Hi there folks. Like I mentioned in my last post, I am collapsing both of my blogs into one. It can be found at dkhundley.com . Thank you for my time here! Looking forward to continuing along with you in this journey of life over at my unified blog.

My job. My wife and baby. My volunteering at the church. My management of two blogs. My graphic design. My personal development via books and online courses. My upkeep of stuff around the house. My sleep. My exercise routine. My eating habits. My "fun" life. My sanity. My life has gotten a little bit out of control lately, so I'm taking an intentional step back now to see what went "wrong" and re-orient where I'm going. My hope is that you can learn from my mistakes, so I'm segmenting this post around 4 central themes: fear, failure, willpower, and focus. Let's get into it.

"Keep your head down." That's probably the worst piece of advice you can possibly ever hear. When it comes to wanting a promotion at work, we have made impossible games for ourselves. Promotional systems that exist today generally have good intentions behind them: we like to create predictable growth. Predictable growth usually comes in the form of promoting certain behaviors, so companies seek to elevate those who exude certain competencies from people who helped pioneer that predictable growth. Seems smart, right? Wrong.

You can't deny that title caught your attention. I'm usually pretty leery about books that use seemingly gimmicky titles to grab attention, but there are definitely cases were those books turned out to be pretty good. The Four-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss and I Will Teach You To Be Rich  by Ramit Sethi are great examples of this. Fortunately, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life  falls in that camp with Tim's and Ramit's books. It's excellent. The title is a little deceiving because it implies that, by the time you're done reading this book, you'll be well on the road to becoming this badass that doesn't care who says what. Internet trolls, nay saying friends? No problem. Nothing will get in your way, you're too good for that now! Well... not so much.

For as much as I love the show The Office , there was one aspect of it that would make me cringe any time I thought about it too much: what business those folks were in. This fictional company, Dunder Mifflin, sold companies paper and paper-related products on a recurring basis via a customer relations salesperson. Yup, this is what your favorite characters Jim and Dwight did every single day. Because when I think about a titillating career in selling something I'm passionate about, paper and paper-related products are the first thing I think about. ...I'm clearly dripping with sarcasm.