A longer
answer
to the question.

I taught myself to program at ten on a TRS-80 Colour Computer because I wanted to make pictures and music out of nothing. My mom was laying out newspaper pages on PageMaker in the next room. My dad told me stories about riding motorcycles across Africa in another life. My big sister and I wanted to go to Disneyland, so he told us we had to run the distance between us and the park before we could go. There was a spreadsheet. On Easter morning, he’d disappear into the Bow River valley before dawn, and my sister and I would spend the entire day hunting down clues he’d hidden in eagle’s nests, beaver lodges, and the edges of cliffs, following a trail that more often than not required a canoe, climbing harness, and sometimes air support.

Reading Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals as a kid, I felt a shiver of recognition I’ve never quite shaken. My family has always been like that. Adventure has been the given, not the exception.

We landed in Calgary by way of Toronto when I was ten. I’ve been here, off and on, ever since.

I have been saying yes to things since, roughly, forever. “I wonder what would happen if I ________,” is a common phrase. Saying yes is how I ended up running a jiu-jitsu school, performing and directing at Loose Moose Theatre, hosting 250+ episodes of the RebelRebel Podcast, co-writing a one-act play called STUMPED that an adjudicator once called “the perfect little play,” certifying as an advanced scuba diver, and accidentally founding a creative agency that’s still running more than twenty years later.

It’s also how I came to write a book.

BrandJitsu: Move Your Brand From ‘Meh’ To Memorable (Dundurn Press) was a labour of love that took about a decade. It’s the methodology I developed at Make More Creative over more than twenty years of helping founders, startups, and stubborn legacy brands find the truth about who they are and say it out loud. I’m working on the follow-up, PitchJitsu: Opening Minds and Wallets, along with a literary memoir called Bubbles and Blood (working title) about learning to breathe underwater and, eventually, to stop being afraid of the dark parts of the ocean.

There’s no plan that connects any of this. If there’s a through-line, it’s curiosity and a suspicion that going sideways into things — deep into one craft, wide into everything next to it — teaches you more than climbing any particular ladder. I call this flashing sideways, and I’ve made a career out of it.

The adventures have come in roughly equal measure with the wreckage. I’ve been lost in the Sulu Sea, I’ve thought I was about to be kidnapped by a ruthless gang, I’ve woken up in a cactus. I’ve blown up a puppet pigeon on stage in a children’s production of Rapunzel. I’ve found myself at the hospital with an extraordinary testicle injury that an entire auditorium of medical students got to see on a screen only slightly smaller than iMAX. I’ve spent fourteen days in a pandemic quarantine hotel developing a complicated emotional relationship with a desk lamp named Brad. I’ve watched my kids find handfuls of marbles on a slack tide on a beach in Ucluelet. I’ve hovered at fifteen feet below the surface of the ocean, watching the sun set through the Pacific while a curious Ling Cod hung out specifically to spite some fishermen.

Most of those stories are in the archive on this site.

I read the way some people eat — fast, messily, and with commitment. I dog-ear pages, break spines, underline in pen, and generally finish a good book looking like I fought it. There is almost always an errant letter stuck to my sleeve.

I live between Calgary and Vancouver Island with my partner Jennifer (Panda, on paper), two sister cats named Charlie and Mabel, five motorcycles, and an evolving opinion about where octopuses rank in the hierarchy of earthly creatures. I have two grown sons who regularly test the bounds of gravity and insurance on motorcycles of their own. My personal motto is do cool and weird shit with cool and weird people, and I’ve found that if you say that out loud often enough, the cool and weird people find you.

If any of this is your thing, the newsletter is how I’ll find you back. The writing is here. The books are on the way. The door is open.