While exchanging texts with a great friend and colleague yesterday, he sent me this message and it’s been on my heart since.

If you know my wife, Jacqueline, you know that she is a unique soul and would do anything for anyone. Her support for my crazy dreams and goals really is my super-power, and I hope to never take it for granted.

A few years ago I had the (crazy) idea to get into video game streaming, and I designed a ridiculous over-the-top “office” that would be great for just that. Jacqueline was on-board from the beginning, helping to paint the walls black and mount a 4th monitor above the others. The entire endeavor turned into some pretty great opportunities.

When we started the FinalVibe Podcast, I thought an in-person studio would set us apart. Jacqueline, again, was all-in. We hung up an acoustic curtain to hide the guest bed, took a trip to IKEA for furniture, and...

During the summer of 2013, I was living in Columbia, working 25 hours a week with a marketing team at Mizzou, taking one online class, and preparing for my senior year of college. I thought about pursuing a more classic internship, as thousands of my classmates did, but it was around this time that I was contemplating living in Columbia after graduation, so I wanted to hang out for the summer to see what life was like. It hit me a few weeks into this summer break that I was potentially putting myself at a professional disadvantage by not interning at a big company in New York City or Chicago, and I decided I wasn’t going to let that lead to me falling behind my peers.

In early June I decided that I wanted to specialize in marketing for the hospitality industry, more specifically hotels. I made a list of the 32 hotels that were in town at the time and ranked them in terms of their...

FinalVibe launched one month ago, and what a month it has been. Over the last few weeks, a lot of people have asked how FinalVibe came to be, and it’s been both fun and interesting to trace back my own thoughts to see how the pieces fell into place to get us where we are today. In short, a lot of moments, both big and small, happened over the last ~2 years that helped me put things in perspective - most importantly the passing of time and what I want to do with what I’ve got. My goal is to eventually create a documented step-by-step process that anyone can complete to help them look at aspects of their life from a different perspective, and I want to share what step 1 will be here.

Document Your Life. When it comes to time, one of the best ways to visualize your journey of legacy is to have the ability to visualize your past. One way I personally do this is through a free app called Day...

“So what exactly is FinalVibe?”

FinalVibe is a lifestyle. FinalVibe is a mindset. FinalVibe is your ideal legacy.

As co-founder Andrew White puts it:
“Legacy, the way I see it, is all about the way I’ll be remembered when I die. I’m not afraid to talk about legacy because I’m not afraid to think about death. As far as I can tell, death is a non-negotiable reality for everyone, so for me the question becomes, ‘How am I going to live my life in light of the legacy I want to leave behind?’ As bizarre as this may sound to some, there’s some part of me that looks eagerly forward to my final moments – those last few hours of life when things have gotten insurmountably grim in terms of my physical health (if I should be so fortunate to see death coming).

But, why?

Because for me, those moments will be the quintessential moments of truth - the moments of ultimate accumulation in which...

I bought www.FinalVibe.com at 10:17pm on April 13. For the 70 days that followed, I spent every free second that I had developing what FinalVibe is today and what it will be in the future. Sometimes that was 5:00am with coffee, sometimes it was jotting ideas down in a notebook while on a bike ride, and most of the time it was what I was doing in the evenings. With all of this being in addition to having a job, I would guess I was doing 18-hours a day, including weekends, and my mind was constantly racing.

I also knew that I was going to the Lake of the Ozarks in the last weekend of June, and planned to do absolutely nothing except relax, order a bunch of pizza, and spend 4 days trying to figure out which seltzer is the best (High Noon, Pineapple) with some friends from college.

The point is, I have determined that what works best for my personal motivation and quality of work is...

When you look at the average life of an American, you can see that most of what makes a person who they are is determined by just a few leaps of faith in their life. It can be terrifying to think about, but how many decisions do you make between the ages of 18-30 that determine what years 30+ look like? A lot.

Some of these decisions are big. College after high school or not? Are you going to marry someone? Do you want children?

Other decisions aren’t as big, at least on paper, but they have major implications. What kind of physical health are you going to have? What are your vices going to be? Who do you spend your time with? You can always change these, of course, but it’s hard to train an old dog new tricks, speaking from experience.

In my own life I have found that those leap of faith moments, when I truly committed 100%, have resulted in the moments in my life I am most proud of.

Did you know that we’re currently a little over 45% of the way through the year? I personally have little doubt that 2020 will be one of the most bizarre 365-day stretches in my lifetime, and I’ve been obsessing over how the impacts of this year will change the world forever. I work in the world of higher education (but also extremely far from it at the same time) and it’s been incredible to watch an industry that has provided a consistent product for 200+ years shift to online courses for an entire student population in a matter of weeks. There are a lot of stories like this, too. Restaurants that always had full dining rooms are delivering their food in styrofoam through your trunk. Major companies are letting employees shift to working from home full-time for their well-being. DogMaster Distillery, among thousands of other of alcohol producers, have shifted to making hand sanitizer...

Positive and negative vibes are a powerful force. I’ve noticed this a lot with this extra free time that social distancing has brought, and it’s given me a lot of time to examine my own thoughts.

I spent the first half of my “quarantine” consuming the news during every waking moment. I would watch 30 minutes of a big network and then switch to a different one. The general consensus between mid-March and April: things. are. bad. People are dying. People my age are dying. Coming up at 7:00, an interview with a 30 year-old woman who just lost her husband who, before COVID, was in completely good health. I found myself feeling down, a lot. I was the guy in the group text, “Numbers don’t look good in China today. If they go back up, we’re screwed.” We watched the press conferences for maybe three weeks straight during dinner. I was obsessed. I was depressed.

So I turned off the news...

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
Paul Romer, Stanford economist

Today is Day 70.

It has officially been 70 days since I’ve been working from home due to COVID-19. It’s been 70 days since the reality of this started to hit me. It’s been 70 days since I first heard the quote above. And that quote has been on my heart every day since.

I will start by saying that I understand how fortunate I am to, at least up until this point, not have been immediately impacted by this virus. My favorite passion - going out to eat - turned into a good deed. I’ve been asked to take 80 hours of vacation over the summer. Jacqueline is still employed. We’re all in good health. The most raw impact that I have seen was this past weekend while attending a heartbreaking funeral for my Uncle Don, with dozens of people mourning, sitting every other pew, singing through mandatory masks and being reminded to...