Have you ever looked at a successful person and wondered if they really earned it or just got lucky? Some levels of success and reward just don’t seem fair. Sure, Jeff Bezos is a smart guy, but does he really deserve to have a net worth of 105 billion dollars? How about the man chasing […]

Chalk this up as one of the worst feelings one can have. You know you could do more with your life. In your imagination, everything works out well — you’re productive, your ideas come to fruition, you get things done. In reality, the opposite is true. That’s the worst part about laziness. You know what […]

With the rise of personal development and a generation of people who want more meaning from life, topics like passion and purpose permeate our thinking. The question burns in your mind — you want to figure out what to do with your life. You have tons of options — maybe even too many. You want […]

How does a complete nobody get the opportunity to become Elvis Presley’s manager? Jerry Weintraub was an ordinary man with extraordinary dreams. One of those dreams was to become Elvis’s road manager. There were a few problems with his goal. One, Elvis already had a manager he’d be working with for years – the Colonel. […]

I had a 0.00 GPA the first semester of my senior year in college. You read that right, I got F’s in every single one of my classes. I didn’t bother going to class at all. I drank 7 nights a week. During the days I would smoke weed and cigarettes in rotation until it […]

Most personal development and success stories are b.s., but they aren’t intended to be. When you succeed, it’s easy to romanticize the process looking backward. You tend to smooth out the rough edges of your story. I write personal development books. I’m in the business of giving advice through my experience, but I can only […]

Hi, my name is Ayo and I have impostor syndrome. A funny thing happens to me each time I “succeed.” When I land a new client, sell a book, get accepted to do a talk, get a new freelance gig, etc — I always feel worse. My stomach forms knots. For a moment, I feel […]

One of my earliest memories in life was me reading stories to my parents. You read that right, instead of my parents reading me bedtime stories, I read them. As early as I can remember, I loved being the narrator, the talker, the pontificator (is that even a word? who cares). In grade school, when […]

    A few weeks ago, a jaguar escaped its cage at a New Orleans zoo and killed six other animals. Rightly, no one blamed the jaguar for being a jaguar. For years, its trainers fed it chunks of meat — pre-cut and requiring no effort to procure. The jaguar accepted those meals day in […]

I’d snapped. After two years of working as a manager at a video store, I’d finally had it. The pay was bad. The customers were rude. I felt trapped and knew I wanted more. I vividly remembered a day where everything went wrong — a Murphy’s law kind of day. I’d gotten so upset I […]