Made in the 80s.
I grew up in western Kentucky, where I developed a habit of becoming completely absorbed in whatever caught my attention. Drawing, computers, music, magic, design, and technology all became temporary worlds I wanted to understand from the inside.
I was also the Kentucky kid who once dressed like a member of New Kids on the Block — an early sign that I had strong opinions about presentation long before I knew what branding or creative direction meant.
That curiosity became the pattern behind my life. I learned by taking things apart, experimenting, making mistakes, and explaining what I discovered to anyone willing to listen.
Finding my voice.
In 2006, I launched Photoshop Quicktips, one of the earliest educational video podcasts on iTunes. The show grew to more than 500,000 downloads each month during a period when audiences still synced videos to iPods and online video had not yet become a mainstream learning format.
The success of Photoshop Quicktips led to my first professional course for Total Training in 2007. Those early productions required me to write, teach, perform, demonstrate software, and hold the attention of an audience I could not see. They gave me an education in pacing, clarity, production, and the discipline required to make complicated material understandable.
In 2010, I began speaking publicly. Local user groups, meetups, workshops, and small conference rooms became my first live classrooms. Those audiences taught me how differently people respond when a teacher can see their confusion, energy, and curiosity in real time.
A clip from the original Total Training course, 2007
The stage got bigger.
When I joined Lynda.com in 2012, I finally found the place where my two favorite things came together: creativity and teaching. Over the following years, I created more than one hundred courses covering graphic design, Adobe Creative Cloud, web design, branding, marketing, business, and productivity. Every course was built with the same philosophy I'd developed years earlier: make learning approachable, practical, and genuinely enjoyable.
Those lessons eventually reached more than 200 million learners around the world. Introduction to Graphic Design grew into one of the platform's most recognized courses, becoming the first step into the creative industry for hundreds of thousands of designers who still reach out to me today to tell me where that journey has taken them.
During this same period, I became a regular speaker at Adobe MAX. I presented at the conference in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. In four of those six years, I was named an Adobe MAX Master, an award given to the conference’s highest-rated speakers.
Those years helped me evolve from an online instructor into a live presenter capable of translating complex ideas for large audiences. My fascination with magic, timing, storytelling, visual reveals, and audience psychology increasingly shaped how I designed my stage presentations.
Inside the birdhouse.
In 2018, I moved fully into learning and development. The work expanded beyond individual courses and into onboarding, enablement, organizational learning, customer education, and the systems surrounding them.
In 2019, I joined Twitter and began working on Twitter Flight School, the company’s global advertiser education and certification platform. The role changed the direction of my career.
I worked under the mentorship of Jim Conley — creator of the YouTube Creator Academy, former Googler, and now the leader of advertiser certification and education at LinkedIn. Jim’s approach gave me a masterclass in customer education, internal business development, executive alignment, program strategy, and the operational realities of building education inside a global technology company.
Flight School demonstrated how education could support product adoption, sales performance, customer success, and revenue. I helped build more than thirty courses and eight advanced certifications for a global audience, while learning how education programs earn trust, resources, and influence inside a business.
The lessons from Twitter became the foundation for The Academy Engine™, my operating model for customer education programs. That work later expanded into Architecting Capability™, my broader body of work focused on helping organizations design the systems, environments, and experiences that enable people to perform.
Today, I bring that perspective to my work at Adobe, where I serve as Senior eLearning Evangelist for Adobe Learning Manager and work with customers around the world to explore the future of learning, customer education, AI, and organizational capability.
Life outside the work.
The work has taken me to places I never imagined as a kid growing up in western Kentucky, but the things that recharge me haven’t changed very much.
Magic has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. I spent countless hours learning card tricks, watching performances, and trying to understand why some moments leave audiences speechless while others disappear the second they’re over. Looking back, I realize I wasn’t just learning tricks. I was studying storytelling, timing, surprise, and the art of holding someone’s attention. Those lessons found their way into my presentations long before I realized it. Meeting Penn & Teller after admiring their work for decades felt less like meeting celebrities and more like thanking two people who quietly influenced how I think about standing on a stage.
I’m also an unapologetic sneaker collector. Good design has always fascinated me, whether it’s software, architecture, branding, or a pair of shoes. Walking into Adobe Summit and seeing an installation built entirely from Air Force 1s was exactly the kind of wonderfully unnecessary idea I appreciate. It’s hard not to admire people who care enough to make something memorable.
Animals have always been part of my life, and Tank was my sidekick for twelve unforgettable years. He had an uncanny ability to remind me that deadlines, airports, and product launches weren’t nearly as important as I sometimes convinced myself they were. Losing him in 2023 was one of the hardest experiences I’ve been through, and I still catch myself expecting to hear him snoring somewhere in the house.
The most important person in my life is Dawn. She has lived through every ambitious idea, every rehearsal, every framework, every podcast concept, and every notebook filled with sketches for whatever I wanted to build next. She’s also the person who knows exactly when to ask, “Are you sure?” and has saved me from more bad ideas than either of us could count. Every creator needs someone willing to celebrate the wins while keeping their feet on the ground. I’m lucky enough to have that person beside me.
Family has always been the foundation underneath everything else. My parents encouraged every strange hobby I picked up growing up, even when they probably had no idea where any of it was leading. Looking back now, I realize how much freedom they gave me to chase whatever happened to capture my imagination. That kind of support is easy to take for granted when you’re young and impossible not to appreciate as an adult.
For all the miles I’ve traveled and all the stages I’ve been fortunate enough to stand on, the moments that stay with me usually happen far away from conference halls. They’re the conversations around the dinner table, afternoons with family, dogs that become part of your identity, and the people who quietly shape who you become without ever asking for recognition.
Across every stage of my career, learning has remained a way to change what people believe they can do. A tutorial can help someone discover a talent. A course can open the door to a new profession. A keynote can give a leader the language to move an idea forward. A well-designed education system can help an entire organization perform differently.
That possibility still drives my work. After more than twenty years of teaching, building, speaking, writing, and experimenting, I remain fascinated by the moment when an idea becomes clear and someone feels ready to use it.
“The best part of teaching has always been hearing from someone years later who tells me a single idea changed the direction of their career.”
PLACEHOLDER · one-sheet PDF to be added