RUSTY LINDQUIST
LIFE ENGINEERING
Founder, CEO
FINDING THE LIGHT
EVEN IN THE DARKEST OF TIMES
I grew up in darkness. I lived amidst abuse; I experienced homelessness and hunger. I experienced abandonment and despair. I lived largely alone as an 11-year-old boy in the mountains of Montana. We had no running water. I ate squirrels, I ate worms, I stole food . . . I was just surviving.
I know what it’s like to live beneath your potential. I know what darkness feels like. I’ve devoted my life to solving this problem. I am committed to helping bring people out of the darkness and into the light . . . to helping them find their purpose and figure out who they are, where they’re going, and how they’re going to get there.
I started a company, Life Engineering, the culmination of my life’s work. An entire company devoted to helping you discover and achieve your potential.
Life Engineering is more than a company. It’s a belief. It’s a belief that you can take control of your life. It’s a conviction that you have power, and that when given access to the right support, you can activate and achieve your full potential.
This is the story of how it all started.
ONE BURNING QUESTION
WHAT HAD I DONE WRONG?
I sat with my mom in the living room of my grandma’s house, the morning sun pouring through the windows. I remember the day so clearly.
We were best friends.
I was 11, and we had gone through tough times together: abusive husbands, poverty, my dad’s attempt to take my life, so much disappointment and despair, and more moves than I can remember. And even though our family had been broken apart, my mom and I had stuck together.
We were inseparable.
That’s when she told me she was leaving.
In that moment, my world stopped moving. My heart stopped beating. In fact nothing existed, except one burning question that haunted me for many tough years to come… What had I done wrong?
This is my story.
one quick note
about this story
This was hard to write. It was was painful to excavate and reconnect with these emotions. For so long I didn’t write it, because I worried about offending and I fret about accuracy.
Additionally, as an adult I would learn that the reasons for my mom leaving, and my being taken from her, might not have been what they were made out to be. As you know, lives are complex, and excavating for truth is not always worth the effort.
On top of it all, I know memories are fallible. But ultimately I’ve decided to share my story with the context that I had at the time, because that’s how I lived it. I hope it will all become clear as you read.
And I hope you find my effort worth it. I decided that if my story can provide strength and perspective to someone who might need it, then I should share. Because mostly this is a story of how I realized that we all have a choice. We can succumb to circumstance, or rise above it. We can dwell on the past, or change our future. This is a story of finding light, even in the darkest of times.
And by the way, as an adult, my mom, sister and I were reunited. It remains one of the happiest memories of my life. My mom is an amazing woman, with a compelling and heart-breaking story of her own.
a sacrifice
he's not your son
In 1974, I was born into a small family in Utah. I had a single older sister, and we lived a simple life in a small house, in an inconspicuous town in Utah.
When I was two or three, my dad developed schizophrenia. It would set my life on a path I could have never imagined.
He began hearing voices. He thought they were the voices of biblical prophets. They told him he would be next and would heal the world of its suffering and wickedness. They started teaching him and giving him instructions. This greatly concerned my mom, and for good cause.
Before long, he received an ultimatum. To prove his faith and worthiness, he was required to make a sacrifice: me.
My mom saved me.
My dad came up the stairs, walked into the kitchen and grabbed a knife, then came to get me. My mom asked what he was doing, and he told her he had been told he had to sacrifice his son. Thinking quickly, she replied, “Then you should know, he’s not your son.”
As he returned to the basement for revelation, my mom grabbed my sister and me, the keys to the car, and we got out of the house and went on the run.
Assuming he would still be looking for us, and with her just trying to make ends meet, we moved every couple of years… always to small towns throughout Utah and Montana.
It meant I would never really develop friends, or roots. I was always the new kid. Always the one who didn’t fit in. Always the one who got beat up. Always the one whose clothes didn’t fit, or whose hair wasn’t cut, or who didn’t smell very good. But in the end, all that mattered to me was that I still had my mom. She was my foundation, and that was all I needed.
CHANGING SHEETS
ALL DAY WITH MY MOM
When I was about 4, my mom remarried, and we moved into a tiny upstairs apartment, cramped and poor, but still together.
I was excited to have a new father. I was hopeful that we would be friends, that he would accept me. But he was an alcoholic, and was very angry when drunk, which he was often.
In fact, I remember setting up traps… hangers dangling from string tied from doorknob to doorknob (I slept in the hallway). When either door opened, the string would sag, and the hangers would clink together to wake me up when he came in. That allowed me enough time to get out of the way, or at least be awake if he was drunk and felt like hitting. He was not my friend.
Soon that marriage failed, and my mom, sister and I moved to a small town where my mom got a job as a hotel maid. They allowed us to live in one of the rooms as part of her pay, and during the day I would go around with her, making beds and cleaning rooms. This was a happy time for me. I still remember her teaching me to fold the sheet corners over the mattress. “It’s ‘hospital style’” she would say, as she taught me to be tidy and clean and look for the details.
By way of material things, we had next to nothing. But in truth, I didn’t mind. In my mind I had everything. I got to be with my mom all day, every day. I’m sure I was incredibly helpful to her. I tried to be.
hiding in a pipe
pretending to play
When I was about 5 she gave marriage a third try. I was optimistic about this one. The first time my mom brought him home, he acted really interested in the matchbox cars I was playing with on the hotel floor. I imagined having a dad that would play with me. I had seen that happen with other kids, and that idea made me really happy.
We left the hotel and moved to a little trailer house in a remote Utah town, and that’s when my mom took me to my first day of school.
I hoped this school experience would be different than the others. But it wasn’t. I soon realized I was still inferior, stupider than all the other kids, I didn’t look like them, and I didn’t fit in. I was still the poor kid. I smelled bad. My clothes were worn out and didn’t fit right. I was new and I didn’t know anybody, and it wasn’t cool to hang out with me. What was cool was to pick on me, make fun of me, push me down and chase me. I got a lot of that.
I wasn’t very smart. I remember my teacher telling my mom I couldn’t come to class until I knew my alphabet. This was a dilemma, because I couldn’t be home alone as she had to work, and there was no money for a sitter. So my grandma came over to teach me. I remember feeling the pressure. I had one day to learn the alphabet. I remember my grandma actually pulling my hair in her frustration about how slow I was to learn. She probably thought it was the best way to get through to me, but I remember thinking she was mean. But it worked, I did it… but that meant I had to go back to school.
School was a harsh place. At recess I would hide in a huge cement pipe by the playground to avoid getting beat up. It was dark and I was alone and safe in there. I remember crouching in the pipe, with my back curved against the wall. I remember looking out and watching the kids play. I would imagine being among them. I wasn’t, but in my mind, I would pretend.
I often remember that long walk home from school with my sister. She was my friend. But no matter how dark my days were, my mom was my ray of light. She was always there when I got home, and she would make me feel better.
She would sing to me. I loved to listen to her sing. She began teaching me Karate to defend myself. I remember practicing in front of her in the living room. Watching and working for her approval. She was a black-belt; she was so cool. You didn’t mess with my mom, and I felt safe with her.
hunger games
no water or electricity
When I was about 9 my stepdad got a new job on an oil rig in Montana. The move to another remote town didn’t bother me. Montana was deep-forest, and to a kid who played almost entirely alone, who had learned to live in his imagination, it was totally awesome. The forest was my playground. It was full of mystery and intrigue. I spent every possible hour by myself, wandering the woods, using my imagination. Escaping. Especially if my dad was home.
He was often drunk, and usually angry. He was no longer interested in my cars or the forest discoveries I brought home to show him. Even the dead turtle I found in a hidden mountain pond. I carried it all the way home on a stick held far out in front of me because it smelled so bad. He especially didn’t like that.
In fact, I was mostly in his way. He was easily frustrated with my childish enthusiasm. When he got frustrated he’d reach out and smack me on the head with his fist. I hated that. It hurt, of course, but it wasn’t the physical pain, it was a reminder that something was wrong with me. It was a reminder that I was less than everybody else. It was humiliating. I learned that pain goes away a lot faster than humiliation. Humiliation stays with you, like a shadow you can’t outrun. But I was tough, I could escape to my forest and my imagination, and not even he could break my enthusiasm for that.
Money was very scarce. At one point we lived in a tent. I remember my dad coming home one day with a quarter of a box of pancake batter. We sat around the fire to make pancakes. That was the idea, but ultimately the smell overcame us, and we just ate the batter with our hands. It tasted so good. To this day it remains one of the most memorable meals of my life. I learned that satisfaction is a function of expectation.
Eventually my mom tired of his constant meanness and abuse, so when I was about 11 my mom, sister and I left and moved into a tiny camper-trailer parked in the woods a few miles down the street. A neighbor there was willing to let us set up on his property.
We didn’t have running water, or electricity, or heat, and very little food. My mom and I would walk down to the lake with a bucket, splash around in the water and catch fresh crawdads, which we’d bring home to boil. Those are happy memories. We ate a lot of millet (seed). I learned to shoot a squirrel out of a tree with a little recurve bow and arrow I had gotten one Christmas (Katniss Everdeen would have been pleased). And I had one good meal every day because I got free lunch at school. Whoever thought of that is my friend.
Most importantly, I had my mom. That was what I really cared about. She remained my constant.
No more free lunch
getting suspended
Because we had no running water, in the summer I would occasionally shower under a hose attached to our neighbors house, but in the winter, I just never showered. As an 11-year-old, that’s not good. I started to really smell bad. It’s really hard to be only tolerated at school, and I was constantly made fun of by the other kids. And even my teacher.
I remember my teacher. She had built a little 2-walled cubicle in the back corner of the class to isolate me and my smell. When I would walk in, I would go sit alone at my desk and close the cubical walls behind me. If I didn’t, she would. I could only listen to what was going on outside my fortress walls. I would let my imagination make up the difference. I would play with my matchbox cars, imagining amazing, daring car chases and battles across the surface of my desk, while the world went on outside my walls. I didn’t learn much.
But this way I wouldn’t disrupt the other students, the important ones, the ones worth spending time on. My teacher couldn’t keep me from coming into the class, but at least she could minimize my impact on her classroom. She exercised control the best way she knew how.
One day when I walked in, she made an open comment about how bad I smelled. It was the public shame that did it. The embarrassment rushed through me as the whole class looked at me and laughed. In a rush of haste and a lack of logic, I hauled off and hit her. It wasn’t much.
Perhaps just what she was hoping for, she marched me right down to the principal’s office. He suspended me. I remember sitting in that chair across from the principal, who seemed sympathetic, listening to my teacher argue for my dismissal, compelling him to suspend me. I remember thinking that I’d much rather return to the forest. But one thought haunted me. No more lunch.
ATOMIC FIREBALL
it was such a happy moment
I remember walking out of the school building that day. Everyone else was in class. My mom wasn’t home to come get me, and we didn’t have a phone at home to call her anyway. I walked out of the doors and stood alone in the parking lot. I remember turning around and looking at the school, feeling alone and thinking, “What am I going to do?” I again wondered what was so wrong with me. Why could nobody like me? I just couldn’t understand what was so broken about me.
I didn’t tell my mom. I didn’t want to disappoint her or put additional pressure on her to find a way to feed me. My sister had already left to live with my grandma. I didn’t want to have to leave as well. Staying with my mom was the only thing that mattered.
So instead I hung out in the woods during school. I had so many grand expeditions. I knew every root and tree and all the hidden secrets nobody else knew about. Sometimes I would hide in the woods outside the school playground, peering through the trees, watching the kids play at recess, and imagine being there.
One time I even snuck onto the playground to play with them. My teacher saw me and kicked me out.
At lunchtime I would steal food from workers at a nearby construction site, or sometimes from the general store.
After school I would be waiting in the woods outside the school. As the kids came pouring out of the building, I would quickly go from one to the other of those that I knew, asking if I could go to their house and play. It wasn’t so much the play that I wanted as it was the after-school snacks. I remember how kids would react to me, I could see it in their faces, but it didn’t deter me. I had to be resourceful. Sometimes they would even say yes. Not usually, but sometimes.
I remember one time finding a dime on the street while walking home from pretending to be at school. I brought it home with so much pride, imagining the possibilities.
My mom, sensing my excitement, told me I could walk down to the store and buy whatever I wanted. I remember standing in that store, weighing my options, imagining the experience of consuming each option. I remember that moment so clearly.
I ultimately decided on an “Atomic Fireball,” because I figured that of all the options, that would last the longest. I was so excited about this rare treat. The only thing I was more excited about was the opportunity to share it with my mom.
I remember carrying it all the way home… this was a many-mile walk, my mouth watering the whole way. When I got home, I remember when I got inside, I carefully unwrapped it and we carefully broke it with a little hammer we had. We sat around and shared the pieces. It was such a happy moment.
she didn't come home
something had changed
My sister had gone to live with my grandma. So now it was just my mom and me. But these were not the normal happy times together. She was very stressed. All we had was this little trailer, but we had no food, or water, or electricity to keep us warm at night. We were constantly and uncomfortably hungry, so she started traveling.
She was an entertainer, and would drive her old, beat-up truck to neighboring towns to drum up gigs in bars, or hotels, or wherever she could find work. Because we lived in such a remote town, these gigs were usually far away, which meant she’d often be gone for a night or two, leaving me all alone.
But this alone was different. Being alone while playing in the woods was one thing. Being alone during school time was one thing. In fact, I was alone a lot, and it usually didn’t bother me, because I knew that in truth I wasn’t alone. I knew that at the end of the day, I would come home, and my mom would be there. She was always there.
But this alone was different, because I would come home from a day alone, and would still be alone. This alone was different because it was a dark, cold, small trailer, with thin walls. This alone was different, because at night, huddled under as many blankets and coverings as I could find, I would sit with an empty stomach and listen to the sounds outside, trying to be brave. This alone felt different, and I didn’t like it at all.
Hope got me through. Hope always does. And as long as those nights were, eventually, she would always come home when she said she would.
Until one night, she didn’t.
Several nights had gone by and she hadn’t returned. She was long overdue, and I was worried. It’s times like these that your mind tends to do mean things to you. I began to wonder if she was ever coming home. I began to wonder why she wasn’t coming home. I struggled to remember if I had perhaps done something that would cause her to not want to come home. Was this my fault? I knew something was wrong with me, but I thought my mom didn’t care.
I remember on my final night in that wretched trailer, staring out the tiny window into the darkness, wrapped in a blanket, with my hands and forehead pressed up against the window, crying softly, and wishing—as if by the power of sheer belief—that she would come home.
Ultimately I gave up, fatigue finally defeating hope, and had just laid down to sleep, when light suddenly poured through the window and I could hear the crunch of tires on gravel just outside. I remember that sound still today, as if it happened yesterday. Flooded with fresh hope, I sat bolt upright in bed and looked out the small window.
It wasn’t her truck.
But I kept watching as the truck came to a stop outside the trailer. Nobody was getting out. It was as though she was steeling herself for what she had to do. After what seemed like forever, she slowly climbed out of the passenger side. There was a brace around her neck. It turns out she had been in a car accident, had broken her neck, and was laid up in the hospital with no way to come home, nor any way to call.
But the accident had changed her. She felt… distant.
pack your things
we're leaving
She came into the trailer with some guy who had agreed to help her and told me to pack. “We’re leaving tonight.”
It was weird.
We didn’t talk much, and I had no idea what the rush was. But packing didn’t take long. We threw our meager belongings into three black Glad garbage bags, tossed them unceremoniously into the back of the truck, and without any further ado, left our little trailer in Montana, never to return. I still wonder what rumors or stories must have sprung up in that little Montana town about the mom and son that one day just disappeared. We drove through the night to my grandma’s house in Utah, arriving very late.
It was the next morning that she told me.
i'm leaving
she'll come back, I know it
You know how there are certain events in your life that are of such a critical nature that the rest of your life hangs in the balance? They’re like hinge-moments. In these moments, time seems to slow down and you remember them with excruciating clarity.
This should have been like that, but it wasn’t.
I only have vague memories of it. I assume that the memory of this particular moment, like so many moments in my life before it, became the victim of selective memory. It hurt too much. And as an 11-year-old, with such a well-exercised imagination from so much time alone, I think I just chose to imagine that it never happened.
Here’s what I do remember.
I remember sitting on a chair in the living room. I remember the sun coming in through the window. I remember that because I always loved how sunlight pours through a window. I would spend hours lying in it, like a basking lizard, napping or imagining. It’s an odd little detail to remember with so much clarity, but I can still see the rays of sunlight streaming through the window, illuminating the lazy dust mites floating around in the air. The happiness of the sunlight was sharply contrasted with what happened next.
She told me she was leaving.
I was going to stay with my sister at my grandma’s house. I had feared this. I had feared it was coming. It was the thing I feared most, even when I had so much else to fear. At that moment, the world stopped. I don’t remember anything else. I’m sure she explained why. I’m sure it was a good reason, but my little mind didn’t process or retain any of it. My brain froze and fixated on this one incomprehensible moment.
I had never not had my mom.
At least not for any real length of time. She had always been there. Fathers had come and gone; at 11 I’d already been through three of them, and good riddance.
But not my mom. She was my constant. She was my world, my base, my strength and comfort. She was… mom.
I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, imagine a world without her. I vaguely remember trying to be tough. I didn’t want to make this difficult for her. I owed her everything.
Later, I stood at the window and watched as she drove away. I had done this countless times before, always knowing that she’d come back. So I did what I always did. I held on to that one thing that was deepest inside of me. The one thing that always kept me going. Hope.
“She’ll come back,” I told myself. “She’s my mom; she’ll come back, I just know she will.” But attached to that hope was a deep-seated dread. It was the recurring realization that something was wrong with me. That I was somehow… unloveable.
I chose to find comfort in that I still had my grandma. I have always loved my grandma; she seemed like a second mom to me. And I was now reunited with my sister. She was a rockstar in my eyes. So solid.
But this comfort, small as it was, was not to last.
not wanted
Another chance at "dad"
It didn’t take long before I started overhearing uncomfortable conversations between my grandma and grandpa, about how he didn’t want to have to be a parent again, about how I needed a real father in my life.
I remember wondering if he knew just how many times I’d been disappointed by my fathers, about how many times I’d opened myself up to them. About how many times I had hoped this one would be different.
I have learned to love hope. Hope is light, hope is strength, hope gives you power—like some magic internal well that gives life to the spirit in dark times.
But the hope for a good father was something I had completely given up on.
All I wanted was to stay with my grandma and my sister. And here I was listening to my grandpa trying to take that away from me.
His arguments were compelling, and soon my grandma relented. She told me we were going on a little trip to Idaho, to visit my uncle (her son) and his family.
I hardly knew them, as we’d met only a couple times before, both unhappy memories: once, for a family Christmas gathering, where he’d heard me use incorrect English and made me stand there, not letting me leave until I figured out the correct way to say it; and then again during another family Christmas where he and my mom had been in a huge fight. I realize now these are unfair memories, but as an 11-year-old, you don’t have much to work from.
So we packed my stuff yet again, put it in the car, and drove 6 hours to Idaho. I didn’t find out the truth until we got there.
losing everything
what had I done wrong?
We arrived at my uncle’s house, where my six cousins greeted me warmly. They lived in Idaho, on the top of a hill at the end of a long, dirt road, way outside of town. It wasn’t a forest, but there were miles of uncharted and unoccupied hills behind the house.
“You’re going to live with them,” she said.
We had stepped outside. She said she had something to tell me. I remember walking over to her car, away from the house. “You need a father in your life,” she said, “and your grandpa can’t be that for you.”
Here it was again. The promise of a father. Like that had worked out so well. And now it was at the expense of everything I wanted, everything I held dear, everything familiar. It was not a good start for a relationship I would forever struggle unsuccessfully to build.
I stood there in stunned silence. I remember looking around me, as if for the first time. It felt strangely similar to the day I walked out of the school, alone, suspended. I felt detached, as if the world had again stopped.
I tried to imagine this as my new house, to be optimistic about my surroundings, but I couldn’t. This was so foreign. I was an alien here.
That day, and the days that followed, my new family worked hard to make me feel welcome, to make it easier. And I felt my cousins truly accepted me, which is beyond my comprehension. But it did little to ease the blow.
When it was time for my grandma to leave, I stood in the front, at the top of the hill, and watched, again, as the last person I knew and loved drove away from me.
Somehow, this was the moment that hurt the most. Reprocessing it, trying to make sense of it in the days that followed, hurt over and over again.
I felt deeply and utterly alone, and it hurt. I felt this great, pressing weight in my chest, like someone was stomping on my heart, mocking my pain. I had felt pain in the past, the sharpness that takes your breath away, but this was somehow different. This was more than just another time you rolled with the punches life gave you, which I had learned well. But I couldn’t roll with this punch.
It hurt so bad. And then it hurt some more. And it just wouldn’t stop hurting.
This felt like life was kicking me when I was down, stomping on my face while I writhed on the ground. I was filled with fury and rage. By this point it felt like it was by design, like life was bent on breaking me. It felt deliberate.
I wasn’t raised religious, we had never really gone to church because my mom was poisoned by the experience with my biological dad. But I remember for the first time wondering why God was doing this to me. Was there even a God? If so, did he hate me, too? And if so, why? What had I done to deserve this?
i was broken
what's wrong with me
My new siblings were very welcoming. There was a warm house. There was food on the table. There was security, brothers and sisters to play with, and lots of little comforts… like toilet paper. Let me pause here and tell you as one human to another, you under-appreciate your toilet paper.
And there was electricity, heat, cooked meals, running water, structure, a real bed, with sheets and blankets. There were so many wonderful things to experience and grateful for.
I noticed none of them.
As much as I had gained, I felt like I had lost everything.
My mom was gone. My grandma was gone. My sister was gone. Everything was gone.
And I hardly knew this family. How could they ever possibly love me? I was clearly defective. Why else would literally nobody keep me? And here I was thrust upon them like an unrequested visitor that would never leave. A troubled child that they now had to feed, clothe, discipline and care for. How would they ever accept me? I was eating their food. This was a terribly awkward time. Not out of lack of effort on their part, but I felt like an unwanted child. I couldn’t help it.
And in times like these, your brain is not nice to you. I was plagued with troubling questions. Why did nobody want me? Was it my fault? Was I doing something to drive these people away? If so, what? What was wrong with me? Would my mom ever come get me? How could I go to yet another school? How could I start over yet again?
I felt overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of how much had been taken from me. When things had been taken from me before, my mom was always there. But this time, nothing was there, I had no one to cling to, I had nothing that was familiar. I was lost.
That was when my tics started. The mental and emotional strain had caused me to develop extreme OCD and Tourette Syndrome. I would twitch, or shake, or bend my neck oddly until my muscles would ache from the strain of it. I would sometimes go into the bathroom, overcome by the need to twist and contort my head, and would stand there in front of the mirror, watching myself literally turn in circles, unable to stop it, and realizing that I was broken.
It was another thing people would make fun of; and I still fight it to this day.
unexpected delivery
i realized I had a choice
For months I would put on my brave face during the day, pretending I was fine, pretending I was strong. But once I knew my brothers, whom I roomed with, were asleep, I would start sobbing into my pillow. Having learned about God, I begged for him to bring me back my mom. These were my first prayers. And they were desperate. “Please, please, please, please, bring back my mom… if you’re there, please hear me, bring back my mom.”
But he didn’t.
Instead, something else happened. Looking around me and feeling entirely alone, it was only then that I realized I wasn’t. It was only after everything had been stripped from me that my eyes could see what was there all along.
It was then that I came to know God. It happened over time, but it was very real. I felt his love, I felt his warmth, I felt his comfort, I felt his presence. It wasn’t conceptual, and most importantly, it wasn’t my imagination. It was real. It was transformative.
And instead of bringing back my mom, which is what I asked for, indeed, all I cared about, he gave me something greater. He gave me strength. He showed me how to forgive. He showed me how to endure. He showed me who I was. He showed me I was greater than the circumstances of my life. We all are.
He showed me that the purpose of life was not comfort, but strength and progress, which only come from opposition. And the greater the opposition you overcome, the greater the strength you develop.
It wasn’t easy; in fact, it took several years. But during this time, and with God’s help, I realized that I had a choice. We all do. I realized I could either choose to be consumed by sadness, or fear, or anger, or depression, or victimization… I could choose to be captive to despair; or I could choose to not. I could choose to rise above it all.
I realized that while I didn’t get to choose what life did to me, I did get to choose how I would perceive it. I realized I could choose to let go of my past, and in doing so, I could embrace a new future. So that’s what I did. I was 14.
letting go
and moving on
It was then that I made the tough decision. It was the decision to stop hoping my mom would return for me.
It was holding me back. And it wasn’t fair to my new mom, who in her angelic way was trying so hard to fill that role. By focusing so much on that vain hope, I wasn’t letting her.
I realized that the past tends to cling to us—like a leech, siphoning the energy we could otherwise use to move forward, sucking away our hope in its refusal to let go.
Then I realized it was the other way around. I realized I was clinging to the past, and it was preventing me from focusing on the future, which held a much greater hope. So I chose to hope for the future. I chose to let go of the past.
And that was when I was tested.
No sooner had I let go, then one Sunday morning the phone rang, and my Dad came into my room and handed it to me. “It’s for you.”
It was my mom. She wanted me to come back. She was ready for me, she said. But that’s a story I’ll save for later.
I had chosen my path, I had found solidarity, I was moving forward.
engineering my life
with light and truth
When I was 18, I wanted to give back, so I volunteered two years of my life to go serve mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I was sent to Sydney Australia, where I learned Mandarin Chinese. I spent two fully-dedicated years not working, or going to school, or dating, or doing anything but teaching those beautiful people from mainland China about the Savior, and God, sharing my experience of how he had changed my life and showing them how he could change theirs, too.
It was an amazing, unexplainable experience, to be lost in a greater cause.
When I came back to the United States, I studied psychology at the University of Utah. I married the most beautiful woman in the world, a girl from Utah that I had actually met when I was in Australia. Now we have 7 amazing children. They are the most happy, intelligent, sarcastic, funny, delightful humans you will ever meet. We are best friends. They keep me grounded. They are delightfully relentless in keeping me grounded. They fill my life with joy and give it meaning and purpose. We now have three grandchildren. We have a home where light and truth prevails.
engineering my life
with light and truth
When I was 18, I wanted to give back, so I volunteered two years of my life to go serve mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I was sent to Sydney Australia, where I learned Mandarin Chinese. I spent two fully-dedicated years not working, or going to school, or dating, or doing anything but teaching those beautiful people from mainland China about the Savior, and God, sharing my experience of how he had changed my life and showing them how he could change theirs, too.
It was an amazing, unexplainable experience, to be lost in a greater cause.
When I came back to the United States, I studied psychology at the University of Utah. I married the most beautiful woman in the world, a girl from Utah that I had actually met when I was in Australia. Now we have 7 amazing children. They are the most happy, intelligent, sarcastic, funny, delightful humans you will ever meet. We are best friends. They keep me grounded. They are delightfully relentless in keeping me grounded. They fill my life with joy and give it meaning and purpose. We now have three grandchildren. We have a home where light and truth prevails.
life engineering
powering human achievement
During this time, the better part of the last 25 years, I’ve been studying success and change and achievement…
The outcome of this effort is an absolute conviction of the following, the one thing i hope you remember:
You have more control over your life than you know.
You have more potential than you realize. You have strength within you... strength to overcome, to endure, to succeed.
Your past doesn't matter, your future does. That's where you should find your hope and place your focus.
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If you are ready for some help on your journey, I have so much to share with you.
I’ve dedicated my life to understanding what powers human achievement and I’ve surrounded myself with people who have the same goal in life.
Together we’ve built a company dedicated to powering human achievement and transforming this industry.
We hired a dedicated science team of scientists, with multiple PhD’s across various fields, all dedicated to perfect and evolve the science of human achievement that I have been working on.
We’ve built a world-class online Achievement Academy and are steadily and relentlessly pouring content into it so you can learn this science, understand these principles, be empowered by the frameworks, and gain knowledge!
We’re now building technology… apps, tools, diagnostics and assessments based on that science. Tools to power performance.
We’ve created processes and models and outstanding intellectual property with one purpose in mind… to help you become everything you’re capable of becoming.