I was a high school swimmer who did not know he was learning about habits. I just knew that Coach Larry Swim made us do the same thing, the same way, at the same intensity, every single day. No exceptions. No motivational speeches. Just reps.

I went on to break school records, break state records, and become a 4 time All American swimmer and water polo player. I thought it was talent. It was not talent. It was rehearsal.

May 18, 2001. Before the companies, before the stages, before the thesis. The most important decision I ever made had nothing to do with business.

She said yes when there was nothing to say yes to. No platform. No framework. No proof it would all work out. Just a guy with too many ideas and not enough sense to quit. She did not marry a speaker or an entrepreneur or a brand. She married a person. And then she stayed while that person figured out who he was supposed to become.

This year we celebrate 25 years. A quarter century of her believing in something before it existed. Every standing ovation I have ever received started with one person clapping for me when the room was empty.

We have raised three amazing daughters and a son who went and did the same thing I did: married his best friend. And then there is Cody, our miniature schnauzer, who runs the house and is fully aware of it.

Yes, that Lovesac. I cofounded the original company alongside Shawn Nelson and Tres White. Three guys stuffing foam in a Salt Lake City warehouse, flying by the seat of our pants, figuring it out as we went. I sold the very first franchise to my high school buddy in Las Vegas.

We took it past $55M in annual sales within four years. Nobody in that warehouse knew what they were doing. We learned it by doing it.

The original company later filed Chapter 11 and reorganized. A new management company bought it and eventually took it public. I hold stock today as a shareholder, nothing more, and I claim no credit for what that company has since become.

What I kept from those years is the part no restructuring touches. I know what it feels like to build something from nothing, and I know exactly what happens to a team when the pressure finally arrives.

During this same period, I developed and delivered an entrepreneur coaching program through Rich Dad Coaching to more than 1,000 private clients.

This is where the obsession with habits, performance, and behavior change took root. I was watching the same pattern over and over: people knew what to do, but could not do it when it mattered most.

I was running a Self-Directed IRA marketing company. Prior to that moment, I had never spoken on a stage and never wanted to. Then came my shot. It was rough. The video is terrible.

But something happened in that room that I did not expect. I felt it. The audience felt it. And I could not stop thinking about it afterward.

Within the next year, that company grew to $98 million in assets under management. The stage did that. I just did not fully understand it yet.

I became a lead trainer for T. Harv Eker's Peak Potentials, one of the largest personal development seminar companies on the planet. Over the next decade I led over 250 events, each one a full three day experience, with audiences ranging from 500 to 25,000.

Can you imagine being on stage for 12 plus hours per day? It was the very best training a speaker could have ever asked for.

Every audience taught me something. Every room confirmed the same pattern. Personal development is key to reaching the next level. But the version that survives pressure is fundamentally different from the version built for calm.

There was a morning at Lake Mead when the question stopped being intellectual. Pressure removed every margin for deliberate thought. What fired was not a decision. It was a rehearsed response.

A small, nonnegotiable habit had been built so many times it activated without any conscious instruction to do so. Nobody had taught me a crisis response protocol.

There is something else about that morning. Something I did not talk about publicly for a long time.

I am Bipolar Type 1. I mean Type Awesome.

That is not a disclaimer. It is context. Because everything I teach about habits under pressure, I am not teaching from the outside looking in. The pressure I build for is the kind that lives inside you. The kind that does not wait for a bad quarter or a leadership transition. The kind that can rewrite your entire operating system overnight if you do not have something rehearsed and ready when it shows up.

Lake Mead was not the first time my habits were tested by pressure that came from inside, not outside. It was just the morning I finally understood what all the others had been preparing me for.

That morning I was one habit away from a completely different ending. One. That is all it took. And that is the truth I have carried with me onto every stage since.

Halloween 2019. The name, the brand, the identity marker. Everything I had been circling for years finally had a name.

Habit Freak was not a marketing exercise. It was the answer to a question I had carried since that pool deck, through every venture, through Lake Mead, and through a decade on stages around the world. What do you call someone who builds habits designed for pressure instead of calm?

Everything I had seen across a career of building companies, a decade on stages, and five years of the most personal pressure of my life crystallized into one observation.

I did not want to be another speaker. Another guru. I wanted to become a category of one.

When Pressure Hits came to life. The five principle Habit Freak Architecture was finalized. The largest research study ever focused on how habits perform under pressure was commissioned. The body of work finally had a structure worthy of the thesis.

In January 2026, knuble signed on as Founding Partner of The State of Workforce Habits, the national benchmark study of how habits hold up under pressure.

Founding Partner is not a logo placement. It is the commitment that put a PhD led study across fourteen industries into the field, and it is why the findings belong to the record rather than to a marketing department.

knuble is its own company with its own customers, a per person people management platform. What it shares with this work is the same question from the other side of the desk: what actually changes how people behave once the pressure arrives.

In 2026, I earned the CSP designation from the National Speakers Association. Established in 1980, it is the speaking profession's highest earned international measure of platform excellence. Fewer than 750 speakers worldwide currently hold it.

To earn it, a speaker must document 250 paid presentations, serve a minimum number of unique clients, pass peer reviewed video evaluations, and maintain the highest standards of professional ethics. It is not given. It is not bought. It is earned.

The CSP is built on four professional competencies: Eloquence, Expertise, Enterprise, and Ethics. It tells meeting planners and event professionals that they are hiring a proven speaker with a verified track record of delivering results from the stage.

For me, it was not the finish line. It was the starting gun.