Noticed a lot of my followers are younger dudes, hustling to make it. Wanted to share thoughts from my perspective, which is: 45, married 10 years, 2 young boys. Business owner, income in the top .1%. Two homes, nine surfboards. Healthy, happy and busy. Made many mistakes in my 20’s, and moved home with parents at 30. Overcame a lot to get where I am, from awkwardness and deep insecurity as a child, to the loss of our daughter as an adult. Here we go: More than anything else, your close relationships will determine the quality of your life. As you grow and take on bigger challenges, you’ll meet more consequential problems. The integrity, and emotional temperament, of the 2-3 people closest to you will either be an anchor that drags you down, or the wind at your back. Seek out people who wish to do things the right way, who have a strong sense of fairness, who treat others well behind their back, and who do not have any obvious addictions or excessive sloppiness in their personal life. Your personal balance sheet will give you more confidence than any car, watch or status symbol. When you feel the urge to exaggerate, flash, or do/buy something to impress other men (or women) try to replace it with a vision of yourself standing confidently and exactly as you want to be seen, in jeans and a t-shirt. You should be comfortable standing in a room full of men wearing nice watches, without wearing one yourself, knowing that you are just as successful as them, if not more so, and that you have absolutely no need to prove it to them. That is the point in which you truly deserve a nice watch - if you even want it by then. Obviously, don’t neglect your health. It is 100% true that things change in your late 30s and early 40s, and the cardiovascular and muscular baseline you have built leading up to that will support a better quality of life, or a worse one. There are a world of wonderful women out there. They are just as challenged to find good men as you may be to find good women. Just like you, they will have an agenda and relationship goals. Quality attracts quality, and to deserve a good woman you must be the man who deserves her. Have fun, have standards and have humility. Marriage is often amazing and sometimes hard. You will figure most of it out, if you have married a good woman, and if you two can argue respectfully and resolve conflicts without crazy escalation. I highly suggest seeing a Gottman-certified therapist as a couple, to get better at conflict management. Kids are the ultimate challenge and the ultimate adventure. If you aspire to serve a higher purpose, to lead, to learn and to love, there’s nothing better. Life with kids is deeper, sweeter and more profound, in a way that cannot be understood until you hold your own child in your arms. To live well is to live with spirit. Even when the joy is not there in the day to day, you must strive for it. Even when you feel encumbered and unfree, you must yearn for freedom. The world is full of opportunities, and second and third and fourth and fifth chances. If you work hard, surround yourself with good men and women, strive to be helpful and useful to others, and you’re financially and emotionally responsible, you’re gonna do great. 🤙🏼

for two years, we battled (and frequently lost) against Amazon copycats who used our product name in their listings. all because we didn't have the trademark. well, we finally got it 🙏 been getting a lot of messages like this one lately, to which the obvious response is: gfy.

hey @quxiaoyin nice little black hat mrr company you’re running here. @FTC have a peek 👀

special kind of dinner date for a special kind of girl on our 9 year anniversary 😍

went out shooting the other night, got some gooooood light

My big dude spent his first night in the ER on Tuesday... Picked him up early from camp and could see he was having a hard time breathing, like he was trying to swallow air and his throat was constricted. It got worse as the night went on and his fever hit 103, so my wife took him while I was putting our younger one down. I am very pushy with hospital people so my wife asked me to come and trade places with her. And indeed it took some pushing, since his SpO2 was 98 and fever was down a bit when they checked him in. As I was driving there I thought back to two previous drives... Five years ago, our cat Dexter got hit by a car. My wife found him and I got a text from her when I was leaving PT, "DEXTER GOT HIT BY A CAR". Scary but I was like ok, maybe it's not so bad... She took him to the animal hospital. I was really upset driving there, but I was like "it's gonna be ok, things work out ok for me and my loved ones." But they didn't that day, and we had to say goodbye. The next part you might know if you know me - a year and a half later, I got a text from my wife during a non stress test late in our daughter's pregnancy: "They can't find her heartbeat, I'm scared". There were a few more after that, I can't remember them but it was the same fucking drive to the doctor's office, as it was to the animal hospital, about two blocks apart. This time my thought wasn't that things would work out... it was that they were totally fucked, but my brain didn't really accept it until I saw the look on the nurses faces at the clinic, and walked into the room to find my wife in fetal position on the floor crying. Then last year, one of my good friends from college died here in Jackson. Super healthy guy, amazing husband and Dad of 3, and very very successful investment banker - he was doing this climb/race thing and started to feel lightheaded. Went back to his room and laid down. His roommate discovered him passed out 3 hours later, they rushed him to the hospital here and he had cerebral edema, apparently from electrolyte imbalance. It's a smaller hospital here and they weren't able to treat him, so they airlifted him to Idaho Falls but he died along the way. So all of these thoughts were in my mind on Tuesday night as I was driving to the hospital. My son's condition got worse for a few hours, and his Sp02 dipped down to 82 at times. Needless to say I was very pushy, and he doing much better now - he had caught a virus that was causing his throat to close up, and he responded to an epinephrine inhaler + oral steroids. Home now and still fighting the virus but clearly getting better. When I was younger I used to look at older people and notice something in their eyes which is hard to pinpoint, but easily recognizable. It's not quite depth, but that word gets pretty close. Now that I'm getting older, I think it's simply described as "the sum of all you've seen and lived and felt," the eyes broadcast it in a way that can't anti-aged away. There are times when I lament the things I had before kids - the loss of freedom, the great self-orientation, etc. And now I've experienced a few acute moments where the pain/fear of being a parent is greater than any pain/fear I've experienced on my own. But the depth of life is far beyond, and the hard stuff comes with the amazing stuff. This week I kept thinking about to this Trevor Hall lyric that I want to get tattooed on my other arm, and I finally figured out the drawing to accompany it. So watch it come now, and watch it go. Don't you hold onto the high or low. The spirit dances on the unknown. Let it move your soul.

IT'S LIVE!!! I just launched my copywriting/advertising course on YouTube. These are the principles that have produced about ~$400M for my businesses. And the course is free. I created it ten years ago. Started selling it, then decided I didn't want to be a 'make money online' guy. So it's been sitting on a Google Drive ever since. Now it's yours, and if you sell anything online, I'm 99% sure that you'll learn something which helps your business grow! If you like it, all I ask is... - share it with friends and/or retweet this post - leave comments on the videos - tell someone special that you love them (seriously) I have zero interesting in building a business, a list, etc. out of this. No interest in monetizing it in any way, or doing coaching or consulting right now - still hardcore operating in my own business. But - I genuinely love this stuff, and I'd love to make more content over time. So if I see enough of the same questions come up in the YT comments, I'm sure I'll make more videos addressing them. Headed out camping in a few hours with the fam, and planning brick my social media and work apps for the weekend. Might check comments for a few hours then check out. So... enjoy! youtube.com/playlist?list=PL…

question for you guys - what’s the best way to post this? my understanding is that X suppresses posts with outbound links. so… put the link in a reply? i’ve got it uploaded, a few of ya sneaks have found it already! but i’m gonna delete and re-upload, so it shows up in the right order chronologically.

ps you really don't need to retweet this, that was a joke. but I won't stop you if you reallllly want to.

question for the media buyers: let's say you've got a month-old acct, ~3k/day in ABO. you've found a few winning videos at target ROAS. now you want to test about 300 statics. how do you do it? dump em all in a CBO? ABO with small budget for each? tyvm in advance

@iamshackelford help a brotha spread the word?

a friend of mine just reached out and reminded me of an email i sent in october 2020 about spacex. had a chance to invest but it was a 1M minimum, which I didn’t feel comfortable doing by myself, so I tried to form an SPV of 10 people at 100k each. Never happened. 🤦🏼‍♂️

the point of buying a patek should not be to impress the average guy walking down the street. in fact, to the degree that that motivates a person to buy a watch, they are subordinating their self image to the average guy walking down the street, which is stupid. the point of buying a patek is to celebrate yourself. as an owner of a 3711, please allow me to paraphrase the line from seinfeld: it’s real, and it’s spectacular.

dtc fam - what split testing software do you like for shopify? we’ve been on sticky for years so i’m a shopify n00b. currently using elevate but they have a bug which is causing our current test to not display live results. only 2500/day spend in this acct right now so it’s not mission critical, but it doesn’t inspire confidence for when we scale.