I was a high school swimmer who did not know he was learning about habits. I just knew 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 four-time All American swimmer and water polo player. I thought it was talent. It wasn’t. It was rehearsal.

I cofounded the original Lovesac alongside Shawn Nelson and Tres White. Three guys stuffing foam in a Salt Lake City warehouse, figuring things out while we were doing them. We took the business past $55M in annual sales within four years.

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

Two very different businesses kept teaching me the same lesson: information is rarely the problem. People often know what needs to happen. The harder question is whether the behavior survives when things get messy.

The original Lovesac company later reorganized under new ownership. I’m a shareholder today, but I claim no credit for what the public company became afterward.

My first real stage appearance was in 2009. I had never wanted to be a speaker. The video is terrible. But something happened in that room that I could not stop thinking about afterward.

That eventually led to a decade as a lead trainer for T. Harv Eker’s Peak Potentials. More than 250 multi-day experiences. Rooms from 500 to 25,000 people. Days that routinely meant twelve-plus hours on stage.

Add it all up and it became 1,533+ days on stage. Enough repetition to stop guessing about what people do. You watch what grabs attention, what creates action, and what disappears when pressure changes the room.

There was a morning at Lake Mead when pressure removed every margin for deliberate thought. What fired was not a carefully considered decision. It was a rehearsed response.

A small nonnegotiable habit had been repeated so many times that it activated when I needed it most. That morning took everything I had been learning about repetition and pressure and made it personal.

There is another piece of context I did not talk about publicly for a long time. I am Bipolar Type 1. I mean, Type Awesome.

That matters because pressure is not always a bad quarter, a deadline, or a leadership change. Sometimes pressure comes from inside you. I don’t teach that reality from the outside looking in.

In 2019, I stepped away from speaking to become my mother’s personal caregiver while she battled Alzheimer’s dementia.

Five years. Every day.

She passed in August 2024. In the silence that followed, the body of work I had been circling for years finally came into focus.

I know she is cheering me on from beyond. Every stage I step onto, she is in the front row.

Habit Freak gave the identity a name. When Pressure Hits gave the thesis a stage. And The State of Workforce Habits is now putting the workplace question under national, PhD-led scrutiny across fourteen industries.

The research is still in progress. The framework came first. The study is designed to help answer the larger question with data instead of opinion.

What started as repetition in a swimming pool became the question I have spent most of my life trying to answer: