Journal Entry Someone once said that giving birth is the hardest thing a person can do in life. It is the essential, living pain that women endure to bring something new into the world. I make no comparisons here to that trial. None at all. But isn’t it funny how they call it labor? I’ve always wondered what came first, that kind of labor or the work kind. The word carries weight either way. Because yesterday, my band gave birth to four new songs. We spent about six or seven hours in the studio taking multiple takes of each song, wandering through final adjustment sections, reworking parts, tightening transitions, and ultimately arriving at the end of production for the new album’s base structure and formatting. We were guided, as always, by our ever present producer Scott Sharrard and Charlie Martinez, who shepherded us through the labor of getting these songs created and born into something real and finished. And here’s the part that struck me. These songs started back in August of last year. Nine months ago. On August 3rd, the very first idea for the first song was recorded on my phone. It was nothing more than a basic riff and a name. One More Time. I went back and listened to those earliest recordings of the album, the raw beginnings, and I was struck by how different we ended up from where we started. But the DNA was still there. The same name. The same simple chorus buried inside of it. The skeleton of the thing was visible, but the body around it had completely changed. Back on August 9th, it was essentially a thumbnail sketch, a rough directional signal of where the song might end up. From there, the idea went through so many iterations, so many changes, reformations, even full pace changes, until its final shape was born yesterday in the studio. And that process reminded me of something I’ve seen over and over again, not just in music but in business and in life. The way an idea develops almost always follows this same pattern. It starts with a simple thought. Something small, barely formed.

I was thinking about impact the other day. Specifically, the kind of impact that comes with a title, a role, a public responsibility that you didn’t just stumble into but swore yourself into. When you take the oath to be a doctor, a lawyer, a police officer, an army recruit, a veterinarian, an accountant, these roles all carry certain oaths. Standards that are considered norms as part of their practice. You step into them knowingly. You raise your hand. You make a promise. And from that point forward, people hold you to it. Society holds you to it. And if you’re worth anything at all, you hold yourself to it. Still Googling your marketing problems? Just ask me. Get Help That got me thinking about something bigger. What about one’s own oath? Not the one handed to you by a licensing board or a branch of the military, but the one you write for yourself. The oath to your community. The truths you uphold. The things you want to make right in the world. Because we all have roles and responsibilities whether we signed a paper or not. We all hold certain moral ethics towards not just the landscape of our personality and our upbringing, but towards our personal achievement in what we do on a daily basis. Our influence. Our output. The ripple we leave behind when we walk out of a room. The easiest way I could frame this whole thought process was to think about the oath of a doctor, and that symbol, the medical caduceus. You see it and you connect the dots in your mind immediately. Healing. Treatment. Remedy. Relief from what ails you. What’s fascinating about that symbol is what it represents beneath the surface. It carries a level of trust and mental significance to the one who upholds that specific doctrine. In this case, we’re talking about the Hippocratic oath of ethics. It’s also known simply as the do no harm theory. Now there’s plenty of dialogue around medical ethics all the time because there’s so much interpretation baked into it that it’s difficult to just leave it at one line. Do no harm can mean a hundred different things depending on the context, the patient, the moment. But having dealt with many doctors over the course of the businesses I’ve grown over the last fifteen years, I’ve come to see a real level of responsibility in each of them. A specific lineage of what they’re trying to do. What they’re passionate about. There is a set of instincts around their output that goes deeper than the textbook, and that is very interesting because it correlates directly to things that you and I may do on a daily basis without ever thinking of it in those terms.

Journal Entry Well, here I am on the final days to close up the album that we’ve been writing for the band since the fall of last year. I go into Harlem this weekend to start the recording process and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a certain weight to that. Walking into a studio in Harlem carries something with it. The streets up there have seen so much music pass through them that you can almost feel it in the pavement when you step out of the car. There’s history baked into those buildings and when you’re about to lay something down in a room like that you want to make sure you’re bringing something worthy of the walls. Still Googling your marketing problems? Just ask me. Get Help Generally, as we get close to the crossing of the line to the final parts of building out this new birthing of music, Scott Sharrard, our producer, will be sending me some snippets of information before we get to the studio to put his historical correctness of the process into my writing. That’s how Scott works. He understands the lineage of what we’re doing and he wants to make sure the details are right, that the writing carries the weight it needs to carry before we ever hit record. He’s asked me to look at some lyrics on one of the songs that is particularly specific, and it’s one of those songs that I think we all believe is going to be the hit of the album. You know when you’ve got one of those. The room gets a little quieter when it comes on. People stop what they’re doing and just listen. Everybody feels it. Now even though we’re not really doing the vocals for the album this weekend, because we’ll probably be overdubbing that over the next couple of weeks, the goal is actually to try and get the theory of the song at least straightened out before we record the main back line of all the instruments. And that matters more than people realize because it has a meaningful impact on the song in general. If the players don’t understand where the lyric is going, the instruments don’t breathe in the right places. The whole thing has to be connected. Basically, in this particular song, the lyrics have identified that the theme is about when you’ve just got it figured out how to make life shine. You’ve found the groove, you’re in it, the pieces are falling into place, and then you look up and the hands of time are spinning quickly and you’re running out of time now. That feeling. That gut punch of realizing you just arrived and the clock is already moving.

Ten Decisions, Twenty-Two Million Dollars Why the gap between what you know and what you earn has nothing to do with effort and everything to do with leverage. I was opening my mail this morning and couldn’t believe what I found. I actually won the lottery. I had overpaid my company tax bill for 2025, and sitting in my pile was a refund check from the New Jersey government. That’s the first time I’ve ever received a check from them. It’s usually me with my hand over my face, gasping at whatever crazy amount of underpayment they’ve figured out I owe. The famous shortfalls I seem to get every year because they always want more and more. But not today. Today was a win. After that piece of mail was another one, a summary from my IRA sent by Brown Advisory. I don’t usually look at these things, but I opened it for a cursory review. It’s a standard mutual fund, a mid-level conservative mix of stock portfolios. Nothing unusual. I started scanning through the normal statistics of a pretty standard review, and then I saw some numbers that stopped me cold. Total assets: $6 billion. Number of holdings: 34 stocks. And the line below that, the one I was staring at: $22 million in fees. Let me get this straight. You have 34 stocks and you charge $22 million to manage them. No wonder the financial industry makes so much money. A handful of decisions a year, maybe the turnover of 10 stocks, and that’s $22 million. Ten decisions. Twenty-two million dollars. That works out to about $38 per $10,000 invested. Pretty good yield-to-value equation if you’re on the receiving end. It really got me thinking about value. The leverage or non-leverage we have and what we could do about it. The mechanic turns a wrench. The teacher plans her lessons. The bartender shines up his glasses. Anyone working has a value, but it’s the leverage on that value that determines the output. That’s what my example above with the financial advisory group illustrates so clearly. It made me think about what I’m good at and how my own value-to-leverage equation could produce better wealth. Most people are still just working today because their value-to-leverage equations aren’t adequate for wealth. They’re very low, in fact. It’s hard to scale leverage when your hands are deep in a Toyota Tundra changing a spark plug.

The 10 Looking Forward Commandments As I think we all do when the sun comes up and our minds awaken, we find ourselves thinking about the things that need to be done that day. We know that as working people, we have a list of tasks to get through because we’re usually deep into obligations with other people who are relying upon us. People count on our skills. They count on us to complete things that, at the end of the day, pay the bills. But I think this way of interpreting life can be driven at a different level. What I mean is this: what if you were actually looking forward to today? I like to think of it as a permanent adventure. Not a permanent vacation. That’s the cop-out, isn’t it? But what if you had a list of things that felt like a conveyor belt of opportunities? Where you’d be in a permanent state of fun and adventure, every single day? I thought about this when I got up this morning. My first instinct was, Yeah, I have a lot of things to do today. Client meetings. Client deliverables. A list of things I probably haven’t even thought of yet that would fill an 8½-by-11 sheet of ticked off items. They never seem to end. But as I was meandering in my mind, a thought took shape. What if I could construct a day so that I’d wake up knowing I had planned it around the theory that I’d be primed to look forward to it instead of dreading the to-do list? What if my list included the top 10 things I actually wanted to do during the day? Of course, I’m not being a Pollyanna here. I know there will be challenges with client work and disruptions and who knows what. But if I could get these 10 things in my mind first and say, Hey, I’m going to be doing these 10 things today, and then try to score my day based on how many I got done. Make it like a game I’d look forward to playing. I’m calling it The 10 Commandments Game: Thou shalt try to have an eventful day. The Looking Forward Model. Think about these first, before any to-do list. So here’s what I came up with: