I used to get frustrated when trying to learn some new skill or advance my proficiency in a personal or professional arena. Why couldn’t I master tai chi or tennis faster? Why was my business growing in fits and starts? Why did I keep making the same mistakes? Why didn’t my wife realize that I was right?… and why did it take me years to figure out that she was often the one who was right? It was a long list.

Was it me? The teachers? The techniques? All of the above? Why did it take so long to learn some stuff and get it right?! I had a lot of questions. Maybe you do too.

But do we really need another self-help book? Is there something missing from the hundreds of thousands of titles that already exist? Apparently so, since people keeping writing books about personal growth and success, and multitudes of others keep buying them.

So what exactly is it that’s missing? No doubt many things, especially as our world keeps advancing, and new titles address novel challenges and fresh opportunities. Plus, let’s not forget our appetite for advice offered by celebrities, authorities, and catchy clickbait titles.

But beyond the novelty of a new book, is there something more fundamental that can help us? That was the big question that I asked myself many years ago as I set out on my odyssey to expedite success and happiness.

In my own life – as a businessman, father, husband, athlete, and spiritual seeker – I often looked for specific books to address singular issues and opportunities. One of my favorite business books is the classic Performance Management by Aubrey Daniels. For romantic relationships, I still remember how Men Are From Mars and Women Were From Venus by John Gray opened my eyes. In parenting, it was Foster Cline who wrote Parenting with Love and Logic. Terry Laughlin, in his numerous books on swimming, explained how that practice and many others became almost effortless when everything was properly balanced. And in the spiritual realm, it was The First and Last Freedom by J. Krishnamurti that I fortunately discovered as an eighteen-year-old boy. They all continue to guide and inspire me.

And yet something was still missing, because virtually all self-help books are either activity specific (getting better at golf, gardening, managing people, writing books, and so on) or they focus on raising awareness (well represented by Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, J. Krishnamurti, Michael Singer, and others). However, as important as all of these topics are, I have come to appreciate that by themselves, they’re only half of the equation. They’re the yin and yang of a bigger whole.

The fact is that we need both increased awareness and improved action. They are both necessary to achieve, advance, and thrive in life. Like the two haves of the well-known yin/yang circle, awareness and action complement and complete each other. But it doesn’t stop there; they also have the capacity to augment and expand the other. As a result, two and two can equal ten… or much more.

It was this basic observation that formed the core of Elevate, my resulting treatise on personal growth and success. It seemed to be the missing link in our common search for fundamental improvement and sustained success.

By itself, a recipe for a given task can be mechanical and limited to just that singular endeavor. But add awareness to the mix and success blossoms as we better understand both what we’re trying to accomplish as well as our role in it. It’s a dynamic process. Our abilities and our awareness grow in tandem. Plus – and here’s the real magic – our increased awareness enables us to better perform all other tasks since we are the primary ingredient in all that we do and aspire to. Eventually, every single thing that we do both benefits and illuminates. It’s a virtuous cycle.

In Elevate and throughout this website, I’ve set out to explore the strong connection between these two halves – between a greater foundation in ten fundamental skills and a deeper awareness of ourselves and the world around us. Once you fully understand and embrace this connection, life will never be the same.