SIDE PROJECTS

I’ve worked on a few “side projects” over the last decade. Check them out here:

The Reading List Project

If reading hasn’t become important to you yet, just wait. With the world increasing in its complexity, there are resources out there that can help us, if we’ll just listen to them. As an entrepreneur, I realized in 2017 that I needed to kick my reading into overdrive to better understand how to surmount the obstacles in my career. Now, for the first time ever, I am sharing my reading list of the best (“5 star”) books I have read over the last few years, as well as the other books I’ve read, my current (aggressive) reading list, and more. This is an actively developing side project, so feel free to bookmark this and check back in a few months to see where it has gone.

The Wisdom Project

We all have experiences in our life, and if we pause long enough to reflect on those experiences, we can learn some valuable insights about how to live life well in the future. I’ve taken this to heart in 2020 and created a blog project where I post the “wisdom insights” I’m discovering based on the gems I’ve mined from what I’ve learned. This personal project is designed to help me grow in my own wisdom, but also I’m sharing to benefit anyone else who is interested in reading what I’ve learned. My intent is to complete this website project by the end of 2020, while making “wisdom mining” a lifelong habit.

Racial Reconciliation: A Resource List

For many of us, George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020 launched us into a discovery journey concerning racial injustice. For me, this hit home because if my wife and I have biological children, they will be considered “black” in America. Further, as a Christian, I believe I have a responsibility to seek justice where there is injustice. It is clear to any educated party that the injustices due to 400 years of racism in America are significant. I want to bring others along in my learning journey, so I have decided to create a Google Doc with all of the best resources I have found that have influenced my perspective and helped me to self-educate.

Contact Info Detective: A Resource List

With numerous sites like Intelius charging to provide people’s contact information, you begin to wonder how you can quickly combine all the free resources on the Internet to achieve the same effect. This project was originally a growing list of websites I bookmarked on a Google Doc, called my “PR Secret Weapons” when I was in PR and contacting journalists or connection of our clients was a required part of my job. It can be scary how many pieces of information are publicly accessible about us for anyone to find online.

The Sword of Ren: A Novella

I wrote an original, novella-length story during a National Novel Writing Month. Given my familiarity with and love for Star Wars, I chose to set this story "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." I wrote this story during a time when I was coming to terms with significant losses in my own life.

The Lightsaber Designs Project

With the success of Disney World’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme park, more and more children and adults are interested in owning lightsaber replicas or props. A lightsaber hilt is a very personal item and to create one that fits its owner, they must first consult a wide variety of designs. This is a growing photo library of artworks and designs on Pinterest, intended to inspire creativity and help prospective lightsaber designers figure out what they’d like to build or have built next.

MAN CARDS: Masculine “Thank You” Cards for Men

MAN CARDS is intended to be a company with an online store that sells masculine "thank you" cards. The concept is on my Pinterest page. The business strategy is to start in phase one as a curation site, directing site visitors to the best masculine "thank you" cards on the Internet. With this start, the only fees will be minimal (cost of web domain and hosting) because there will be no inventory or overhead with an opportunity for ad revenue. If a long-tail ad campaign helps visitors to find the site and it becomes the Internet's best resource to purchase masculine "thank you" cards, phase two includes the design of MAN CARDS' own line of "thank you" cards designed by men for men.