Your friend and mine Amber Rae asked me to contribute to a book she is publishing on chasing down dreams and desires, something she is calling The Ah Ha Moment. Today she published a few excerpts and I was lucky enough to be included along with another couple great writers. Hope you enjoy!

soon i’ll be publishing a book on HOW to create inspiring, admirable work and I’m calling it ‘the ah ha moment.’ it’s about living passionately and ACTING on your ambitions. more deets on the book here.

i’m so damn impressed with the stories that I decided to share just a quote or two of a few stories every day until the book is published.

from deep to thoughtful to witty, here are the stories of kyle, david andandy.

enjoy :)

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But behind every apparent paradox lies a number of deeper insights. The best question to ask is why you even believe something to begin with.

This is the question that leads to more information, to more connections, and ultimately to more insights.

via kyle s

(i met kyle at big business breakfast at Katz’s Deli while visiting New York in December. we clicked immediately and are pretty much bff now. we often find ourselves pondering the purpose of life and every other philosophical paradigm. it only makes sense that Kyle explores human insights and trends at PSFK.)

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And I’m sitting there and my breakfast companion is late, so I’m staring out the big front window. With the rain and darkness and my reflection in the window, I for a second see the older me staring back, though I don’t really take any notice at the time.

I wake up the following morning thinking about him though, not realizing that two days from now I will call up my travel agent friend and buy a one way ticket to a part of the world I’ve never been. And I’ll do that because I’ll suddenly remember the older me sitting staring back at me in the window, and see him deep in thought in that distant future moment, and it will occur to me that I owe it to my future self to take care of the “What ifs”; something my dad said to me not long after his own father died. “What I’ve figured out is that life is about getting rid of the ‘what ifs..?’”. One down, so many to go.

via david g

(david is a lovely Australian musician who currently lives in Toronto. we haven’t met in person yet but I plan on seeing him in new york in the coming months. i came across david after finding his brilliant presentationDigital Strangelove, “or how I learned to top worrying and love the internet” which has over 40K views. check it out.)

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Amber asked for a contribution describing my experience with “a-ha” moments, a request I gladly accepted. Eager to start writing about the foundation for “a-ha” moments - I mimicked the behaviors of creative people I observed daily at countless coffee shops in Chicago. The moleskin and multi-colored post-it note purchases were simple, but I struggled to compile a creative playlist optimized for writing (Freddie Hubbard and Wayne Shorter were the winners if you were wondering).  I naively assumed, “This combination creates brilliance! If I channel just a small portion, I will produce amazingly insightful writing about inspiring insight.”  Unfortunately, my “proven” approach yielded little more than ten unfinished thoughts discussing everything from the irrelevance of time to my personal mandate for rebellious behavior in daily life. I effectively created a poorly written manifesto on how to over-think a simple request…

via andy angelos

(the witty and charming andy knows how to push the envelope more than most people i know. ex-bickering buddy / cubemate at a digital agency in Chicago, andy recently founded ScaleWell which provides startups with the capital to reach milestones and gain traction.)