I am far from a perfect dad. And I always will be. But I’m a damn good dad, and my son will always feel bigger than anything life can throw at him. Why? Because I get it. I get the power a dad has in a child’s life, and in a child’s level of self-belief....

Fishing is much less about the fishing, and much more about the time alone with your kid, away from the hustle and bustle of the everyday.

Parenting is the greatest pay it forward system on earth. We don’t owe our parents anything. We owe our children everything. The same was true for our parents. The same will be true for our children.

real”.

Don’t hate the bullies. Experience tells me that hating them, or being angry with them, will always make it worse. Instead, put your arm around them. Love them. Tell them that they are valuable. Tell them that you expect great things from them. They will stop the bullying. They will stop, because they will start...

If I could give one message to the bullied, it would be this: You are not alone. You are strong. You have a voice. You are beautiful. You are intelligent. There are many kids who want to speak up for you, but they don’t because they are afraid of becoming bullied themselves. There are many...

Who I am is not the same minute to minute or day to day. There are far too many variables for that to ever be true, for me, or for anyone.

Every person is attractive to somebody. You are. I am. Jim Bob over there is, too. Every person is probably ugly to somebody, too. You are. I am. Jim Bob over there is, too. Don’t take it personally.And, we all need to do ourselves a favor. We need to believe people when they tell us...

Do you love yourself? The test is simple. Do you look at others and see anything besides another beautiful human being? Do you see somebody who is more beautiful or less beautiful than you? If so, look down a little deeper and ask yourself why. It may be painful. The whys usually are. Do it...

I’m not going to pretend I’m something I’m not so that you like me more.

One of the greatest acts of service you can do is to find someone who is secretly lonely and be a friend to them, if only for a day.

Don’t be mad at me for my success. Be mad at yourself for not doing what it takes to get what I have. Then do something amazing with that emotion.

People usually live up to their expectations. The kid picked first for dodgeball feels a duty to be the best, and to perform the best, and to be better than anyone else. They feel a need to execute. And, the only way they are going to achieve that is to make their body run faster,...

Having a religion doesn’t make a person love or not love others. It doesn’t make a person accept or not accept others. It doesn’t make a person befriend or not befriend others.Being without a religion doesn’t make somebody do or be any of that either.No, what makes somebody love, accept, and befriend their fellow man...

I think it doesn’t matter if you or I or anybody else thinks homosexuality is a sin. It doesn’t matter if you or I think anything is a sin. It doesn’t matter if homosexuality is a sin or not. In fact, it doesn’t matter if anything anybody else does is a sin or not.Because sin...

how many times have I told you…

I’m not going to miss 95% of life to weigh 5% less.

The goal was never dependent on the route that took me there. It was always dependent on the heart that got me through whatever route opened itself up to my efforts.

Having a college degree does not make you educated. Always learning new things is what makes you educated.

Certain girls deserve lots of flowers. You are one of them.

Every success and failure of any relationship is two-sided. No matter how thin, the pancake always has two sides. Yes, I blew my marriages. And so did they.

Death is most terrifying to those who have yet to live.

For twenty-one years, I have been paralyzed by the fear of what this society will do with me if they ever were to know of the thoughts that I continually push away. For more than two decades, I have made a choice to be straight. After all, it’s as easy as making a choice, isn’t...

Make life easier for those around you, not harder.Every person you know is fighting their own great battle. Few of us ever know what those battles entail, and so often we say and do things that push others deeper and harder into the front lines of those battles. I know such has been the relentless...

Life and love are not about what you know, but about what you know you don’t know.

You want to be popular? It’s easy to do. Just be a total weirdo and love yourself for it.

So many people hate me and love me for the exact same reasons. This is all the proof I need that my opinion about myself is the only opinion I should ever care about.

Be a little less obsessed with how I live my life and a little more obsessed with how you live your own.

I’m not saying you are jealous or insecure. I’m just saying that you obsessing over another person’s accomplishments makes you look that way.

The easiest way to disarm a bully or a jerk is to take any insult he throws at you and follow it with, ‘I know, and isn’t it fabulous?!

The next time you want to withhold your help, or your love, or your support for another for whatever the reason, ask yourself a simple question: do the reasons you want to withhold it reflect more on them or on you? And which reasons do you want defining you forevermore?

When one says, I won’t judge you for that, what they’re really saying is, I am judging you for that. Think about it. If you walk into my house and I tell you, “I won’t judge you for wearing those pants,” what am I really saying?

Share your weaknesses. Share your hard moments. Share your real side. It’ll either scare away every fake person in your life or it will inspire them to finally let go of that mirage called “perfection,” which will open the doors to the most important relationships you’ll ever be a part of.

The world is so obsessed with defining sexuality for everyone and attaching labels to it. Any time any person openly leaves the sexual norm, their sexuality becomes, more often than not, the absolute defining characteristic of that person. It becomes the first thing people think about and often the first thing they mention. Every other...

Sometimes we need to look at everything going wrong in our lives and admit to ourselves, “I am the only common denominator here.

I promise you it doesn’t matter what you believe, how strongly you live your beliefs, or how true your beliefs are. Somebody else, somewhere, thinks you are in the wrong. Somebody else, somewhere, thinks your beliefs are senseless or illogical. Somebody else, somewhere, thinks you have it all wrong. In fact, there are a lot...

Dads. It’s time to tell our kids that we love them. Constantly. It’s time to show our kids that we love them. Constantly. It’s time to take joy in their twenty-thousand daily questions and their inability to do things as quickly as we’d like. It’s time to take joy in their quirks and their ticks....

Happiness comes from striving to make tomorrow better than today and being at peace when yesterday was better than today as well.

If you don’t want your past to own you, try owning your past.

I’ve been chained to my bathroom scale for two decades now. I’ve used the number on my scale to tell me if I’m valuable or not. I’ve let the number on my scale destroy many beautiful opportunities in my life such as scheduling family photos, having fun at the beach, or giving myself 100% in...

Mirrors have three purposes. To show you who you are. To show you who you were. And to show you who you want to be.

Our greatest mistakes, if we look at them, and digest them, and interact with them, and learn from them… they can be the greatest moments of our lives.

I think if I were to sit down in a bid for power, I would ask myself what I should control if I want to control the people. The answer would be sex. Money. And definitive knowledge of the afterlife. Then I’d make fantastically pleasant rules surrounding every one of them.

When someone points out your past mistakes, look at them dead in the eyes and follow with, ‘and I’d do it all again to have the life I have now.

So you were talking crap about me? Hm. I missed it. I was too busy being fabulous.

Smile at people everywhere you go. Don’t just give them one of those half-smirk/head nod things. Raise your eyebrows, show those teeth, and chuckle while you smile. Next time you’re at the store, give a full-hearted smile to at least three complete strangers. You’ll be amazed at what this does for them and for you.

If bullies actually believe that somebody loves them and believes in them, they will love themselves, they will become better people, and many will even become saviors to the bullied.

My entire life, I’ve never been able to understand the concept of not being happy or excited when others were successful or had something good happen to them. It quite honestly is a concept that I cannot grasp.

Explain to me how you having a problem with me is my problem…

There are too many people who love me, and accept me, and never try and change me, and who don’t condemn me in the slightest, for me to waste even one moment of my life anymore worrying about what other people will think.