I started Think Grow Prosper in 2014 during a period when I felt my life was falling apart.
I began making simple Instagram posts whose sole purpose was to help give me perspective and enable me to move forward.
These posts served their intended purpose but they also had an unforeseen side effect: They struck a chord with others, too.
Over the next couple years, Think Grow Prosper attracted a worldwide audience of millions who wanted to realize their personal power, build healthy relationships, deal with challenges, improve their mindset, and find meaning.
Over time, however, my motivations and purpose for writing changed.
The 2016 U.S. Presidential election played an important role in this. The cacophony of contentious conversations I witnessed online affected me deeply and caused me to look at personal development in a new light:
Where does personal development fit into the bigger picture of reality?
What exactly is personal development and how does it relate to politics—and morality more broadly?
How am I contributing to this ongoing conversation?
My simple Instagram quotes may have been uplifting but they weren’t doing justice to the complexity of the human condition. Nor did they sufficiently satisfy my growing curiosity about what justifies right action.
So, I set out to rebuild my knowledge structure from scratch (like any good Enneagram 5 😜).
Over the next several years, I made it my (full-time, unpaid) job to educate myself more thoroughly about politics, psychology, philosophy, and any other subject that I thought might help me put together the pieces of the very large, very complicated puzzle we call reality.
It was a disorienting and chaotic period but also one of great discovery and growth. I examined and overturned many of my long-held beliefs and acquired new lenses through which to make sense of the world.
When my son was born in early 2019, my learning became even more focused and intense. Like an AI researcher, it dawned on me that I would be responsible for writing the first draft of a moral code that another agent would use to navigate the world.
My knowledge was no longer theoretical, it was practical. I needed to get clarity on the most important questions of all:
How do we live a good life?
How can we even be sure what a good life is?
On what solid foundation can we ground these answers?
Fortunately for humankind, I wasn’t the first person to consider these questions. Many brilliant minds had thoroughly addressed them over the course of the last 2,500 years or so. The problem was that many of the answers seemed to conflict with one another.
So I became obsessed with understanding conflicting values and how we might integrate them to create rich, harmonious lives, both individually and collectively.
As far as I can tell from my research, the best way to do this is to adopt an overarching life philosophy that accounts for the complexity and contradictions of the human condition. Such a philosophy must allow us to express our full range of values and needs in constructive ways.
This, in a nutshell, is what I’ve come to refer to as harmony.
It’s the central idea around which much of my work now revolves and the subject of the book I’m writing.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers, I’m simply trying to figure out the truth as best as I can manage. In truth, most of my writing is aimed at some version of myself—either past, present, or future.
I hope the perspectives, tools, and resources I offer here will help you on your path, as they have helped me.