I’m trying to understand what makes us stronger—and what that strength is for.

I earned my B.A. in Psychology from California State University Channel Islands, and I’ve spent more than fifteen years using fitness as both a lived practice and a lens through which I can examine the rest of life.

Family isn’t background scenery in my story. I’m a husband, father, son, brother, uncle, and grandson shaped by an Armenian home in which love, sacrifice, hospitality, expectation, and responsibility were rarely abstract ideas. My father brought home my first pair of five-pound dumbbells from a garage sale. My parents modeled endurance; my grandfather and great-grandfather helped awaken my love of philosophy, reading, and writing; and the birth of my nephew helped give me the reason to finally begin my first book.

I’ve lived with ADHD, hypothyroidism, poor sleep, self-doubt, cultural expectations, setbacks, and the ongoing challenge of translating insight into action. Those experiences shaped a conversational philosophy that refuses both shallow optimism and needless self-punishment.

I’ve also learned some lessons by getting them wrong: confusing exhaustion with discipline, trying to outwork physical limits, overthinking myself into paralysis, and discovering that insight alone does not change a life. I am still practicing. I have no interest in pretending I’ve become immune to struggle.

I Lift, Therefore I Am grew from years of reading, reflection, training, journaling, and long conversations about why we think, avoid, endure, change, and influence one another.

Since completing my first book, I married Rubina, the love of my life, and together we welcomed our son, Grigor. Our marriage is grounded in love, trust, communication, and respect. Becoming a father gave this work a deeper center, and Grigor has given Rubina and me a joy unlike anything we had known before.

Early fatherhood has also coincided with job loss and serious financial pressure. I share that neither to invite pity nor to turn hardship into a performance. I share it because philosophy should be able to survive contact with an unfinished life. The practices I write about help me carry the stress, remain useful to my family, and continue looking for solutions when certainty is unavailable.

Finding work in a changing market—where demonstrated employment history may be easier to recognize than the skills a person can actually bring—has been humbling and difficult. But I refuse to make a permanent identity out of a painful season. I continue to work, adapt, and build without surrendering faith in myself, in Christ, or in God.

This mission is not an escape from my responsibility to my family. It grows from that responsibility: to build a secure and loving home, to become the husband and father my family can rely upon, and to turn what I learn along the way into something that may help you carry your own seasons.

It feels so much harder to find genuine care—someone willing to listen to you, think things through and philosophize with you, tell you the truth without talking down to you, and actually give a shit whether any of it helps.

That’s what I want Lift With Meaning to offer. I’m not speaking from a pedestal, and I hope to God I never do. I’m living through my own unfinished life, trying to practice what I preach, getting some things right and others wrong, and paying attention to what actually helps.

I understand the weight of what I’ve decided to take on. Whatever I put my name on is my responsibility: the ideas, the convictions beneath them, and the way I treat the people who place their trust in me. I will always hold myself accountable for all of it.

May God bless you.