Many billionaires are trapped inside a poverty mindset. Sure, they have money managers, private jets, chefs, and all the trappings of material abundance, but underneath it all when you scrape right down to the nub… they don’t act like a truly confident human who trusts their wealth.

Take Charles Eisenstein’s example of a man in the favela who would spend every spare dollar he had buying musical instruments for the children in his neighborhood. After buying some beans and whatever essentials his family needed, he would give all the rest away. …

Despair is a heart so broken you no longer have any tears left to cry. It has a lot to say. It insists the fear or sadness will swallow us up whole and never let us go.

(No, it won’t swallow you up. Yes, it will let you go.)

Despair creeps in when our hopes have been dashed a few times too many for our nervous systems to handle. From 16 Years of Alcohol, the protagonist Frankie says –

“Hope is a strange thing, a currency for people who know they’re losing. …

You are love, you are love, you are love.

You are made of love. Your bones are love. Your tooth and tongue are love.

> But I’m tired. I want to go to sleep.

Sleep will come and with it your dreams.
Duendas.
Cielitos.
Languages never spoken.

You are becoming. You are a becoming. That will never change.

> Will my soul come out to play?

Yes, make sweet time to speak to it.

> I’m so, so tired. I don’t know how to rest.

Rest not in supermarket fantasies of bedtime dreams. Search for simple pleasures. …

The Enneagram illuminates how you can die from chasing fun.

We all have some way in which we’re born inside out.

As I read through the stories that have recently surfaced around the death of Zappos founder, Tony Hseih, a familiar pattern emerged.

The way Tony was born inside out was in his desire to have a happy life. What could be wrong with that, you wonder?

What does it mean to chase fun until you’re miserable? What happens when all of your wealth and being surrounded by throngs of adoring, friends, and strangers still doesn’t fill the hole within you? It left Tony whittled down to 100 lbs. …

There’s an existential crisis hanging out on the weather forecast of 2020 called “why is this happening?”

Believe me, I’m with you on this one, I’ve asked myself the same thing many times this year. However, I find most of the time “why” questions have no answer … at least not one that’s satisfactory.

We live in terror of these moments when we’re called into the metaphoric principal’s office.

“Why” questions automatically enlist our minds with defensiveness. Think about the last time someone asked you “why did you do XZY?” How did that feel? Cozy? No.

No matter what follows after the word “why” we hear the question as “Why do you suck so hard…

My daddy gave me a bedroom set when I was a tiny kid. As an adult, I discarded pieces of it one by one until I only had the rickety old dresser left. I changed the knobs and silver-leafed it in an attempt to make it more aesthetically pleasing. The drawers stuck. I lugged it around in dozens of moves. Finally, my therapist asked me if having that dresser helped me remember my dad. Somehow getting rid of it felt like a betrayal of his memory, but the truth is that my dad wasn't in that dresser. …

“Shit,” he says, “it’s all fucking shit. I entertain the masses. I make magic for the whole damn room. They’d all be bored as hell in their little predictable boy-girl romantic comedies without me, but no one wants to hear my side of the real story. She’s been talking to everyone, and everyone believes I’m the bad guy. She’s been playing nothing but power games since I broke up with her.”

She broke up with him.

“She wouldn’t have sex with me. Now she won’t even talk to me.”

“Why do you think that is?” I reply.

“She’s a selfish…

I know people who are prettier than me who don’t have a beloved.
They are loved by many yet still, they are single.
Their wound is different than mine
yet has the same result?
Always being wanted and never wanting back,
perhaps that’s what they feel.

Perhaps.

I know a woman smarter and more clever than me.
Still, the world does not beat a path to her door.
I saved a lot of time watching my friend
and learning I didn’t have to go down that trail.

It doesn’t bring happiness either.

I remember being 11 years old sitting on…