Author: antp

  • Remember when we used to play pretend?

    Remember when we used to play pretend?

    Embracing Your Creativity to Achieve Your Goals Remember when we used to play pretend as kids, in the backyard with sword sticks and hay bale wrestling rings?  As I knelt in that cage with a mouth full of blood squeezing another man’s neck in my arms, it hit me that I was playing pretend superheroes in real life. Life only sucks…

  • How To Start A Cult

    How To Start A Cult

    When someone asks if GodXP is a cult, I take it as a compliment. Cult is the first part of culture. A cult is a density of a specific culture in society. To change culture, you need a strong cult. The most infamous cults of America are definitely scary and weird, but the best cults…

  • Happy as Foreigners

    Happy as Foreigners

    Last weekend Meg & I went to Zion National Park and experienced foreigner-happy. I grew up an hour from Yosemite, CA. You may not be surprised that I’ve never truly “done Yosemite.” A few short trails with Meg and some family picnics is as far as I’ve experienced this natural wonder that attracts ecstatic foreigners the…

  • Connecting Points

    Pull the salon door handle and enter the realm of hairdryers, gossip, house music, and noxious fragrance. I’m already walking towards you with a smile on my face. This is your first time here, you’ve never seen me before, but your next 45 minutes is at my mercy. There’s this subconscious habit I developed at…

  • Being Cool For A Living

    Being true to yourself in the game of life is the best way to win the game. When you’re a kid, it’s easy to be cool. When you’re an adult is when the stakes count. It seems like a lot of people give up on the game of being cool and settle for whatever life…

  • Boring-Proof Meditation

    Boring-Proof Meditation

    Meditation doesn’t work –  Until you know how it works. Most people mess up meditation by getting stuck on one of its two parts: Meditation is a practice, but it’s also a state of being cultivated by practice. Meditation done right is boring-proof. Everyone knows they need to meditate just like they know they need to hit the…

  • Decentralize Religion

    Enlightenment is a Choose Your Own Adventure Game. “In order to combat modern materialistic mores, as religion must, to fight nihilism and egotism, religion must also develop, must be flexible in its forms, and it must have a correlation with the cultural forms of the epoch.”Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Is having a mystical experience proof of God? I don’t know. Growing up it…

  • Kids Are Waking Up

    Kids Are Waking Up

    I didn’t start reading books until age 23. Apparently every century there’s a rise in great thinkers who use literature to send future civilizations a warning message.  In the 1900s Ayn Rand taught us self-interest can lead us to virtue and altruism.  In the 1800s, Emerson showed us how all of history takes place in…

  • Men Are Evil Until They Forgive Their Dad

    Men Are Evil Until They Forgive Their Dad

    Afraid of ending up like your parents? I spent a lot of my 20s trying to decide how much like my dad I wanted to be, realizing how much I was like him, and hating and loving myself for parts of my dad I saw in me. My mom always told me “you’re just like…

  • How To Get Into Yoga and Stay Into It

    How To Get Into Yoga and Stay Into It

    I’ve heard it at least a hundred times. More. Every Jiu jitsu gym I visit I hear the same question: “How the hell are you so flexible?” I was in two violent car crashes before I ever stepped foot in a Jiu jitsu gym.  Now I’m the most flexible and mobile person in the room.…