When I first dreamed up FinalVibe and thought about what I would love to see this brand become, I knew that it involved a group of people (FinalVibers?) documenting their journeys through success. How they wanted to document - blogs, vlogs, a private Instagram account shared with friends, a podcast, etc. - that doesn’t matter. What matters is that FinalVibers are pursuing a better version of themselves and sharing the highs and lows along the way. I think doing this is helpful for two big reasons. First, the FinalVibe community and your own friends/following will cheer you on along the way and hold you accountable. Secondly, your eventual success will likely motivate someone else to pursue their own FinalVibe, and what’s cooler than that?

My dream is that searching for ‘FinalVibe’ will one day show you an endless thread of individuals living the FinalVibe mindset one day at a time. I...

Last week was an exciting one because we were getting a new AC unit installed in the house on Friday morning. As if the old machine knew this, it completely stopped working last Monday, meaning I had a very warm work-from-home week. Friday eventually rolled around and as the group of installers were packing up their things and the cold air started blowing throughout the house (finally), our internet went down. After a call with tech support, I learned that it wasn’t coming back until this coming Thursday.

My initial reaction was to, naturally, freak out. Quite a bit of my life (okay, all of it) revolves around the internet. As the house dropped from 85 to 84 degrees, I was feeling warmer than I had all week, worrying about how I would get things done and what I would do to keep projects moving forward. As I started making contingency plans, it hit me that this was a great moment for...

I believe that the concept of FinalVibe - the act of pursuing your ideal legacy - is important for everyone, but I also know that every person will come to this realization when they are ready. A sudden loss of a job, a serious illness, a death in the family, or a pandemic can all be moments that make you step back and realize how fragile all of this is. Some people are hit with this when they are young, and others decades later in life.

This happened to me in 2017, when I became extremely anxious about my own health and, until recently, struggled with this on a daily basis. This started with random and small muscle twitches that were happening all over my body, which lead to me in a neurologist’s office on two occasions to rule out ALS (never Google your symptoms). The peace of mind that came from those appointments was short lived, however, when I started experiencing… let’s call them...

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...