Co-founder of allGaia
Your life can match what you want.
Being happy sits behind every other thing you want. Everybody wants that, and almost nobody says so out loud. Then comes the but. But the company. But the kids. But next year. But look at what I have.
I work with people who have already built a life that looks right from the outside. The but is what I work on. You will still have buts at the end. The difference is that you see the but coming, and you choose what to do with it.
What you can do afterwards.
Six things. Some of them you can already do on a good day. Afterwards you do them on an ordinary one, and on a bad one.
You can test every one of them in your own week. You will not have to ask me whether it worked.
You catch the pattern while it is still running.
You could always explain it perfectly the next morning. Now you see it in the hour it happens. Explaining it changes nothing. Catching it is what ends it.
The first hour of the day is yours.
You wake up before the day starts pulling at you. Your body can take a hard year, because you built it for one.
The talking in your head stops deciding your day.
It does not stop talking. It stops being in charge.
You say the thing.
The conversation you keep avoiding is already shaping your life. Now you have it, with the person it is about, not with a friend behind their back. Carrying it silently cost you something every day. You get that back.
The sentences you carry about yourself stop being facts.
You know who wrote them and when. After that they are only sentences.
You stop looking for the next person to explain your life to you.
Me included. That does not mean doing everything alone. It means you know when to listen, when to ask, and when the decision has to be yours.
The one thing in the way.
You have known for years what you should do. You have been told. Knowing has never once been enough.
That is not weakness and it is not a lack of discipline. It has a name. It is the but. I want to be happy, but. I know what to change, but. The but has good arguments, and they win, year after year.
Your but is very reasonable. Mine was reasonable for my whole life, and it still comes some mornings. I see it come, and I choose. That is the only thing that changed in me, and it was enough.
It makes no difference how big your life is. The but works the same way in a family kitchen and in a company with four hundred people. Most people never see it arrive. They see only the result, which is another year gone in the same place.
I show you your own but. After that you see it every time.
There should be no buts
in your life.
It reads hard. It should not feel hard.
I write about this work honestly, so it reads heavy. Twelve months. The tests. The maze. Read like that, it sounds like something to survive.
It is not. Making the way enjoyable is the actual work, and it is the part I am best at. If you are gritting your teeth through it, then I have built it wrong.
My job is that you enjoy every step of the way, and I can promise you that, because I know what happens otherwise.
Nobody keeps doing something that feels like punishment. That is the real reason most change does not last.
Twenty-five years, one subject.
For years I shared what I had found in the only way I knew how. Not on stages. One person at a time, at my own table, often until early morning. Someone who had sat there told the next person.
I would have gone on doing exactly that. Triinu-Liis, my partner in life and in allGaia, watched those nights for years and saw what I could not see. She said I had drawn a map. She said the map was not meant only for the few people who happened to find their way to my table. She said: you need to write a book, and share what you do with people in a different way. People need it.
I did those nights for nothing, for years, and I would do them again tomorrow. Somebody carries a thing for twenty years. Then they put it down in front of you, and you watch their face change. There is no better hour in a life. That is why any of this exists. The whole story →
Why me.
Thirty-seven years of building companies in Estonia and the United States, and I am still building them. Most people who sell what I sell have never run anything.
I make the material my own body was missing. It is called allGaia. It exists because I could not buy it, so Triinu-Liis and I built it. Why the same man makes a product and runs a year →
Twenty-five years on one subject. I tried all of it on myself before I tried it on anyone else. Nothing here is a method I was taught. It is what happened to me, in the order it happened.
Hundreds of people have sat at that table and not one of them paid. Nobody was sold anything, for years. That is where all of this came from.
I am fifty-eight and I still have my own work. You do not get my whole day. I built it that way on purpose, and it is part of what you are paying for.
I turn people down more often than I take them, and my reasons for doing that are on this site, so you can read them before you write to me. What I refuse →
This is not how my family lives,
so I am free to tell you the truth.
Who this is for.
Your life can look successful and still no longer fit you. That is why this change is the hardest one to start. Nothing outside is forcing it. You have to choose it.
You built the life.
Now you want to thrive in it.
Nothing is visibly wrong.
That is exactly why nobody asks you, and exactly why it can go on for twenty years.
If the last achievement did not give you peace, the next one will not either.
A bigger result cannot repair a pattern that has not changed. You have run that experiment more than once, and you already know the result.
Your problem is not smaller than the problem of a person whose life has fallen apart.
It is the problem almost nobody will help you with. Something is still missing.
And if you think you are too far gone.
In twenty-five years I have not met one person in the state I was in myself at forty-four. Not one. That story is on the about page.
So when somebody tells me their case is hopeless, I know something they do not. I have watched people come back from more than you would think possible.
A body is far more intelligent than the story most people have been told about it. That is not encouragement. It is what happened to me, and then what I watched happen to other people.
Honest limits.
I have no medical qualification and this is not medicine.
You keep your doctor and you tell them what you are doing.
Nobody will manage you, motivate you, or check whether you did the work.
You do not need more motivation. Motivation disappears. You need a structure that still works on an ordinary morning when you do not feel inspired.
Try it on yourself first.
Start tomorrow morning. Seven letters, one each morning, free. Seven days is enough to find out what happens to a day when its first hour changes.