I’ve been more than a few different versions of myself, some by choice and a couple out of necessity, and I’ll probably be a couple more before my time here is done. When I sat down to write this book and spent a year working through every word, paragraph, and page while Roxy worked her way through grade five, I knew I was going to wind up right here. The part where I have to come through on everything I promised. This is the part that scared me the most then and still does now.
I think the point to all of this is to just always believe there’s something bigger out there—not necessarily better, just bigger. A bigger version of you. One that laughs louder and loves harder. One that’s a little more patient and a whole lot smarter. Maybe even one that doesn’t hurt all the time. Much like my dad I’m a dreamer, and that’s just what us dreamers do. Always dreaming of something bigger.
I live my life with my feet on the ground and my head in the clouds, and I certainly don’t have all the answers, but that’s only because I haven’t asked all my questions yet. And I question everything. Question everything.
How does this end? Where are you going? If you feel lost, left behind, or stuck today, what the hell makes you think you’re going to feel any differently tomorrow? Or next year? Are you even the one writing your own story? If you jump, where would you land?
You should never be afraid to reinvent yourself. I’m talking a drastic and noticeable reinvention. Never think it’s too late to rip it up and start again—to become the exact person you think about the most, even if you’ve convinced yourself it was never going to happen for you. Maybe because you don’t think you deserve it. But it’s never too late to fix the things that feel broken because, believe it or not, the fixing isn’t the hard part. With the right tools we can dismantle just about anything, even ourselves, spread the parts all over the basement floor and do our best to figure out what went wrong or where the problem is. Identify the problem and fix the problem. That’s actually easier than you think. It’s the putting it all back together again that we’re afraid of. That’s why we throw things away, and why we’re so quick to label ourselves damaged, ruined, used, and broken. But when you’re lying there, in a thousand pieces, how do you even begin to put it all back together? Where do you even start? That’s why we so easily give up on ourselves. Because we don’t know how to rebuild.
We are not our mistakes. We are not our past, our scars, or our secrets. We are not our guilt.
It’s easy to get stuck, or even paralyzed, in a specific traumatic moment or a whole series of them. Believe me, I know all too well what that feels like. I know what it’s like when the only way to feel anything is to hurt yourself. I spent some of my best years protecting myself from failure, from vulnerability, and from ever feeling like I was too much. I was in a loop. I’d convinced myself, If this is as good as it’s ever going to get, then so be it. I never wanted to be somebody’s problem or their project. I was fine. But sometimes we protect ourselves so well that we don’t give anyone else the opportunity to help, or even to care.
I was protecting myself from the things I actually needed the most. Purpose, love, and a shot at being a great dad.
So, how did I get out? Well, there’s an easy way and a hard way. And much like my dad, I’ve never been afraid of the hard way. He would have been the first to tell you the hardest part about war isn’t the fight—ask anyone who’s served—it’s the coming home. That’s when you realize what you left behind. The parts you’re never going to get back. I could have taken a lifetime to go around everything that was broken, all the pieces, and maybe I would have got where I am today eventually. But that’s the easy way.
The hard way out is to go through it. That’s how you rebuild.
You don’t leave it behind. You take it with you, and you stop apologizing for it. You learn to breathe and cry and love. You stop blaming yourself and you fight for your goddamn life.
Do we deserve to be happy? Sure. But not all the time. Being in a constant state of happiness is not only unrealistic, it’s slightly weird. Instead, find and do the things that make you happy. Nobody can do that for us.
Katherine taught me this. Katherine has built her life around those small moments of joy, and she’s never once let common sense stand in her way. She’ll drive fifty-five minutes with a single cupcake in the passenger seat because a friend said they had a shit day. She’ll drop it off on their doorstep, ring the bell, and leave without sticking around for any sort of thanks. I’ve never met anyone who recognizes, better than Katherine does, when someone else needs a win. She’s the brightest part of most people’s day. That’s her joy. That’s her happiness.
Katherine is a great photographer, but what she’s brilliant at is getting people to see beauty in themselves they didn’t know existed. Most people don’t like being faced with themselves, but Katherine is all about round edges and soft landings, creating a space where people can play, and celebrate their achievements, and be proud. She fights like hell with clients, models, and celebrities to not remove every wrinkle and scar, the imperfections and flaws we all obsess over. That’s too easy. Katherine never sees an ad campaign or magazine cover when she’s taking someone’s picture. She sees a life. But as talented as she is, it’s never the final product people remember. It’s never about the shot. It’s how she made them feel during the process. She was the best part of their day.
Katherine has turned me into a closet optimist. Seeing the results, everything that comes back to her, from living a life of kindness and compassion, is both inspiring and infectious. She puts it out there, and it always comes back. I still wouldn’t exactly say I’m nice, but I am kind, and I lean into that as often as I can and always try to recognize the people who are out there just trying to do their best. Because that’s most of us.
If you ask me what I do for a living, on the radio show, my answer is very simple and will always be the same: my job is to make someone else’s day a little bit easier or a little better. That’s it. That’s what we do. We don’t have to be all the things, and we certainly can’t be everything to everyone. But when you’re stuck in your car during your commute, which is probably the worst part of your day, my job is to try to make it a little bit easier or a little better.
On the show, we do foolish things and never mind looking like fools doing them, and we take the most ridiculous things very seriously, because that’s the only way I know how. We play. But we’ve also shared the stories of our lives, our loves, and immeasurable and unspeakable heartbreak. We’re upfront about our insecurities, tragedies, and failures. We’ve all cried. We’ve cried with the audience and with each other.
I said in the very beginning of this book that when you do morning radio right, when you’re truly successful, you don’t become famous, you become family. And that’s exactly how I feel at the end of every show. Like family.
Every day I try to learn something new, then I figure out how I’m going to be better tomorrow without relying on the things that made me great today. Every day is an evolution. Every day is part of the rebuild. On a normal day I spend almost an hour and a half sitting in traffic going between my two jobs and home. I take Ubers everywhere, and spend over six hundred a month just getting myself to and from work. But having that time is worth way more to me than what I pay for it. I’d pay double.
That’s ninety minutes a day, every day, that I dedicate to learning new shit. That’s my joy. My YouTube and Google history is filled with everything from dealing with childhood trauma, to how to make the perfect béchamel, to changing the air filter on a two-stroke engine, to how to braid hair. I learn new shit every single day.
But I’m not just a viewer. I’m not passive about it. I learn it, then I do it. I collect new skills like summer camp merit badges sewn onto an ugly vest. Everything has purpose. I was numb for a lot of years, looking for freedom from being overwhelmed by everything while trying to manufacture a life I didn’t even know I wanted. I was separated from the world and from my body, and I desperately needed to reconnect with both.
When people who need help and are feeling that same way call into the radio show, or send me messages on social media, I always ask the same question. These are people who are usually unhappy with their lives, relationships, their jobs, or the choices they’ve made. They’re stuck. I always ask: What are you good at?
It’s a simple question, but I’m amazed how hard it is for people to answer. There are rules to that question, too. You can’t say your job, being a parent, working out, or Instagram. Being a good friend doesn’t count, and you can’t say making money or having sex, either. What are you good at? You need to get good at something, and you need to do something you’re good at every single day. Without question. Something personal that brings you joy. Something analogue and something real.
You need to do something where your hands and your head are both working together. Video games don’t count. Neither does doing your own makeup. You need to try something really damn hard and give yourself enough time to fail a few times before you see results. Build something, write something, or cook something, but keep it personal. This isn’t a side hustle, and it’ll never make you money. Try new shit and learn hard things. If vinyl can make a comeback, why can’t pottery? Pottery is punishingly hard, and you don’t have to look further than Seth Rogan’s Instagram to understand the pride and pure fucking joy of making your first bowl or bong or whatever those weird and wonderful things are that he creates. Do something that makes you proud of you. It all starts by sitting down, that first time, and not being afraid to get a little dirty.
When you find yourself stuck in the middle of normal—jump.
Aside from every beautiful and bonkers minute when I’m with my girls, I’m my happiest and at my best when I’m in my kitchen, or out in the lawn. In a lot of ways, cooking helped save me. I cook 99 percent of the meals that my family eats and I have no problem whipping up three separate dinners, after having just worked thirteen hours, if we all want something a little different that night.
Just like when I was a kid, dinner with my family is always the best part of my day. Laughing around the table and listening to Roxy’s kid stories is what makes sleeping five hours a night and getting up at 3:56 a.m. all worth it.
Every day you see me I’m the most tired I’ve ever been, but that right there is the reward.
When it comes to being a dad, I’m what you might call a Modern Classic. If they created a robot version of me in 1984, I’d be the D.A.D. 2000: The Future of Dadding. I can sew, cut hair, cook the perfect steak. And I cry. I also own five lawn mowers and have spent years trying to turn our backyard into that perfect, and perfectly striped, golf-course-quality lawn. A place for me to escape and a soft landing for Roxy’s cartwheels.
I’m the dad who stands on the back deck, after a real good mow, with his hands on his hips and just watches that shit thrive. Other dads come over and immediately flip their shoes off and run their toes through my rye grass cut precisely to three-quarters of an inch. I’m every single retro cliché and modern meme out there, but I built that lawn. I grew it from nothing and I’m proud of it. It’s my mediation and my church. A way for me to reconnect with the world and my body. It gets me out of the house and out of my head.
Lawn work isn’t difficult work, but it is hard work, and you can’t buy the perfect lawn. You have to nurture it with care and sweat and without fear. I’ve accidentally killed my entire lawn more than once, but failure is all part of the process. Being afraid to fail is just no fun.
I’m not perfect, but like most things my dad managed to fix, I don’t have to be. I don’t want to be. Perfect is boring.
Now, I’m still insecure and do still make a shit ton of mistakes. But on those days, the days when I feel like something has been taken away, when I’ve lost or have been beaten—when I’ve failed—I no longer run to the dark. I don’t hide. When I lose something, I add something. Creativity, or playing or whatever you want to call it, that’s what I do. It’s about getting an idea out of my head and into the world. Turning ideas into life. I no longer chase opportunity. I chase creativity. We spend so much of our lives swiping past, sharing, double-tapping, and being in awe of other people’s creativity that we’ve forgotten how to be creative ourselves. When we see something we love, something perfectly curated, flawless, and filtered, it doesn’t inspire us. Instead, we want to know exactly how they did it so we can do it too. We’re copycats and consumers and we’ve forgotten how to be artists.
We are all artists. That’s how it started for every single one of us. We all have the ability to create, and the reason we don’t is because we’re afraid of criticism. We’re afraid to do foolish things because we’ll look like a fool doing them. We’re afraid of being judged, or we feel we just don’t have it in us.
It’s much harder to put something beautiful out into the world than it is to sit and point out all the things that are ugly—that’s easy, and too often we make decisions based on what’s easy and not what’s best. We walk around problems rather than walk through them. Force yourself to walk through them. Get creative, stop filtering the truth, and take the hard way. You’re built for this.
You are the architect, artist, and author of your own life, so get up every single day and work on your goddamn masterpiece.