Our Core Focus
Helping people thrive by distilling life's hardest lessons into simple, memorable stories.
The Missing Map
by Nick, Founder, Living Skill Tree
School taught me plenty. How to solve for x. How to write a five-paragraph essay. How to memorize a timeline of dates I'd forget within a year.
What it never taught me was how to sit through a hard conversation without flinching. How to build a habit that actually sticks past January. How to figure out what I even wanted, once the assignments stopped telling me what came next.
I don't think I'm the only one who left school with a diploma and not much else pointing the way.
Who This Is For
Alyssa is standing at the edge of something new. Maybe she's already finished school. Maybe she's got a semester or two left, and the real world is already starting to feel close enough to touch. Whether she's pulling espresso shots, interning at a startup, or settling into her first real job, her background isn't what defines her. What's important is the turning point she's standing at: the diploma's coming or already earned, but the map that's supposed to come next never showed up.
She's starting to ask bigger questions. What does she actually want? What does it take to build a life that feels like hers, not just one that looks fine on paper? She might be ambitious but unsure which direction to point that ambition. She might be self-aware and still feel completely overwhelmed.
She's not hunting for hacks or a five-minute fix. She wants real clarity. Real tools she can actually use. Whether she ends up building a company, leading a classroom, or running a trade of her own, she's looking for the compass nobody handed her on the way out the door, and she's ready to start tuning it.
Why the Living Skill Tree
Broad, Distilled Life Curriculum
The Living Skill Tree integrates essential insights from across psychology, leadership, communication, habits, and mindset, offering a unified, simplified toolkit that covers the whole person, not just one narrow slice of self-help.
Story-Driven, Simplicity-First Teaching
We teach through metaphors, narrative, and engaging dialogue, breaking complex ideas into clear, relatable, and memorable lessons. It's not just easy to understand, it's hard to forget.
A Guided Journey, Not a Feed
Most personal growth content is a pile of disconnected posts to scroll and forget. The Living Skill Tree is built as an actual path, a Complete Journey through life's biggest skills in order, with focused Quests for anyone who wants to go deep on one at a time.
About Me
I've spent the last seventeen years building businesses, since I opened my first one at twenty-two. What started as a single retail shop grew into several ventures across pretty different industries: secondhand retail with Disc Replay and Plato's Closet, European Wax Center, and now home services with Superior Fence and Rail. I recently became a franchisor for Disc Replay as well. Combined, those businesses generate somewhere around $60 million a year. Crain's Detroit Business and DBusiness were generous enough to notice along the way, naming me to their 40 Under 40 and 30 in Their 30s lists.
None of that is really why I write, though. I've always been an obsessive reader, not just business books, but biology, physics, psychology, finance, whatever seems to explain something true about how the world actually works. Somewhere in all that reading, I kept noticing the same handful of ideas showing up again and again, just wearing different clothes depending on the field.
Running businesses is what turned those ideas from theory into something tested. I've had the hard conversations, built the habits, broken plenty of them too, and made the expensive mistakes nobody warns us about in advance. Writing has always been how I make sense of things, and simplifying complicated ideas turned out to be one of the few skills nobody had to teach me. The Living Skill Tree is what happens when I put all three together: the reading, the writing, and years of learning things the hard way. Now, I’m trying to hand what I’ve learned to others.
What I try to hold myself to:
Being honest, even when it’s uncomfortable
Staying curious instead of assuming I’ve got it figured out
Listening first
Owning my mistakes without spiraling over them
Following through, not just meaning to
If any of this resonates, I’m glad you’re here!
Nick