This is my journal entry from February 20, 2026 — my real, unedited day, shared just as it happened.
I wake up this morning, ready to see what'll happen at the 8.30 yoga. I take a walk around Crescent Lake to warm up a little bit. And then I head to class. Sure enough, I get there and there's no sign of the woman from my yoga class there again. I'm like, seriously, this girl switched yoga classes here. The one class she went to, she switched classes to not see me again. That's so crazy. But then again, I remember the four agreements that I shouldn't take anything personally and don't assume things. You don't know what happened. And even if it happened for the reason you think, you don't know the why behind that. Maybe she has a boyfriend or maybe she likes women or who knows what it is. But you don't know what's going on.
What distracts me immediately, though, is I see a yoga instructor I know there. She walks in right before me. I met her in 2020 when I was doing the Jerry Banfield show at a yoga event I did at someone's house back when everything was closed. She then did one of the shows for me. I had her as a guest and she did this intense workout class in the park. It was the class where I met another yoga student that I ended up doing a bunch of yoga with after that. I hadn't seen her in three years. The last time I'd seen her, she was at a yoga studio sitting in one of the chairs pregnant, looking pretty sad. And now she's looking fantastic. You'd never know she had a kid. I put my mat down next to her and catch up a little bit. And we begin the power flow class. I'm thinking, well, the woman from my yoga class isn't here, but this is really cool. She's here. It's a fantastic reminder of how powerful the rest of the world is, how anything could happen, how the world could just drop the money or the woman at once right in your path whenever it feels like it. The only frustration from there, though, is like, alright, if it has all this power, why doesn't it fucking do it faster? But then that'd ruin the adventure, wouldn't it? If you just immediately got the partner and the money you wanted, honestly, would that be fun? Maybe. Maybe not. I gotta say, a little deprivation certainly adds to the fun.
Towards the end of class, she gets up to leave early, and I have a split second to decide. I wanted to talk to her some more. I had her phone number years ago, but I don't have it anymore. So I get up and walk right out of class with her. She seems a little surprised, but I walk a couple blocks with her to her car. And she doesn't have her phone either. My phone's in the yoga studio. So she says, well, message me on Facebook because we used to be Facebook friends. But I said I deleted Facebook. So she just like gives me a hug and like walks off to a car and says, we'll see each other again. I'm like, OK, that's that's great. I walk back to the yoga studio only to remember that they locked the door five minutes after class and there's about 10 minutes of class left now. So I sit outside the class all hot and sweaty in shorts that are totally sweated out with no shirt on like a homeless person. And I'm like, just feeling so rejected, like, fuck, like. This seemed like it'd be such an awesome experience to see someone I hadn't seen in so long, and it just left me feeling shitty. She said she had a plane flight to catch and was in a hurry to go, but why the hell do you schedule a hot, sweaty power flow where you're gonna need to shower afterwards right before a plane flight? I guess I'd do something like that to try and fit my fitness in before traveling all day. I leave the yoga class after the door opens, I go get my stuff, and I'm feeling pretty defeated, and I'm thanking God for the matchmaking matches that I'll get to meet one day. But then I'm losing faith. I'm like, ah, fuck it. Are those even going to work out? I don't know, but at least I have them. And at least I have something I know is coming my way.
I head back home and shower. Then I have a little some of my almond butter, like a pretty random little kind of snack for lunch. I'm thinking I'll work on the taxes, but I want to check my business plan first. I'm getting clear that the business plan needs to be helping people with their legacy. So I talk with ChatGPT about that and I give it a bunch of data. I tell it, I write like a 10 minute voice memo out and get the transcription of that in there. And we start ironing out the details. It comes up with some pretty good lines I could put on the envelope that I want to promote this by putting it on an envelope outside people's door. Something like, you know, on the outside of the envelope, it'll say one day it'll be too late to tell your story. You lived a life worth preserving. Don't let it disappear. And then it says schedule your legacy planning session at Jerry Banfield dot com. Then on the bottom, it says Jerry Banfield, author in St. Petersburg.
Then on the inside, there's a long form sales letter that explains how I preserve my legacy. I have my book on myself, which has my entire life story in it. I have my Speaker Meeting 2017 book, which has my whole life in addiction and recovery that I recorded in early recovery. And then I have this daily journal that I add to every single day that'll give my kids a play-by-play of my life as they're covering their childhood and beyond. If I could have done anything again creatively, I wish I would have done something like this as early as possible. Thus, I'm in a great position to help people preserve their life stories, whether they just want one long format memoir, or whether they want to start doing something like this, or if they want it in video form on a podcast or a YouTube channel, or even in something like shorts, where they could do, you know, a thousand little shorts documenting their life. I could do all that. What I work with with ChatGPT is lasering in this because yesterday I was kind of focusing on services for wealthy people. And it's like, okay, well, what's the one service I can provide that will most serve wealthy people in which I have the best experience for? And I'd say it's preserving a legacy, controlling the narrative of your life and your story and sharing that for other people, preserving the wisdom that you've gained. And I think it feels great to do a life story.
I also work on the business model, figuring, okay, what do I want the call to action to be? What I don't want to do is do free consultations. Because I've noticed several coaches and people I've worked with do these free consultations. And it seems like you offer a lot of help and get a lot of time wasters in those. And then you have to offer something much higher price to compensate for that. And then people know the sales pitch is coming. And it's like, I just don't even want to engage with it. I'd rather just know up front what I'm getting into. Plus, with something like legacy planning, I could easily get, you know, 90 people that want to talk to me and only like five that want to pay. So what I want to set up is I change on my website at jerrybanfield.com. When you click on schedule your time with me, now it takes you to a page that says the appointment is a 90-minute legacy clarity session in person, St. Petersburg, Florida, with Jerry Banfield. An immersive private session where we explore your life story, clarify what truly matters, and design a personalized path to preserve your legacy in a format that'll last for generations. And that is priced at $300. That feels really good because some people, that might be all they need from me is just to talk about it.
And what I want to do is give people options because I know so many different ways to do things. Some people who are pretty tech savvy, they could just do a YouTube channel and put all the videos up to preserve their life story that way and then put that up on a podcast also, and that would be good enough. Other people, I could take those videos and turn them into a book on top of their videos and their podcast. Other people, they could literally just dictate some voice memos. And I could give them a prompt to use with ChatGPT and they could crank out a little book at home on a printer themselves and then pass that around. Other people might want a book that they could get on Amazon and they wouldn't want to do anything with the technology. Yesterday, ChatGPT had me thinking I needed to do some rigid thing on an exact system, but that's not me. What I offer that's awesome is flexibility. That I can take a person's unique situation and help them figure out how to best leverage that and turn it into legacy planning. I could help somebody who's tech savvy see how they could do a YouTube channel with just videos like I'm narrating these. They could do videos like this every single day and put them up to preserve their legacy. And I love that. I love the idea of doing that and helping people figure out what's their unique way to preserve their legacy. Somebody might want to write their life story out by hand and just make copies of that. But there's all kinds of different ways to do it.
And I love that I offer a session for $300. That might be all somebody needs. But if somebody wants me to do everything, like, say, picture somebody in their 70s who doesn't want to fool around with technology. They just want to talk about their life story and they want it turned into a book. Then I could offer them for, let's say, you know, it'd come down to how many hours do they want to spend doing interviews, which would roughly correlate with how much book information I'd have. Like if they want to do, say, 20 hours of interview, that should get a nice 100 plus thousand word memoir that's deep and comprehensive of their life story. Then something like that, I might charge like, OK, for that, I'll charge $10,000 to do all the interviews and turn it completely into a book. And I can do an AI narrated audio book for them also. And that then becomes a service. I don't need to offer very many of those to make $10,000 a month on average, and 100 plus thousand a year. There's all kinds of people in this town who have a life story they'd love to preserve and who have 10 plus thousand they could spend on it. Especially paying for the matchmaking service is really enforced with me. I need to be looking at, you know, kind of ordinary people who have 7,500 plus to spend and seeing what I could do for them. And this looks like the most powerful offering. I'm really excited to settle on it. Now all I need to do is execute the details. I'm glad I've taken the time to think like, what should my offering be? Because there's no point in offering, doing the work to market something where the offering hasn't been really well thought out. Now I feel with this, the offering's been really well thought out and it's something I've proven I'm doing really well for myself and I can help other people with. So I'm really excited with that. Now we'll keep ironing out the details, specifically the letter to promote the service and my website whenever people come there to sign up.
I talked to a friend for an hour and a half on the phone to catch up with him. It's really nice to reconnect with him. We hadn't talked in a couple months. He lives over in Thailand. He says for $7,500, I could have bought a plane ticket to Thailand and he'd have introduced me to at least 12 different Thai girls that I could date. And I said, you know, if this matchmaking service doesn't work, yeah, that'll be my next plan. I'll fly over to Thailand and see if I can find a Thai girl over there. My friend has some Bitcoin that he bought in like 2017. I tell him I think this is a good time to sell it because we could be on a downslide for quite a while longer. And if there's upside, it's not going to be that much up. Meanwhile, I'm looking at my ICP that used to be worth 70 or 80,000 sitting there for like 10,000. And at least for taxes, I'm only going to have like $20,000 that I got paid for my business, plus a couple thousand I sold that I had from the year before to report. So I should be getting a nice tax return.
After talking to my friend, I go pick the kids up from school. They're happy to see me because they expected me there today. They explained that they're expecting Nana yesterday to take them to get fast food, and instead they get Dad that brings the fresh fruits. And it was just they were a little thrown off. They're really happy to see me today. I take them over to my ex-wife's house. I tell my ex-wife about the legacy planning. She thinks that's a great way for me to go. And she said she thinks that's my best business idea. Out of all the business ideas I've heard, she thinks that's the best one, which I really appreciate her feedback on that because, well, she's in the best position to know me and what I could do well and what other people might need in the area.
After I drop the kids off, I drive down to try out the singles tennis on Friday afternoon. Little social they have from four to six at the tennis center where they have we end up having six of us. A fellow tennis player is there, the guy I played ultimate with the week ago. And there's six of us total or seven, but he drops out because one guy didn't show. There's one older guy. Then there's a black woman and a white woman, both, you know, maybe like around mid 30s, early 40s. And then there's a, you know, real in shape tan guy. And then there's a, you know, older, maybe like a 50 year old guy. And the old guy is 70. So I start off playing the old guy. I win the first two games feeling pretty good. He fucks me up after that. I lose five games in a row. I am boiling. This old guy has a harder, faster serve than I do. He can run and cover the court almost as well as me. And his shots, he hits so many winners. I'm so mad, but I'm not emoting like I was against a friend. I'm just fighting a war with myself inside the inner game of tennis. I'm like, I'm so proud of this guy. I'm so inspired this guy, but fuck this guy. I should be able to beat this guy.
And then I end up playing the guy on the, there's three courts. So there's the winner court, the transition court, and then the loser court. So I ended up on the loser court against the guy that's like 50. And we have a pretty good time. Both of our games are going back and forth until the last couple games. I finally catch some good shots and his game falls apart. So I end up winning that one and going back to play the old guy again in the middle court. And he fucks me up again. The only thing I can do to get a couple of points off him is hit this really spinny, slicey serve that like drops right over the net. I win a couple of cheap games against him while I'm serving using that serve. But even that serve falls apart and I keep hitting it into the net on my first serve. And I am trying to do all the inner game and positive and love stuff I can do. And meanwhile, my emotions are just boiling. I'm so mad. And it's fun. I'm like, this is fun. And it's a great workout. And I'm so grateful I could do that hot power flow this morning and play two hours of singles tennis this afternoon. My body is doing fantastic. This is awesome, the amount of energy it has. People talk about semen retention and energy, but in my experience I had a shitload of energy today regardless, after the power flow and two hours of tennis, and yeah, now I'm getting tired at 9:30 at night.
I head out from the singles tennis, trying to figure out which AA meeting to go to. I cook some beans and I have a big ass portion of nachos for dinner. All they have is salsa, beans, and avocado oil chips. I decide to go to this meeting I haven't been to in a little while. And there's an attractive blonde girl that meets me. She's probably like mid 40s. Right when I'm walking in, I say hi to her and thank God for any woman that's actually friendly and attractive. How nice. I talk to her. I sit down. I get called on first at the meeting, which takes me by surprise since I'm sitting behind the speaker. And I share and then call on the pretty girl I walked in talking to. It's a nice meeting. And yet I'm getting sleepy. I call my mother and I go over to visit my mother. I spend like 30 minutes talking to my mother. And then I'm so tired, which I guess makes sense with all the physical exertion I did. So I come home and I don't even have time to dictate the entry for today. I'm like, fuck it, I'll do that tomorrow morning. I go home feeling kind of tired and realizing my brain's not operating fully correctly. But I get to sleep a little before 10, really grateful.
Looking at the positives, I'm like, it's nice. I don't have any, you know, being single is so simple. Like, I'm so excited for the next woman, but being single is really simple, and I love that I can just kind of do whatever I want all day. And if I want to go to bed at 9.30 or 9.50, I'm not disturbing anyone, not ruining anyone's night. And it's kind of nice. There's no pressure on me tonight either. You know, it is really a simple life, and I'm enjoying the adventure. And I thank God for those matchmaking matches. Sure hope that shit works.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.