I spent 19 years in Hollywood building movie sets. My job was to create temporary worlds. We would frame walls, paint them to look like 100-year-old stone, shoot the scene, and then tear it all down.
I remember once leaning against a lamppost on a massive budget set. It looked like heavy iron, but I almost knocked the whole thing over. It was just painted foam and plywood. Lesson learned: always check the structure before you lean.
For a long time, my life felt like that lamppost.
I had the exterior. I was the “old school gym rat.” I had the wife, the family, the friends, and I was working in my dream industry—all the things people spend their lives chasing. But the foundation was cracking. I was living on “Paper Lines”—boundaries I set for myself that looked good but tore the moment life applied pressure.
I built this blog because I got tired of building temporary sets. I wanted to pour a foundation that could actually hold weight.
Why “One Step”?
In the self-help world, everyone sells you the “Montage.” You know the scene in the movie where the hero goes from broken to champion in three minutes set to music? That’s what Instagram sells.
But real life isn’t a montage. Real life is the Production Phase. It’s the boring, unglamorous work of doing the same take over and over until you get it right. It’s showing up to the “Call Sheet” when you’re tired.
I’ve worked turnarounds on sets that are illegal now—back-to-back shifts with no sleep. We only got through those days by leaning on each other.
Motivation is Garbage
People say, “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” They say, “Just use willpower.” If I had that much willpower, I wouldn’t be here now. Willpower runs out.
Any gym rat will tell you that you aren’t going to bench 450lbs from the get-go. You aren’t going to get jacked overnight. The real work is having a gym partner carry you up the stairs because your legs are so sore from the last workout that you can’t even sit on the toilet. That is the reality of growth.
I started the One Step Club because you can’t build a house on motivation; you build it on systems.
The Blueprint
This site isn’t just about sobriety, though that was my first step. It’s about Character Development. It’s about using the tools of Ancient Philosophy (Stoicism) and Modern Neuroscience to rewire your brain.
- Stoicism is the Form. These are weathered truths that have survived hundreds of years. They give the structure shape.
- Neuroscience is the Concrete. It is the proof that those ancient words are backed by biology. It locks the form in place.
- The Builder Mindset is the Tooling. It is the daily discipline we need to keep working to make dreams become real.
I’m not here to hand you a hammer and walk away. I’m the gym partner who is going to get you through the set. I’m the Crew Boss who has been through hellish film sets that made seasoned veterans cry, and I’m telling you: we can build this.
We aren’t trying to “edit” our past mistakes. We can’t fix the typos on the lines we’ve already written. We are hitting the Return Key. We are dropping down to a fresh line, and we are writing a new story.
We are going to do the hard work. Me and you together. We will build the life we were destined to live—the one deep in your gut.
Welcome to the crew. Let’s get to work.