Happiness Through Creating
Happiness Through Creating
Happiness isn't what's left once the opposition clears. It's what becomes possible when you learn to create with it.
I was a young boy standing on the back of my parents' couch. I'd combined two things I believed in: what my parents taught me about faith, and what Superman had shown me was possible. I could see me doing it, so I did it… I jumped.
Gravity had other plans. The ankle healed, but the questions remained — and they've led to some of the greatest learning I've been given.
Here are two free assessments. One measures how you see yourself as a creator. The other measures your capacity to create.
Beliefs, perspectives, and behaviors behind seeing yourself and acting as a creator.
Identity · Agency · Vision · Courage · Learning · Stewardship · Responsibility · Opposition response
The capacities, practices, and environments that support meaningful creation.
Capacity · Practice · Environment · Flourishing
Keynotes and workshops on creating, opposition, and whole-being — adapted to your timeline and your room.
Ongoing coaching and consultation to build the center that feeds the life of a person or a group. Discover, design, deploy.
A year-long certification that helps students graduate with something they can do, not only something they know.
The full framework and where it came from — twenty years of building companies, coaching young athletes, and learning to read opposition as the condition of creation rather than the interruption of it.
The same ideas, drawn. A faster read, a good place to start, and a good thing to leave where people will pick it up.
I was a young boy standing on the back of my parents' couch, and I was going to fly. Gravity had other plans.
The ankle healed, but the questions stayed. I believed I had something extraordinary in me, so why couldn't I fly? What had I gotten wrong? Versions of that question have led to most of what I've learned since.
I've spent my working life as an entrepreneur, and I've met a good deal of opposition along the way. The same type of opposition everyone faces when trying to create anything worth creating.
What I have found in the middle of the opposition is a pathway to peace. And with it the recognition that opposition wasn't destroying what I was trying to create. Rather, it was part of what made creating possible.
There truly is opposition in all things. Creation and destruction, happiness and sorrow, truth and error.
My current effort is all about taking what I have learned and become, and doing my best to help others create — not in spite of the opposition they face but because of it, so they can live after a manner of happiness and increase the joy they experience in life.
This journey is my attempt to answer the call I hear. And I'm not just winging it and telling stories. I'm providing proven models that will help. My teaching has broadened and deepened because of the work I did to receive my Master's Degree in Happiness Studies and the work I'm doing to finish a PhD in Happiness Studies.
If you're trying to intentionally create, let's have an interaction. Get in touch and let's see what we can create together.
Creation is not only what we make. It's how we intentionally shape ourselves, our relationships, our work, our environment, our future, and our contribution.
Here are two free assessments. One measures how you see yourself as a creator. The other measures your capacity to create.
Both assessments are free. Start with the Mindset Index if you're not sure which — it's shorter, and it's the one that tends to tell people something they didn't already know about themselves.
Explores the beliefs, perspectives, and behaviors behind seeing yourself and acting as a creator.
Creator identity · Agency · Vision · Courage · Learning · Stewardship · Responsibility · Opposition response
Explores the capacities, practices, environments, and sources of flourishing that support meaningful creation.
Capacity · Practice · Environment · Flourishing, across 21 development dimensions
For an audience, group, team, organization, family, or a school.
Audiences leave with confidence in their own capacity to improve, and a practical way to read the opposition in front of them. I have memorable ways of holding on to important principles.
Twenty years of building companies, sixteen years coaching young athletes, and a doctorate in progress give me a breadth of examples. I adapt to your timeline, from a conference keynote to a half-day or multi-day workshop. I'm even happy to do a little presentation. Let me know what opportunity you have for me to share.
At the center of every individual and every organization is the thing that feeds its life. Most groups have never identified theirs.
I work with organizations, families, and communities to establish that center and the patterns around it. I use science-based strategies for whole-being. The process is discover, design, deploy. Feed-forward interactions let me customize for the group rather than applying a template.
If you aren't getting the results you want, it's often because you're doing it the way everyone else is.
Every student graduates with something they know. Too few graduate with something they can do. When your school becomes a Creator Academy, you empower students to use what they know to create impact and income.
A curriculum delivered through your existing school system. Not a new subject, but a new way of teaching the ones you already have. One hour a week, plus five to ten minutes a day.
Five domains, seven weeks each, repeatable every year a student is enrolled.
Impact and income
Growth from experience
Trust and influence
Value for others
Character and whole-being
The Creator Mindset Index and Creator Capacity Index serve as a baseline in week one, a midyear check, and evidence at the year-end capstone. This is about growth, not completion.
Everyone is a creator. Everyone meets opposition.
We tend to treat opposition as evidence that something has gone wrong. Maybe we chose the wrong goal, took the wrong job, or simply aren't cut out for the challenge.
But what if opposition isn't a sign we're on the wrong path?
Opposition is part of the process of creating. It tests what we're trying to do, reveals what we're capable of, and invites us to adapt. The question isn't whether we'll face it, but how we'll respond to it.
Drawing on research, science, and more than twenty years of building companies, coaching young athletes, and watching people succeed and fail, this book offers a practical framework for understanding what you're up against—and what it can make possible.
You'll learn how to read the opposition you face, how character shapes what you create, why relationships are the resource that multiplies every other resource, and how to turn experience into genuine capability.
And ultimately, how to create and experience more joy and happiness along the way.
Call it what you want; you are a creator. Since this is true, you might as well be great. Your greatness will be measured by the opposition you have overcome to create.
The same ideas, drawn.
Some people absorb a framework better when they can see it. This companion takes the concepts from The Creator's Opposition and puts them in pictures — the man wrestling the tornado, the woman chiseling herself out of stone, and the rest of the images that have become the visual language of this work.
A faster read, a good starting point if you're new to the ideas, and a good thing to leave where people will pick it up.
I regularly join book clubs, leadership teams, and faculty groups by video for a conversation about the ideas.
Simple, short episodes helping everyone tap into their deepest human gift: The Power to Create — and enjoy more of its sweetest fruits: Joy and Happiness.
Whether we're creating abilities, relationships, businesses, ideas, or designing our path forward, each episode explores the process of creating, the opposition we meet along the way, and what it can teach us about living with more joy and happiness.