Where have you been?

A brief look back

Sep 02, 2025

It has been 24 months and 50 posts here on Guide to Human. Time to stop and look back ever so briefly to ensure the direction of travel has remained consistent.

Whether you're discovering Guide to Human for the first time or have been walking this path with me for the past two years, this overview captures what I've been writing about and learning—often through mistakes and struggle—about purposeful living grounded in practical wisdom, authentic leadership, and the transformative power of leading with love. That's a very long sentence. It had to be.

I started writing these articles primarily to illuminate my own path, to make sense of my experiences, and to process lessons learned through military service, personal loss, and the humbling work of guiding others.

If they've helped you along the way, that means more to me than I can put into words. Words are often not an exact match for human emotion.

Thanks for reading Guide to Human! This post is public, so feel free to share it.

For New Readers: What You're Walking Into

Guide to Human isn't another productivity blog or motivational platform.

This is my attempt to make sense of difficult experiences and share what I've learned about living with intention, leading with love, and finding meaning through service to others. Built from my military experience that often left me questioning my assumptions, tested through personal losses that brought me to my knees, and refined through the privilege of guiding others—including my friend Ivan Castro through marathons after he was blinded in Iraq—this represents my ongoing education in what it means to be human.

If you're facing a significant transition, questioning your purpose, struggling with leadership challenges, or simply wanting to live more intentionally, some of these hard-won lessons might be helpful. I'm still learning myself. Feel free to follow along.

For Longtime Readers: What We've Discovered Together

Over the past 24 months, I've been working through some fundamental questions about purpose, service, and what it means to lead well. If you've been reading along, you've watched me wrestle with these ideas — sometimes successfully, often stumbling, but always trying to be honest about both the insights and the confusion.

What we've developed together is a way of approaching life that takes both struggle and service seriously. I'm grateful you've allowed me to think out loud and share what I've learned, relearned, or am in the process of learning, even when the lessons are often tied to failure and loss.

The 7 F's Framework

Most of what I've written is grounded back to the 7 F's—what I initially thought was just a way to organize life's competing demands:

Faith: Your spiritual and philosophical foundation

Family: Investment in your closest relationships

Fitness: Physical, mental, and emotional health

Finance: Resource management aligned with values

Fun: Joy, recreation, and life's pleasures

Friends: Social connections and support networks

Fulfillment: Personal growth and meaningful contribution

However, through my own struggles with prioritization and purpose, I realized that frameworks without a foundation are less useful.

The addition of the 8th F—Foundation (discovering your life's purpose)—came from my own confusion about what I was supposed to be doing with my life after leaving the military.

For new readers, I'd suggest starting with the Fs - I'm still figuring out how to maintain all these areas in a healthy and balanced state after years of practice.

Leading with Love: A Hard-Won Understanding

The most important thing I've come to understand after 40 years of leading: it's about developing the capacity to care for others, even when it's challenging.

This wasn't something I learned from books. My mistakes taught me that love-based leadership isn't soft—it's the hardest work there is, requiring you to see people clearly and care about their growth even when it's inconvenient for you.

It's an easy concept to say and a difficult one to master.

Learning from Suffering

I've had to learn that growth requires engaging with difficulty, though I certainly didn't seek this education out. The PREPARES framework (Process, Reframe, Expectations, Positive, Awareness, Routine, Exposure, Support) originated from my efforts to make sense of my own struggles with discomfort and loss.

Running ultramarathons with my brother, Ivan, wasn't about pursuing suffering—it was about discovering, often by accident, that shared challenges can become shared healing. These experiences crystallized that vulnerability doesn't weaken you, though I fought against that lesson for a long time.

Most of what I've learned about turning pain into purpose came through necessity, not wisdom. I share my path to help someone else navigate similar terrain with a little less stumbling than I did.

Practical Wisdom Over Theory

Every philosophical principle has to pass the reality test. From the military maxim "right place, right time, right uniform" to specific approaches for asking better questions, concepts in my head have consistently become actionable behaviors.

For new readers: This approach stems from real-life experience rather than the study of leadership theory. You're not getting motivational platitudes—you're getting reflections from someone who has tested these ideas under pressure, often out of necessity.

Combat doesn't care if you are prepared, neither does parenthood - and both demand everything you have to do them well. I’m retired from one and fully committed to the other.

For longtime readers: You've seen me work through these concepts, sometimes getting it wrong before finding a path forward.

Which practical applications have resonated most with your own experience?