Franklin Taggart's Unconventional Life Blog

Black Friday is one of the worst ideas ever to flow from the mind of humanity. Fill large buildings to capacity with humans who are experiencing various levels of FOMO, scarcity, the urgency of impending holidays, etc. Then offer extreme deals on limited supplies and watch them fight about it. And if you really want to make it happen, start a day early on a holiday that everyone used to take off to be with family or volunteer at the mission. This just doesn't seem like a good idea. And yet, Americans have begun to treat it with more reverence and anticipation than Christmas and Easter and all the lesser holy days. Black Friday has become, for me, a good excuse to stay home and do fun things. Write songs, watch movies with the family, and purposely avoid spending any money anywhere. This year will be different. My friends Joseph Bennett and Meridith Grundei are offering a more colorful Friday experience with their first-ever Pod-a-Thon. From 10 AM-10 PM EST on Friday, Meridith and J...

Eli Hans is a multi-passionate Renaissance man, having worked on his own for thirty-five years, reinventing his career several times, in television, special events production, as a voiceover actor, interior designer, life and business coach, holistic cancer coach, and his latest iteration as the writer and performer of his mostly one-man show: Out of The Blue, a Miraculous Musical. In 2009, he and his husband Joseph Bennett exited the American rat race by moving to an artistic ex-pat community in Mexico called San Miguel de Allende. Eight years ago, though flourishing in their new lives, Eli was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive type of cancer. That's when everything changed. Having about a 10% chance of survival, Eli focused 100% of his energy on his successful recovery. Confronting his mortality helped him realign his goals and for the past 6 years, he's been supporting others to discover their passions to create meaningful work, using their natural abilities to make a dif...

  I recently had a wonderful conversation with my friends, Meridith Grundei and Joseph Bennett on their Are You Waiting for Permission podcast. We covered a lot of territory in our short time together, but there were some lovely nuggets to be found. Some of our topics: ** The important distinction between gifts and talents. ** Your gifts define your purpose. ** There are people here who are waiting to find you because they need your gifts. ** The creativity we imagine doesn't usually include the messy parts. ** A part of becoming masterful at something is the willingness to suck. ** Very often our struggle to master something becomes most difficult right before the breakthrough happens. Thanks, Meridith and Joseph for the fun conversation! You two are lights in my world! Listen here now: Be sure to subscribe and review! You can find Meridith: Meridith Grundei Coaching You can find Joseph: Joseph Bennett the artist/coach extraordinaire