Sweet Life Labs

At its core, The Sweet Life is about finding an inspiring mental picture of the life you really want, and coming up with an informed, action-focused strategy to make that picture happen.

It’s about getting to know yourself. Finding out what you want out of life and making a plan to go get it.

Learn more about Sweet Life Labs on our Start Here page.

We’ve been on a 10 year journey to redefine the role of work and business in our lives, and it’s amazing what we’ve discovered!

The quest for our Sweet Life has taken us through the world of corporate america, small business, tech startups, self-employment, remote work, and lots of passive income lifestyle options.

These experiences give us unique insights that we’ve been using to help others navigate their work and business options.

We use what we have learned to help people develop a practical and inspiring strategy for living a satisfying life.

If you think about it, nobody takes the time to help you explore the different paths to an inspired career and a rewarding life, but hey, that’s what we’re here for!

Our Bittersweet Story

Think back to when you were a kid. Like us, you probably had all kinds of things you wanted to do “when you grow up”.

But, somewhere along the way, your hopes collided with “reality” and things got hard. The “real world” got in the way of what you always hoped you could do.

Years later, you feel stuck. You can sense the path you are on isn’t really going to get you where you had hoped.

That’s pretty much where we found ourselves a few years ago.

It felt like the life we wanted was just out of reach.  It felt like time was slipping by. We wanted to do something about it, but didn’t know where to start.

When we graduated college, we were excited to start working towards our dream life.

Up to that point, we had been hopefully optimistic; confident that we’d immediately land a job where we would do exciting things and make lots of money.  But, it turns out that things don’t usually work like that… 

A few months after graduating we got married.  When the wedding craziness died down and we settled into our working lives, we started to we realize that we were further from our dreams than ever before.

That year we were on our 2nd and 3rd jobs (oh and by the way, they were all pretty lame). Oh sure, the jobs looked great on paper, but we had hoped for a lot more.

We felt exhausted and overworked. It truly felt like our work wasn’t really helping anyone (and the income wasn’t exactly thrilling either). All in all, our reality didn’t match up with the dreams we were clinging onto.

All we wanted was to have a nice, fulfilling life but we didn’t really didn’t know how. It sucked, and we didn’t know what to do about it. It felt like we were wasting time and missing out.

At the same time, we realized the people around us were also on a similar path. Most of them just enduring their work so they could fund their life; for the most part, they just lived for the weekends.

They had hoped for a more exciting life, but couldn’t really see it happening for them (and neither could we).

But, as we looked around, we saw that there was hope.

There were people living their dreams- living large and making a difference.

People with financial abundance and cool careers, making a difference in the world and helping others.

At that point in time, if you had asked us, we would have said we were “fine”. But on the inside, we were still haunted by a unspoken truth we could’t escape.

It kept us up at night.  We thought about it every morning on the commute to work.  We’d catch ourselves staring out into space- trying to figure it out.  It was the obvious issue we ignored in our conversations. So, what was haunting us?

[This nagging thought] Deep down, we knew that we weren’t on track to actually live out our dreams. Not even close…

In fact, The way things were going, it was never gonna happen.  We were right on pace for a boring, ordinary, average life. It was like we were on autopilot, but didn’t know where it would lead.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with an uninspired life… unless the thought of living like that crushes your soul (like it did to us).

We had to face the truth- If we didn’t make big changes, we’d never get to live the life we wanted.

Gut check time. We got serious about figuring out how to take control of our life.  We started to do some serious soul searching and tons of research. We did not want to give up on our dreams.

We began by asking ourselves some really tough questions like these:

• What type of life were we trying to build?
• What options were available to us?
• What type of career would we actually find interesting?
• Where would the different paths ahead of us actually lead?
• If we succeed in a plan, would the results be worth it? Or, would we have to start all over again?

Cute questions, eh?  Sounds nice, right?  Actually, it was really hard.  Why? Here’s what we found:

1. You can’t do everything – choosing 1 thing means saying no to everything else (temporarily).
2. You have to be courageously authentic and brutally honest.  That means working through confusion to find clarity… it takes time and consistent effort.
3. If you try to answer those questions without exploring your options, you’ll always wonder if you made the right choice.  But, how do you explore your options without using too much time?
4. In the end, you still have to start with a “best guess”, and put it to the test.

That soul-searching process made us realize that we needed to learn more about the world to make the right decisions.

But, it also helped us to discover our top priorities and gave us a clear mental picture of what we were hoping to find.

So What Did We Do?

Well, we went kinda crazy… We got kind of obsessed with exploring the options for earning and living.

We didn’t just stick our toe into the pool of change- we did a cannonball.

Specifically we did this:

We even temporarily moved to a new city for 9 weeks to get immersed in an elite bootcamp for ambitious career changers (crazy huh?).

By the way, we did ALL the self-improvement stuff (not exaggerating).  Why? Well, we had to be sure we wouldn’t be the weak link in our own plan.

We became truly proactive-  in every sense of the word.

The Plan

We got organized and came up with a “Working Plan” and put it in to action. It began with our best guess of top ways to align our values, interests and goals.

As we researched our options, we started to organize things into a system so we could make sense of it all.

We structured our dreams into a “GPS system” that would keep re-routing us if we got off course.

We tweaked the plan constantly as we made progress.  We tried, failed, and adjusted. We started new projects and made pivot in new directions.

We kept pushing ourselves until we had a crystal clear understanding of the life we wanted and how to get it.

In our plan, we dissected career paths into detailed pros and cons.  

We explored business models and compared their strengths and weaknesses.

We developed a set of criteria for work that matched our lifestyle objectives. We questioned our assumptions about the limits of work and business. We analyzed our options, tested them, and compared them to our plan’s criteria.

There were beautiful epiphanies, and hard-hitting realizations. We took our hard-won insights, and we examined them from different angles.  We sequenced and structured, tinkered and hacked, cut out all the fluff, and our planning system started to work.

What we did was crazy.  Most people would never do what we did.
If they took the same trial-and-error approach, almost everyone would give up and go back to a more familiar way of living.

A lot of our plans failed. Many times we wanted to give up because it was “easier”. We had exciting successes and disappointing failures along the way. It took a lot of energy to get back up and re-route our course. Our picture of our Sweet Life was tested time and time again.

It’s nothing to brag about… but for whatever reason, we never lost our dream.

The Birth Of Sweet Life Labs

We know the life cycle of hope- how dreams are tested by overwhelming odds. We know how easy it is to give up. But, we also know the reward of keeping the dream alive.

We’ve also been on the receiving end of bad advice. We’ve lost years of precious time chasing exaggerated possibilities that were sold to us.

We’ve felt the sting of being suckered by some who was looking to profit from our ambition.

That’s why we are committed to providing objective advice.

Bad advice is worse than no advice. We feel tremendous responsibility toward giving advice and helping people make important decisions. We take it really seriously.

We know how hard it is to find the correct voices to listen to. Voices that cheer us on towards our dreams and propel us towards them.

We want to be one of those voices for you.

And that, my friend, was the birth of the Sweet Life Labs.

We wanted to provide a place where we could join with other people who want the same things out life, and are willing to work for it. A place where we can learn from others who are way ahead of us and provide advice in the areas we are further ahead.

We wanted to create a way for our experiments and efforts to benefit more people than just us.

So far, we’ve worked with hundreds of people, helping them launch their journey toward a better future.

Along the way, we’ve been honored to see countless people transform their lives. Its amazing to see the power of a dream brought back to life.

How Does Our Story Help You?

We want you to benefit from all of the time, energy, and effort we’ve already put in. It shouldn’t be as hard for you as it was for us.

It doesn’t need to take you 10 years to learn the lessons we’ve picked up.   That’s what we are so passionate about – seeing our hard work help you make real progress in your life.

We’ve now developed a system that anyone can use to find direction and make real progress toward their most exciting goals.

We don’t attempt to persuade anyone toward a single path; instead we help you create your own goals, show you the best options (that we know of) to accomplish it, and help you make the best of your own complicated path to your goal.

The only expert for your life is you. You have to own that. Never give away that responsibility. You must develop the wisdom to decide for yourself what fits into your life.

We are far from perfect. We have learned a lot so far, but we have way more still to learn.  But, we didn’t want that to stop us from sharing the things have helped us so much already.

We pray for the wisdom in the things we share, and we for you to have wisdom in the way you choose to apply it.

You can choose to be unstoppable – you really can live your sweet life.

We deeply believe that.  We have seen it happen enough times to know that you can do it too.

We’re here for you.  We are working hard to provide you with everything we can to help you build your sweet life.  We’ve created some great material for you already and there is more on the way.

Anyway, that’s enough about us… What about you?

Where are you in your journey right now?  

We’d love to hear about it and help if we can.

Sign up for to get the the plan and reply to one of the emails we send you.  We’ll read it and get back to you if we can.

Sunsets and Strategies,