Author: Dave

I’ve recently come to discover that psychological self-defense is an area that a lot of people could benefit from learning more about. Learning to recognize red flags is a key bulwark against manipulative tactics and one I wished I’d learned much sooner in life. One of the most vivid examples was when I formed a…

As I discovered in my sales jobs previously, the notion of courage was used as a selling point to convince me that I should ignore my instincts and ignore social decency. The one who just pushes through will get many things. But I think it may be like the songbird inside the egg. Brute force…

I mean, really. There are SO many marketing agencies out there and a high percentage of them are full of shit. What do I mean when I say “full of shit”? I think in terms of several criteria that don’t necessarily involve lying or explicitly breaking contracts (but often can). In the essay “On Bullshit”,…

I used to have a blog dedicated to the subject of religion, and alas, I made the mistake of starting a free WordPress blog that was eventually deleted from cyberspace. So lately I’ve thought about how to slowly reconstruct some of the material I had created. I have new thoughts on the subject as my…

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette discusses in depth the four primal masculine archetypes. I’ve referred to the book often over the past few years. Lately, I’ve been noticing a need to draw on the archetype of the Warrior. I’ve spent a lot of…

I’ve long struggled to function in social circles where people “drop hints” in the form of nonverbal cues or indirect statements. As a literal communicator by nature, I tend to miss a lot of cues that seem obvious to others. Perhaps it’s a socialization issue or cultural mismatch, but it took me a long time…

Recently I was exploring my relationship to the word “commitment.” Throughout most of my life, I have heard the word in a negative connotation. I have historically associated commitment with a lack of freedom, and I have also associated commitment with deception and dishonesty. My experience with commitment as often involved, entering into a contract…

As a man on a mission to build intentional communities, a central pillar of my mission is authenticity. We can’t have thriving community if people can’t be themselves. And I believe people are inherently creative. One of my favorite books on the subject is The War Of Art by Steven Pressfield. I highly recommend it.…