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Do you know Dr. Preston Cherry? He’s the founder and president of Concurrent, author of “Wealth in the Key of Life,” and someone who brings the psychology behind every financial decision into sharp focus.

If not, allow me to introduce you. He’s a master at helping people understand the emotional and psychological drivers behind their money choices, combining behavioral finance with practical wealth-building strategies. I wanted to connect with him because he embodies something I value deeply: the courage to look in the mirror and do the honest self-work that leads to real transformation.

Our conversation is LIVE now on the Just Press Record YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you’ll hear him break down the psychology of fear, rejection, and why most people need permission when they should be giving themselves courage.

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Everyone has an ego that needs feeding. That’s not controversial – that’s human nature. What’s controversial is admitting we should learn to work with it instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.

I sort of want to blame Ryan Holiday for telling us that ego is an enemy. I mostly want to blame Megadeth for putting that idea in his head.* I know the truth is more nuanced, and I think about this stuff a lot.

Ego comes from the Latin “I” – effectively meaning, your core sense of self. Freud made it weird from there. But the sense of self and identity refers to a basic self-awareness, not any form of arrogance.

Here’s a universal truth, i.e. it’s true whether you bombed 7th grade Latin or successfully avoided it: Everyone has an ego that needs feeding, a sense of self-awareness that requires finding, and an arrogance-line worth learning to exist above.

When Dr. Preston Cherry casually tossed out this Martin Luther King Jr. quote on Just Press Record, it pushed that idea into my mind, big time.

Dr. King said… everybody has an ego… It’s how you feed that ego, you know, how do you use that ego to do, to do life’s works for the greater good?

Preston Cherry, Just Press Record on Cultish Creative YouTube

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Every day you live a little, and every day you die a little.

Art happens in the balance of this science.

The moment came as he watched one $20 payment at a time show up via direct payments in PayPal, for an instrumental album (French Blends) that he otherwise couldn’t put out on a label, but he very much could self release on Bandcamp.

Even on Tuesdays – when, almost nothing feels artful, if I’m being honest.

It’s what you do with the excess in either direction, aka the net-living versus the net-dying – as only Bukowski could put it,

Art is a day by day game of living and dying and if you live a little more than you die you are going to continue to create some pretty fair stuff, but if you die a little more than you live, you know the answer.

Charles Bukowski, Letter to Ann Bauman, June 20th, 1962 (via Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970, edited by Seamus Cooney)

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After 25 years in the music industry, making beats for some of hip-hop’s biggest names, Alchemist was burning out. Maybe even burned out. But then he discovered a formula from – of all places – Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor that changed everything for him.

After all those years of chasing bigger features, bigger budgets, bigger everythings. After being inspired by Jim Jones verses for “crazy money.” After four different versions of the same song that went four ways to nowhere. Trent Reznor breaks through to him on a video.

The moment came as he watched one $20 payment at a time show up via direct payments in PayPal, for an instrumental album (French Blends) that he otherwise couldn’t put out on a label, but he very much could self release on Bandcamp.

Up that point, he had always been a record industry guy. He had only done distribution the old way, because he was succeeding that way, but at the prompting of some friends he tried something new and – it blew his mind. Instead of writing, recording, sending it off and then waiting forever to maybe get paid, this was immediate. One day you’re finished, the next day it’s in the fans’ hands, and the money is in your bank account.

I want my mind blown too. Don’t you?

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In 1996, Philly scenesters The Roots, put out a video for “What They Do,” to help promote their less live-band feeling third (official) record, Illadelph Halflife. The sheer contradictions in 1996 are hard to remember, let alone explain if you weren’t living it, but the song – it’s like being early on a market-timing call or something.

They wanted to declare, “Hey, we do it differently and that’s cooler than you realize” with a parody type video. Given how different the group was, it wasn’t a punch down in any way, I thought it was a great joke whenever I first saw it too, but – the rest of the world didn’t quite see it that way.

You should probably watch the video before we get too far into this. You have to see it because of the sarcastic subtitles especially, calling out every mid-90s rap video cliché, by putting “Rented for the day” over mansion shots, “It’s really ginger ale” over champagne pours, etc. Like I said before, to suburban punk rock me, this was AWESOME.

However, as The Roots would soon find out, sometimes, when you draw a line in the sand, it can create a situation for something else to blow up in your face.

Read more at cultishcreative.com