The Beginning of a Magnificent Year

Dear friends,

Let me first wish you a new year full of life, love, intensity, and evolution. My feeling is, that's what we're going to get anyway...

As you might have noticed, I've been silent for a while. But don't worry, I'm still around.... I had some considerable "personal issues" to deal with, as well as things related to health. I plan to get in more detail about all this in the days and weeks to come. Not because I like to tell personal stories but to share the insights that these events have given me.

One thing that I realized more deeply is that the Jungle Pants project wasn't quite aligned with the direction of my life. If you have been following EJP, you probably know that I have always tried to genuinely make it about more than just the pants. And this wasn't just a sales pitch. This was a real and honest effort to use this product and the brand to project certain values and ideas into the society. Ideas that would effectively be making a positive change in the world.

However, I recently realized that this effort to put more message and more "transformational value" into my brand wasn't emphasized enough in the way I was "doing business". My model was largely based on paying Facebook to publish my advertisements and posts to people, and then hoping that enough of those people would end up buying my product, so that I could continue my ad campaigns and hopefully put some money in my pocket.

It is true that I designed those ads in a way that I felt was promoting certain positive values, such as freedom, independence, personal evolution.... But at the end of the day I was still pretty much caught up in the rat race that I have so desperately been trying to get away from. This ticking clock does something to you. You know you are spending money and that you need to "convert" or be gone with.

This kind of business model inevitably leads to an attitude where you are overly concerned with selling. In other words, much of your focus is on getting something instead of creating real value for people. You become overly concerned about what people will think of you, and try to be likable and acceptable to a wide enough audience, in order to be able to sell enough products to survive...

By doing this, I realize now that I diluted my message, and by doing that I actually sacrificed some of my integrity in order to achieve a material goal. You might think that I'm too hard on myself, and that "You need to make a living". That's true, and I actually don't have any self blame and I am not writing this as any kind of apology. Instead, it is meant as a self-reflection that might perhaps be valuable for some of you out there.

So, to sum up.... I have decided to start focusing much more on creating real value and less on advertising. I will soon start creating videos in which I will share my views on events, as well as my personal insights that have accumulated through the years, and that are still unfolding today.

I realize that I will lose a lot of my current audience who will be either intimidated by some of my views and ideas, or simply not willing to invest the effort to really get what I am saying. And that's totally fine. I would honestly rather have just a few people who really get the message, and who find it intriguing and motivating enough to actively participate in it, than to have an army of customers that I can only pretend to relate to, and need to constantly watch what I'm saying in order not to alienate them. I just don't have time for this game anymore!

How will it turn out business-wise? Who knows... It feels right though and if I don't even take back the freedom to follow my own heart, than it's all a bunch of BS anyway...

So, if you resonate with what I am saying I invite you to signup to my email list below. You can expect my emails to be mostly comments and videos about topics that I care about, and not about the commercial side of my project.

As always, I'd be happy to read any comments to this "way-too-long" monologue.

And again, happy 2016!