CreativeMornings ™

The way you do one thing is the way you do all things.

Maybe the No that I am feeling is really just a Not Quite or a Not Yet. A No is always a particular contextual No, fixed in time and space; not a definitive, eternal No.

Frenetic thinking can help us see a big huge NO as a YES in disguise, a disappointment as an opportunity.

How do we go in and mine that talent. That's what this place is all about. How do we rediscover their purpose in life and then empower that purpose in life.

One thing that I've discovered amongst people that battle some of these extreme mental-health problems is some of the most creative people that I've ever met on the planet.

We have the greatest designs on the planet. And when our men and women come into the community, they get to walk around like you and I get to walk around, and make choices about where they are going to live.

You have to open the door . . . The creatives are sitting here with ideas, simple ideas. How do we take those simple ideas and maybe explode them into a movement. That's what we believe has happened here.

We are building an RV park . . . to lift chronically homeless men and women up off the streets . . . people that most would consider the most despised and outcast in our community.

But you have to bring to the table the willingness to allow many, many people to come in and nourish that.

Organic, heirloom quality, free-range chicken eggs, goat's milk, honey bees--all on this farm that's free to everybody that lives in this community.

You're going to see the most awesome, the most beautiful urban farm in all of Austin, Texas. It's unbelievable what we're doing out here from a mustard seed of an idea.

The mustard seed of an idea was 'could we go out and purchase one gently used 5th Wheel RV and lift one human being up off the streets' . . . just one.

This is a product of what can happen when creativity collides with vision.

All of this happening from somebody that you could look at and stereotype as just being a worthless . . . gang member that has no value in life. And it was one of the many extraordinary lessons that I've been blessed with over the course of this journey with Mobile Loaves and Fishes.

He told me that when you really wanted to keep warm, you took your toothpaste, and you squeezed it out over your body limbs, and then wrapped yourself in newspaper . . . these are these little things that you begin to learn about what it takes to survive outside with no resources.

My mantra for life is to dream, to plan, and to execute.

In my life, my desire to be free, my creative mind that's kind of all over the place, at some point had to figure out purpose. You can lead with that creativity, but you've got to put some structure around it and have an end goal.

Though we had become successful, we weren't really making a huge impact for anybody other than ourselves.

Four years later, we had a company that had done ten million dollars in sales through this process of being creative, of sticking to it, but then putting those barriers around it to actually give us something that could scale.

The mature version of the entrepreneur started to emerge.

So I figured my way forward creatively and that's been my journey.

I told my friend . . . ' I cannot work for anybody, not in that sense,' and I was 14 years old. And so I started cutting hair in the basement. I started selling t-shirts in the halls of North High. And by the time I was 16, I was making 950.00 a week.

My punishment was I had to get a job.

I remember getting out of juvenile detention on a Sunday. No one gets out of jail on Sunday.

My wife passed away seven months ago . . . and I mean it's tough, you know , . . . but when she passed away I decided that I was going to harness all my grief and burn it like jet fuel creatively, and she is still teaching me to this day.