. The first record that made me want instruments.
The first record that made me realize: this isn’t just music. This is a world.

4. Rush – 2112

I told you this would be weird.

Here is the fourth installment of albums that informed my life with Rush’s 2112, which was released a couple months after Frampton Comes Alive! 2112 (Neil Peart, RIP) ensured I would become a drummer.

Not “influenced” me. Ensured it. Because when you hear Neil Peart at the right age, something irreversible happens. You don’t just admire it. You get infected by it. You start hearing drums not as background, but as the nervous system of the whole song. You start thinking in fills. You start counting time in your sleep.

And if I’m being completely honest, it was Neil Peart who truly inspired me to lose my hearing and suffer from tinnitus in my adult life. Starting with cranking this album in Bill Burnham’s bedroom, which housed the greatest stereo I had heard up to that period.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s a receipt. Because when you fall in love with that kind of drumming, you don’t practice politely. You practice like you’re trying to summon thunder. You turn it up. You play harder. You chase that feeling of power and precision until the walls complain and your future self-starts sending you warning letters through a faint ringing you can’t turn off.

Worth it? Ask me on a quiet night.

This concept album (at least the first half) with its constantly changing dynamics and levels of power was seductive to my teenage ears. The sound effects and robust, distortion-heavy chords would take me to some outer-worldly space and time, only to be brought back to earth in the calmest way. It was like science fiction you could live inside. Like a movie you didn’t watch, but inhabited.

It captured my imagination in myriad ways: the athletic drumming, the Ayn Rand futuristic storyline, the complexities, and the imaginary landscape all combined to compel my attentiveness to every track.

And the drumming… my God. Peart’s playing wasn’t just fast or technical. It was composed. It was orchestration. He didn’t just play drums. He wrote on them. He told the story with them. The fills weren’t decoration, they were plot. They were the camera angle shifting. The drums were the weather.

And the most dangerous thing about Neil Peart, for a kid like me, was that he made discipline look like freedom. You could feel how hard he worked. You could hear the hours. You could hear the obsession. But instead of it sounding rigid, it sounded expansive. Like the more structure he built, the more room the music had to breathe.

I wasn’t the only one. This was their commercial breakthrough album, saving them from getting dropped by Mercury Records. It remains Rush’s second highest-selling album behind Moving Pictures, which Bill Burnham and I bought the day it came out February 12, 1981. This was also my first concert tour ever, when they came to the Forum later that year.

But for me, it’s still more than a successful record. It’s a monument to ambition. It’s a reminder that sometimes the thing that saves you is doubling down on the weirdness that got you in trouble in the first place.

Because 2112 wasn’t safe. It wasn’t trendy. It wasn’t trying to fit in.

It was three guys saying: this is what we are. This is what we believe music can be. If you don’t like it, we’ll go down with the ship.

And instead… it made them immortal.

And it made me a drummer.

And, apparently, it made me a lifelong member of the faintly ringing-ear club too.

5. Gary Wright – The Dream Weaver

Here is the fifth installment of albums that informed my life with Gary Wright’s The Dream Weaver, released just a month before Frampton Comes Alive!.

It wasn’t so much that the music off this album compelled me in any way, though “Love Is Alive” played on the outdoor speakers where the skate ramp was throughout 1976. It was that Gary actually lived across the street from Dave Brow, my best buddy from Montemalaga in PV.

Gary had a courtyard with a gate and a big bell you could ring, so his house was the best for ding-dong-ditching. You could sneak into the courtyard, ring the bell real loud, then dash out, across the street, and into the bushes to hide and wait to see who came out looking for you.

Later in life, I told Gary this when I was with him at a party. He laughed and said they had a butler who had to deal with us punks. At that time, we discussed the album, as he’s had to do for four and a half decades with fans like me. The idea that this was an all-keyboard album (though guitar shows up briefly) and that he played Fender Rhodes, Hammond organ, Hohner clavinet, Moog synths, ARP String Ensemble, woodwinds, and special effects on all of it. He mentioned how pro Jim Keltner was on the title track, like a human metronome who could be as mechanical or loose as required. There certainly was a swing carrying this ethereal track.

Gary’s lucid tenor voice doesn’t hurt any feelings and the title track was essentially his biggest hit, hitting #2. Looking back, I can’t help but project onto it the idea that this was a song about someone with infinite compassion and love carrying us through the night of our trials and suffering.

We may want to blast this one in the backyard a few times while working on our kick flips and flipping nightmares into dreams of spring, how all of us are blossoming. Meet me on the other side, and we can go ring the bell together.

6. Steely Dan – Aja

And this is the sixth installment with Steely Dan’s 1977 release, Aja.

This was their best-selling album and their first platinum album, with good reason. But even that doesn’t quite capture what Aja is. This record isn’t just “successful.” It’s untouchable. It’s one of those albums that feels like it was engineered in a secret laboratory where the air is cleaner, the lighting is perfect, and nobody is allowed to play a wrong note.

If one just looks at the firepower of musicianship on this album, not including Walter Becker or Donald Fagen, it’s staggering. Nearly 40 musicians are credited on just seven songs. Wayne Shorter. Steve Gadd, Bernard Purdie, Victor Feldman. Chuck Rainey. Michael McDonald. Timothy B. Schmit. Joe Sample. The list reads like a backstage pass.

And that’s part of the legend, of course: the revolving door of elite session players, the perfectionism, the endless takes, the obsessive sculpting of sound until it becomes something almost inhuman.

But what’s most impressive is that the end result doesn’t feel clinical. It feels alive. This album is the master class in restraint and obsession living in the same body. It’s sleek, but it’s not cold. It’s polished, but it’s not sterile. It’s the sound of adults with impeccable taste doing something slightly criminal in perfect lighting. Like they’re breaking the rules without ever smudging their cuffs.

And here’s my confession: This is quite possibly my favorite album of all time.

Not “one of.” Possibly the one.

The one I’ve spent the most time with. The one I’ve returned to over and over, not just as a listener, but as a drummer. The one I’ve spent the most time practicing to over these past nearly 50 years.

Fifty years. That’s a wild thing to write. But it’s true.

Because Aja isn’t an album you simply put on. It’s an album you study. It’s an album you live inside. It’s an album you can spend decades with and still hear something new on the 3,000th listen. A ghost note. A hi-hat opening. A bass note that shouldn’t work but does. A chord voicing that feels like it was stolen from a dream.

And yes, the drumming. The drumming is the sermon. People talk about Steely Dan as if they’re just “jazzy rock” or “dad music” or whatever lazy label they want to slap on it. But drummers know. Drummers hear Aja and immediately understand: this is Mount Olympus.

You can spend hours memorizing the parts and the crazy 16th-note triplets Bernard Purdie, Steve Gadd, and the crew laid down like they were casually rearranging your brain chemistry. The feel is so deep it almost feels unfair. The precision is so effortless it makes you question your entire life’s work. The pocket is so perfect it becomes spiritual.

Steve Gadd’s playing on the title track alone is one of the great recorded drum performances in modern music. It’s not just technique. It’s narrative. It’s dynamics. It’s taste. It’s swagger disguised as discipline. And all in one original take. No need to do a second take.

Aja doesn’t just influence you. It recruits you. And here’s the part that makes me smile now, years later: Jahan loves this album too. Which feels like the greatest possible win as a parent. Because you can try to pass down wisdom, values, life lessons, and all the other things parents are supposed to pass down… but if your kid genuinely loves Aja? That’s proof you did at least one thing right.

During Covid, when Spotify Wrapped came out, the title track “Aja” was Jahan’s most played song of the year. Not “one of his favorites.” Not “top five.” Number one.

In a year when the whole world was anxious and disoriented and trying to figure out what day it even was, my son’s most-played song was an eight-minute masterpiece of sonic perfection. And that, to me, is both hilarious and deeply comforting. Because it means the album still works. It still reaches across generations. It still does what the best music does: it steadies the room. It upgrades the air. It gives your mind somewhere beautiful to go.

And if you’ve ever needed proof that obsessive craftsmanship can still feel soulful… if you’ve ever needed proof that precision can still swing… if you’ve ever needed proof that “perfection” doesn’t have to be sterile…

Aja is your evidence.

7. Camel – Moonmadness

Here’s the seventh installment with another album from 1976, Moonmadness from Camel.

“Who is Camel,” you ask?

Exactly.

Camel was an English progressive rock band born right in the heart of that ’70s UK prog explosion. That era where bands weren’t afraid to be ambitious, where albums weren’t just collections of songs, but full-on worlds. Where you could buy a record and it felt like you’d bought a portal. Yes, there were the giants: Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes, King Crimson. But Camel lived in a slightly different lane.

They weren’t as theatrical. They weren’t as aggressive. They weren’t trying to be the loudest, the weirdest, or the most cosmic. They were trying to be beautiful.

And in that way, they were one of the most quietly distinctive bands of the entire prog movement.

Moonmadness is a great opener to their catalog because it captures exactly what made them special: melodic sophistication without ego. A band capable of complexity, but never obsessed with proving it. They could stretch out musically, but it always served mood, emotion, and atmosphere.

Camel always felt like music engineered to make you kinder.

Pleasantly soothing, but not sleepy. Emotional without the melodrama. They write melodies that feel like you’re remembering something you haven’t lived yet. Like déjà vu for a life, you haven’t gotten to. It’s music that doesn’t demand attention, it earns it, quietly, like someone you end up trusting because they never once tried to impress you.

There’s a warmth to this record that is rare in prog. Prog can sometimes feel like a contest. A flex. A battle of chops. Camel was never that. Camel was more like… a long drive at dusk. A soft horizon. The sense that the world is complicated, but not cruel. The sense that even the strange parts of your mind deserve a soundtrack.

If you’ve ever needed a record to reset your nervous system without turning you into wallpaper, this one does the trick.

It’s not a soundtrack for chaos. It’s a soft argument against it.

8. The Who – Quadrophenia

Here’s number eight with the second rock opera from The Who, Quadrophenia, the double album from 1973 composed entirely by Pete Townshend.

And let’s just say it plainly: This should be considered The Who’s pinnacle achievement.

Yes, Who’s Next is a monster. Yes, Tommy changed everything. But Quadrophenia is where the band becomes fully mythic. It’s the album where their ambition, their musicianship, their emotional violence, and their intelligence all collide at the same time. It’s not just a record. It’s a full-scale human weather system.

The story is Jimmy, a Mod, dissatisfied with life, work, love, home, family. An ode to teenage angst and counterculture rebellion, and also a criticism of the British class system and the hypocrisy that comes free with adulthood.

But for me, it’s bigger than plot. It’s the ocean inside a young person. It’s identity fractured into characters, then stitched back together with volume. It’s the sound of being trapped in your own skin, then learning how to break the lock with a chorus.

And musically? This album is insane.

Townshend didn’t just write songs. He wrote cinema. He wrote scenes. He wrote emotional architecture. The writing is layered, thematic, and unbelievably cohesive for a double record. Motifs return. Melodies echo. Chords reappear like memories. And the production, especially for 1973, is remarkably advanced. It’s dense but not muddy. Big but still detailed. You can feel how much thought went into the sonic world: the waves, the rain, the train sounds, the atmosphere, the sense of place.

It’s a rock opera, yes, but it’s also a psychological novel with amplifiers. Now, if you want to talk about why this record is immortal, you have to talk about the rhythm section.

Because on Quadrophenia, John Entwistle and Keith Moon are operating at a level that almost shouldn’t be legal.

Entwistle’s bass playing on this album is a masterclass in melodic aggression. He’s not just holding down the low end. He’s writing counter-melodies. He’s moving like a lead instrument, but with the authority of a foundation. His tone is massive and articulate, and his lines are so musical they almost feel like a second guitar… except heavier, smarter, and more dangerous.

Entwistle wasn’t called “The Ox” for nothing. He played like a stampede, but with perfect diction.

And then there’s Keith Moon.

This is award-winning drumming, and I don’t mean that figuratively. Moon’s work on Quadrophenia was recognized, celebrated, and studied for a reason. Because for once he wasn’t just “a wild drummer.” That’s the lazy take people use when they haven’t listened closely.

Moon was a composer on the kit.

He played like the drums were the emotional narrator of the entire story. His fills aren’t random (like they normally were). They’re punctuation. They’re character. They’re chaos with intention. He doesn’t keep time so much as he animates it. He makes the music feel like it’s constantly surging forward, like the whole album is trying to outrun something.

And maybe it is.

Because Quadrophenia is a record about the terror of becoming an adult. The terror of not knowing who you are. The terror of realizing the world is both bigger and smaller than you thought. The terror of wanting to belong and wanting to disappear at the same time.

And Moon plays exactly like that. Like he’s trying to outrun mortality with every fill.

The thing that blows my mind, even now, is how The Who could sound so enormous and still feel so human. They’re sloppy in the best way. They’re raw in the right places. They’re not polished into sterility. They’re alive. And that aliveness is what makes the emotional punches land harder. This album is not perfect. It’s better than perfect. It’s real.

If Tommy was The Who inventing a form, Quadrophenia is The Who mastering it. It’s the band at full power, fully formed, writing at the peak of their ability, playing like their lives depended on it, and capturing the chaos of youth in a way that still feels accurate decades later.

Because that’s the thing about great art. It doesn’t age. It just waits for the next kid to need it.

9. Talking Heads – Remain in Light

Here’s number nine with Talking Heads’ Remain in Light. Released in 1980, their fourth release, and my favorite for myriad reasons.

And let me say this clearly: this band, especially on this album, has been with me daily since 1980. Daily. And Freshman year in college, it was the album most likely to heard emanating from the dorm room. I shared with Tom Martin.

Not as nostalgia. Not as a “back in the day” thing. As a constant. As a piece of my internal operating system. The kind of music you don’t outgrow because it was never trying to be trendy in the first place. It was trying to be true, and truth doesn’t really have an expiration date.

At the time, rock music was at an all-time height of earnestness. Stadium sincerity. Big choruses. Big hair. Big feelings. Meanwhile disco still had the dance floor. Everything was split into camps: serious rock guys over here, dancing people over there.

Remain in Light didn’t pick a side. It built a new country. It folded African polyrhythms into art-rock brains, strapped funk to minimalism, layered it all in loops and repetition, and then David Byrne walked around inside it asking existential questions like a nervous preacher in a sweater vest.

But what makes this record so enduring isn’t just that it was “ahead of its time.” That phrase gets thrown around like confetti.

This album wasn’t ahead of its time. It was outside of time.

The production is a huge part of that, and yes, Brian Eno is absolutely central here. Eno wasn’t just “producing.” He was helping them build a method. A new way of writing. A new way of arranging. A new way of thinking about how a band could create music. The whole record feels like it was assembled in a lab using rhythm as the primary ingredient, with guitars and vocals becoming textures, accents, and stabs rather than the traditional center of gravity.

It’s not a “guitar album.” It’s a rhythm album, a percussion album, a bass album. It’s a record where groove becomes architecture.

And it’s also a record where repetition becomes hypnotic instead of boring. It’s built on loops and layers, patterns stacking on patterns, until the songs feel like they’re breathing. Like they’re alive. Like the music is a machine that somehow grew a soul.

This album is dense, but it’s not cluttered. It’s complex, but it’s not academic. It’s weird, but it’s not alienating. It’s danceable, but it’s not disposable.

It taught me that you can be smart without being sterile. Weird without being inaccessible. Danceable without turning your soul off. It’s art that sweats.

And Byrne… Byrne is the perfect frontman for this kind of music because he’s not a “cool” rock singer. He’s not trying to be sexy. He’s not trying to be mysterious.

He’s trying to be human.

Or at least, he’s trying to understand what being human even means when you zoom out far enough. His voice on this record is anxious, ecstatic, paranoid, prophetic, comic, and deeply sincere, often all in the same verse. He sings like someone reading the newspaper while having an existential crisis while trying not to spill his coffee.

And the wild part is: he’s still doing it.

Decades later, David Byrne is still capturing our imagination with his new work, because he never stopped being an artist. Not a nostalgia act. Not a legacy act. An artist. Still making performance art that collides with music. Still creating shows that feel like theater and dance and punk and gospel all at once. Still asking the same essential questions, just in new costumes.

Which is exactly what Remain in Light is. A question dressed up as a party. A nervous breakdown that learned how to groove. A record that sounds like the world speeding up… and somehow makes you feel more alive instead of less.

And if you’ve ever needed proof that the mind can dance too… this is it.

10. U2 – October

Here’s number ten with U2’s October, created in the 12 months following their debut, Boy, during pretty crazy times: Reagan elected, the Iran hostage crisis ended, Reagan shot, Pope John Paul II shot, J.R. shot, and devastatingly, John Lennon shot. Britain burning. Culture shaking.

It’s hard to overstate how unsettled that moment felt, even if you were young. The world had this sense of instability, like the floor could move at any second. Like the adults were guessing. Like the future was something you braced for instead of something you planned.

And in the middle of that, U2 made October.

October isn’t their most famous record, but it’s one of their most human. You can hear a young band trying to reconcile faith, doubt, politics, love, and ambition while the world is spinning like a coin about to fall. It’s raw, searching, imperfect, and because of that, it’s honest.

But what really separates October from almost everything else in their catalog is its religious undertone. Not religion as marketing, nor righteousness, nor religion as certainty. Religion as longing or as questioning. Religion as a young person trying to find a handhold in a world that feels morally slippery.

This album is full of spiritual ache. It’s full of songs that sound like they were written with knees on the floor. And that’s what makes it powerful. There’s no stadium polish yet. No grand declarations. No “we’ve figured it out.” It’s a band still small enough to admit they don’t know what they believe half the time.

And that’s what faith actually is, if you strip away the politics: not certainty, but pursuit.

You can hear the tug-of-war inside the songs. The desire to be pure and the awareness that you’re human. The desire to be brave and the awareness that you’re scared. The desire to be righteous and the awareness that life is complicated. There’s a reason this record has always felt like a secret handshake for the people who love it.

It’s not U2 as heroes, as they were still becoming. It’s U2 as seekers, on their way to something enduring

And in a way, October is the record where Bono isn’t yet the frontman we all came to know. He’s still just a kid with a huge voice and a spiritual hunger that he can’t quite name. The Edge isn’t yet the iconic sonic architect. He’s still a young guitarist discovering that restraint can be more powerful than speed, and that pedals can make you powerful. Larry and Adam aren’t yet “the rhythm section of an arena band.” They’re still building a pulse, a heartbeat, a sense of forward motion.

There’s a vulnerability in that. And that vulnerability is the point.

Some albums don’t teach you how to win. They teach you how to keep going while you’re unsure what winning even looks like. October is one of those albums. It’s a record that doesn’t give you answers. It gives you a place to put your questions. A Question Box, if you will.

11. UFO – Strangers in the Night

Number 11: another double live album. UFO’s Strangers in the Night.

Recorded in the U.S. in October of 1978 and released a couple months later, this has to be one of the greatest live rock albums ever.

And like Frampton Comes Alive!, this is one of those rare live records where the songs don’t simply survive the stage… they become the stage. They expand. They sharpen. They hit harder. They sound more alive than their studio counterparts ever did.

For some bands, the studio is the truth and the stage is the reenactment. For UFO, on this album, it’s the opposite. The studio versions are the sketches. Strangers in the Night is the painting.

It captures the band at full power, fully locked, with that dangerous late-’70s energy where everything feels slightly out of control in the best way. The tempos breathe. The guitars bite. The vocals have that extra edge that only happens when a singer knows the room is listening. And the crowd, of course, is part of the band. You can feel the electricity in the space between the notes.

Someone much older than me once proclaimed this was the greatest “make-out” album ever. I must say I played this album an irresponsible amount, so the data set is large.

There’s something hilariously true about that claim, though. Because this record is seductive. Not in a soft way. In a dangerous way. In a “come closer even though you know you shouldn’t” way.

It’s a live record with teeth. It’s sweat, lights, danger. It has that sense of a band walking out onto a stage like they’re about to commit a beautiful crime in front of witnesses. Like the whole night is going to be slightly reckless, slightly romantic, and absolutely unforgettable.

And the power of this album is how confident it is. Not cocky. Confident. The kind of confidence that comes from a band that knows exactly what it is and exactly what it can do. The songs feel tighter, louder, hungrier. The solos don’t feel like “guitar solos.” They feel like the air getting ripped open.

This record is the sound of a band that doesn’t need to prove anything… because the proof is literally vibrating the room.

Sometimes you don’t need music to be complicated. You need it to be undeniable. And this album is undeniable.

12. The Clash – London Calling

Here’s the 12th installment with The Clash’s London Calling.

I realize this is a no-brainer, but here we are 40+ years later and it’s still unarguably radness vinylified. The only contention is whether it’s one of the greatest albums of the ’70s, the best album of the ’80s, or just the GOAT. Released in December 1979 in the UK, it didn’t land in the U.S. until January 1980, hence the argument.

And the argument itself is kind of funny, because it doesn’t matter what decade you assign it to. This album doesn’t belong to a decade. It belongs to rock and roll.

It’s also one of the most widely acclaimed albums of all time, and for once the hype is not inflated. Critics love it. Musicians love it. Punk kids love it. Rock guys love it. Reggae fans love it. People who don’t even like punk somehow love it. It’s one of those rare records where consensus doesn’t feel suspicious. It feels earned.

Because London Calling is not just a great punk album. It’s a great album, period.

This record is punk with a passport. It’s rage with range. It’s rebellion that learned how to write songs that could survive the fight. It’s a double album that somehow has almost no filler, which should be illegal. And it’s a masterclass in versatility: punk, rockabilly, reggae, ska, pop, R&B, dub… all of it stitched together into one coherent worldview.

And that’s the key: worldview.

The Clash weren’t just making songs. They were making a statement about what mattered. And they did it without turning into preachy bores, which is the hardest thing in the world to pull off. They had politics, yes, but they also had humor. They had anger, but they also had romance. They had critique, but they also had craft.

And that craft is the reason this album lived so deeply in my life. Because when I was playing in my first real band, we covered a ridiculous number of these songs. Not because they were “easy.” They weren’t. Because they were perfect, and slightly challenging.

We played “London Calling,” “Brand New Cadillac,” “Hateful,” “Spanish Bombs,” “Clampdown,” “Death or Glory,” “I’m Not Down,” “Train in Vain”… and probably a few others I’m forgetting.

And that’s when you really learn what a record is made of: when you have to play it. When you have to count it off. When you have to hit the accents. When you have to sing it with conviction.

The Clash wrote songs that were built to be played by bands. Songs with structure. Songs with hooks. Songs with urgency. Songs with that rare combination of simplicity and genius where you can play them in a sweaty club, or in a garage, or on a stadium stage, and they still hit the same.

And I love that about them. They weren’t trying to be precious. They weren’t trying to be mysterious. They weren’t hiding behind abstraction. They were direct, and they were fearless, and they were insanely good at what they did.

London Calling didn’t just influence what I listened to. It influenced what I tolerated. It raised my standards for sincerity and swagger living in the same sentence. It taught me that a band can be dangerous and melodic. Political and funny. Raw and refined. That you can make a record that punches the world in the mouth and still make people dance while they’re bleeding.

And if you want to talk about “greatest of all time” albums, I won’t argue against it. Because this isn’t just a record. It’s a blueprint.

And here’s the part that still makes me smile, because it’s one of those full-circle moments that feels almost too perfect: Years later, when I was at Globe International, I pursued doing a shoe collaboration with The Clash. And it became one of the most fun projects I ever spearheaded.

We created an incredible high-top vulcanized shoe, with a clear sole that revealed the band’s logo underneath. The upper contained lyrics. It wasn’t just a product; it was a wearable artifact. Like you could lace up the album and walk around in it.

But the real magic was the shoebox. Because we didn’t make a normal shoebox. We made a shoebox that was also a speaker.

All you had to do was plug your iPod into it and the whole thing would light up the room. Literally. Sound-wise and spirit-wise. It was the kind of idea that makes you remember why you got into brand-building in the first place: because sometimes you get to make something that feels like play, like punk, like invention.

We even did a sweepstakes, and lucky winners got the shoes and an iPod loaded with The Clash’s entire music catalog. Which, honestly, is the kind of prize that should still exist in the world.

The only music project I worked on that was above this one was the collaboration with DEVO, because I got to spend a lot of time with all the members of the band developing a full line of travel accessories, clothing, shoes, and bags of all sorts.

But The Clash project? That one was pure joy. It was my way of saying thank you to an album that helped shape my ears, my standards, my sense of what “cool” actually is, and my belief that a point of view matters more than polish.

Because that’s what The Clash always had. A point of view. And once you’ve lived with that, you don’t just admire it. You try to build your life with it.

13. Roxy Music – Avalon

Lucky No. 13 of the albums that informed my life is Roxy Music’s Avalon, released in 1982 and their final album.

If London Calling was attitude music, Avalon represented something starkly different: smooth, adult-oriented non-attitude music.

And the contrast is almost comedic if you think about it. Roxy Music emerged as an artsy-fartsy, experimental glam rock group, abrasive and cutting-edge, camp and irony baked into the early DNA. But Avalon is devoid of that. It’s not trying to be clever. It’s not trying to be punk. It’s not trying to fight you.

It’s trying to seduce you.

This album’s lush, stately sound is a kind of graduation. Not in the boring sense. In the “I’ve lived a little and now I know what matters” sense. It’s almost embarrassing for me to admit, but this is a sophisticated British New Wave equivalent of a classic Quiet Storm record.

Perhaps too silky for even Yacht Rock.

Soft, and totally different than UFO’s Strangers in the Night in terms of greatest make-out infernos, Avalon is its own kind of make-out inferno: not the backseat kind, but the late-night kind. The one where you’re old enough to understand what you’re risking.

This album is midnight. It’s perfume in a dim room. It’s the feeling of driving with no destination because the point is not arriving, it’s escaping your own thoughts by giving them somewhere beautiful to sit.

What stands out to me is that in its entirety it represents one mood that flows seamlessly from “More Than This” and its breathless commencement all the way to the last track, “Tara,” which is simply an improvised instrumental that acts much as the credit roll at the end of a movie: a perfect goodbye kiss to all of it.

But it’s literally “The Space Between,” the sleeper on the album, that captured my imagination. Probably because the rhythm is so rich. The bass is doing its own thing in some sort of dark disco funk fashion, while on top of it swirls synthesized melodiousness, and then over the top of that are some kind of synthetic soul horns. All these varying purviews. All these layers. It’s exuberant ambient that feasts on contradiction.

And that’s what makes Avalon so powerful: it’s romantic without being corny. It’s melancholy without being heavy. It’s sexy without being cheap. It’s mature without being boring.

It’s the sound of someone who has been broken at least once, but refuses to let the world see the bruise.

And maybe that’s why it stayed with me. Because for all my love of drumming and power and chaos and the holy noise of punk and hard rock, there’s another side of me that has always been chasing taste.

Not taste as in “I know what’s cool.” Taste as in: I know what lasts.

Taste as in: I know the difference between something trying too hard and something simply being itself.

Avalon taught me that sophistication isn’t snobbery. It’s craft. It’s restraint. It’s knowing exactly how much to show, and exactly what to leave implied.

And it also taught me this: Sometimes the most rebellious thing you can do is not be loud. Sometimes the most dangerous thing you can do is be beautiful.

14. fIREHOSE – Ragin’, Full-On

We’re two weeks in and this is No. 14 of the albums that informed my life: fIREHOSE’s Ragin’, Full-On, the first album from the band after the breakup of the incredibly influential punk band Minutemen, due to the death of the trio’s 27-year-old guitarist D. Boon.

This album changed the way I hear music today and the way I drummed back then. And more importantly, this album changed how the world views indie rock forever.

But here’s the thing that makes this one different than a lot of the albums on this list: this wasn’t just a band I discovered. This was a band that lived near me. This was our band.

They were from San Pedro. Pedro. Right there. A place with salt in its lungs and rust on its knuckles. A working port town that doesn’t ask permission and doesn’t apologize. And because they were local, we got to see them live frequently. Not once. Not twice. Over and over. Close enough to feel the bass in your sternum and watch the sweat fly off the snare hits.

And if you’ve never seen Mike Watt live, it’s hard to explain. He’s not just a bassist. He’s an engine. A freight train with a grin. The godfather of punk, yes, but also something rarer: a musician who never stopped being grateful to be there. Watt’s energy is feral and joyful and absolutely relentless. He plays like the music is oxygen and the room is on fire.

But what made fIREHOSE so special is that Watt’s intensity was matched, pound for pound, by George Hurley on the drums. Hurley doesn’t get talked about enough outside of the people who know. He is one of the most unique drummers to ever come out of punk, because he wasn’t just bashing. He was playing. He brought jazz instincts into hardcore speed. He made the whole thing swing without ever softening it. It was wild, but it was musical wild. Controlled chaos. Like the whole band was on the edge of falling apart, but they never did.

And then there was Ed from Ohio.

Ed Crawford was the balance in the middle section. The calm in the cyclone. His guitar and voice didn’t try to overpower Watt’s gravity, and that’s exactly why it worked. He brought melody into the madness. He brought structure into the sprint. He made it possible for the band to go places that weren’t just loud. He made it possible for them to be emotional without getting cheesy, and smart without getting pretentious.

This album is bass-driven punk-blues-jazz. It’s a masterpiece of feel and ferocity. It broke down the conventions of rock music at the time and bridged the gap between hardcore punk and modern alternative.

And the truth is, I’m still hearing its fingerprints everywhere.

You can draw a straight line from this record to the entire world of indie rock that came after. Not because fIREHOSE was famous in a stadium sense. But because they were influential in the way the best things are: quietly, deeply, permanently. They changed what felt possible for a three- or four-piece band. They made it okay to be punk and still be a musician. They made it okay to be a musician and still be dangerous.

And personally? This album didn’t just influence my taste. It influenced my drumming. It influenced my relationship to rhythm. It influenced my belief that energy matters more than perfection.

We even covered their song “Brave Captain.” Still one of my favorite songs of all time. There’s something about it that is both defiant and tender, like a fist that also knows how to hold someone’s face gently. It’s one of those tracks that feels like it was written for people who keep going, even when the world is trying to convince them not to.

This album is pure fILTH.

And I mean that as the highest compliment I can give.

15. R.E.M. – Document

Here’s the 15th installment with R.E.M.’s Document (1987), the same year as The Joshua Tree, Strangeways, Here We Come, Appetite for Destruction, and Sign o’ the Times.

Ridiculous year. 1987 wasn’t just a good year for music. It was one of those rare years where it felt like culture itself was getting rewritten in real time. Where rock wasn’t just entertainment. It was a language people used to survive the decade. Every one of those records felt like a different kind of revolution. A different kind of prayer.

And in the middle of all that, R.E.M. dropped Document.

It would’ve been easy to pick several earlier R.E.M. albums. Murmur is a masterpiece. Reckoning is a mood. Fables of the Reconstruction is its own haunted, beautiful thing. But Document is the one I chose because it feels like the band stepping into a bigger room without losing their soul.

That’s rare. Most bands, the moment the room gets bigger, they start sanding down the edges. They start making choices for radio. They start writing songs that feel like they’re trying to be loved instead of trying to be true.

R.E.M. did the opposite.

Document still has mystery. It still has melody. It still has that sideways, half-buried Stipe delivery where you’re not always sure what he’s saying, but you’re absolutely sure what he’s meaning. But now it also has confidence. It has teeth. It has muscle.

It’s the sound of a band realizing they can be both art and anthem. And that’s not a small thing.

Because being “art” is easy if you don’t care whether anyone hears you. Being “anthem” is easy if you don’t care whether it lasts. But being both? Being weird and accessible? Being intelligent and emotional? Being poetic and punchy? That’s the high wire.

That’s the place where the best bands live.

This album is full of songs that feel like they’re holding something back while still being urgent. Like they’re trying not to scream, but they’re also done whispering. It’s political without being preachy. It’s human without being sentimental. It’s the sound of a band growing up without selling out.

And then there’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” It remains one of the best panic songs ever written. Helpful in 1987. Helpful in 2020. Helpful in 2026. Timeless, like dread.

Because that’s what great music does. It doesn’t just soundtrack your life. It predicts it. It gives you language for emotions you haven’t had yet. It hands you a flashlight before you even realize you’re walking into a dark room.

When the band toured for this album, they came to a new venue in Irvine, where our band played all the time. It was the Bren Events Center, and suddenly R.E.M. wasn’t just a club band anymore. They were playing arenas.

We got to go backstage. And it was exhilarating and strange all at once.

That backstage world is its own universe. It smells like cables and sweat and cigarettes and adrenaline. It’s full of people who look like they’re doing something important even when they’re just holding a clipboard. It’s the place where you realize the magic has a logistics department.

And that night gave me something else too, something I didn’t see coming. It was the first time I had ever been hit on by a man. It was also the first time a lead singer had hit on me. And that experience changed my aperture on life. Not because it was scandalous. Not because it was traumatic. Not because it was a “story.” But because it was revelatory. I was clueless to a more complicate life that surrounded me.

It was the first time I felt, in real time, the full reality that desire doesn’t always follow the neat little lines we draw for it. That identity, attraction, and power are not always predictable. That the world is wider than the version of it you grow up assuming is the whole map.

It made me more empathetic and curious. It made me more aware of how often people walk through life being misread, mislabeled, underestimated, or unseen.

And it also made me realize something else: The people who create the art that changes us… are often living outside the expected story. They’re listening harder. Feeling harder. Seeing angles the rest of us miss.

Which, in a way, is what R.E.M. always did.

So yes, Document belongs on this list because it’s an incredible record.

But it also belongs here because it marks a moment.

A moment where the music got bigger, the room got bigger, and so did I.

16. Lloyd Cole – Don’t Get Weird on Me Babe

No. 16 is an album I’m sure many haven’t heard, but I hope to encourage at least one of you to download it: Lloyd Cole’s Don’t Get Weird on Me Babe.

Most people know Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, the Scottish band that scored four Top 20 albums and five Top 40 singles. They were one of those rare bands that could be clever without being smug, romantic without being syrupy, and literate without sounding like they were trying to win a debate.

Then the band broke up. Lloyd did his own thing. And this, his second solo record, is widely considered his best work.

It tanked anyway. Capitol dropped him. Of course they did. The world has always been weird about the best stuff.

There’s something almost poetic about that, in a dark little way. The best records are often the ones that arrive quietly, live in the margins, and then haunt you for decades. They don’t show up with fireworks. They show up like a sentence you can’t forget. Like a smell. Like a memory you didn’t know you were keeping.

And Don’t Get Weird on Me Babe is exactly that kind of record.

This is not an entertaining happy fun record. It borders on uneasy listening. It’s not the album you put on to “get the party going.” It’s the album you put on when you want to feel like someone else understands the part of your brain that’s always awake, always watching, always noticing.

Cole was on the Bacharach, Jimmy Webb, Scott Walker tip early, adding a soaringness few other artists were touching. He was writing with the kind of melodic intelligence that feels almost out of place in rock music, like he accidentally wandered into the genre carrying a novel and a glass of something expensive.

He also had that rare gift: the ability to make longing feel intelligent.

Not melodramatic. Not self-pitying, nor performative. Just… precise.

And then there’s the thing I love most about him, the thing that makes this record so addictive: his obsession with implication. With the half-said. With the sideways glance. With the way real life almost never gives you the full story, and real love almost never gives you the clean ending.

This album is built on the genius of half of everything.

Half-confessions.
Half-answers.
Half-regrets.
Half-desires.
Half-truths we tell ourselves so we can keep moving forward without collapsing under the weight of what we really feel.

It’s an album that understands how adulthood actually works. How you can be deeply romantic and deeply cynical in the same day. How you can want someone and resent them. How you can be brave and still be afraid. How you can be a grown man and still feel like a kid who doesn’t know what to do with his own heart.

I played this album nonstop for a year. Not casually. Obsessively.

And it’s one of those records that makes you feel like you’re thinking in higher resolution. Like your internal monologue suddenly has better lighting. Like your emotional vocabulary expands. Like the room in your mind where you keep your secrets just got a new window.

This record doesn’t just influence you. It refines you. And maybe that’s why it didn’t sell. Because refinement doesn’t trend. Refinement doesn’t go viral. Refinement doesn’t shout. It just stays.

And if you’re lucky, it becomes one of those quiet albums that changes the way you write, the way you love, and the way you see the world… without ever asking for credit.

17. Crowded House – Woodface

Now we are at #17: Woodface from Crowded House (1991), a period when I was going through a transition of sorts and this one accompanied me in the VW van quite a bit.

And if you’ve ever had an album that became the interior of your car, you know what I mean. The van wasn’t just transportation. It was a moving listening room. A rolling confessional. A place where you could drive and think and not have to explain yourself to anyone.

You could say this album was death by chocolate.

These Kiwis made one of the most enduring pop/rock albums of the 1990s. It’s emotive craftsmanship, evocative singing, melodies that hit you with that particular ache of beauty that feels almost unfair.

But what makes Woodface truly genius, and what makes it different even within the Crowded House catalog, is the collaboration between brothers. Because this album isn’t just Neil Finn doing what Neil Finn does. This is Neil and Tim Finn together.

And when those two voices collide, something rare happens: you get a record that feels both effortlessly melodic and emotionally complicated at the same time. Their voices complement each other in a way that feels, well, genetic. Like harmony isn’t something they learned, it’s something they were born into. There’s a warmth to it, but also a tension. A push and pull. A sense that these songs were built through shared history, shared scars, shared humor, and shared genius.

The songwriting is ridiculous. The kind of songwriting that makes you angry if you’re a songwriter, because it feels too easy. Like they’re cheating. Like they have access to a melodic vault the rest of us don’t.

But it’s not cheating. It’s craft. It’s joint craftsmanship.

It’s two brothers shaping songs the way great architects shape buildings: with structure, restraint, and an intuitive understanding of what makes a space feel like home.

And the thing I love about Woodface is how it manages to be lush without being bloated. Sweet without being sugary. Emotional without being melodramatic. There’s a clarity to it. The songs have air in them. They breathe. They don’t beg for your attention. They invite it.

Woodface is proof that “pop” can be profound without trying to be important. It’s songcraft as emotional architecture. It’s the kind of album that makes you want to call people you miss, apologize to people you wronged, and somehow still laugh about it… because the harmonies are holding you up.

There’s a kind of emotional generosity on this record. It doesn’t posture. It doesn’t perform cool. It doesn’t hide behind cynicism. It just shows up and tells the truth in melodies so good you almost don’t notice how deep they cut until later, when you’re alone and the song is still in your head and you realize you’ve been quietly wrecked.

And maybe that’s why it stayed with me during that time in my life. Because when you’re going through a transition, you don’t always need music that matches your chaos. You need a blankie to take with you from childhood to adulthood. A comfort object of sorts.

Sometimes you need music that reminds you beauty still exists or that craft still matters or that tenderness is not weakness. That there are still people out there who can take the mess of being human and turn it into something you can sing along to with the windows down.

18. Jeff Buckley – Grace

The 18th: Jeff Buckley’s Grace (1994).

This is one of those albums that doesn’t just live in your collection. It lives in your nervous system. It’s not a record you “throw on.” It’s a record you enter. And when you come out the other side, you’re slightly altered.

That year of writing, I remember the steady drip of obituaries, and how it felt like the world kept taking musicians away one by one. Even now, loss arrives like a song you didn’t choose. It just starts playing, and suddenly you’re remembering everything you didn’t say, everything you didn’t appreciate enough while it was still in the room.

Buckley’s story is its own kind of heartbreak. A pain that still feels impossible. The kind that still makes you shake your head as if disbelief could rewrite history.

And Grace carries that voltage. It’s tender and ferocious. It’s hymn and howl. It’s the sound of someone with too much soul for the container. Like his body was barely big enough to hold the voice, and his voice was barely big enough to hold whatever he was feeling.

This album is full of moments that feel supernatural. Not because they’re “perfect,” but because they feel unfiltered. Like you’re hearing someone sing without armor. Like you’re hearing the truth before it gets cleaned up for public consumption.

And that’s what makes Grace so rare.

It’s not “alternative rock.” It’s not “singer-songwriter.” It’s not “a great debut.” It’s a singular document. A first record that somehow sounds like a final statement. Like the artist knew, on some deep level, that he wasn’t going to get many chances to say what he needed to say.

Buckley could take a whisper and make it feel like a storm warning. He could take a love song and make it sound holy and haunted in the same breath. He could move from tenderness to fury without ever losing the thread. He could sing like he was pleading and preaching and seducing and grieving all at once.

And the musicianship is just as important as the voice. The band plays with that rare kind of sensitivity where everyone is listening harder than they’re performing. The arrangements leave space. They let the songs breathe. They let the tension build. They let the silence do some of the talking.

This is not music that tries to impress you. Rather, it’s music that tries to reach you. And it does.

This album taught me that vulnerability is not weakness. It’s power with the safety turned off. It’s what happens when you stop trying to be liked and start trying to be true.

And once you’ve heard that level of truth, it changes what you accept from everything else. It raises the bar. It ruins you a little. In the best way.

Because after Grace, a lot of music starts to sound like performance. Like posture. Like people trying to look like they feel something.

Buckley actually felt it. And he wasn’t afraid to let you hear it. That’s why this record still matters. Not because it’s sad or mythic. Not because of what happened to him. But because it’s one of the clearest examples of what music can be when it’s made by someone who is not protecting themselves.

It’s a record that doesn’t just sound beautiful... A record that sounds brave.

19. Dave Matthews Band – Under the Table and Dreaming

No. 19: Dave Matthews Band’s first major release, Under the Table and Dreaming.

This one is easy for me. I like many of their albums, but this one captured my imagination not just as a fan, but as a drummer. And not in a casual “that’s cool” way. In a “this just changed what I think is possible” way.

Because at that time in my life, I was playing music more than ever. I was drumming in a couple bands, playing out a lot, rehearsing constantly, and basically living behind the kit. That era was full throttle. Full calendar. Full volume. And when you’re playing that much, your ears become picky. Your standards rise. You stop being impressed by flash. You start craving feel, taste, ideas.

Then Carter Beauford shows up. And suddenly the drums aren’t just a rhythm section tool. They’re a language.

What I loved immediately about this album was the sound: strange rhythms, violin, horns, acoustic guitar, funky jams, and clever tightness. It was intricate but not fussy. It was busy but not cluttered. It was musical without being precious. It had a kind of kinetic joy in it that felt almost rebellious compared to what was dominating rock at the time.

Because remember: this album hit in 1994, the same year as Grace. The Pacific Northwest grunge machine was still grinding. Everything was distortion and gloom and flannel and existential exhaustion.

And then here comes this band from the other side of the country, with a violin player, a horn section, an acoustic guitar, and a drummer who played like he had four arms and a sense of humor.

It didn’t sound like Seattle. It sounded like sunlight.

But the real story for me is Carter. Carter Beauford is a left-hand lead drummer on a right-handed kit, with ride cymbals on both sides and a ton of drums. And his playing on this album was a full-on invitation into a different universe. He didn’t just keep time. He danced with it. He decorated it. He turned grooves into conversations.

His linear playing opened up new possibilities for me, because I’d toyed with left-handed playing already. But Carter didn’t just make it “possible.” He made it necessary. He made me want to relearn the instrument from the inside out. Like a right footed soccer player only using their left foot until one day there is no favored side. Just the one that works in that moment.

I started going back to playing both left- and right-hand leads. I started thinking differently about sticking. About how to move around the kit without repeating yourself. About how to create motion and flow without losing the pocket.

And linear drumming, for anyone who doesn’t speak drummer, is basically a kind of wizardry where you’re not stacking sounds on top of each other in the usual way. You’re weaving them. One note at a time. Kick, snare, hat, tom, ghost note, ride, backbeat… all in a chain, all in a braid. It creates this rolling, tumbling feel that sounds like a groove doing gymnastics.

Carter made that style feel joyful. It wasn’t academic. It was happiness. Ever watch him play, and you’ll see the joy. What a lucky dude to live his life like this.

The result was tons of work, not just to emulate the playing, but because I had to start building a kit that could even allow for that kind of expression. I was lugging around an extra-large drum set with probably 12 cymbals and extra snares. That meant I had to be the first guy at soundcheck and the last guy to leave the gig.

There are many reasons why chicks don’t dig drummers, but being the last guy done packing is a big handicap. But I didn’t care. Because this album was that powerful at the time.

It made me want to play more. Practice more. Experiment more. It made me feel like music was still full of undiscovered rooms. Like rock didn’t have to be one thing. Like you could be technical and still feel human. Like you could be complex and still be fun. It reminded me how much I didn’t know and still does today.

And maybe that’s the biggest gift this record gave me: it reminded me that joy is not lightweight. It’s discipline, decision, and dedication.

Joy is sometimes the hardest thing to keep alive.

And sometimes that’s exactly what you need to keep hitting things with sticks and believing it matters.

20. Zero 7 – Simple Things

Ok, here’s the 20th: Zero 7’s Simple Things (2001), released prior to 9/11. Their debut album. An accomplished slice of soulful genius that got played in our house with a frequency that merged into the time-space continuum with the birth of our son, Jahan, in March of 2002.

Hank Binns and Sam Hardaker “cocktailize” musical elements: soul-influenced vocals (male and female), bubbling and ringing keyboards, classical string arrangements, into a relaxing, potent wave of sound. During that 9/11-time capsule, we were all looking for something soothing. It was easy to rediscover the ’70s, but it was more rewarding to discover something new that could make you feel new feelings of joy and contentment.

Even the artwork emotes a harking back to simpler times. Sonically, it offers all the chill-down atmospheric trickery, digital winks and whooshes layered over Fender Rhodes chords, swaddles of strings, tender trumpet parps. But it’s the languid grooves and the soft melancholy of their melodies that make dream-state instrumentals like “Give It Away” and “Polaris” so enchanting.

The real power of Simple Things, however, is in its songs. Beautiful is beautiful. Especially when placed beneath the seductive vocals of Sia on “Destiny” or the heart-breaking “Distractions.” And the great news for me was I got to see them live in a small venue, standing a few feet from Sia, rich and potent and full of life. Imagine doing that now, standing in a small music venue with people pressing in from every side.

There is immense aural delight in this music, but it was these lyrics that gave me an emotional connection:

New born son
Life has won
Take this turn then he’ll run
Run away from all that’s been
I have done, I have seen

At the time, just those first two lines stood out and made me feel joy. Jahan, whose name means “The World,” was all that mattered. His babbling and baby coos mingled with this album’s swirling sounds throughout the house.

And now, nearly a quarter-century later, with Jahan at 23, those next lines hit different. Not as prophecy, exactly, but as a reminder: our children are always running toward their lives, and we’re always standing there, half-proud and half-ruined, trying to love them without gripping too tight.

21. Radiohead – OK Computer

Here’s the 21st with Radiohead’s OK Computer (1997). Third studio album.

This one entered my 5-disc CD player and never left for well over two years.

And I don’t mean that in the casual way people say, “I listened to it a lot.” I mean it became part of my daily atmosphere. It was the record that was always there, like a second set of thoughts running beneath whatever I was doing. It was a companion. A warning. A mirror. A prophecy.

Because OK Computer isn’t just an album. It’s a shift. It’s the moment rock music stopped pretending the modern world was manageable. It’s the sound of a band looking straight at technology, capitalism, media, alienation, and the coming digital fever dream… and saying, this is going to break people.

And they were right.

This is a transition record. Abstract lyrics. Myriad influences. Foretelling future sonic explorations. What stood out to me was the layer upon layer of density: many varied musical voices on different notes, not easily simplified. It’s a record that doesn’t want to be flattened. It refuses to be summarized. And live, it’s incredible.

OK Computer was inspired by Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, aggressive yet beautiful jazz-fusion, tape manipulated and looped, spliced together at night after the band went home. It takes you places you aren’t expecting, or even particularly human. Disorienting. Hard to know which way is up or which way is out.

Radiohead created mostly live, but they shared Davis’s yen for disorientation. So, what you get is panic. Darting guitars. Shaky percussion. Moaning. A desire to always know which way is out.

And that’s the genius of it: the album isn’t just about anxiety. It creates anxiety. It builds it into the architecture of the songs. It makes you feel the claustrophobia of modern life, the way your brain can’t fully relax because there’s always some invisible pressure humming in the walls.

I love the adventurousness. The juxtaposition of textural richness and queasy orientation to technology, then suddenly “Karma Police” comes in like genius you can sing along to. It’s one of the great tricks of the record: it gives you a handrail just long enough to steady yourself, and then it removes it again.

By the time the somber piano gives way to dive-bombing guitar distortion at the end, you’re disoriented again.

The mythic status of “Paranoid Android” almost makes it harder to hear why it’s so successful. A multi-part opus that could be a ’90s “Bohemian Rhapsody” is not much of a selling point, but it showcases the density. Not grandiosity, but generosity.

It’s a band giving you everything they have: all the ideas, all the textures, all the moods, all the sharp edges, all the paranoia, all the beauty. Escaping unborn chicken voices, fuming at us for not remembering their name, warning us about panic and vomit, while the “Fitter Happier” robot checks your psychological state.

And “Fitter Happier,” by the way, is one of the most chilling things ever put on a rock record. It’s not even a song. It’s a diagnosis. It’s the sound of a culture turning human beings into bullet points. The sound of self-optimization becoming self-erasure. And in 1997, it felt like dystopian art.

In 2026, it feels like a daily notification. This album is a testament to what a five-piece band with ingenuity can make happen on a record. It’s proof that rock music can still be intellectually terrifying and emotionally devastating without ever losing its beauty.

And that’s what keeps pulling me back: the beauty. Because for all its panic, OK Computer is gorgeous. The harmonies. The chord choices. The way Thom Yorke’s voice floats above the wreckage like a signal flare. The way the guitars shimmer and stab. The way the record manages to sound both mechanical and fragile at the same time.

Like a human trying to breathe inside a machine. And then there’s “No Surprises.” That gentle brutality still lands like a truth you didn’t want but needed. “A job that slowly kills you.” That line ages like a scar. It’s one of those lyrics that becomes more accurate the longer you live. The older you get, the more you realize how many people are walking around with invisible bruises from lives they didn’t choose.

And the miracle is: the song is almost lullaby-soft. Like the record is trying to comfort you while it’s telling you the truth.

That’s what makes OK Computer so powerful. It doesn’t scream. It trembles. And somehow that’s worse. Because you can ignore a scream. But you can’t ignore a tremble that sounds like your own.

In 1997, this album sounded like paranoia. In 2026, it sounds like Monday. The future Radiohead feared didn’t arrive with explosions. It arrived with notifications.

22. Led Zeppelin – The Song Remains the Same

Here’s the 22nd of the albums that informed my life with Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same. I had to get clever here because Led Zeppelin is essentially my favorite band, and this live album (and movie) is basically a live greatest hits recorded at Madison Square Garden and then released in October of 1976.

Upon its initial release, TSRTS got some bad reviews, with some saying it was over-produced and lumbering. Yep. And even the band themselves have expressed a lack of fondness for the recording. Jimmy Page has admitted the end product was hardly the best representation of Led Zeppelin as a live band, more soundtrack than “live album,” and he’s not wrong.

But my love of this album doesn’t require any affirmation from critics, or answers to the eternal questions like: “Why this take?” “Why not that show?” “Why didn’t they include ___?” or “Is the audio sweetened?” (People love to turn rock and roll into forensic science.) To me, the album is just thrilling, capturing the greatest rock band in the world while they were peaking, at least commercially. And the film, of course, showcases the band’s showboating, strutting, and snarl. In time it’s become, for many, a cultural-temporal touchstone for an era of rock excess unseen before or since, a testament to sheer spectacle.

Critics say these New York City shows represented the last on a lengthy tour and suggested the band seemed worse for the wear, but how would they know? The genius of Zeppelin was never about technical perfection. It was about the balance of counterparts and the feel of their collective presentation, rather than pristine execution. Page gets accused of being sloppy, but the more I listen, and I mean actually slow it down and listen very carefully to parts, the more “sloppy” begins to sound like the work of a rhythmic genius. Listening to later guitarists, everything gets very clean and accurate but seems to lose some of the raw feel. Page gets away with it (generally) because for him the guitar is more about feel than technical ability. There are times you can hear he’s playing beyond the limits of his technique. Sometimes it’s flawed. Other times it strays into absolute genius.

And that is not just a guitar lesson. That is a life lesson.

As with all demigods, there is something holy and unholy about Page’s playing on this record, and I don’t mean that in a churchy way. I mean it in the way certain artists feel like they’re channeling something older than themselves, something half-ancient, half-illicit. The kind of energy that doesn’t ask permission. It just takes the room.

Now… as a drummer, my fixation always slides to Bonham, because it has to. Bonham wasn’t simply “the heavy drummer.” That’s the lazy shorthand people use when they haven’t listened closely. Bonham had feel first and time second. He could be powerful and nimble at the same time, which is not normal. He had swing, too, the kind you can’t fake, the kind that comes from having jazz in your bones even when you’re playing at stadium volume. You can hear those jazz/swing influences everywhere. Buddy Rich. Gene Krupa. Joe Morello. In fact, Bonham borrowed a lot of Morello’s triplet ideas, and if you go back to Brubeck’s “Take Five” after living in Bonham-world, you hear the family resemblance in a whole new way.

And because Bonham played with that deep enveloping feel, someone had to be the anchor. That was John Paul Jones. JPJ’s role was quiet genius: the steady, firm presence that keeps the ship from turning into a bonfire. If you want a parallel, think John Entwistle in The Who. The anchor lets the chaos become art instead of accident.

So yes, I got fixated on what Bonham would do with his feet and his hands, not just the feel but the speed. That’s the most noticeable awesome-like quality in his drumming: he could bend time. Good drummers can do this. Their brains move in nanoseconds, calculating what was just played, what is being played, and what is about to be played all at once. The best example of Bonham’s speed is the end of “Dazed and Confused” on this album. There have been fierce debates about whether it was sped up. I can assure you it wasn’t. The hand is quicker than the eye.

And here’s the thing that makes Bonham immortal in a way that’s hard to explain: even when drummers learn every note, deconstruct every pattern, nail every accent, they still don’t get that. The spirit. The weight. The unspoken decisions between the decisions. The micro-timing that makes you feel like the band is leaning forward as one organism.

That’s why this album stays on my list. Because the most enrapturing moments happen in those places where the band stops being four guys playing songs and becomes something else entirely. Toward the end of “Stairway to Heaven,” (which this live version is tied with Aja as my favorite song) where the 8-minute studio version gets augmented with nearly three minutes of pure rock gold, the genres of blues, standard rock, hard rock, and funk come together for a musical moment of majesty. It suggests what is possible for a band to achieve when all the sloppy stars align in some celestial map of heaven, where the union is a communion and the darkness is only there to offer the brilliance a canvas to pierce.

Plant’s lyrics say more with how they feel than what they really mean, and while “Stairway” is seemingly a song about the inevitability of death that’s really a song about fear but actually a song about greed… or something… Plant communicates its sweeping vagaries with a passionate, pensive and ultimately primal delivery that convinces us he knows exactly what he’s singing about.

And I think Robert Plant uttered the most words of the band’s history on this album when he said, “I think this is a song of hope.”

That line matters.

Because in the middle of all the spectacle, and the excess, and the mythology, the thing that keeps pulling me back is not the legend. It’s the humanity under the legend. It’s the idea that even the loudest band in the world was still trying to say something simple and necessary: hope exists. Even here. Even now.

23. Cake – Fashion Nugget

The penultimate album: Fashion Nugget.from Cake.

If you know me, you know I’m a sucker for albums that feel like a new language. Records that show up, deadpan and sideways, and quietly rearrange what you think “rock” is allowed to be.

That’s Fashion Nugget.

And yes, I have a personal connection to Cake. I’ve been friends with their trumpet player, Vince DiFiore, for nearly 50 years. But I’m not including this album because of that. I’m including it because it’s a masterclass in being completely original while pretending to be ordinary. It’s one of the most influential alternative albums of the 1990s, even if it didn’t look the part. And it still sounds like the future.

· I should note, the only time Vince has ever played in a full horn section is with our band, Horn If You’re Honky. We had fun.

Cake started in the early ‘90s but arrived right in the middle of the mid-’90s era of heavy, guitar-forward noise. John McCrea used to call it “that Viking alternative rock,” which is the most perfect description of the time I’ve ever heard. Everything was big and loud and earnest and masculine and distorted. Every band looked like they’d been raised by power chords and resentment.

Cake didn’t fight that world head-on. They didn’t try to out-grunge the grunge. They didn’t try to be heavier, angrier, or more tortured. They did something far more dangerous. They were calm. They were pragmatic. They were funny without winking at you.

And they were sincere in a way that made people suspicious. Because in the mid-’90s, sincerity had to be wrapped in noise to be considered legitimate. Cake had the audacity to write wry pop music with a straight face. They found artistry in strip malls, in rush hour, in the slow humiliation of adulthood, in the quiet comedy of consumer culture. They weren’t trying to be glamorous. They were trying to be accurate.

Fashion Nugget is like an oversized diner menu. It’s got something for almost everyone: mariachi, jazz, tango, funk, country, disco… none of which were cool at the time. And none of which were supposed to be sitting at the same table. But Cake wasn’t genre-hopping to be cute. They were doing it because they could. Because they had taste. Because they had ears. Because they understood something most bands didn’t yet understand: we were headed into a post-genre world.

And that’s why this album still holds up. It predicted the way we listen now.

The band self-produced their records, and you can feel that control. The sound is economical, but never cheap. Minimal, but never empty. Everything has purpose. The guitar is dry and percussive. The bass is nimble and melodic. The drums are tight and unflashy. And then there’s the trumpet.

Vince’s trumpet is the signature of Cake… unless you count John’s unique singing approach.

Because McCrea is one of the most misunderstood frontmen of that era. His voice is blunt. Ordinary. Almost aggressively unromantic. And because of that, people assumed Cake was a joke band. An irony band. A novelty act.

They were wrong.

McCrea wasn’t trying to be cool. He was trying to be true. His voice sounds like a guy who’s lived. A guy who has opinions about things like landfills and the waste cycle of pop culture. A guy who knows the difference between “rock lifestyle” and actual music. A guy who can deliver a lyric like a dry punchline… and still leave you with an emotional bruise.

And then there’s the way this album handles covers. Three of them. The tango standard “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps.” Willie Nelson’s “Sad Songs and Waltzes.” And of course, their wildly misinterpreted version of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”

People thought it was parody. It wasn’t. It was an honest tribute. But filtered through a very specific point of view: a white guy’s quiet rage, a man shrinking inside his own pride, a person trying to look tough while clearly being hurt. It’s funny, yes. But it’s also painfully human. Which is what Cake always was.

Here’s the part that still makes me smile, and still makes me respect them even more: at the height of “The Distance” climbing the charts, McCrea compared the band’s ascent to being at the top of a toboggan run. “There’s an out-of-control feeling,” he said, “but there’s also a typical feeling. Because the toboggan ride is a set course that many people have gone down, you feel like you’re part of this grand rock cliché.”

That’s Cake in one quote. Self-aware without being self-important. That’s how Vince is too. Wry without being detached. Real without needing to perform “real.”

And then, at one point, their drummer took a hiatus.

Vince called me and told me there might be an opportunity to play with the band. And when he sent me a tape of music to learn and master, none of it was Cake music. It was the music that inspired their unique sound and approach. That’s how deep their thinking was. They weren’t just a band with a sound. They were a band with a philosophy. With references. With roots. With a whole internal compass guiding what they did.

That tape alone told me everything. Cake didn’t stumble into originality. They engineered it. And that’s why Fashion Nugget is genius.

It’s an album that sounds effortless, but it’s built with intention. It’s an album that sounds casual, but it’s actually incredibly calculated. It’s an album that got tagged as “ironic,” but is ultimately sincere. It’s an album that feels simple, but is secretly sophisticated. It’s an album that made alternative radio dance without losing its brain.

It’s one of the rare records that can be played at a party, on a drive to work, in a bar, in a garage, or alone at midnight… and it still feels right.

And that, to me, is the ultimate sign of a great album: It doesn’t just soundtrack a moment. It becomes part of how you move through life.

24. Calexico – Feast of Wire

The final album: Calexico’s Feast of Wire.

Like Cake, I have a very intimate relationship with this band. But I’m not including this album because of proximity. I’m including it because it’s one of the most transportive records I’ve ever lived with. It’s a masterwork. A desert film you can play with your eyes open. A borderland dream that somehow makes you feel both haunted and held.

Still, the personal story matters here, because Calexico isn’t just a band I discovered. They’re a band that has been braided into my life for decades.

My brother and I were in a band with Calexico’s architect and lead singer, Joey Burns, for many years. One was called More Love Now. Another was Field Trip. Joey and I studied at UCI together, so we had countless occasions to play, and he would often sit in with our band. This was before we started More Love Now. Back then, Joey was already Joey: musical, generous, curious, quietly brilliant. The kind of person who doesn’t just play music, but collects it from the world.

And then there’s the story that, to me, feels like destiny disguised as friendship: Joey turned my brother onto the sitar when he was just 13.

That introduction, and the gift of a sitar, informed the rest of my brother’s life. He went on to study Classical Indian Musicology as one of his degrees, then went to grad school at the Ali Akbar school of Indian musicology, where he got to perform with some of the greatest Indian musicians ever.

That is not a small ripple. That’s a life rerouted.

To this day, my brother and Joey are best friends. And Johnny has helped the band, written material for many of their albums, and contributed to recordings across these decades. Our kids have been lucky enough to be backstage with both Calexico and Cake over the years, which still feels surreal when I stop and actually think about it. Not many people get to watch their children stand inside the world that once saved them.

But now the album…

Feast of Wire came out in 2003, and it’s widely considered Calexico’s first truly masterful full-length. Pitchfork called it “crammed with immediate songcraft, shifting moods and open-ended exploration,” and described it as “the album we always knew they had in them but feared they would never make.”

That’s not hype. That’s accuracy. Because Calexico had always been restless experimenters, genre juxtaposers, and journeymen, crafting this unique fusion of mariachi, desert-rock, jazz, Americana, and something else that doesn’t have a clean name. Their sound is instantly recognizable. You hear it in film. You hear it in television. You hear it in the background of scenes where someone is driving toward something they can’t name. Their music has become part of the modern cinematic language.

But Feast of Wire is where all the ingredients finally fuse into something undeniable. This album is the Southwest, but not the postcard version. Not the tourist version. It’s the real one: the dust, the light, the border tension, the abandoned mission, the stories people carry in their bodies, the sense of beauty living right next to hardship. It’s a record full of movement. Full of geography. Full of weather.

The production is stunning. It’s detailed without being precious. Melodies rise against countermelodies. Guitars get sealed in amber. Instruments blend in ways that feel unpredictable and inevitable at the same time.

And Joey, vocally, is at a peak here. There’s a confidence in the singing. A clarity. A tenor that feels assertive and emotive without ever becoming theatrical.

It’s the sound of someone who doesn’t need to oversell the emotion because the music already carries it.

Track to track, the album moves like a film cut by someone with taste. A waltz opens the door. Border stories thread the middle. Instrumentals create space. And then it pivots into this second-half stretch where the band gets even braver, even stranger, even more textural, without losing the thread.

It’s a record that knows when to speak and when to simply show you the landscape.

And that’s what makes Calexico so special: they are not just a band. They are world-builders. They make music that feels inhabited. Music that feels like a place you can step into. Music that doesn’t just play in the room, but changes the room.

Which is why this album belongs as the final entry. Because in a list full of records that shaped my wiring, Feast of Wire is one of the ones that still feels like a compass. Not north. Not south. Something more human than that. The direction of home.

Conclusion… And that’s the list. Twenty-four albums, written first as little sonic postcards during Covid, then reread years later with fresh eyes and a slightly different heart. The world has changed, my life has changed, my kids have grown up in what feels like a single breath, and the CD players that held half of these records hostage have long since gone extinct. But the music hasn’t moved an inch. These albums still do what they’ve always done: they steady me, shake me, humble me, light me up, remind me who I am when I forget, and occasionally make me laugh at the sheer absurdity of being alive. If anything, time has only proven the point. The records you truly love aren’t just entertainment. They’re emotional architecture. They’re your private religion. They’re the soundtrack to your becoming. And nearly six years later, I wouldn’t replace a single one.

Virtually all of us are right- or left-handed. Almost no one questions it. About 89% of humans are right-handed, roughly 10.5% of us left-handed, and less than 1% of us live in that strange, enviable sliver called ambidextrous. We accept this distribution as if it were gravity. Natural. Immutable. Done.

But it begs the question…

Why so lopsided?

Why should one side of the body, one hemisphere of the brain, be crowned ruler so early and so completely?

And more importantly: what happens if we refuse that coronation?

Most of us grow up reinforcing a single channel. The dominant hand gets sharper. Faster. More articulate. The other becomes a loyal but clumsy understudy. Over time, the brain obliges. Neural pathways thicken where they’re used. Thin where they’re ignored. Efficiency replaces exploration.

Yet there’s a quiet middle ground most people never visit. You don’t need to be part of the mythical 1% to become functionally ambidextrous. There’s a growing population of people who deliberately train their “weak” side until it’s no longer weak. Not equal perhaps, but competent. Conversational. Awake. These are people who understand that the brain is not a fixed map but a living city, capable of building new roads if you’re willing to tolerate a little traffic.

Neuroscience has shown us that dominance is not destiny. The brain develops preferences early, yes, but it remains plastic far longer than we were once told. When we challenge it, when we introduce novelty, difficulty, and uncertainty, different regions begin talking to each other. Cross-hemispheric communication increases. The system becomes more integrated.

This is why learning an instrument later in life can feel intoxicating. Why puzzles calm us. Why learning a new language, or a new movement pattern, briefly makes us feel younger. It’s also why altered states have fascinated humans for millennia. Substances like LSD temporarily disable certain neural “safety mechanisms,” allowing normally segregated regions of the brain to collaborate. The mind becomes less hierarchical, more democratic. Connections appear where fences once stood.

You don’t need chemicals to experience this. You can get there through effort.

- Learn a chord with the wrong hand.

- Eat with your other hand.

- Brush your teeth awkwardly.

- Write illegibly until it isn’t illegible anymore.

- Try a skateboard trick that feels backward.

The reward isn’t just skill. It’s range. And range, I’ve come to believe, is one of the great predictors of joy.

Which brings me to Rodney Mullen.

I had the great pleasure of working with Rodney across a variety of film and creative endeavors over more than six years. That meant long road trips where conversations stretched past midnight. Time spent sitting around offices where ideas bounced not off whiteboards but off lived experience. Visits to Ojai, where the pace slowed just enough to let thinking deepen. I didn’t learn these ideas about Rodney. I learned many of them from him.

Rodney doesn’t teach in a didactic way. He reveals. Through observation. Through patience. Through a relentless curiosity that never announces itself as intelligence, even though it clearly is. I absorbed his thinking almost osmotically, and I found myself applying it to my own life long before I realized I was doing so.

Which is fortunate, because I was already on my own strange journey toward ambidexterity.

I was trained to be right-handed. Schooled that way. Corrected that way. And yet, innately, persistently, I was pulled left. I drew with my left hand. I use my mouse with my left. I ate with my left. When I sat behind a drum kit, certain rhythms made more sense when I led with the “wrong” side. None of this was ideological at first. It was instinctual. A quiet refusal my body kept making on my behalf.

Meeting Rodney gave that refusal language.

He is often introduced as the Godfather of Street Skating, which is true in the same way calling the Wright brothers “good pilots” is true. He didn’t just influence skateboarding. He rewired it. Invented its grammar. Then, when that grammar no longer served him, he dismantled it again.

Rodney began as a freestyle skater in the early 1980s. That matters. Freestyle wasn’t rebellion. It was precision. Geometry. Balance. A conversation between force and restraint. While others chased speed and spectacle, Rodney solved puzzles. Tricks, to him, were mathematical problems. Vectors. Energy transfers. Systems waiting to be optimized. Skateboarding felt like engineering long before it felt like sport, a sensibility he has articulated repeatedly in conversations about science, invention, and culture.

By his mid-teens, he had already turned professional. By his early twenties, he had invented more tricks than anyone in history. The flatground ollie. The kickflip. The heelflip. The 360-flip. Moves so fundamental now that we forget they had to be imagined first. Each one a doorway that led to dozens more. Invention piled on invention until modern street skating existed almost entirely on foundations he poured.

Then freestyle died.

Or at least, the culture decided it had.

Most people would have defended their throne. Rodney didn’t. He reinvented. He moved into street skating, adapted to a new aesthetic, co-founded World Industries, then Almost Skateboards. He didn’t chase relevance. He chased understanding. His question was never “how do I win here?” but “what is actually happening when a human body, a wooden board, gravity, and intention meet?”

Injuries forced the question deeper. Ankles. Knees. Hips. The quiet tax of repetition. Rodney began to notice something most skaters never articulate. Skating exclusively in one stance wires the musculoskeletal and nervous systems asymmetrically. Muscles overdevelop on one side. Neural pathways become rigid. The brain gets very good at one answer and very bad at alternatives.

Switch skating becomes difficult not because it’s new, but because the system has been over-optimized.

Rodney’s response was radical. He chose not to specialize further. He chose to balance.

He trained himself to skate equally well regular and goofy. Not as a party trick. Not as a contest flex. As a solution. As a philosophy. He spoke to me about how the nervous system resists this kind of rewiring. How it prefers certainty over adaptability. How dominance feels like identity until you question it. He moved effortlessly between discussions of quantum mechanics and joint articulation, often pausing mid-thought to make sure I was still following. Frequently, I wasn’t. And he would patiently circle back.

What emerged was something new. A reinvention. Rodney became effectively stanceless. Directionless. Fluid. He removed the hierarchy between front and back, strong and weak. In doing so, he didn’t just protect his body. He unlocked new creative territory. Lines no longer had a preferred orientation. Tricks no longer belonged to one side of the brain.

Modern skateboarding lives here now. Switch. Nollie. Fakie. Entire generations fluent in multiplicity, often without realizing who taught them the language.

Rodney has spoken about this evolution publicly in talks that feel less like skateboarding stories and more like meditations on innovation, failure, and the courage to abandon winning strategies before they ossify. One of the most elegant expressions of his thinking lives in one of his Tedx Talks I encourage you to watch in full. It weaves science, creativity, and skating into a single argument about curiosity, resilience, and community. It’s not about tricks. It’s about how ideas survive.

If you like that one, here is an even more popular Tedx Talk from Rodney:

This is why Rodney belongs in a conversation about doubt and reinvention. Because he never treated success as a finish line. He treated it as a hypothesis. Something to test. Something to outgrow.

Most of us don’t fail because we lack talent. We fail because we stop challenging the systems that once made us good. We confuse efficiency with truth. Stability with life.

Becoming ambidextrous, literal or metaphorical, is not about mastery. It’s about refusing early death. The slow kind. The kind that arrives when curiosity gives way to comfort.

That is the art of doing versus dying. A much longer narrative about this sits in my book with the working title, DOUBT and the Art of Doing or Dying.

Our best often begins by picking up the tool with the wrong hand and seeing who you might become on the other side of that discomfort.

He came back more animated than I had ever seen him. I clearly remember the day, because normally he didn’t have that verve after a long day.

Twenty-five years ago, a former colleague, Dick Baker, came back from a talk by Guy Kawasaki (Most notably Apple’s first chief evangelist) practically buzzing. He was animated in a way that cut through the usual post conference fog of branded pens and empty superlatives. What stuck wasn’t a slide deck or a clever framework. It was one idea.

Reinvent yourself every seven years.

He was almost sixty at the time.

Not desperate. Not lost. Not looking for relevance. Just alert. Dick was awake to the idea that comfort was not the same thing as health, and that staying still too long came with its own quiet consequences. The seven-year part almost didn’t matter. What mattered was the permission it gave him to imagine another version of himself without erasing the one he’d already earned.

That idea has stayed with me this past quarter century, even as I’ve learned that Kawasaki never meant it as a rule etched in stone. It was never about the number. It was about motion. About staying useful. Curious. In play.

Kawasaki’s philosophy has always been less about dramatic reinvention and more about staying in circulation. Skills have half-lives. Industries don’t wait. If you cling too tightly to what once worked, you don’t preserve relevance, you embalm it. Reinvention, in his world, is proactive. You move before the market shoves you. You add chapters rather than defending footnotes.

What I’ve come to realize, especially while writing my book DO̶U̶B̶T̶ and the Art of Living or Dying, is that motion alone isn’t enough. Movement without psychological flexibility just turns into panic or performance.

That’s where Adam Grant enters the conversation.

In Think Again, Grant lays out something deceptively simple and deeply destabilizing. Mental health improves when people can tell a coherent story from who they were to who they are becoming. Not a clean story. Not a heroic one. Just a believable one.

The problem isn’t change. The problem is when we fuse our identity to outdated beliefs and then defend those beliefs as if our survival depends on it. When that happens, being wrong feels like being erased. Growth feels like betrayal.

Grant draws a crucial distinction between knowing and finding out. Knowing is closed. Fast. Certain. Finding out is slower, humbler, and far more expansive. When you’re fixated on knowing, you miss entire dimensions of reality. When you’re interested in finding out what you don’t know, you don’t just learn. You learn when you’re wrong.

That’s the hinge.

Life transitions make this easier. When your direction is already changing, old beliefs lose their grip of caution on your getting up and leaving for a brighter day. You’re no longer required to carry them just to stay consistent. Reinvention becomes less about courage and more about honesty.

And perhaps most importantly, Grant argues that we must separate our opinions from our identity. Who you are should be anchored in what you value, not what you believe. Beliefs should be revisable. Values should be durable. This is true for brands, too.

Which brings me to one of the most profound examples of reinvention I know. This individual is responsible for me (and a multitude of others) becoming a drummer.

Neil Peart was already considered one of the greatest drummers in rock history by the early 1990s. Precise. Powerful. Canonized. Nothing was broken. Nothing needed fixing.

And yet, that’s when he chose to doubt himself.

Peart sought out jazz drummer and teacher Freddie Gruber and dismantled the very technique that had made him legendary. He loosened his grip, literally and figuratively. He relearned wrist motion. He adopted traditional grip. He chased fluidity over force, efficiency over spectacle.

This wasn’t reinvention as reinvention theater. This was reinvention as humility.

Peart separated his past achievements from his present practice. He didn’t protect the myth. He risked it. He chose finding out over knowing at the exact moment when knowing would have been most defensible.

And it didn’t stop at drumming. His lyrics evolved. His writing deepened. He rode his bike often 100-miles between show venues, rode motorcycles across continents, thinking in motion, translating solitude and grief into prose. The through line wasn’t novelty. It was mastery that refused to harden.

That, to me, is DOUBT in action. Do trumps Doubt.

It’s not about self-destruction nor indecision. But the willingness to hold your beliefs lightly enough to keep moving forward without losing yourself.

We are entering a moment where this matters more than ever. Artificial intelligence is not coming for our jobs in some abstract future tense. It is already reshaping how we create, decide, diagnose, design, write, and think. The people who struggle won’t be the least talented. They’ll be the most certain.

Reinvention isn’t about chasing trends or abandoning your past. It’s about examining which beliefs still serve the future you’re walking toward. It’s about anchoring identity in values while letting methods, opinions, and assumptions remain negotiable.

Kawasaki reminds us not to stand still. Grant teaches us how to move without breaking ourselves. Peart shows us what it looks like when mastery chooses curiosity over comfort.

As I continue writing DOUBT and the Art of Living or Dying, I keep coming back to the same quiet invitation.

Examine what you believe. Ask whether it still fits the life you’re building. And give yourself permission to find out what you don’t yet know.

The future doesn’t belong to the certain. It belongs to the adaptable. The flexible shall inherit the earth.

Here’s a great listen and read from Guy Kawasaki: https://guykawasaki.com/what-reinvention-really-takes-with-ilana-golan/

I met Stanley Moss at a moment in my life when the floor seemed to be giving way beneath me, when the old gods of instinct and bravado were failing, and I was left clawing for something truer, older, more eternal than the chest-puffing bravado of commerce. Ocean Pacific had just become my strange inheritance, a sun-bleached relic with tangled roots, nostalgia clinging to it like wet clothes. And I, newly anointed as its unlikely steward, needed, though I could not yet say it aloud, a teacher. A compass. A human tuning fork to strike against the hollow walls of what branding had become.

Then came Stanley, not in a blaze, not with the ego-forward strut of a consultant or strategist, but in a kind of drifting arrival, as if he had been blown in from every corner of the world simultaneously. A man carried by winds that had pressed their palms to India and Paris, Zurich and Manhattan, to Hopi mesas and New York subway platforms, to punk clubs and French drawing rooms, to the tangled roots of his own peculiar, exquisite childhood.

He showed up quietly, with that soft, undemanding voice and the presence of a man who has seen too much to ever need to raise his volume. He set a study on branding in front of me, but it was no study. It was a scripture disguised as a report. A whisper disguised as a hammer. A masterwork disguised as a memo. It felt like someone had handed me the Rosetta Stone to a world I’d been living in but blind to.

I think that was the moment I realized: this man had been taught by the gods of clarity. He had apprenticed himself to Armin Hofmann, Fritz Gottschalk, and Paul Rand… the trinity that built the visual spine of the modern world (My mother worked with Paul Rand, prior to Stanley, coincidentally). His mind carried their DNA: precision, silence, proportion, restraint. Negative space as language. Minimalism as moral code.

And yet his heart belonged to the storytellers, the wanderers, the rabble, the kachinas.

We went out for Indian food that first day. When they asked what level of spiciness we wanted, we would answer at least 8 and then enjoy curries so hot they peeled memory off the bone. And then again, the next day. And the next. It became our communion. I’d sit across from him in those places that smelled of turmeric and smoke, and he’d unfurl stories about living in India, about the young technocrats whose lives he had slipped inside while writing The Hacker, about the way a country like India forces you to see the future and antiquity wrestling right there in the streets. He spoke of the Hopi nanny who raised him from ages three to six, who shared her language and myths, who marked him in ways no schooling or strategy session ever could. “To this day,” he told me once, lowering his gaze, “I believe the kachinas protect me.”

But he also spoke of an emotionally unavailable family, a childhood where feelings were rarely acknowledged but books were everywhere. His father forever reading, tearing through crossword puzzles like a man possessed. His mother an ecstatic polymath, a one-woman cultural mission who taught him to read before the first grade, dragged him through museums, steeped him in Shakespeare and Greek drama and the wild hilarity of Gilbert & Sullivan. A mother who fed him mythology and fables as if they were vitamins.

And somewhere in that mismatched upbringing, the silence of emotion, the loudness of intellect, Stanley learned to look harder, deeper, sideways. He learned to find meaning where others only saw symbols.

He saw branding not as commerce but as cosmology.

After Indian food, sushi became our second language. The grammar of raw fish became our shared dialect. The more we ate, the more he taught. Not with instruction, but with the easy unfolding of a life lived in restless pursuit of meaning.

He told me about the time he escaped Los Angeles, that sprawling mirage of newness, driving east with a Chinese girlfriend toward New York City, with only dreams and rudimentary skills and a willingness to sleep on a friend’s wood floor on the Upper West Side. He found work as a designer — low-grade, yes, but a foothold — and then stumbled into the French Industrial Development Agency, where a brilliant woman took one look at him and understood he could translate ideas into form. Paris soon followed. And from there: the world.

He told me about Basquiat. Not the legend, but the hungry, wary teenager he met at the Mudd Club through the painter Duncan Hannah. A kid living mostly on the street, brilliant and suspicious, carrying scraps of art that looked like they’d been torn from the future. Stanley bought his drawings. Fed him at the now-mythic “Caveman Dinners” he held every Friday night in his East 53rd Street apartment, where a dozen fascinating misfits crumpled into his home, devouring filet tails from Gaby the butcher, drinking wine until midnight, then heading downtown to dance until 4 a.m.

Once, he said, a young Basquiat made a maquette for a silkscreen Stanley proposed they publish together. But someone convinced him to abandon it. Those maquettes, of course, are now in private collections. A few even cite provenance from Stanley’s early ownership. A secret fingerprint of influence.

He told me about Andy Warhol. Not the mythic figure, but the man glimpsed secondhand, via Jed Johnson and the Factory’s strange gravitational pull. Visiting Andy’s house when Andy wasn’t home. Seeing the cookie jar collection, the oval Lichtenstein above the mantle. Running with the loose constellation of people whose lives orbited Interview magazine. Designing the typographic signature for Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party.

He told me how Dr. John, whose real name is Mac Rebennack, and how he became family. Not metaphorical family. Not industry-family. Family-family. The kind of man whose lap held Stanley’s three-year-old daughter as she demanded, “Play the ‘Big Chiefs,’ Mac,” and he did. A friendship that traversed cities and decades and veered between the sacred and the absurd. A friendship that yielded drawings, album covers, private concerts, and a quiet companionship that stitched itself across the years like a secret hymn.

He told me about designing 33 issues of BOMB Magazine from the mid ’80s through the early ’90s, back when downtown Manhattan still glistened with danger and promise. No handbook. No roadmap. Just raw necessity and the influence of Brodovitch humming like a tuning fork in his head. Poetry was the hardest to design, he said. You must never violate the author’s intention.

Then he told me about Medinge, and how it began around 2000 in a Swedish estate, a motley gathering of thinkers, spies, academics, and practitioners, where Stanley became CEO for eight years. How he built the website, shaped the identity, created the Brands With A Conscience awards in Paris. How he fought quietly, eloquently for humanistic branding, an idea born from years of seeing the industry drown itself in noise, manipulation, and the psychological strong-arming of consumers.

A brand, he would say, should behave like a good citizen. A brand should reflect conscience before commerce. A brand should be a vessel, not a megaphone.

He told me about Zürich, which taught him the purity of visual clarity. Chandigarh, which taught him the sanctity of master planning. The Jeanneret chair in Corbusier’s studio that, simply by existing, revealed something essential to him about modernism and intention.

He told me about the secret, intense strategic work he could never publicly claim, where he drafted a position paper for the Olympic bid of a world capital city, only to later see his very words quoted in global media defending Wolff Olins’ controversial identity.

He told me about rebranding the American Hotel & Motel Association, a sweeping project whose excellence earned a “1000 Points of Light” acknowledgment from the Bush Sr. White House. And how awards never mattered to him. He never joined organizations, never angled for recognition. “I wanted only to do the good work,” he said, and the room seemed to steady around the weight of that sentence.

He told me about a venerable private Swiss bank founded during the Napoleonic wars and how his work with Gottschalk brought them into the modern age, redrawing their legacy lion for the digital era, shaping annual reports that became quiet revolutions in financial communication. Years of work. Global influence. And complete discretion.

He told me about clients who surprised him by their generosity, and clients who pushed him so hard he had to sprint just to understand the technology beneath their requests. Cryptocurrency before the world knew the word.

He told me about New York businessmen who never disputed a bill, and Swiss NGO leaders who wanted an art-based initiative but didn’t know their own values enough to articulate a mission. He told me about telecoms wanting to brand themselves sustainable when they weren’t, and how he told them, bluntly, to fix their internal culture before selling a lie to the public.

“Brand scriptures,” he would say, “aren’t about words. They’re about truth.”

By then, I already knew: this man was my teacher. The one I hadn’t known I’d needed.

And then there were his stories of childhood… drawing a life-sized Superman on the garage wall at age four, receiving a wallop and still feeling proud. His grandmother Faye Mahler spinning yarns in Yiddish and English, knitting and talking in her shop, becoming the ancestral root of his instinct to narrate the world. His father wanting him to join the army, his mother pushing law or politics, his own misfires in architecture school, and the eventual salvation of landing at UCSB’s College of Creative Studies (both my brothers also studied and received their degrees from here, one with an extra degree in Indian Musicology), where Kenneth Rexroth, the poet, translator, essayist, took him in as a mentee. A door opening just when the hallway seemed to dead-end.

I realized then that Stanley’s life wasn’t linear; it was a constellation. A map of bright points connected by intuition rather than direction. In many ways, my own life was very similar, from musical pursuits, professional athletics, and a career that took me all over the world to elucidate the truths of global brands through events, art, music, collaborations, marketing, brand bibles, and storytelling.

He had lived everywhere. Places like Los Angeles, Marrakech, New York, Portland, India, France, Switzerland had been home, but he belonged only to the work. Or maybe the work belonged to him.

His travel writing for Lucire piled into more than a hundred pieces, featuring dispatches from Lugano, Paris, Tokyo rooftops, Versailles’ hidden corners, Delhi, Lisbon, Greece, Bali, Val d’Isère, Amritsar, Dharamshala, New Zealand, Malta, Sicily, Florence, Paris, Venice, Aix, Costa Rica, Croatia, London, India, California, Scotland. On and on. A global diary disguised as journalism.

He had written best-selling novels, including The Hacker and its sequel, Hack Is Back, which were part of an elaborate brand strategy to lift an emerging Indian IT company. Not a marketing campaign or plan, but rather a novel. While that story is amazing, my favorite novel of Stanley’s is Arborea. He used fiction as scalpel, microscope, mirror. It was such a compelling read; I found myself having devoured it over just two days.

He had lived enough for several lifetimes yet carried the air of someone perpetually beginning again.

At some point, I can’t remember when, he told me about Henry Diltz, the photographer who captured the American ’60s and ’70s without ever meaning to. They met in their twenties. Recently, we met for Indian food at Henry’s cabin tucked into a private artist enclave in Laguna Beach. Henry was too pure for the corrupt record people Stanley worked for then, so Stanley protected him by telling his bosses they couldn’t afford him. That single ethical gesture birthed a decades-long friendship that ricocheted from Seattle to Goa to Los Angeles to Paris to Uppsala. These days they speak every week.

So, as it was, Diltz lived inside the eye of the storm without trying to control it. And there was Stanley with his partner Paula Sweet (a multifaceted American artist, designer, and author known for her innovative "Muslin Mink" coats (now in the Met Museum), her insightful Couture Comix and Paula's Proverbs books about fashion and life, and her recent work in mental health through her podcast, The Truth About Mental Health, focusing on practical tools for well-being, often inspired by her travels and observations of humanity. When we met in Laguna at Henry’s place, Stanley and Paula were traveling through California with Henry during Grammy week, hoping his receiving of the Trustee’s Award, a list who previous inductees include the Beatles, Disney, and Duke Ellington.

Of course Stanley wrote Henry’s Grammy Trustees Award acceptance. Of course, Henry added the perfect ad-lib at the end: “Above all else, be correct.”

Of course, Stanley was there. He always is in the rooms that matter.

“People think Henry is just an old hippie with a camera,” he told me, smiling faintly. “Then they realize he’s a bodhisattva.”

Across years of conversation, over curry and raw fish, over emails and long silences punctuated by profound bursts, Stanley became, in the quietest possible way, the man who rearranged my inner architecture. Kind of makes sense, since architecture was an early love of his (and mine, as I studied it for many years).

He taught me that brands need scripture, not slogans. That clarity is a moral choice. That beauty is utility. That truth is a language. That silence is a strategy. That you cannot lie your way into a legacy. That art is not decoration but north star. That meaning is discovered, not invented. That intuition is memory of the future.

He taught me to see.

Not like a designer. Not like a marketer. Not like a businessman. I was already those things.

But like a human being moving through a world of symbols, signals, stories, lineage, pressure, contradiction, grace.

A human being who understands the responsibility of creation.

The world knows his résumé.

I know the man.

And because of him… because of the quiet force of his life, because of the way he smiled when telling me even the hardest truths, because of the uncompromising beauty of his mind, because of the monk-like steadiness with which he approaches meaning, my own work has been forever shaped, sharpened, humbled, enriched.

This chapter is a thank-you letter disguised as memory.

A compass disguised as prose.

A scripture disguised as story.

Stanley Moss taught me to see.

#StanleyMoss #WhatIsaBrand #TheManWhoTaughtMeToSee #BeliefOrSomethingLikeIt #CreativePilgrimage #BrandPhilosophy #HumanisticBranding #BrandAsBelief #CreativeGuidance #DesignAsMeaning #SeeingDifferently #StandingOnShoulders #LivingInfluence #TeachersAndGuides #WisdomInPractice #CreativeNonfiction #LiteraryBranding #ArtAndCommerce #CultureMakers #MeaningOverMarketing

The ballroom shimmered like an aquarium of sequins and salt air, the surf industry’s finest packed shoulder to shoulder in tuxedos and tropical gowns, their laughter ricocheting off the chandeliers. I stood just offstage at the Ritz-Carlton, Dana Point, the hum of fifteen hundred voices swelling like a restless tide. This was the Waterman’s Ball—the high holy night of our tribe, the evening when we toasted our saints and, if we were honest, ourselves.

After the emcee welcomed everyone and gave the first presentation, I was supposed to not only keep things moving, but to build the intensity of the night and introduce the honorees, plus remind everyone why we were there. Instead, I was caught in the noise: the clinking glasses, the bars overflowing, the hallway revelers half listening, the din of an ocean that refused to be tamed. Somewhere inside that chaos, I felt a calm that didn’t belong to me. The emcee’s voice faltered against the crowd, and I stepped forward, not with authority but with surrender.

I raised my hands. Once, twice, three times. Each motion softer than the last, like waves receding. And something impossible happened: the sound fell away. The clinking paused, conversations stilled, even the hallways hushed as if the building itself had taken a breath.

In that silence I spoke… not as an executive or host but as a conduit. I talked about why we had gathered, about Gerry Lopez and the grace of a man who had found stillness inside violence. I spoke about the ocean as teacher and mirror, how every paddle stroke is an act of faith. And as the words poured out, I realized I wasn’t controlling any of it. I was tuned into something wider, clearer, freer.

Later someone told me it was the best speech I’d ever given. Maybe. I only knew it was the truest (and only one I’ve ever given while on LSD). The room itself seemed to exhale.

That night cracked something open. It reminded me of the first time I learned what it meant to expand.

Esmarelda’s

Del Mar 1990. The smell of fresh scones and spilled coffee wrapped around the narrow room of Esmeralda Bookstore and Café. The crowd was intimate, half-pilgrims, half-professors, waiting to orbit the man who had taught a generation to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Timothy Leary—part oracle, part comedian, part scientist gone rogue—stood at the front holding the newest edition of Flashbacks.

He looked more professor than prophet: tweed jacket, bright eyes, a grin that carried both mischief and mercy. Every sentence seemed to curve toward laughter. He didn’t lecture; he riffed. He spoke about the brain as a cathedral, consciousness as a design challenge. “Most people,” he said, “furnish their minds like bad motel rooms—no art, bad lighting, and they never open the windows.”

The room oozed in knowing laughter, and I laughed too, though part of me was already memorizing the cadence of his thought.

When the last of the crowd drifted out, I lingered. He was packing up books and smiling at the mess of crumbs on the table. “My ride forgot me,” he said. “The universe always forgets a few of us on purpose.”

“Where are you headed?” I asked.

“Leucadia. I used to hide out there when the law got too interested.”

I offered to drive him in my 1972 VW van. The salt had permanently crusted in its seams; it smelled like surf wax and sunburn. He climbed in, slapping the dashboard like greeting an old friend.

We rolled north with the windows down, the night air tasting of eucalyptus and ocean. Leary talked the whole way—not about chemistry but about freedom. “Consciousness,” he said, “isn’t a ladder you climb; it’s a sea you swim. Most folks cling to the dock.”

He turned toward me and said something like, “You surf, right? Then you already know: you don’t conquer the wave, you dissolve into it.”

The Coast Highway shimmered under the moonlight. As he spoke, I could feel the rhythm of his mind—playful, curious, utterly unconcerned with convention. He gestured toward the horizon. “There’s the trick,” he said. “Push away what drags you down. Pull in what lifts you. It’s not rebellion, Michael; it’s buoyancy.”

When I dropped him at a small house near the bluffs, he pressed his hand to the window. “Keep expanding. The map’s not done with you yet.”

I drove home feeling as if the night itself had rewritten me.

INTERLUDE: THE FATHER OF THE PSYCHEDELIC MOVEMENT SHARES FLASHBACKS

He wasn’t just another author doing a bookstore circuit. Timothy Leary carried with him the hum of a cultural fault line that had once cracked the entire American psyche in two.

Harvard psychologist. Fugitive. Philosopher. Trickster. The father of the so-called psychedelic movement, though that phrase feels too small now, too journalistic. He wasn’t selling escapism; he was mapping inner space with the same intensity as NASA mapped the stars.

Back in 1960, at Harvard’s Center for Personality Research, he’d dared to treat consciousness as a frontier instead of a diagnosis. He dosed professors and poets, theologians and inmates, insisting that what they saw in the kaleidoscope of their minds was not delusion but data. It was heresy dressed in lab coats, and eventually the university locked its doors to him. The state followed suit, and (after an original sentence of 30 years in prison for possession of marijuana) he spent years behind bars for what he called “exploring the software of the soul.”

Then came the escape, literally. He slipped out of prison with help from the Weather Underground, a Houdini act that turned him into both outlaw and icon. His road wound through Algeria, Switzerland, Vienna, Beirut, Kabul. Each stop another chapter in the long improvisation that was his life. William Burroughs once wrote that Leary’s story felt like “science fiction with fingerprints.” He wasn’t wrong.

Now, decades later in 1990, the man stood before us in a café in Del Mar, reading from Flashbacks—his autobiography, his confession, his cosmic comedy. He spoke not with regret but with the giddy precision of someone still enthralled by the possibilities of being alive. He quoted Cary Grant’s LSD revelations like gospel, laughed at his own incarcerations, and treated his exile as a punchline the universe had written just for him.

The room smelled of coffee and sugar and a little bit of ozone, as if lightning were about to strike. You could feel history pressing against the walls, not the kind that sits in museums but the kind that still vibrates, unfinished. Listening to him, I realized this wasn’t nostalgia; this was transmission. The man who once told a generation to turn on, tune in, drop out was now standing in front of us, older, yes, but unbowed, still urging us to tune in… not to a drug, but to our own circuitry.

And when the signing line thinned and the night air crept through the doorway, I stayed behind. The crowd left with autographs; I stayed for the afterglow.

He looked up at me and grinned. “You hung around for the encore,” he said.

“I think I was waiting for the next chapter,” I told him.

“Good,” he said, closing the book. “Maybe you’re supposed to write it.”

Experiments in Expansion

Throughout the rest of the nineties, I kept chasing that edge where control dissolved into communion. I found it in motion: in running, in racing, in surfing, in performing. Each effort a meditation on how much weight the self could shed.

The first real test came at a massive triathlon in Ventura. I had a hotel and race fee paid for by the race director, but I had been sick for weeks with what would end up being Mono or Chronic Fatigue. I wasn’t sure I could finish, so I just told myself, “Get through the swim, and you can drop out.” With that inner dialog, I also gave myself permission to partake of some LSD. I mean, who would do that? I think Timothy would approve…

Dawn was fog-soft, the sea a silver plate. I stood among thousands of athletes, wetsuits squeaking, hearts thrumming. The horn sounded, and we plunged into the Pacific.

Something happened as I moved through the water: time thinned. The noise of the pack fell away. My body stopped feeling like mine and became a single note in a larger chord. Every breath was rhythm, every stroke a conversation with fluidity. Like the speech at the Waterman’s Ball, the effort seemed to come from outside of me, or rather, way deep inside me, both quantum and celestial.

By the time my feet hit sand again, I was in seventh, laughing—half from exertion, half from the wild clarity that comes when every barrier drops away. So, I kept going, in spite of my body’s illness. The bike leg ended, and I was still in seventh. But the run unfolded in a different way, perhaps as it was the act closest to my being.

I could see each of the guys in front of me, and more importantly, I could see the leader way up ahead, as he was being escorted by a couple lead vehicles and a press moto. It wasn’t a blur of breath and light. Rather, it was this steady, guided output of energy that allowed me to pass each one in front of me until about 2km to go, when I approached the leader and his escorts, finally coming up alongside of him.

As we passed the one-mile to go mark, he gave me one of those side glances that was less a welcome gesture and more a quip of “Who invited you?” I looked back at him and said, “You blew it.”

“Huh?” he said.

I said, “You blew it, I’m a miler, there’s no way you can beat me.”

I attacked him, just as that comment confused his inner dialog enough to let me go on to a glorious victory—the last triathlon I ever did. When I crossed the finish line, someone shouted my name, but it felt like they were calling to a ghost I’d already outgrown.

That race taught me what Leary meant when he said, “Think for yourself, question authority.” The authority wasn’t government or culture; it was fear. It was the small voice insisting you stay the same. It also taught me the subtle skill of planting seeds in the minds of those around us, hoping they may find purchase in the soil of their own cultivation.

Years later, I found myself paddling alone from Swami’s toward Pacific Beach for what would be thirty-five miles of open water replete with a Great White Shark encounter. The morning began calm, the ocean a mirror. By midday the wind had turned, and the swells rose like moving continents. I kept stroking, rhythm locked to breath, mind wide open.

Somewhere past the halfway mark the world slipped its edges. The horizon breathed. The sea seemed to inhale me. I wasn’t fighting the distance anymore; I was inside it. Every memory, every loss, every ambition floated up and dissolved. For hours afterward I carried that stillness like a secret language.

When I reached shore, no one knew what had happened, and I couldn’t explain it anyway. All I could say was that I felt weightless.

Those moments—on the course, on the sea, onstage with music pulsing through my body—were less about achievement than about surrender. Each was a rehearsal for freedom, a test of how far I could stretch before snapping back into self.

Sometimes I imagined Leary watching, grinning from whatever cosmic perch he’d built. “Set and setting,” he’d whisper. “You got the setting right.”

The Art of Expanding — Part II

Years rolled like tides, carrying me from one incarnation to the next—publisher, athlete, musician, executive, wanderer. Each role felt less like a mask and more like another way to breathe. The further I went, the clearer it became that expansion wasn’t about addition but subtraction: losing fear, doubt, expectation, everything that kept the horizon from widening.

By 1995 I was touring a lot with Soul Scream, a band that grooved with the same raw vibration that had always run under my skin. We were booked at the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset, opening for Primus—a night that smelled of stale beer, sweat, and promise. I remember the crowd as a living organism, hungry and molten, the stage lights so bright they seemed to pierce through bone.

When the set ended, the room buzzed like an over-amped amp. I ducked backstage, still vibrating, when I saw him—Leary, thinner now, hair silvered to starlight, a twinkle of mischief still orbiting his eyes. His son Zach stood beside him, beaming, half proud, half protective.

“Do you remember the night I drove you from Del Mar?” I asked.

He squinted, grinning. “Yes,” he said, “in that VW van.”

A perfect recall, as if time itself had been waiting to complete the sentence.

We talked for an hour, or maybe ten minutes—it’s hard to measure time when it loops back on itself. I shared with him the myriad psychedelic experiences I had enjoyed since meeting him. The Boston Marathon on two hits of acid, playing in front of 15,000 people, speaking in front of 1,500 people, winning the triathlon, surfing Waimea Bay. He marveled at each of these experiences, asking if I had done them alone, and I had. He told me he was writing The Art of Dying, which ended up being titled Design For Dying.

“It’s the last adventure,” he said, smiling instead of frowning. “People think dying is the end. Nah—it’s the big upload. You can’t take the body with you, but you can keep the curiosity.”

He laughed that quick, contagious laugh, the sound of someone still fascinated by everything. “You’re doing it right,” he said. “You’re living experiments, not running from them. Keep at it. Expansion isn’t rebellion—it’s devotion.”

That was the last time I saw him in person. The following spring, word spread that he’d slipped the tether with characteristic flair—ashes scattered, a portion even launched into orbit. Typical Timothy: leaving Earth without really leaving it.

INTERLUDE: DESIGNING THE EXIT

Leary liked to call his diagnosis “Mademoiselle Cancer,” as though death were another character in his lifelong performance—uninvited, maybe, but still worthy of a costume change. Where most people step toward the end in fear, he leaned in with the same irreverence he brought to every frontier.

His final book, Design for Dying, wasn’t a treatise on despair. It was a script for a better ending—a reminder that dying could be intentional, expressive, even celebratory. He imagined exits with the punctuation of fireworks: consciousness uploaded into circuitry, bodies chilled for later lifetimes, spirits carried forward by code and curiosity.

What mattered wasn’t the technology. It was the posture—the refusal to let fear write the final act.

In those last months he showed us, with outrageous grace, that the art of dying is simply the art of living without flinching.

Flashbacks

The years since have been filled with echoes. Sometimes they arrive in motion: running marathons, winning bike races, the city streets turning to a river of light, every stride, every pedal stroke, dissolving into the next until I was certain the whole world was breathing through me. Other times they arrive in stillness: sitting at dawn on the porch in Leucadia, the marine layer pressing against the windowpanes like a gentle hand.

In those moments I can hear him again, voice like a grin: “You’re as young as the last time you changed your mind.”

He taught me that expansion isn’t about escaping reality but enlarging it—stretching perception until the ordinary becomes luminous. He called it “neurological yoga.” I just call it living.

I’ve come to understand that every act of reaching—every race, every wave, every note played in front of strangers—is a small rehearsal for transcendence. The body is the lab, the heart the compass, the imagination the only map that matters. When fear shows up, I remember Leary waving his hands in that half-mocking, half-holy gesture and saying, “Caution is the polite word for paralysis.” Then I move forward anyway.

Leucadia, Now

The house I live in sits not far from where I dropped him off that first night. When the day allows, I walk with Ruffy to the bluff and watch the ocean unspool below. Pelicans skim the surface like living hieroglyphs; surfers wait for sets that may never come. Dolphins love it here too. The horizon breathes in and out, patient as a mantra.

I think of how he raised his arms in my van that night—one hand pushing away the sediment of fear, the other scooping in the wild light of curiosity and joy. It occurs to me that he wasn’t gesturing to some cosmic truth; he was showing me how to live.

We meet certain people not to find answers but to become better questions. Leary remains one of mine—a living riddle about freedom, curiosity, and the courage to keep becoming.

I still hear him whenever I edge toward comfort: Keep expanding, Michael. The map’s not done with you yet.

And so, I do. In the way I ride, the way I build brands, the way I write. In the way I wake each morning determined to be involved with everything that breaks the caution of our getting up and leaving for a brighter day.

The art of expanding, I’ve learned, is simply the art of believing that the next horizon will always be wider if you’re willing to pedal, paddle, or pivot toward it.

#TheArtOfExpanding #TimothyLeary #Belieforsomethinglikeit #PersonalGrowth #Consciousness #Storytelling #EnduranceLife #SurfCulture #PsychedelicHistory #Leadership #Belief #Transformation #Expansion #LinkedInArticle

The Beginning of a Beautiful Chaos

By the time I found myself standing on a floating tower at Cloudbreak, I’d already spent years directing some of the most complex and colorful events on earth, from the Ironman World Championships in Kona, to the Orange County Marathon (which ran from Angel Stadium to UC Irvine through six municipalities), to the World Cup Skateboarding at Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne, and a string of music festivals that could make a logistics manager weep.

But nothing, truly nada, prepared me for the Globe Fiji Pro.

Directing an event in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, miles from infrastructure or even stable ground, was a confluence of chaos, curiosity, and creativity. It was one of the greatest challenges of my professional life, and ultimately, one of the most rewarding.

There are a few places on earth that feel like they were built for revelation. Cloudbreak, the hollow left reef off Tavarua in Fiji, is one of them.

From 2005 through 2008, I had the surreal honor of helping bring the world’s best surfers to that reef as Executive Director of the Globe Fiji Pro. It was five years of prep, passion, exhaustion, and magic that would come to define the modern era of the World Championship Tour (now the WSL).

It wasn’t just a contest. It was a living, breathing, cinematic experience. It was a test of courage and creativity that spanned oceans and cultures… all from the most remote location of any World Championship Surfing event.

It took a global village: the keepers of Tavarua, the chiefs of the local islands, our endlessly kind Fijian hosts, and a ragtag international crew who believed that if we could beam a live surf contest from a tower in the middle of the Pacific, then anything was possible.

2005: The Perfect Storm

The 2005 Globe WCT Fiji has since entered surf lore as The Perfect Storm.

As Surfline reported at the time, “A massive, long-period southerly swell detonated across Cloudbreak and Restaurants, producing the best surf ever seen for a WCT event.” The official Globe timeline still marks that moment as one of the most perfect contests in professional surfing history. The news of this swell brought the eyes of the surfing world to Fiji. Even Laird Hamilton flew over from Hawai’i to surf the largest Cloudbreak ever during our contest window…

When the storm hit, Cloudbreak transformed from a tropical dream into raw, roaring power. Just inside, at Restaurants, the razor-sharp reef famous for its precision and peril, waves began to reel off with mechanical perfection. They came one after another, unrelenting, as did the surfers chasing them. In one pre-contest session we filmed for Secret Machine, Bruce Irons disappeared into a cavern so long it seemed to defy physics—nineteen full seconds inside the tube—before emerging to the thunder of the largest crowd ever gathered on Tavarua’s shoreline at Restaurants.

Kelly Slater, then a six-time world champion, put on a performance so flawless that Surfer Magazine simply called it “the greatest WCT contest ever held.”

In the final, Slater faced Globe’s very own C.J. Hobgood in flawless six-to-eight-foot perfection at Restaurants. Kelly posted three nine-point rides, locking C.J. into a combination. His backhand tube-riding over that shallow coral was surgical, fearless, and otherworldly.

That win, his second in a row after Tahiti, returned him to #1 in the world for the first time since 2003 and set him on course for his seventh world title.

“For a few days in Fiji,” one journalist wrote, “Slater was surfing not waves, but time itself.”

Broadcasting from Nowhere

We weren’t just producing a surf contest; we were inventing a new way to tell the story of surfing.

Our “broadcast booth” was a scaffolding tower bolted to a coral reef three miles offshore. No cables, no safety net — just airwaves. We transmitted our feed through the sky from that tower to Tavarua, then to Plantation Island, and finally to the Fijian mainland for global satellite relay.

Every gust of wind threatened to knock us offline. Salt spray fried electronics. The tower swayed. The Pacific tested our faith hourly.

And yet, somehow, it worked.

With Mike Hill orchestrating the production and Steve Douglas nailing the impossible logistics, from boats to bandwidth to backup generators, we pulled off a live broadcast from what was essentially a floating dream. Joe Guglielmino (Joe G.) filmed everything with his trademark mix of grit and grace, and Chris Cote, our voice and ringmaster, hosted with equal parts humor and heart. Brian Robbins tended to our athletes’ every need.

The daily recap shows — edited on the islands and broadcast globally — became as popular as the heats themselves. In fact, some drew more viewers than the competition. They captured the feel of the event — the laughter, the exhaustion, the poker games, the camaraderie. It was surfing’s first truly immersive, global broadcast.

We didn’t just show surfing; we showed the life that surrounds it.

The Heart of Fiji

No story of the Globe Fiji Pro is complete without honoring the people of Fiji — the keepers of Tavarua, the families of Plantation, the chiefs of the nearby islands, and the smiling souls who made us feel like kin. I was lucky enough to be the honored guest of all the local chiefs at the opening presentation where I got to express our sincere gratitude for their hospitality and grace, as well as the opportunity, as luck would have it, to showcase the best surf ever for a World Tour event.

Every dawn began with a chorus of laughter and the smell of coconut fires. The local boatmen navigated reefs by instinct, threading between coral heads while humming songs older than any of our surfboards.

When the waves went flat, they invited us into their world to share kava, dance, play ping pong, and stories passed through generations. Their warmth anchored us. Their joy was the heartbeat of the entire production.

The Fijian hosts didn’t just make the event possible, they gave it its soul.

2006: Reinvention and Revelation

How do you follow perfection? You evolve.

In 2006, we deepened the experiment. The broadcast team grew sharper; the storytelling more cinematic. Joe G. was simultaneously filming Secret Machine, New Emissions of Light & Sound (Globe’s avant-garde surf film), and the Fiji event became part of that living canvas.

We embedded with surfers, following them through dawn surfs, downtime, and delirious nights, capturing moments that blurred the line between sport and art.

We had built the platform; now we were exploring its emotional depth.

Globe’s own Damien Hobgood would win this one in a magnificent heat against Shaun Cansdell. Legions of fans cheered from the channel on boats of all sizes and shapes.

2007: The Coup

Then, reality intervened.

In 2007, as we prepared to return, Fiji’s military commander staged a coup d’état. The government fell. Travel advisories went up. Insurance evaporated overnight.

The event was canceled.

We were crushed. But what remains remarkable is how our relationships with the Fijian people endured… rooted in respect, laughter, and countless shared meals under coconut palms. When we eventually came back, the welcome was even warmer.

2008: Return to the Dream

When the Globe Fiji Pro returned in 2008, it felt like a homecoming.

The webcast team — now battle-hardened from years of reefside chaos — wrestled with transmission dropouts and bandwidth gremlins all week. As Jay Johnson of Wetsand later wrote, “There’s nothing easy about producing a live event from a tower at Cloudbreak.”

But when it worked, it was magic. And Kelly Slater and CJ Hobgood, once again made the finals together.

Slater won again, collecting his 37th CT victory, and in doing so, closed the loop on one of surfing’s greatest modern rivalries - the two Floridians. The waves might not have been as biblical as 2005, but the emotion was just as intense. The world watched, live, from thousands of miles away, proof that the dream could survive even a coup, a storm, and the limits of technology.

Planting Forests, Not Just Flags

Long before sustainability became an industry buzzword, we launched Globe First, which was an initiative to offset our event’s carbon footprint.

In 2005, we became the first surf brand to plant forests to balance our impact, establishing reforestation projects in Nicaragua.

It wasn’t a marketing tactic; it was a statement of gratitude — to the earth, the ocean, and the islands that hosted us.

Legacy of a Dream

The Globe Fiji Pro remains a high-water mark; not just for performance, but for what a surf event could mean. It proved that surfing could be culture, community, cinema, and conscience all at once.

It also redefined what was possible technologically. The webcast innovations we pioneered from that reef tower became the foundation for the WSL’s modern streaming era. Every live heat you watch today, every drone shot and on-demand replay, traces its lineage back to that tower at Cloudbreak and the Glob crew’s ingenuity.

We were out there, suspended between the sea and the sky, believing that beauty was reason enough to try. The power is what made it so magnificent.

Looking back, what I remember most isn’t just the waves, it’s the faces. Steve Douglas hauling crates across the dock. Mike Hill calibrating a feed through a windstorm. Chris Cote laughing through the chaos. Joe G catching magic through a lens. The Tavarua boatmen steering into sunrise. Brian Robbins keeping everyone happy.

We were all part of the same strange, sacred orchestra.

For a brief, perfect time, we didn’t just document the dream. We lived it.

VINAKA.

A few years ago, I wrote the introduction to a book called Lost Dogs. It was a study of the dogs who frequented the Lost Abbey’s Confessional Pub. I chose to write it from our dog’s point of view. I hope you find his ‘dogdactic’ truths to be something edifying and/or entertaining—The Gospel According to Ruffy.

My person likes to take me places and I’m always happy to go, I never complain or ask why. Besides, I love sticking my nose out the window… even my whole head. You wouldn’t believe the things I can smell. As you know, I have an olfactory sense that is like a million times better than my person, so I’ve got that going for me.

Anyway, my person likes to go to this place called The Confessional. I think his frequent visits have to do with some deep need for absolution, which is truly a human thing. But I guess there is something therapeutic for both us there. For me, I get to learn new things about him; things he doesn’t share with me on our walks. For him, however, the experience is almost transcendental… the practice of confession has deeply ancient, religious roots that don’t mean much to me, but I can see the benefits in him, and the drive home is usually more festive.

Not to be ‘dogdactic’, but I should note, the act of confessing—of seeking absolution—was designed not just to let the person who is confessing spill their guts, but it is also a sort of collective anecdote… where intimacy with a community has been destroyed by vice, it can only be brought back by the restoration of a lost confidence—that is, through the intimacy created by confession.

Now here is the part where my person and I differ, philosophically and anatomically. In fact, it’s this very specific peccadillo of my person’s I chuckle about. He never takes the time to consider that I don’t hang on to things the way he does. The anatomy of my dog brain and my cognitive abilities are superior to that of his. You see, the cerebral cortex in my brain, the part responsible for higher-order thought functions and language, is not developed to be human-like, with its silly conceptual thinking. I have, like all my canine friends, an anatomical feature which makes me incapable of feeling guilt, which allows me to forgive easily, because I don’t have the encumbering framework that structures and retrieves memories in human detail.

Sure, I can hear you now, “This is an impediment that turns out to be a gift,” as if it’s some Rain Man like quality in an otherwise compromised furry body. But, let’s be honest, since we’re best friends, my ability to let go of past wrongs—to come back again and again—is just about the greatest gift I provide my person. It’s not like I don’t remember that he stepped on my paw, forgot to give me food this morning or hit me with the car door. It’s just that I don’t hold onto it the way that he might.

I hope he reads this that he doesn’t try to write me off like I don’t have a good memory. I have an excellent memory. Why the hell do you think I freak out when we’re pulling up to Dog Beach or squeak and whine and pace with excitement as he turns onto our street? Yeah, I remember.

So, my admonition to my person, because he thinks he has the big brain in this relationship, is that thinking this way is more of a burden than a blessing. Sometimes he can get in his own way and hinder his relationship with me unnecessarily. He might do well to take a page out of my book; let it go.

I bet if you were to ask him in the confessional what I’ve taught him, he’d share with you in a hushed voice (not like the one he uses to call me back in the house) that he’s grateful for everything I have taught him, especially this marvelous capacity for forgiveness.

So, the next time you’re lost, try looking down instead of up. You might just find a reminder at your feet who’s ready for his dinner. While you are down there, here’s my checklist for making time at The Confessional more about drinking and less about absolution:

· Just forgive

· Be open

· Be in the moment

· Give your time

· Be loyal

· Have courage (try a new beer for cryin’ out loud)

· Be playful

I hope after reading this my person comes to realize that he still has a lot to learn from me. Despite his supposed intelligence, science, critical thought and advanced technology, it seems he could take a cue and be slow to anger, quick to forgive and even quicker to seek forgiveness from others whom he has wronged.

I so look forward to the day he can be a bit more like me. If nothing else, I wanna play more.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go pee.

Absolutely,

Ruffy

H. R. Rufnstuf

#LostDogs #DogsOfSubstack #CanineWisdom #Forgiveness #TailWagTruths #LetItGo

Six years ago, I wrote about a surfboard—an unridden Timmy Patterson thruster that sat in my shed as a silent monument to missed opportunities. I wrote it six years after the actual event

JoJo, my son, and I had won it at the Waterman’s Ball, imagining it would be our shared vessel for sunburns, laughter, and those elusive moments that stitch a life together.

When I found it—still unwaxed, still unridden—I felt that gut-punch of regret. It wasn’t about the board. It was about time. About how quickly our best intentions get buried under busyness, how work can so easily edge out wonder.

Back then, I promised we’d ride it. We did. And it was magic—imperfect, fleeting, but magic nonetheless.

But what happened after mattered far more than that single session.

The Power of Quantity

Exactly one year ago next week, I took JoJo golfing for the first time. Neither of us knew that first round would spark a full year of full‑on golf.

Somewhere in that year, he became enamored with the game—its maddening puzzles, its quiet beauty. And he got good. Fast.

What I learned was simple but profound: quality time is often born out of sheer quantity.

Not one “perfect” outing, but hundreds of small, ordinary ones—nine holes at dusk, practice sessions at the range, long walks to the next tee box.

The hours stacked up. And in those hours, connection, trust, and joy quietly bloomed.

This week, JoJo moved back to New York City to start a new program after graduating from NYU last year.

It’s exciting to see him continuing to grow, but bittersweet too. The quantity of time we’ll have together just dropped dramatically.

And that makes me more grateful than ever for the time we did have—the rounds, the conversations, the quiet in‑between moments that became our shared history.

The Lesson for All of Us

This isn’t just about parenting. It’s about how we choose to show up—at home, at work, in life.

We obsess over “quality time.” But what if the real secret is quantity?

What if, in leadership, it isn’t the polished keynote or the annual offsite that truly matters—but the messy middle, the consistent check‑ins, the small acts of being there?

What if we stopped trying to manufacture the perfect “memory” or “bonding moment,” or crafting that Instagram post—and instead simply chose, again and again, to be present?

Belief, as I once said on a TEDx stage, isn’t a banner you wave. It’s a quiet choice you make, over and over.

The Work of Presence

Presence is a superpower.

It turns managers into mentors, colleagues into collaborators, teams into communities.

It says: I value this time with you enough to make it ordinary and frequent, not just special and rare.

And those ordinary moments—like a round of golf at dusk or an impromptu brainstorming session—compound. They become the real history we share.

Becoming, Together

The board in our shed taught me that. So did JoJo. So did golf.

Because in the end, belief isn’t about winning—it’s about becoming.

Becoming the kind of leader who invests the time, not just the speeches.

Becoming the kind of friend or parent who chooses presence over perfection.

Yes, we rode the board. But more importantly, we kept riding—waves, fairways, and whatever life handed us next.

And maybe that’s the quiet lesson here: the only thing more fleeting than a wave is the moment you didn’t take to catch it.

Where in your life—or your work—could you simply show up more?

Those extra hours, the ones that look ordinary in the moment, often turn out to be the ones that matter most.

This idea—belief as a choice we keep making—is at the heart of my TEDx Talk and my book, Belief, or Something Like It.

👉 Watch the TEDx Talk

I skateboarded until my knees stung and my palms bled, surfed until the sun slipped behind the horizon like a shy guest at a party. I dribbled a soccer ball through the patchwork of shifting shadows, flicked baseballs over chain-link fences, and attempted to hang in the air on a basketball court as if I might never come down.

But soccer held a particular sway over my restless soul — that Fram jersey felt like a second skin, stitched with the sweat of early mornings and twilight drills. My number was 4, a talisman I would carry all the way through my college career, a silent totem of patience and practice.

Then came May of 1977 — the month that changed the whole damn orbit of my life. I got my first real 10-speed bike – a gold Schwinn Varsity. A machine of freedom, a cathedral of chrome and possibility. I entered my first road race — 48 miles of rolling hills and sun-scorched asphalt. Legs screaming, lungs clawing for air, skin rubbing, heart hammering like a jazz drummer on speed.

A month later, I stood at the start line of the 10th Annual Palos Verdes Marathon. Twelve years old, bones far from hardened, a head still swirling with childish reveries. Yet there I was, toeing the line with the big dreamers, the weekend warriors, the hometown heroes. And for 31 years straight, the PV Marathon held a variety of things for me — my sanctuary, my silent reckoning, my annual measure of spirit. It became a commitment, an annual pilgrimage no matter how little I had run in the 364 days between races, a streak I refused to break until my knee no longer worked.

I never won outright, but I led it like a ghost chasing its own echo many times, only to falter in the fleeting miles. I snatched division wins, danced on the edge of exhaustion, and in 1979 — a year that saw 8,000 runners and 54 boys toe the line in the 14 & Under Division — I set a record that still stands like an ancient monolith: 2:49 at age 14, all 4'11" and 97 pounds of me. Just a boy, barely shaking off the chokehold of asthma, buoyed by a new drug that gave me wings — and sometimes the dry heaves if I hadn’t eaten properly.

It wasn’t about the medals or the local legends whispering my name. It was about testing the tensile limits of my spirit. I learned early: anything is possible if you commit, if you surrender to the silent monastic discipline of training (which I would always overdo), if you're willing to share long miles with discomfort until it walks beside you in silence.

In Palos Verdes, finishing that marathon was more than a feat — it was a coronation. They’d read every finisher’s name over the school loudspeakers, echoing through dusty classrooms like a gospel. I still hear those names bouncing around in my mind, the roll call of young dreamers daring themselves toward the horizon.

Later, marathons became something else — part quest, part communion. I chased gnarlier courses and wilder places: the raw, rugged hills of Catalina where bison roam, the self-inflicted sufferfests of ultra distances. I ran 50 km in training just to see where the mind frays and the soul starts humming.

I even dipped into the 2:20s for the marathon a couple times — a number that still flickers in my mind like a distant lighthouse. But I never gave myself fully to that singular siren. Because back then, I was spinning out 300 to 500 miles on the bike each week (commuting 85-miles a day five days a week for a year, the asphalt humming under my tires, the wind my constant companion. Running was just a few days a week, a secret lover to cycling’s all-consuming embrace.

Being in motion — from here to there and back again — became more than a pastime. It was a philosophy. A lifeline.

And behind it all, there was a figure who loomed large in my young imagination: Steve Prefontaine. Pre wasn’t just a runner — he was a flame flickering against the cold wind of convention, an unrelenting spirit who turned pain into poetry. His fearless front-running, his raw, unfiltered drive lit a fire in me, made me want to see what I was made of when everything else was stripped away.

My parents, beautifully reckless in their support, fanned that flame. They nurtured my wild urges to go long and go hard. They didn’t hold me back; they handed me water bottles, cheered from the sidelines if they too weren’t running, let me fly. They believed in the strange gospel of movement as salvation.

Now that I’m older, I have the time and temerity to look back in rich, bone-deep appreciation. The roads of Palos Verdes weren’t dusty at all — they were sinuous, ever undulating ribbons of possibility, fringed by bougainvillea and kissed by the Pacific breeze. They offered magnificent views that could hush the noisiest mind. And there were trails, glorious dirt escapes that twisted through sagebrush and eucalyptus, where I spent much of my training, learning to listen to the earth and my own ragged breath.

I’m lucky beyond reason to have been born into a family where madness was the norm. All six of us marathoners, galloping down those winding roads, laughing in the face of so-called common sense.

I still remember my grandmother complaining at my mom, aghast: “Those kids running marathons? That’s child abuse!” We folded ourselves into laughter, our calves taut and our spirits untamed.

Those wild years sculpted me — mind, muscle, marrow. They taught me that every start line is a question, and every finish line is a fleeting answer.

Caption: 10 years after my first marathon, I got to represent the USA at the World Triathlon Championships in Nice, France. I also won the World Amateur Duathlon Championships.

And to this day, that lesson finds its way through everything I do. The long, weird, wonderful journey of pushing past what’s expected. In work, in play, in life — it’s still the same old song: go farther than you think you can, then go a little farther still.

Because in the end, we’re all just kids on a sinuous, sun-splashed road, our names crackling through tinny loudspeakers like some half-forgotten prayer, chasing that shimmering line on the horizon — that glimmering mirage of a distant city called time, forever just beyond our grasp, forever calling us forward into the golden hush of the unknown.

#ChasingHorizons #EnduranceMindset #PersonalGrowth #Resilience #PushingLimits #NeverStop #MyJourney #FromTheUnroad #MovementAsMetaphor #LessonsFromTheRoad

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Brands aren’t built in boardrooms; they’re baked in the mud, molded in the minds of a community, and seared into memory by moments that can’t be mass-produced. Nowhere is this more evident than in the curious case of the Belgian Waffle Ride (BWR) — a deliciously disruptive cycling circus that, in its fifteenth year, remains as irreverent, irrepressible, and irresistible as ever.

While gravel racing has grown into a full-on global gravel gala — with new events sprouting like mushrooms after a rainy Spring Classic — BWR isn’t just another number pinned to the peloton. It’s a movement, a mash-up, a madcap melding of mud, macadam, and mind games.

From Sunglasses to Singletrack: The Birth of BWR

The BWR wasn’t born in a vacuum or dreamt up in a dusty garage; it was meticulously concocted as an experiential marketing extension of SPY Optic. At its core, SPY’s mission was to cultivate a "happy disrespect for the usual way of looking at life," a cheeky, sun-drenched philosophy that aimed to get smiles on faces everywhere — its own vision of heaven on earth.

For BWR, this mantra morphed into "a happy disrespect for the usual way of racing a bike." At a time when roadies stuck strictly to smooth tarmac and "gravel" was still an unsexy synonym for your uncle’s driveway, the idea of sending road bikes into the dirt, up fire roads, down sinuous singletrack, and over chunky truck trails was borderline blasphemous.

This wasn’t just a new event; it was an entirely new form of racing that didn’t exist yet. In fact, it’s no exaggeration to say that BWR — along with a few other pioneering events — forced the bike industry’s hand to create the now-ubiquitous gravel bike category.

Rider Anecdotes: Mud, Madness, and Magic

Ask the riders, and you’ll hear a thousand stories. Like the one about the pro who flatted four times but still crossed the line beaming, clutching a goblet of Lost Abbey Devotion Ale in one hand and a waffle in the other. Or the rider who rode the final 20 miles on a shredded tire, egged on by a spontaneous support group of fellow masochists — all rewarded at the finish with a divine pour of Judgment Day Ale, as dark and complex as their day on the bike.

Or the countless stories of first-timers who underestimated the savage sand pits and soul-crushing singletrack, only to find themselves converted — reborn in a haze of sweat, dirt, and Carnevale Ale foam.

Each story becomes part of the BWR folklore, retold around kegs and fire pits long after the last rider limps across the line.

Beer: The Other Belgian Staple

No ode to BWR would be complete without raising a glass — preferably filled with a potent, yeast-driven, golden-hued Belgian ale. Beer isn’t a mere afterthought; it’s a cultural cornerstone woven into the fabric of every BWR event.

The Lost Abbey has been the spiritual liquid glue of BWR, crafting an alchemy of ales that match the event’s personality: irreverent, bold, and surprising. From the light and inviting Devotion Ale to the bright and playful Carnevale Ale, from the dark and decadent Judgment Day Ale to the fiery, hop-forward Inferno Ale — these brews are as much a part of the BWR identity as the waffles and wheelies.

When riders finally cross the line — battered, beaming, and sometimes broken — they’re greeted not just with high-fives and medals but with chalices brimming with The Lost Abbey’s finest. Because in BWR’s world, rehydration isn’t just functional; it’s celebratory, communal, and downright necessary.

Freddy Merckxury: The Digital Domestique

As if BWR’s brand weren’t already as layered as a Liege waffle, enter Freddy Merckxury — BWR’s AI-powered chatbot and digital brand extension. Freddy is the Flemish-flavored, fast-talking, never-pulling, always-wheel-sucking virtual sidekick who can dish out everything from detailed course profiles and survival strategies to waffle recipes and beer pairings.

He embodies the event’s voice: cheeky, clever, a touch mischievous, and always ready to help. He’s not just a bot — he’s a cultural companion, an encyclopedia of BWR lore, and a living example of how branding transcends logos and leans fully into living, breathing community touchpoints.

Historical Milestones: The Ride That Redefined Racing

From the first “Hell of the North (County)” edition in San Diego, where 118 curious masochists turned up to take on the 118-mile odyssey, to the sprawling multi-state, multi-nation series it has become, BWR’s history is punctuated by wild firsts and unexpected legends.

And now, we celebrate a staggering milestone: BWR has officially completed its 35th edition — more gravel races than any other organization has ever produced. The 35th was no ordinary spin around the block. It was the inaugural BWR Montana in Bozeman — an exhilarating success, perhaps the best course ever crafted in BWR history.

The Montana course exemplified everything that makes BWR extraordinary: a creative course cocktail of road, dirt, champagne gravel, snappy singletrack, and surprise sectors that had even seasoned pros questioning their life choices mid-climb. It was a masterclass in community building and an ode to brilliantly executed racing — a true testament to the spirit of BWR, proving yet again that suffering can be served with a side of smiles and suds.

Branded Films: Storytelling in Motion

Beyond the roads and the revelry, BWR has invested deeply in storytelling — with branded films that have become some of its most powerful marketing tools. Chief among them is THIS IS NOT A GRAVEL RACE, a cinematic love letter to the event's ethos that aired on Outside's cable TV network and reached hundreds of thousands of cycling enthusiasts around the world.

These films aren’t just highlight reels; they’re brand documentaries that capture the grit, the grins, and the glorious chaos of BWR in motion. They immortalize the community spirit, the audacity, and the sense of shared adventure that define the BWR experience. Each frame carries the brand’s DNA — authentic, raw, and joyfully defiant.

Iconic Logo and Seasonal Brand Alchemy

The BWR logo is more than an insignia; it’s a badge of bravery, a seal of silliness and suffering intertwined. It’s an invitation to embrace the chaos and to belong to a tribe that knows how to laugh through the pain.

Much like a fine Belgian Saison, each year BWR reimagines its branding elements — from jerseys to event posters — crafting fresh interpretations that capture the spirit of each edition while remaining unmistakably BWR. This seasonal reinvention keeps the brand bubbling with excitement, ensuring that every returning rider feels both at home and surprised — like finding a new note of pepper or citrus in a farmhouse ale that’s always been your favorite.

Peer-Driven Praise: Awards Worth Earning

BWR doesn’t just hand out medals for the fastest finishers; it celebrates the intangibles that make cycling a beautiful, brutal ballet. Peer-driven awards like the kUDOs Award (honoring the spirit of fallen friend Udo Heinz), Attaqeur (for those who light the race on fire), Hardman and Hardwoman (for supreme grit), and the 'Nspire Happiness Award (reflecting SPY’s original mission to spread smiles) turn the podium into a storybook of shared suffering and soul.

These awards embody the brand’s deeper philosophy: it’s not only about how fast you go but how fully you live, how boldly you ride, and how brightly you inspire.

The Bible, the Bumps, and the Belief

The importance of brand adherence goes beyond paint schemes and patch designs; it’s the bedrock of belief. A strong brand compels people to buy, to believe, and most importantly — to belong.

This is why the BWR brand thrives even as other events get lost in the fog of sameness. Riders come not just for the race but for the irreverence, the inside jokes, the knowing nods, and the communal suffering that feels like an inside secret shared only by the initiated.

SPY envisioned a world where "happy smiles sit on faces everywhere" — and BWR, in its dusty, delirious, waffle-and-ale-fueled way, has become that vision manifest on two wheels.

The Sweet Spot of Suffering and Smiles

As the Belgian Waffle Ride rolls into its fifteenth year, it doesn’t just celebrate survival — it celebrates evolution. It’s a reminder to all of us in the business of selling experiences, products, or even dreams that brand is the binding syrup that holds it all together.

Whether you’re concocting custom carbon, crafting culinary-themed energy gels, or plotting your next "epic" event, remember: the real race isn’t to the finish line — it’s to the heart.

So, here’s to BWR: a brand born from sunny irreverence, refined in the fire of fearless experimentation, celebrated across 35 legendary editions (and counting), served with a side of waffles, washed down with a Lost Abbey Devotion, Carnevale, Judgment Day, or Inferno Ale, amplified through films like THIS IS NOT A GRAVEL RACE, and now whispered across the world by Freddy Merckxury himself. Proof that when you stay true to your brand bible, the smiles — and the legends — follow.

#Branding #Cycling #BelgianWaffleRide #Marketing #Community #Storytelling #LostAbbey #FreddyMerckxury #BWR #THISISNOTAGRAVELRACE

Nearly 50 years ago, a box arrived at our door. Inside it: a pair of handmade Nike prototypes built by Bill Bowerman for his muse, Steve Prefontaine. These weren’t replicas. These weren’t retros. These were his shoes—the ones he trained in, the ones that pounded Oregon trails, the ones that carried the weight of promise and rebellion alike.

Pre left them at my Aunt Mary’s place in Portland—the same Mary he dated throughout college, the one who loved him dearly until his tragic passing in 1975. He was more than a houseguest in our home; he was Uncle Steve to me, a young asthmatic kid who clung to his every stride as if it were gospel. I ran my first marathon at 12 because of him. Not because I was chasing medals—but because I was chasing meaning.

Now, as we mark the 50th anniversary of his death, these shoes are entering the world stage through Sotheby’s ICONS auction—a curated celebration of culture-shifting footwear and the legends who wore them. You can view the listing and auction details here.

OregonLive called them “a time capsule of American grit,” while Runner’s World described them as “the rarest of relics in running,” but for me, these shoes have always been more than collectibles. They’ve been a north star. A reminder that greatness isn’t about accolades—it’s about authenticity.

These shoes represent:

• The birth of Nike, with Bowerman’s waffle iron still echoing in their soles.

• The soul of Pre, who became Nike’s first sponsored athlete.

• A movement, not just a man.

They are a time capsule of rebellion, style, and spirit. As Pre once said, “To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.” That gift lives on—not just in these shoes, but in anyone who runs to be better, not just faster. I like this quote from Pre even better, "Some people create with words, or with music, or with a brush and paints. I like to make something beautiful when I run. I like to make people stop and say, 'I've never seen anyone run like that before.' It's more than just a race, it's style. It's doing something better than everyone else. It's being creative.”

Imagine if more of us lived this way through our running shoes, instruments, pens, paint brushes or equipment.

The Sotheby’s exhibit opens tomorrow. The auction runs June 6–17, 2025.

It’s not just history on the block. It’s heart.

And if you want to experience the full story—including the love, the legacy, and the long road these shoes have traveled—click here to view the full deck.

Let the next leg of the journey begin.

With all the media coverage of late regarding Lunada Bay lawsuits and the ongoing saga of the Bay Boys’ gang-like territorialism over the surf spot and broader community, I thought I would offer up an insider’s purview on the dynamic at play—shared through an archetypical anecdote of Bay Boy bad behavior. I originally wrote this over 20 years ago for a book entitled "Surfing in the '70s."

I grew up in Palos Verdes, where my mom worked at PV High, just up the hill from Lunada Bay. From an early age, I knew the unspoken rule—outsiders weren’t welcome at Lunada Bay. The Bay Boys controlled the break with intimidation, vandalism, and outright threats. If you weren’t from PV, your car might get keyed, your tires slashed, or worse, you’d get run out of the water.

This wasn’t just localism; it was mob-like rule. Even when I was at Surfing Magazine, I received death threats in the mail, complete with chilling messages like "We know where your parents live." It wasn’t just about keeping waves to themselves—they wanted people to be afraid.

Despite decades of lawsuits, police intervention, and national scrutiny, the Bay Boys’ presence still lingers. Their illegal stone fort was torn down, and the city had to pay up in legal battles, but the culture of intimidation remains. Surfers still hesitate to paddle out, and the locals still send the message loud and clear: this wave isn’t for you.

That history—the aggression, the territorialism, and the deeply ingrained culture of exclusivity—is exactly what I explore in my latest article. It’s a personal account of the Bay Boys’ reign and why the Bay Boys of Lunada Bay never really left the ’70s.

It happened on a casual winter day while my friend and I were on the southern section of the open cliffs in Palos Verdes (PV) that line Lunada Bay, checking the waves from a ‘safe spot’ on the Avalanche side of the bay that’s usually not patrolled by the Bay Boys. There was a younger kid, about 13 years old, sitting along the edge of the cliff near us with his unwaxed, brand-new board straddling his knees. We didn’t think much of him except that his board wasn’t from one of the local shapers, but rather a South Bay shaper, which the kid didn’t know was like wearing a blue bandana to a Bloods BBQ. It was just the three of us checking out the surf at the Bay, when out of nowhere came a Bay Boy we only knew as ‘Jeff,’ a feeble surfer usually looking to compensate, walked past us in that classic Bay Boy style—low hanging pants, flannel shirt, Ray Bans and the duck-like shuffle affectedly conveying some sort of street cred... as if to belie his (family's) wealth. With a façade of genuine caring, Jeff walked right up to the kid and said in the nicest way, “New board, huh?” The kid replied with a smile, his new stick. Jeff said, “Lemme check it out.” And the kid easily handed it over to this seemingly innocuous character, and began answering the soft serve of questions Jeff delivered his way as the board was genuinely inspected in its every detail.

My friend and I were caught off guard by this surreal interaction. It just seemed so incongruous with everything we had ever witnessed growing up around this surf spot, especially with this Jeff character, who was notoriously pernicious to all but fellow Bay Boys. We pretended to talk to one another while listening to the kid answer the questions: “Who shaped the board?” “How thick is it?” “It’s small, huh?” “Why the double wings?” “What’s with the swallowtail?” “Where are you from?”

And then it happened…

Jeff began to hand the board back to the kid, but with one smooth lunge of devotion to everything his little mind and body aspired to be, the new board went hurling off the steep and tall cliff, swirling and twirling, whooping and whirling, briefly, almost miraculously, defying gravity on its way to a fate usually reserved for the most battered and yellow of old boards. All four of us watched for what seemed like a full minute as the board unraveled its spectacular dance of death, but the instant it was out of sight, Jeff turned to the kid and said, “Get the fuck out of here and never come back.” The kid even mustered a “you dick” before he began visibly weeping, just as Jeff turned to us, the only audience he had, chuckling oddly to himself as if he had just killed a rattlesnake.

Looking back, what was most noteworthy about the incident was the style in which it was perpetrated—like some well-rehearsed routine executed with flair, pomposity, and disdain, the Machiavellian nature of the act overshadowed its cowardly criminality and symbolized the Bay Boy existence. It was a unique affront, in that moment, in that person, in that subculture, which was lost in time but still intact in some odd radioactive way, with a half-life radiating intensity in a self-possessed fashion with self-preservation at its nucleus.

Jeff wasn’t afraid the kid was going to surf the Bay, not that day. No, Jeff’s act had a much deeper, more sentimental meaning behind it, besides making him feel taller and more potent. It was about preservation of the place, the people, the feelings and the fraternal magic. It was about keeping things the same, about holding onto the past and the purity of surfing Palos Verdes when things were much simpler. That kid, with his youthful exuberance and new board, was symbolic to Jeff of everything he and every other Bay Boy consciously or otherwise feared; that the newness of the modern, outside world could take it all away.

The reality that encased the PV surfer during the '70s—the spectacle of Lunada Bay and its Bay Boys, their codes, nicknames, personalities, and demeanors—seemed to carry with it an incredible, collective, unspoken desire to hold onto something nostalgic. It was as if the Bay Boy's customs, rites and rituals, clothes and attitudes could half-retrieve the magic of the early days. Maybe by wearing black wetsuits, riding outdated white boards, going leashless, shunning the new, listening to the Stones or The Who or The Dead, they could conjure it all back to life. The Bay Boys were nothing more than sentimental creatures looking to hold onto something precious, a wave, a feeling, a moment, a subculture, themselves, their parents’ money.

Like the gangs that developed in East Los Angeles during the mid-century, the Bay Boys were born out of a confluence of geography, sociology and economic factors. Though they weren’t born out of repression, they were born out of possession; for all intents and purposes, their parents owned the cliffs and, more importantly, the surf spots below them, which were aplenty and amazingly good during the winter months. They banded together to preserve their status quo, and they could do it, if they could keep the outside world off of their little island. (Oddly enough, PV actually used to be an island; the channel between it and the mainland eventually silted up to form the Los Angeles Basin.)

The Bay Boys are merely a reflection of the larger Lunada Bay culture, which has been informed by a long-held self-entitledness of the denizens of this bucolic yet small-minded community, and this includes surfers and non-surfers alike. They don’t want to share their waves, parks, roads, or even their sunset views with outsiders. Their tenets have been cultivated by a “it’s mine” mentality and the idea of preserving it for themselves, and they take their preservation to stylistically interesting extremes. Like real gangs, the Bay Boys have thrived on intimidation and notoriety. Many of their younger or more insecure members find cowardly vandalism or violence glamorous or necessary in order to maintain their individual status within the lineup. Like most groups, they have depended upon both individual and group participation.

Unlike legitimate groups or organizations, there hasn’t ever been one identified leader. In fact, those at the top are the least likely to be involved in anything negative, leaving the dirty work for those on the lower rungs of the pecking order—spurred on by the unscrupulous members’ directives. Most importantly, like other gangs, the Bay Boys have had their own hallmarks of identity: The clothes, the vehicles, the sunglasses, the stares, the music, the walk, the protocols, the P’s and Q’s. In the water, the style has been even more apparent. Besides the white boards and black wetsuits, there is a litany of behavioral characteristics that comprise their style, all with an intended purpose, a saving grace, that with a critical mass and less-than-critical thinking could preserve it all for a select few who would somehow never grow old (or up).

Surfing in PV was and still is controlled more or less by the Bay Boys, whose ethos was planted in the sixties but found purchase in the seventies. Ever since, PV has been caught in a time warp of out-of-date sensibilities that keep it purposefully ever-behind. While dramatic board advances were being made off The Hill, the few PV shapers kept to their insular world, content to stick to their own ways. Moreover, even though the leash was being widely produced by the mid-seventies, they were largely unused the entire decade amongst PV surfers (leashes were for kooks—which I still find has merit).

While the rest of the surfing world was growing in new ways, the Bay Boys maintained their integral mores; surfing longer, more gunny boards than needed, swimming into the rocks to gather their leash-less battered boards, riding waves with a style that harks back to earlier times but failing to push the performance extremes of the envelope they had intentionally sealed themselves into. Some would argue the Bay Boys pushed each other and grew their skills over the years, particularly through summer sojourns to Puerto Escondido, but somehow, they managed to keep the outside world away. It seems their own myopic efforts of not sharing managed to keep their dream alive. That is until now, as a number of incidences have drawn the attention of international media and ultimately the Coastal Commission, most compellingly represented in a couple federal class action lawsuits.

Still today, inspire of all the lawsuits, investigations, and civil judgments, just as it was in the '70s, on the surface Lunada Bay is a serene, beautiful, enchanting place that’s home to one of the best big wave spots on the California coast with slight crowds who share waves, take turns, patrol the cliffs and socialize together. But upon closer inspection, it’s easy to discern the sad tension, even angst, which permeates the fabric of their culture. Yes, many will agree the Bay Boys ride boards that are too big, with style that is antiquated; that their rituals are archaic, that their conduct is criminal. All true. But through all that, they've managed to stop time, to hold onto to something precious and preserve both the feeling and the place, and they’ve done so with a style all their own, and with a criminality that not only the ‘adults’ endorse, so too does the local law enforcement. It's a slice of paradise in the wild west, the California Dream, hidden right in the heart of LA. And no, you can't have any, still. Don’t even look at it.

#SurfCulture #Localism #SurfPolitics #Territorialism #SurfWars #BayBoys #LunadaBay #PalosVerdes #PVSurf #SoCalSurf #CaliforniaSurf #LAStories #LunadaBayBoys #SurfHistory #UntoldStories #BehindTheBreak #TrueSurfTales
#SurfingUnfiltered #Longform #FirstPerson #SurfJournalism #PersonalEssay
#NarrativeNonfiction

Why I’ve Gifted More Copies of Siddhartha Than Any Other Book

Over the course of my career—across companies I’ve led, brands I’ve built, and teams I’ve mentored—there’s one book I’ve gifted more than any other: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. Dozens of copies, handed to young people interviewing with me for roles in marketing, brand, or athletic ambassadorships. Not as a test. Not as homework. But as an offering.

It wasn’t about showing them what I valued. It was about giving them a mirror to better see themselves—and a compass for navigating what comes next.

A Brief Synopsis of Siddhartha

Siddhartha follows the life of a young man on a spiritual journey during the time of the Buddha. Dissatisfied with inherited teachings and traditional paths to enlightenment, Siddhartha sets out to discover truth for himself. Along the way, he lives as an ascetic, indulges in worldly pleasures, amasses wealth, experiences love, loss, and ultimately finds peace not in perfection, but in the flow of life—embodied by a river that becomes his final teacher.

It’s not a book about religion. It’s a book about self-discovery. And that’s why it’s so powerful.

What I Got Out of Reading It (Over and Over Again)

Every time I read it, something new surfaced. Here are the core lessons I carried forward—and hoped others would too:

Be Original, Not Imitative

Siddhartha doesn't follow any one doctrine—not even the Buddha's. He chooses to experience life directly rather than accept borrowed wisdom. That’s what I wanted young people to grasp. Whether you’re building a career, pitching a brand, or representing one—don’t parrot what you think others want. Be real. Be you. That’s what cuts through the noise.

The Journey Matters More Than the Job Title

We live in a world obsessed with milestones. But Siddhartha teaches that the learning along the way is what transforms you. When someone interviewed with me, I wanted them to see the role not as a destination, but a chapter in their unfolding story. This mindset helps people grow with humility and integrity.

Stillness in the Storm

Marketing and sports can feel like chaos. Deadlines, competitions, pivots, and pressure. Siddhartha reminds us that peace isn’t the absence of intensity—it’s how you show up in the middle of it. That’s the presence I looked for in teammates.

Embrace Your Contradictions

Siddhartha is a seeker, a lover, a failure, a sage. He lives many lives in one. Similarly, the people who thrive in branding and sport are often multifaceted. The quiet ones with fire. The extroverts with depth. I always wanted people to stop feeling like they had to be one thing. It’s the mix that makes you powerful.

Listen More Deeply

Siddhartha learns most not through lectures, but through listening—to people, to silence, to the river. That’s what great brand builders and athlete-ambassadors do: they tune in. To culture, to people’s needs, to their own gut. That kind of listening builds resonance and loyalty—something no algorithm can fake.

A Book as a Culture Signal

In giving someone Siddhartha, I was never just sharing a story—I was offering a mindset. A challenge to consider how they approached getting hired, how they built their careers, and how they lived their lives. It was my way of saying:

If you’re building a brand—personal or business—whether through content, community, or competition

—Siddhartha is like a philosophical compass. It helps the people around you stay true to themselves, and by extension, to the brand's spirit. Sharing it signals that you’re not just after performance—you’re building a culture.

#Siddhartha #HermannHesse #LeadershipWisdom #BrandCulture #MarketingMindset #AthleteMentorship #CareerAdvice #BuildTheBrand #AuthenticLeadership #PurposeDriven

It’s shouted in celebration, in awe, in approval—at flamenco dancers, bullfighters, and maybe most often… kindergarteners who have finally braved show-and-tell.

Let me explain.

When I was a kid, I was paralyzed by the thought of speaking in front of people. I wasn’t just shy. I was stomach-in-knots, sweat-in-my-socks, wide-eyed-wondering-how-I'd-escape shy.

In kindergarten, we all had to participate in show and tell. You brought in something you made or loved and shared it with the class. Innocent enough. Unless you were me.

Of course, my day was slotted last on the calendar. So, I had a full year of fretting. A full year of fear. But when the dreaded day arrived, I showed up with a LEGO boat I had built—my pride and joy—and I survived. Just barely. The fear didn’t vanish, though. It deepened.

By second grade, it had grown roots. Unfortunately for me, second grade came with a school play. There was no escape. I couldn’t call in sick for two months. The teachers knew my fear, so they assigned me the “easiest” part. At the end of the play, after all the singing and dancing, I would be hidden under a giant hat. And when the final scene ended, the cast would lift the hat, and I would jump out and yell… you guessed it:

“¡Olé!”

One word. One moment. One terrifying spotlight.

But something strange happened. I peeked out from under the hat and saw a sea of smiling parents and teachers. And, when I finally leaped up and exclaimed ¡Olé! Those same parents and teachers were cheering loudly, including my teacher. The applause wasn’t just for the end of the play. It was for all of us – it was ¡Olé! I had survived again. No, scratch that—I had succeeded. And something inside me cracked open.

From that day forward, “Olé” became my rally cry. My secret weapon. My whispered win.

I wasn’t suddenly fearless—but I had a tool. I could whisper “Olé” to myself before class presentations, pep rallies, or even uncomfortable conversations. It was a reminder that the scariest moments are often where the most alive version of you is hiding.

Years later, I was playing in bands, serving on the student body at UC Irvine, and somehow, I found myself president of the largest fraternity on campus. The once-silent second-grader was suddenly the guy giving speeches, rallying a room, leading song, speaking up. A long, long way from that LEGO boat.

Now, I give keynote speeches. I lead lectures. I speak at major events. And before I take the stage, I still think: Olé. Not as a performance, but as an invitation to show up. To bring energy. To move people. To risk something.

Here’s what I’ve learned: Fear never really disappears. But neither does your power. And more often than not, the very thing you're afraid of is the gatekeeper to your growth.

We all have fears that anchor us to our comfort zone. But we weren’t made to stay parked in safe harbors. We were made to set sail—even if it’s in a LEGO boat at first.

Most of the things we worry about, never happen.

So, I’ll ask you this:

What are you afraid of that might actually free you? What performance, presentation, or leap are you avoiding that might end in your very own “Olé”?

Let’s break free from the grip of caution. Rise up. Speak out. Show up. Whether it’s a personal fear or a brand challenge, let’s trade hesitation for action—and step into a better day.

And when we get there, let’s say it together—

Olé.

Want help finding your “Olé” moment? I’ve been there. And I’d love to mentor anyone stuck in the muck of fear. Let’s talk.

#FearToFreedom #PublicSpeaking #Leadership #OvercomingFear #GrowthMindset #OléAllDay