Summary:

• What I've learned since AJ Brown's sideline book-reading made him the most famous scholar-athlete in the world one year ago.
• ​The Best Possible Life gets re-released (Hachette Book Group) March 31.
• ​Inner Excellence is on sale at it's lowest price ever ($8.11 paperback, $2.99 Kindle).
• The next Inner Excellence retreat is April 9-13 in Ensenada, Mexico. Check out the Inner Excellence Freedom Project website for more information.
• We're switching to Substack soon--and sending out weekly articles this year!
• In addition to weekly newsletters, I'll be working on The Inner Excellence 90-Day Challenge: Exercises to Train Your Mind and Live the Best Possible Life.

Note: Please pray for the humanitarian crises around the world, especially in Venezuela as well as the civil wars in Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Please also continue to pray for supplies in Gaza and donate to humanitarian organizations like ​Amnesty International​ to help those suffering and dying in the genocide.

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Next week it will be one year since the NFL wildcard game between the Packers and Eagles where star wide receiver AJ Brown was filmed reading Inner Excellence during the game.

It was January 12, 2025, a day that changed my life. In the year that followed, I did what I imagine to be somewhere between 250 and 300 interviews (I had 17 scheduled in one day). Here's three of the more popular ones:

​The Rich Eisen Show (22 minutes)

​The Real Reason You're Burned Out (and How to Fix it) Rich Roll Podcast (1 hour 57 minutes)

​The Truth About Failure Ed Mylett Show (49 minutes)

The main message of Inner Excellence

Most of my life, and I think most of us in Western Culture, have played the wrong game. We're working so hard to be successful, to get better and better results so we can have better and better circumstances, which we think will lead to a better life for ourselves and our families.

The problem is you can spend your entire life trying to be successful and still never get what you really want: a meaningful, fulfilling life with amazing experiences and deep enriching relationships where you feel fully alive.

And beyond that, most of us never even discover the real reason we're put on the planet. Because we're too busy. Trying too hard, doing too many things to try to get more, do more, and be more, so we can be enough--but it's never enough.

If you truly want an extraordinary life, then you'll need to develop self-awareness, of who you are and why you're placed on the planet. As you'll read in The Best Possible Life, this kind of life means having one foot in joy and one foot in suffering.

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What I've learned this year

The week of January 12, 2025 was a big week for me.

AJ Brown does his thing on the sideline and four days later my mom dies. The following week my mortgage payment bounced and my checking account went to negative (I had money in another account but wasn't watching close enough). I signed with United Talent Agency and in February signed a 3-book deal with Hachette.

Here's some takeaways:

1. Everything is training--especially the hard times. God has been training me my whole life. You as well.
2. Time with the underprivileged will be key going forward. Wisdom only comes to those who see and hear clearly, and we can't do either when we're focused on ourselves and/or are not grateful.
3. I'm a recovering perfectionist--which i used to think was a higher standard--but now realize also greatly limited my freedom.

And something I wrote about in my journal recently:

Most of my life has been limited because I've had limiting beliefs. Most of us have limiting beliefs because beliefs are energy, and when our lives are cluttered there's no energy to see what's possible. Most people don't believe in the "impossible" or in things that have never been done before because they are caught up in transactions, immersed in a world of logic and unbelief.

Thanks for sharing life with me. I'd love to hear from you all.

Love Jim

PS

We're planning on 52+ issues of this newsletter this year, focused on teaching Inner Excellence. My team and I will simultaneously be researching and working on the IX workbook (90-Day Challenge).

If you're interested in being an early reader/volunteer to give feedback, let me know!

PPS

The YWAM/Inner Excellence Retreat is here! Inner Excellence has teamed up with YWAM (Youth With a Mission), a non-profit organization that has a Homes of Hope division where they/we build a house for a family start to finish in two days. Watch a video of last April's build here. This is the only chance for the public to do an Inner Excellence retreat (you get both the full Inner Excellence retreat and YWAM house build) until November 2027. The spots fill fast so don't hesitate (20 people is the cap).

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