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.

We all have been a victim of something at one or another point in our lives. Those situations can widely range in scale from an atrocity such as rape to being affected by a questionable change in the workplace. This post particularly addresses that latter piece and purposefully does not seek to put down great atrocities at all. (I hate having to begin posts that way because I hope you'd naturally trust me and assume that I have no ill intentions.)

We all know those folks. The people who persistently point out where a comma was misplaced, where a word was misspelled, and where something wasn't properly capitalized. Mistakes happen, and spelling / grammar is definitely important. But when a person takes it upon themselves to start correcting these minor mistakes, there is a much deeper problem going on.

A few posts back, I noted that we should focus on big things because we become preoccupied with the details of the goals we set for ourselves. So if you set the goal to lose 20 pounds over 6 months, you'll adopt strategies to make that goal a reality when if you set a goal to lost 100 pounds over 6 months, you'll adopt strategies to make that goal a reality. The time doesn't change, nor does the mentality. I'm currently reading through Mark Manson's The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck  and learned about a concept called Parkinson's Law. Parkinson's Law states the following: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Have you ever read something or been told something that hits you so hard that it virtually stops you in your tracks? Unable to write, speak, or even think? My mouthy self has spoken for eight months now on this blog, and not once has something hit me so hard as it did yesterday. The reason I'm able to continuously churn out content is because I believe wholeheartedly that, opinion pieces aside, what I have to say is true. And I've come across a lot of truth in things like books, podcasts, and videos. But there's something I've semi-unknowingly buried. And yesterday, it hit me like a ton of bricks.

Back in the day, if you wanted to publish a book, you had to sign a deal with the book publisher. The book publisher would then work with bookstores, who would ultimately sell the book to the consumer. That book would get lost in a sea of other books, so the probability of somebody finding the book you wrote was really, really low. Even if they did discover your book, the bookstore and book publisher gets a cut of that revenue before you do. That's all different now.

I've gotten back into Ramit Sethi's work in a big way, and I've found a lot of his stuff has complemented previous posts on this blog quite nicely. I'm specifically referring to decision fatigue. As a very quick reminder, decision fatigue is the idea that we make poorer and poorer decisions as the day goes on because our brains just aren't wired that way. In an Art of Charm podcast featuring Ramit Sethi, host Jordan Harbinger questions Ramit on that balance between creativity and basically re-using concepts tested by other people. Ramit was all for re-using tested concepts. Why? Because he discerned that cognitive thinking should be reserved for times when creativity is needed, and creativity isn't needed in every aspect.

Education is a tricky thing. Many jobs require you to learn things prior to you getting on the job, but sometimes, that education is more valued in retrospect. What is and what isn't valuable gets especially lost in four year degrees that mandate something like 130 credit hours for graduation. A college isn't going to tell you, "These classes are important, and these classes... not so much." To be fair to colleges, value is a subjective thing. What I might have found valuable might be different to somebody else. This is especially true for a more general major like mine, Business Administration. I took courses in macroeconomics, marketing, communications, finance, accounting, HR management, and more. If you go ask my fellow graduates which courses they valued the most, I bet every one of them would give you different answers. Anyway, I was reflecting back on my own undergraduate education and thinking about the classes I wish I could go retake. It's not that I...

We have been lied to. We have been told that we are special just because we live and breathe. That all our actions provide equal and meaningful weight across all humanity. That nobody can tell us this or that because we are each discovering our own truths every day. This has manifested itself in a number of ways. Participation trophies and medals are at an all time high. College campuses have become houses of affirmation rather than places of learning. Children are being taught to "be yourself" and expect to be automatically accepted and loved by everybody. This is dangerous thinking. And it's dangerous because it's just... Not... True.

Ten years ago... Barack Obama was not a president yet. MySpace was the most popular social platform. Smartphones were just on the horizon, and tablets and smartwatches didn't exist. CDs were still the primary way you listened to music. Netflix's core business was shipping DVDs with VOD only in its very early infancy. That was all only ten years ago.

This is actually my third time reading through this book, and there's a reason why. They're all centered around the release of another of Bell's books, Love Wins . Prior to Love Wins , Rob Bell was the hottest thing in the Christian community since Welch's grape juice. Bell became best known for his very well produced video series, NOOMA, as well as his other endeavors like the Everything is Spiritual keynote and Sex God book. And also because of Velvet Elvis . Fast forward to 2011 when Bell launches Love Wins  and all hell breaks loose. For those familiar with the premise of Love Wins , you'll know I had a punnerific pun there when I said "all hell breaks loose". The premise of that book is that Bell believes all people will eventually turn to God, even post-death, meaning that hell will eventually become null and void at some point in the future. This didn't sit well with a lot of people, especially since many people interpreted the premi...

Spoiler alert: This post is probably going to come across as super pretentious, but I still write it because I believe every single word. I'm also not going to lie about the fact that fashion is super interesting to me. One of my favorite movies of all time is The Devil Wears Prada , and I'm such a regular at Express that I ought to be sponsored by them. If I had the money, I'd probably go shopping on a very regular basis. (My wife would tell you I already do more than enough shopping for the both of us!)

Ever since finishing Mindless Eating , I've been hyper-aware of the environments and situations in which I eat. One of the points in that book is that its not that we are unaware of the nutritional choices we make but more so that our emotional side kicks in and takes over regardless of hunger or health. Think about the Rider / Elephant metaphor from the Heath brothers' book, Switch . Our logical side (the Rider) is well aware a donut is not a healthy choice, and its easy to tell ourselves not to eat a donut when they're not around. But then, you have a coworker bring in a box of Krispy Kremes, and your emotional side (the Elephant) says it's game on. Despite the fact that we know the donut is bad for us, we don't care and scarf down five of them. (Okay, maybe five is an exaggeration for most people, but... well... that's not an exaggeration for me. 😌) That said, I thought I'd share my five biggest "danger zones" as a means for you to think ...

I love food. Deep dish pizza. Peanut butter M&Ms. DQ Oreo frappes. White chip macadamia nut cookies. Kettle cooked potato chips. Spaghetti made with Ragu's "Super Chunky Mushroom" sauce.  These are just to name a very select few of my favorite foods. Even after losing 100 pounds, it is a daily battle to keep off the weight. The weight may be gone, but the appetite certainly is not. That said, I'm constantly looking for ways to help keep my weight off. It is a deathly fear of mine, and I don't exaggerate when I say that I still weigh myself at least twice a day to ensure I'm not indulging too much into my favorite foods. I actually stumbled across Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think unintentionally. As I like to do, I was listening to a podcast where Tim Ferriss was interviewing I Will Teach You To Be Rich  entrepreneur Ramit Sethi, and like he normally does, Ferriss posed this question to Sethi: "What is the book you gift to people...

If you’ve read my very first post on this blog, you’ll know that I actually attempted to start blogging a couple times prior to establishing this blog (and my other blog) but ultimately shut them down because I viewed them as failures. Failures because they didn’t get the views I was hoping for. And that’s why they failed so quickly: I was in it for the views, not to promote some sort of cause or idea. What I didn’t explain in that post was why I chose a name that was not my own. Most people have blogs under their own name, and actually, my first two attempts were done under my name. I still own the URL rights to www.dkhundley.com because A) I never know if I’ll want to use it again in the future and B) It only costs me $12 a year to sit on it. If you try going there, all you’ll get is a simple, poorly maintained Wix-based site.

Steve Jobs is often cited as one of the greatest influencers in modern business, and rightfully so. He not only helped to establish one of the largest companies in the world but helped to resurrect that same company from almost certain death in the late 1990s. Time and time again, Jobs helped usher in a new idea via a new product that would ultimately revolutionize the industry again and again. Those familiar with the popular biography by Walter Isaacson will know that Jobs's sustained success had a lot to do with what people called a "reality distortion field". Under this "reality distortion field," Jobs had an almost magical influence to make people truly believe in anything Jobs had to say, regardless of how wacky it seemed at the time . Where some people looked at Jobs as insane because of this, history has proved in favor of Jobs with the success things like the original Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and even the Pixar Animated Studios. So, what was it ...