Last night I felt this incredible surge of energy in my heart. It came immediately after recognizing that sometimes writing is difficult for me, but that I could become someone who’s easily able to write about even the most hard to articulate topics. It was this feeling that my writing could take me anywhere. That by developing my ability to write I could remove the barrier between my personal experience and the world.

After I hit this point of excitement, I thought of people like Bill Simmons (comedic sports writer and founder of grantland.com) who took their ability to write and capture an audience and eventually turned it into an empire. He once hosted Nate Silver (the guy who used big data to correctly predict who would win all 50 states in the 2012 US presidential election) on a podcast, and they talked about how strange it was to go from writing a column to being someone who’s on TV and all of a sudden has an amazing outlet to reach people. I see myself being able to do that; but instead of writing about sports in an entertaining way, or data in a useful way, I’m writing about our individual capacity to create the world around us. My writing could help you change your perspective on something you personally create, rather than something you merely observe.

After I got hit with this surge of energy I got even more excited about the shift that was occurring within me. I knew that upon falling asleep that night I would temporarily release all the limitations of my physical perspective and awaken with a fresh opportunity to see my relationship with writing anew. It no longer had to be a struggle. I could focus in such a way that expressing myself on paper would no longer be a question of whether or not I could do it, but an inevitable result of knowing that I can.

My old focus could sometimes cause writing to feel like a tortuous task I could never complete. There were so many thoughts about how my writing reflected upon me and how my audience would perceive it. It reminds me of a video game I love playing and what happened when I started to play ranked games. Ranked games are designed to tell you how good you are. When you win or lose a ranked game, your rating rises or falls to tell the world you’re now better or worse than you were before. The more ranked games you play, the less each new ranked game matters because you’ve already become accustom with where you stand and know that it will take many matches with a different outcome to change your standing.

Sometimes I would lose a ranked game and through habit start to look for another one. There’d be just enough downtime before I could say yes to the new match for me to question whether or not I was still in a good enough mental place to start a new one. “Should I be playing ranked still or did that last loss drain me too much?” And I would just quietly say to myself. “These are ranked games. This is what I do. A non-ranked game would be meaningless for me to play right now because what I’m desiring is to develop my ability to thrive at this competitive level.” And then I’d redirect my energy toward winning the next match.

Now I feel like I can do this with writing. “I’m a writer; it’s what I do. If I experience adversity I can accept it and focus right back on what I’m wanting to do.”

I’m wanting to express myself. I’m wanting to share myself with you and ultimately create a space where you can share back. I want to start a dialogue around all these amazing things we could be talking about. This is a small step in that direction, but it adds up. The more I write, the less each piece of writing will seem to make or break me, because I’ll have already established myself through my body of work. So I can simply relax and enjoy the process of improving as a writer.

So it doesn’t really matter whether or not anyone reads this piece, or the next one, or the next one. It doesn’t really matter where I stand now any more than it matters what airport I catch my connecting flight at while finding my way home. What matters is where I’m going.

It doesn’t take years to decide to go somewhere different today, it just takes a decision. And I’ve decided to be a writer. To bring a voice to what’s inside me. To activate something inside of you. And to have a damn good time doing it.

Yesterday morning I awoke to an intriguing email from a long-time reader and trusted friend:

I feel compelled to tell you that you should be building a following, if you’re not already, in the form of a mailing list. Just write something free(like a PDF) that people would want to get in exchange for giving you their email address, set it up using Aweber.com which costs like $10/month, put it on your website/facebook/forums, and then just send out a few inspiring lines to them 2-3 times a week or whenever you get inspired until you have something to sell. You do not need in any way to know what that will be, you just need to start list building ASAP. It takes a while to build a good size list (I’ve been working on mine for almost 2 years and it’s only at about 5,000 people) so there’s no reason to wait to do it.

It would be gay if in a few years, you realize you have something valuable you really want to sell to people but then you have to figure out a way to reach them. A mailing list is easily the most valuable asset anyone selling anything through the internet can have. And the most important thing about all of it is to provide value, and I think that’s where your head is, so you should have no trouble building a very responsive mailing list (that will buy stuff you tell them to buy.)

Of course, I have no clue what is going on in your life, so I could be way off here, but like I said, I felt compelled so I’m going with it!

At first it seemed as if this email came right out of the blue, when I remembered an Abraham quote: “It never comes out of the blue, it comes out of the oblivious.” So I re-framed the situation and realized that it didn’t come out of the blue, it came in response to my desire. That perspective got me excited; that my desires were reaching out into the world and the world was reaching back!

I laid in bed for a while and felt into the energy of several different ideas that I might create a short ebook about. Thoughts flowed freely for a while and new ideas came forth. But soon I realized that the task of turning these raw ideas into a readable, completed form seemed too far out of reach. So I shifted my energy toward writing a blog post about one of the smaller ideas; but after several hours I couldn’t quite find the write ending that tied everything together, and the piece felt incomplete.

Now I’m taking a different approach. Rather than trying to be the apparatus that fulfills my desire, I’m going to become the point of attraction that naturally attracts it!

This seems MUCH more in reach. Now I can create a blog post with the much simpler focus of amplifying my point of attraction. “I Want to Write a Short eBook” seemed like a good title to start with, but I felt a little off-ness in that focus. What I really wanted was to follow the energy of my desire. The ebook itself wasn’t necessary for me to align with the essence of what I’m wanting, so focusing on manifesting the ebook would focus me on the manifestation instead my point of attraction (the thing I wanted to focus more on in the first place).

So I want to follow my desire. I want to align with the path of least resistance and feel jettisoned by springs of inspiration. I want to be open and include others in on the process. I want to tap into something that carries me to higher levels. And I want to share that something with you.

If you have any input or encouragement, or something you’d love for me to expand upon in a more detailed form (such as a short ebook?) please do let me know!

It’s been six months and one week since I last posted a personal growth article on this site. During that time, I’ve actually shared quite a bit through Facebook and other forums, but never felt inspired to share that content or expand upon it via my blog. In examining why, I realized that I’d set different expectations for what this blog should be, and my desire to express myself in a way that met those expectations simply did not meet the threshold required to bring a new blog post into being.

So today I set forth a new set of expectations. Rather than trying to conform to my idea of what this blog should be, I want to create a space where I can be me. Regularly. Wholly. And ever-expanding.

I once read an article that said the two most important words in blogging are “you” and “because.” Essentially, the “you” part is because people are infinitely more interested in themselves than they are in some random stranger they are just now brushing up against via the internet. But this got me to thinking, what would it take to successfully violate this rule? Who would I have to become in order to be so compelling that I could write purely about the things that interest me and still inspire others to joyfully join me on the journey?

I’ve experienced this quality in people before. People who’ve talked so openly about their own lives that I’m irresistibly drawn to hearing more. Their openness is refreshing and revealing, and it creates a space for me to step into a new version of myself.

I want to be that open. I want to be that refreshing and revealing. I want to create a space for me to step into new versions of the me I’ve thus far only dreamt of becoming.

And perhaps in creating that space for me, I can offer you the opportunity to do the same.

Last year I posted my 2012 Oscar Pool Spreadsheets a day before the event and it created the biggest traffic spike in this blog’s modest history.

This year I’ve taken all the fun and originality of those old printable spreadsheet and recast them into fully automated entry and score keeping spreadsheets that allow you to track every player’s score in every pool in real time with the click of your mouse.

Here’s what you’ll find in this years pools:
• Six uniquely awesome pools (Basic, Confidence, Rank All Nominees, Salary Cap and the all new Biggest Loser and Upset pools)
• Easy to fill out entry forms with drop down menus for every selection
• And super slick score sheet with sortable standings and real time scoring for up to 50 players

If you want to dive in and learn more, check out the tutorial below. Or keep reading for pics and in-depth descriptions for each of the six game modes.

2013 Oscar Pool Spreadsheets Tutorial

Download Links

Due to the drop down menus and fancy formulas, you need Microsoft excel to use the spreadsheets.

Customizable Entry Form
2013 Oscar Pool Score Sheet

Please watch the tutorial if you plan on running your own pool. If you’re just curious at this point feel free to read more below and check out some of the game modes.

Join My Pool

If you don’t feel like creating your own pool but still want to play with the spreadsheets than feel free to join my pool. You still have until 2:00PM central (UPDATE: Deadline pushed back to 5:00PM central!) on Oscar Sunday to get your sheets in for my contest. Full instructions here.

I’m running all six pools detailed below.

2013 Oscar Basic Pool

HOW TO PLAY: This is the simplest of all the Oscar pools to play in. You simply pick one winner for each category and get points for each correct answer. Some categories have different point values based on how prestigious the award is, so correctly picking the Best Picture category is worth far more than guessing the winner for Best Animated Short. The person with the most points at the end of the show wins. The tie-breaker is total number of correct guesses.

2013 Oscar Confidence Pool

HOW TO PLAY: Select one winner from the drop down menus for each of the 24 categories listed below. Then, under the “Conf Points” column, select a number from 24 to 1 based on how confident you are about each pick (24 = most confident). You can only use each number once. Each correct pick will net you the corresponding amount of points. The person with the most total points wins.

2013 Oscar Rank All Nominees (RAN) Pool

HOW TO PLAY: RAN stands for Rank All Nominees, and that’s exactly what you get to do in this pool. Rank each nominee for each of the 24 categories below from 1st to last in order of how likely you think they are to win. To rank them, click on a yellow cell below and then click the down arrow to see a drop down menu of the remaining nominees. Fill out all the yellow boxes to complete the form. The higher you rank the eventual winning nominee, the more points you’ll receive (Rank/Points charts listed next to each category). The person who finishes with the most total points by the end of the awards show wins!

SCORING EXAMPLE: Let’s say Argo wins Best Picture and you ranked it 1st. You would receive 80 points, which would be 32 more points than anyone who ranked it 2nd and 56 or 72 more points (respectively) than anyone who ranked it 3rd or 4th. But if you ranked it 2nd, then you’d gain ground against anyone who picked it 3rd or lower, but lose ground to all who picked it 1st.

2013 Salary Cap Oscar Pool

Every dollar counts in the Oscar salary cap game. Pick a winner for each of the 24 categories below, while keeping your total money spent under $1000. Each correct pick is worth one point, but don’t throw your extra money away because the tie-breaker is how much money you left unspent. Nominees are priced at $1 per percentage point (ranging in price from $90 to $1). You MUST select a winner for each of the 24 categories, but FLEX nominees can be left blank. You can see how much you have left via the “Unspent Money” box to the right.

2013 Oscar Biggest Loser Pool

HOW TO PLAY: Pick a nominee from each category that you think will lose. The more favored the nominee is to win, the more points you get when they lose. For example, if you pick a 25% chance nominee to lose, you get 25 points if they do. The catch is that each time one of your picks wins you lose an increasing amount of points. As you can see from the color-coded chart on the far right, picking a few accidental winners is healthy, but once you start getting into the red your chances of winning quickly fade away.

2013 Oscar Upset Pool

INTRODUCTION: The upset pool was created with the idea of, “What if we gave you incentive to gamble on nominees that are longshots to win?” In most other pools, if one nominee has a 50% chance to win, and another has a 25% chance, it’s very hard to justify picking the 25% chance nominee over the 50% one since the 50% one is twice as likely to win. But this pool erases that deficit by making the 25% chance nominee worth twice as many points as the 50% nominee so you can pick either nominee without putting yourself at a disadvantage.

BASE POINT VALUES: If you look over to chart above you’ll notice that the lower the odds of a nominee winning, the more points its worth. There’s actually some really simple math behind this. 100% of 10 = 10. 50% of 20 = 10. 10% of 100 = 10. 1% of 1000 = 10. The point system is designed to give you an even money gamble no matter which nominee you choose.

Thanks for checking these spreadsheets out

I spent well over 100 hours putting these spreadsheets together because I absolutely love playing these pools and sharing the fun with all who want to partake. If you have an extra kick ass time using these spreadsheets, feel free to click the Donate button and shoot some appreciation my way, or just comment below or contact me to tell me about how your experience went. Either way, thanks a ton for checking out the spreadsheets. I really get a kick out of creating something I love and sharing it with the world.

Deadline to join pushed back to 5:00PM central.

You still have time to make your picks and have a kick ass evening!

Here’s how the pool works:

• Download the spreadsheet and decide which pools you want to play.
• Fill out the entry forms for the pools you want to play.
• Email your spreadsheet to the email listed on the ‘Finish Here’ tab before the Sunday at 2PM (Central time) deadline.
• I input everyone’s picks and email everyone the Score Sheet which will allow you to see everyone’s picks.
• You can then use the Score Sheet to update the scoring live, for all pools simultaneously, by selecting announced winners from a single drop down menu.

If you want to play for real money I’ll have to send you instructions for where to send your payment (comment below or use the contact form to get me your email). Otherwise anyone who sends in a completed entry form will be entered into a play money pool.

Run Your Own Pool

If you would rather run your own pool check out the tutorial and download links here.

There’s still time since it only takes a few minutes to fill out an entry form, and copying everyone’s picks into the score sheet is super quick and takes less than a minute per entry form.

Spreadsheets now complete available. Click here to check out the blog post!

2013 Oscar Spreadsheets are here! Click here to check them out!

This is the story of how a tooth problem led me to new insights about abundance, letting go, and not having to settle for a future the past seemed to doom me to.

Questions to Ponder: What if we don’t manifest problems simply to correct them and return to normal? What if they’re here to take us beyond our status quo and make things even better than they were before?

A simple visualization to raise your vibration and your self-esteem by remembering the intrinsic worthiness that we’re all born with:

I actually shot and uploaded this video to YouTube over two months ago, but decided not to post it on my blog because the audio seemed too quiet. Then a few days ago I got an email from YouTube saying someone had subscribed to my channel after somehow stumbling across this video.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that someone resonated with it, since I was really inspired when I shot it.

The funny thing is that if I would have simply focused on the intrinsic worthiness of this video, I would have posted it without hesitation.

How would you feel if your girlfriend nonchalantly testified before a joint session of congress that your inaction directly led to the deaths of hundreds of people, wasted millions of tax dollars, and was the root cause of her personal inconvenience?

That’s roughly how I felt yesterday when my girlfriend, while relating a story to me in which she sympathized with someone whose daughter never cleaned up after herself, uttered the words, “Josh doesn’t do dishes, either.”

First off, I have no defense for this. I do things when I want to, and if someone else has a greater desire to get something done than I do, they usually do it before I get the chance. This is just how the world works. The universe always takes the path of least resistance. That’s why Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, and Paris Hilton pets a dog.

But in all seriousness, hearing those five little words really struck a negative chord within me. Rather than focusing on all the positive things she conveyed during the conversation, I came to all sorts of unwanted conclusions about what those words meant.

“Josh doesn’t do dishes, either” =
1. Society says I’m supposed to be doing something that I’m not doing. Cleaning up after yourself is “welcome to the real world” 101. How will anyone ever entrust me with great opportunities if I can’t even handle the simple things in life?
2. It’s my fault that she’s not getting what she wants. After all, if I could just act like a freaking adult and clean up after myself, she wouldn’t have this problem to begin with.
3. She’s focused on my inability to give her what she wants, and from that place of focus she’s going to continue seeing what she’s trained herself to see. So if she wants something to change, it’s her job to change it. How am I supposed to do anything about her point of view?
4. I haven’t met the person she told this to, so the only thing this person has to go on is the things my girlfriend tells her about me. And if all this person knows about me is what I don’t do, then how do they see me? When I see myself solely through the eyes of what I don’t do, I feel like nothing. So does this person now see me as nothing? And what about all the other people my girlfriend talks to like this?
5. It doesn’t bother my girlfriend, but it bothers me (she didn’t even get mad when I started blaming her for everything). And it bothers me even more that it doesn’t bother her. Because if it doesn’t bother her then she has no motivation to try and change it. And if she’s not going to change it, then I have to change my perspective on it. But I’m not focused on my ability to change my perspective, I’m focused on how unwanted what I observed was. And I end up trying to make my unwanted, her unwanted, so that she will do something about it.

Knowing everything I just wrote out, doesn’t it make sense why I might have overreacted? And if I just tried to push this aside and tell myself that it’s petty and insignificant, would I have gotten all this clarity with such ease?

One person’s seemingly casual observation that I’m not a fan of doing the dishes actually carried with it a host of insights that, when followed to their natural conclusion, actually told me a lot about how I see the world — and how I might want to see it differently in the future.

If I believe that one person, with one slightly disparaging comment, can cause such harm to my character and well-being — then what sort of consequences might that have on my willingness to expose myself to new people? Could this be why I seem to have an aversion to marketing myself and sharing more of what I have with the world? And could that aversion to sharing myself with the world be the reason why I’m bringing in so little income and in debt? And could those facts about my income and debt help shape how I see myself and how I think others will see me, further undercutting my desire to expose myself to new opportunities?

And what if I could make one tiny little shift in my perspective and, instead of blaming my girlfriend for the imagined consequences I assigned to her off-hand remark, begin changing my story about how the world works and how I fit into it. Because everything I just told you about my current situation changes the moment I’m willing to see it differently.

That’s ultimately what our emotions are telling us. Not that this tiny, insignificant detail is way more important than we thought. But that the way we’re seeing this tiny detail is a microcosm of how we see the world.

So the next time you find yourself overreacting about some seemingly insignificant detail, maybe the most beneficial thing you can do is let yourself overreact. Sometimes the first step to self-discovery is actually letting yourself be yourself.