Backing up to the end of 2019, I was professionally in the place I always wanted to be. We were still called Revenue Collective, and we were growing. More and more people were buying into a world where values and generosity were at the root of decision making. We were building the foundation on which we could scale. We were making a difference.

But despite that professional success, my personal life was far from thriving. I won't go into too much detail, but I separated from my wife Camille in late 2019. I finally found what I was looking for in the corporate world, but, ultimately, I was lost.

I took a lonely trip to Florida that year, hoping to find some peace and decompress from the personal stress. It turns out Miami is not the place you should go for relaxation. I ended up spending my time there miserable and frustrated.

Yet, on a rooftop at the One Hotel in Miami in December 2019 I had one more epiphany. A personal one to mirror the professional epiphany I had at the rest stop back in 2017. I was sitting there nursing a drink, spending the holidays alone and feeling sorry for myself. That's when I finally began to really analyze myself and who I wanted to be.

For me, mindset begins with the narrative inside my head. That voice that sits on top of my perceptions and applies commentary and critique to everything happening in my life.

For so many years, that voice was not very pleasant. Throughout my life, I had a longstanding Google Doc filled with goals and resolutions. And reading through it, one would get the distinct sense that I don't like myself very much. My inner commentary was like a really tough athletic coach or a disapproving parent who is never happy with anything and has a problem with every accomplishment. Why wasn't it better? Why wasn't it more? Why wasn't that an A+?

I think about that inner voice like an aquifer. In fact, it's almost your inner essence is the aquifer. Your primordial view of the world and yourself in it. Your feelings and emotions pass through that aquifer to form words.

Those thoughts form your words, who you think you are. That flow becomes your essential feelings about how you look at the world. Suddenly that inner voice holds real power and can influence how you move through life.

And it determines whether you look at your life from a place of fear and pain, or from a place of love and abundance. All of your rationalizations stem from these fundamental belief systems that have already put the words in place.

And that's why it's like an aquifer. If your inner thoughts are already tainted with self‐doubt and loathing, then your words, feelings, and actions will be tainted, too. Changing yourself is incredibly hard because you have to go back before you can move forward. You have to dispense with all of these fundamental ideas you might have about yourself. All of these things that you think are objective facts. You need to realize that they aren't set in stone, and that you might be looking for a reason to bring tension or frustration or pain or anger into a relationship or into dynamics because of how you talk to yourself. That's what I had done most of my life.

I can't stress this enough because this is very, very difficult to practically accomplish. This is foundational. Your idea that you are who you are. That they are who they are. I remember a friend of mine once asking me, “What if everything was perfect? What if your life was absolutely perfect, including your relationships?”

I laughed when he said that. It couldn't possibly be true. Obviously, there were all kinds of problems. And all kinds of problems that other people had. They weren't my problems. They were their problems. I was beset with their challenges. Even though I was also a failure and couldn't get anything right.

My coach, John, calls these thoughts and ideas “your paradigm.” Your existing mental map of who you are and who everyone else is. And the problem with your paradigm is that it's very smart. It's you after all. It's logical. It's persuasive. It's all of the things you are but with a particular view of the world.

It was there on the rooftop in Miami when I thought back to that run with my friend Scott, the one who helped me emerge from the sense of failure when I was fired in 2017. The one who told me how unhelpful it is to be so hard on yourself.

Carrying around all of these burdens and expectations and feelings of inadequacy doesn't create the right framework or energy to spur new opportunities, and, perhaps just as importantly, it doesn't make other people want to be around you very much.

So I thought to myself, How can I make the same changes I made professionally, personally? How can I power myself with generosity and give myself some grace? The answer was I needed to learn to love myself. I needed to be the kind of person I would actually want to spend time with as a friend. I needed to show myself some compassion.

Breaking the Cycle of Self‐Loathing

As someone who struggles with and is treated for depression, I had been in therapy for years. But I was never sure if it was working. I would go in and talk about my relationships and leave those sessions more embittered and embattled then I'd been before.

For me, some of that came from the inherent nature of therapy to look backwards. My therapist would help me look back on the causes of my pain, find who or what could be responsible, and then validate my feelings based on my past experiences.

While probably not my therapist's intention, I would come out of my therapy sessions blaming others for my problems. It wasn't me, it was how I was raised. Or because of some experience. It would affirm that I was right, and it was others in my life who were in the wrong. That made me less willing to compromise and centered my experience in an ultimately detrimental way.

I have a theory that every therapist wants you to get divorced. That's, of course, very problematic, but I just remember so many times going into those sessions and either explicitly or implicitly asking the question, “I'm not crazy, right? That person is objectively messed up.” And of course my shrink would rarely ever directly say, “Yes they're messed up. You're right and they're wrong.” But it was strongly implied. And there was one time I was complaining, and he literally said, “I just want you to know, that's messed up, and, no, you're not crazy.”

Well, as someone who didn't want to get divorced again, who was looking for a way to repair my relationship, and who wanted to have harmonious relationships with people in my life, it's not particularly useful to walk out of every therapy session fired up and ready to have an argument because my indignation was just validated.

I remember for years and years and years, asking Camille, “Do I seem different? Is it working?” My experience is this: If you literally can't tell if something is working after years and years and years, that's because it's not working. There's not some mysterious force at play that's subtly shaping you into a saint but you can't tell. You'll know when it's working. And if you're worried something isn't working, it's because it isn't.

I began seeing executive coach John Mark Shaw in October of 2019, and he brought a new perspective to me. That perspective was about positivity and a forward‐looking view of the world.

John's perspective is a common one shared by all kinds of people throughout history from Napoleon Hill, to Tony Robbins, to Oprah. It's based on the idea that we are infinitely powerful spiritual beings and that if we focus intently on good and positive things, good and positive things will happen to us.

I realized on the Miami rooftop that therapy wasn't working for me—but coaching was. Most importantly, beneath all of that, I realized I needed to start loving myself. I needed to say it out loud. I needed to hold myself in much greater regard. And if I did that, everything would change.

And it did.

I can't tell you how I knew. I just knew. I knew that love was the secret that needed to be unlocked. I began typing furiously into my phone. I have that long rambling message even today. I remember literally crying at that bar when I wrote “You are not a disappointment. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You are wonderful and beautiful and I am so proud of you.”

The light bulb, the epiphany, was that I needed to directly speak to myself and support myself. Because I had carried around so much disappointment and shame. Because I was scared that I wasn't worthy. Because I was afraid to be happy and afraid to be mediocre.

The practice, the last piece of the puzzle, was love. And maybe that sounds silly. But it's real. If you can hold yourself in high regard, not out of egotism, but because you are worthy and valuable and beautiful. If you can practice doing that, and repeating it daily, it will change your life.

Following that trip to Florida, I channeled my inner Stuart Smalley. I started telling myself directly, both out loud and in writing, that I loved myself. More than three years later, that is still a part of my daily journaling practice. I don't just journal my gratitude or thanks, but I write directly to myself with compassion and care and say “I love you, Sam.” I write “I am so proud of you. I even talk to myself a lot particularly when I'm working out a difficult challenge.

We all assume that the voice in our head is speaking complete sentences. And it's not. It's speaking half sentences. It's a few words here and there and some feelings and some images. And that's why actually writing out how you feel and talking to yourself out loud is so useful. Because it forces you to put these ideas into actual words and think in complete sentences.

Fear is many people's dominant emotion. I know it was mine for much, much too long. I was so overly focused on negativity, on what I didn't have, on what wasn't there, instead of what I did have. I was so stressed about the future, so focused on my every flaw and failing. When I started writing and speaking to myself with compassion, I realized I could put that fear aside. I realized there was nothing to be afraid of.

My advice to you is to confront the fear, confront the impulses. Confront your inner voice. Dig as deep as you can to reset your aquifer and figure out who you want to be.

Only then can you find what you love and do it. All of the business lessons in this book are useful, but they lack vigor and impact if you are missing the fundamental ingredient of self‐love.

Framing Your Future

Embracing self‐compassion and working with John Mark Shaw completely changed the trajectory of my life. One of things I loved about working with him, and with other executive coaches, was the optimistic, forward‐looking lens with which they taught me to view the world.

One of my favorite exercises centered around building scaffolding images when goal setting. I find that there is a fundamental issue in how a lot of people set their goals. Most people list goals with theoretical language, saying things like “I hope that I will do X” or “My goal is to achieve Y.” I've learned that this is how you introduce doubt and ultimately set yourself up for failure.

Through coaching, I found that goals should be set as if you have already accomplished them. Imagine yourself in the future looking back on what you've already done. Write a paragraph of where you are at the end of the quarter, a year in the future, or even five years from now. Add as many details as you can. This is the trick. It needs to feel as real as possible. That's the scaffolding‐images part. You are creating a clear picture in your mind that will help support you in accomplishing your goals.

So set the scene for yourself. Use specific details: Where are you? What's the weather outside? What specifically were you just doing before you sat down to write your reflections?

From there, list out specific accomplishments, how you accomplished them, and how good they made you feel. Use positivity. Here's one of mine:

“It's December 2022. I'm sitting in my living room enjoying a drink while snow falls gently outside and my dogs sleep happily by my feet. I'm so happy and grateful that two months ago I handed out physical copies of my book to Pavilion members at our in‐person conference. I did it by hiring a book coach, recruiting my colleague Kerri to help draft the manuscript based on my outline and interviews, and signing a publishing contract with Wiley. I am ecstatic to be a published author and chart the course for a kinder way to do business.”

Do you see how this is so much more powerful than saying “I hope to publish a book someday”? As we talked about in the previous chapter, abundance begets abundance. When you approach your life and your work with positivity, optimism, and abundance, that is exactly what you will get in return from the universe. When you frame your goals in this way, you'll be surprised by how much quicker you will achieve them. This is all about setting yourself up for success and opening your mind to the generosity of the universe.

In Pavilion, we offer dozens of schools and courses that can help you level up or hone a particular skill. The cornerstones of Pavilion University are the first two programs we ever built—CRO School and Rising Executives School. We begin both programs with a workshop on framing your career. In the modern world, there's no linear path to career growth. Each career is a sequence of non‐linear leaps from one opportunity to the next. Which makes framing your career all the more important.

We teach how having a detailed career plan helps you work backwards to understand sequential steps along your journey, exactly as I learned in my goal‐setting exercise with John Mark Shaw. This isn't to say your career can't or won't take other paths, but if you have a destination in mind, it makes difficult decisions (e.g., Should I take this new job? Should I move to this new region?) easier if you understand the general direction in which you want to move.

Framing your career requires self‐reflection and self‐compassion. Maybe where you wanted to go before isn't where you want to go now. That's okay. Reset your destination and work backwards. A Pavilion Member told me that for years she had one destination in mind—CRO. But when I challenged several Members to build out their five‐year plan, she started to question herself. What really drove her pursuit of that title? What was it that she actually wanted out of her career? Did she need to be a CRO to get the freedom that she craved? She said she felt that too often salespeople are chasing the next accelerator. Feeling like the position they hold isn't good enough. That you need more. But when you get there are you happy?

This really struck me. I spent years in that cycle, letting frustrations simmer. I was stuck, resenting what others had and comparing it to what I didn't have. It felt like nothing I did would ever be enough. I thought I had to get to the next level to get what I wanted. To attain that wealth and status and respect I craved. To finally feel that I was living up to my potential.

Ultimately she found that what drove her was the power to choose who she led and how and in what ways she would lead. With that framing in mind, she could turn back to the task of identifying how she could make that a reality.

My roadside epiphany in 2017 set me on a path that ultimately led to self‐compassion and a new way to think about what it means to be successful. Like this Member, I had to get to the heart of what I wanted. To the heart of the fear that led me to be dissatisfied. To really understand myself and what I wanted. Only then, could I build the foundations for a new kind of life and a new kind of business.

It flows from playing for the long term, as we discussed in Chapter 2. It's also reminiscent of the OKR structure of goal setting. In this framework, you state your intended end objective, like being promoted to VP of Sales. Then, you list three to four key results you need to achieve to accomplish this objective. In this case, that could be $10 million in new business closed, presenting three opportunities to the board, and hiring an inside sales team before the end of the year.

Like many startups, we use the OKR framework in Pavilion HQ. And if we achieve 100% of our OKRs, we know they weren't ambitious enough. We want to keep pushing ourselves to see what's possible. To see how much we can get by giving all we have. To see the future before us and find a way to get there. Having compassion for our Members and ourselves is how we are able to do just that.

Embracing Positivity

Many have written about the impact of positivity on achieving your goals. An article I like is from Arthur Brooks, published in The Atlantic in December 2020. Brooks talks about John Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton. Norcross analyzed both successful and failed New Year's resolutions, noting the behaviors with both. He found that resolution failure is associated with negative thinking, such as focusing on the harm from the old behavior, berating yourself for slipping up, wishing that the challenge didn't exist in the first place, and minimizing the threat.

Breaking from this cycle and framing your future with positivity is the first step in actually getting where you want to go. The perception of your reality will ultimately prove true. If you've attended one of my sessions on executive compensation and negotiation, you might have heard me joke about 60/40 relationships. In any relationship, you should always feel that you are giving more than you are getting. You'll know you're doing it right if the scorekeeping part of your brain keeps nagging you that you're putting in more than you're getting out.

It's the key to a good marriage and a good working relationship. Pavilion was founded on this give‐to‐get principle. This book is about conducting business from a place of generosity. Positive framing falls in line with this train of thought.

I'm not saying you won't have negative thoughts or that you shouldn't be realistic about your situation, whatever it may be. Anyone who works with me knows I'm prone to moodiness and can be direct. But what I am saying is that if you put positive thinking into the world without expectation of getting back all, or any, of what you gave, you will end up reaping the rewards.

The power of self‐compassion, positivity, and leading with love were the final puzzle pieces in the framework I had been building since the start of Revenue Collective. Now that I unlocked this part of myself I could finally look to the future with optimism—both professionally and personally.

My goals going into 2020 were simple. Every day I wanted to write, read, exercise, be kind to others, and be kind to myself.

That fundamental framework initially felt strange and alien, but the essence is that I was shifting from being a punitive disciplinarian constantly frustrated by my inconsistency to being a supportive parent and coach who held myself and my ambition in unconditional positive regard.

To this day, I still use this framework. I have what I call a good day sheet, and the markers of a good day are the same as my goals for 2020. If I was able to journal, read, exercise, and help someone else, then I had a good day. No matter what else happened, if I can check each of these habits off, the day was a success. It's an objective way to take a step back and make small, incremental steps toward happiness.

Notice that these daily goals are not hyper‐specific. My goal of daily exercise is not saying that I need to run 20 miles or burn a certain number of calories. A 20‐minute jog counts. So does a half marathon. I could write five pages in my journal, or I could write one word. It matters more that I did something, whatever it may be. And it matters more that I don't beat myself up for not doing the absolute most every day.

And the results speak for themselves. I'm happier, my business has grown, and my life is exceeding my wildest dream since I started embracing positivity, abundance, and generosity.

Love Is a Leap of Faith

How can you play for the long term if you're not guaranteed success? How can you trust that all your efforts will pay dividends? How can you believe that the lessons of this book will actually work?

Here's what I've discovered.

All wonderful things are leaps of faith. In some way, you have to simply trust that if you put the work in and you approach life with optimism, gratitude, and abundance, that things will work out. You have to believe that. Even when it's hard.

All wonderful things are wonderful precisely because they are not guaranteed. I want to go back to the person I was getting fired from GLG or go back to the sad and broken kid who didn't get into Thomas Jefferson, or Princeton, or the Echols Program at UVA, the kid that felt like a failure.

I want to go back and tell that kid everything will be all right, everything will work out great.

But if I did tell myself that, if I could find some way to travel back in time, there's the reality that I might not have achieved any of this.

Because that's the whole point. If things were predestined, if they were guaranteed, there wouldn't be any fear, there wouldn't be any risk.

And that's exactly the opposite of how things need to be to work out. There needed to be risk. There needed to be failure. There are no guarantees. As much as I'd like to go back in time and tell my younger self, “Here's what your retirement account will look like in your mid‐forties, so chill” it's doubtful that would have worked.

You have to trust. You have to believe. Not because it's guaranteed but precisely because it's not. You have to step off the cliff and trust you'll be caught with your heart full.

And in that way, so many of the lessons of this book are quasi‐spiritual. I'm not telling you to go to church every Sunday (although you can if you want), but I am telling you that you have to figure out a way to fill your heart with belief and power your contentment from inside. And that if you can do that and take that leap, you'll be amazed at what you're capable of accomplishing.

The key, again, and to reiterate, is using positivity and love to power that belief, not fear and anxiety.

The House in the Hamptons

I want to tell you a little story about the power of future‐casting and the power of taking a leap of faith and believing in yourself. And I'm sure there are cynics out there armed with the regular “This is not statistically significant” counterpoint.

But nevertheless.

It was the beginning of the pandemic. I had a handful of employees and about $180,000 in the business checking account. Summer was approaching, and I'd been cooped up in the apartment for a long time.

If you've ever spent a summer in New York, you know that it's best to get out of the city when the heat arrives, if you can afford to. The streets smell like urine and poop. Garbage is rotting. It becomes oppressively humid.

And the place most New Yorkers want to go is the Hamptons on the east end of Long Island. Now, the Hamptons are incredibly expensive. Hard to say if it's worth it; that's up to you. But for me, it's a beautiful place and one I love spending time in.

However, I knew that if I rented a place I wanted a pool, and I wanted it to be nice. I was tired of getting the cheap, shitty place and feeling self‐conscious and keenly aware of the lack of things like a place to swim or air conditioning.

I found a beautiful home with a pool and all the things I wanted. And to rent it for the months of July and August was a whopping $70,000. A huge amount of money.

I spoke to John, my coach, and he said, “What if you think of this as an investment in the future? What if you make a resolution to yourself to 10x the investment? What if by being in this amazing, beautiful place for an extended period of time you come up with some ideas so powerful that they catapult your business into the next stratosphere?”

Well, that sounded compelling to me, and it reinforced my own desires anyway. So I said okay. I wired the money from the business account (at that time before we had investors the business account and my personal lifestyle were hopelessly intertwined as most family businesses are). This was a full half of the money available to me and by all accounts a stupid and feckless decision. I immediately had a panic attack.

“You stupid f***ing idiot. You can't have $5 in the bank without finding a way to blow it. You reckless imbecile.”

My inner voice had reared its head. My paradigm. It was chastising me as it had for so many years. If Camille had been around, I would have found a way to blame her, I'm sure, or picked some other kind of fight.

I called John back and said, “I think I just made a terrible mistake.”

“Calm down, Sam. Remember, we talked about this. This is an investment. This is just your paradigm trying to keep you in common hour thinking. Focus on the 10x. Focus on the joy of being out there.”

I talked myself off a ledge and resolved to make this a 10x decision.

When I got there, the house was as beautiful as I'd imagined. I swam in the pool every day. I hung out on the deck and watched the lavender grow. I went to the beach and cooked steak and read Norwegian Wood by Murakami and watched The Expanse on television. I had a blast and began to rebuild my relationship with Camille as well. I hired Carly Pallis, our first VP of Marketing, and Laura Guerra, our first VP of Sales.

I remember feeling happy and relaxed and having a lot of fun.

And come October, when I logged into the business checking account, lo and behold there was $700,000 in there. We had 10x'ed our membership. It was really amazing. By the end of the year, we'd broken through $1,000,000 in the checking account.

Now, 18 months later, I've seen millions of dollars in both my and the business account numerous times. But back then, that was the first time I'd ever seen a million dollars. It was some mythical barrier I had never truly believed I was capable of crossing. And it had been crossed.

Powered, in part, by a leap of faith, and a resolution to believe in the power of abundance, optimism, and transformation.

Chapter 8 Tactics

Practice Writing Out “I Love You”

I derive a lot of value from writing down “I love you” in my journal almost every day. I journal out a couple of paragraphs of observations about the day, things I've done or thought about. But I always end by writing, “I love you, Sam.” The first time I did it on the roof of the One Hotel, I felt simultaneously silly and like I'd had a major breakthrough.

I knew I was on to something because I knew that's what had been missing. My own efforts to be a better friend to myself. That is truly when things began to change.

And, as with all things, practice helped reinforce these ideas. Over the course of 2020, I journaled nearly every day. I journaled when all of New York City shut down. I journaled when Trump got COVID. I journaled when the election was finalized. And in each of those entries I would end with “I love you, Sam. I'm so proud of you.”

When people used to ask me if I was happy, I would never be sure. But now I am. It took a lot of practice. And it took a willingness to feel silly and specifically talk to myself. But it has fundamentally changed my self‐image and my perception of who I am.

Give it a shot.