Your inspired flights and flops, and the art that makes your heart flutter, say more about you than any ol’ resume. Here’s my journey, through inspiration, awe and mustered courage…

* Biggest creative feat ever: born May 25 1969. My mom, a teen-ager at the time, brings me to college with her so she can finish her BA.

* Nursery school teacher reports that I’m very bossy and motherly.

* Age 7. First poem is rejected from curated collection.

* Grade Two. Public speaking contest. I talk about how awesome Eskimos are. (This is subversive retaliation against the kids who teased me for looking like an Eskimo.)

* Draft my first young adult novel. Get criticized by a grown up. Burn draft in the fire pit behind our barn.

* Best part of high school was To Kill A Mocking Bird, by Harper Lee.

* Drop out of Fashion Design school application process when I realize that sewing gives me migraines.

* Work at a Romanian orphanage as a “Department of Social Inventions” project with The Body Shop. First cultural heartbreak.

* Text art by Jenny Holzer. The power of the word is affirmed to me. I am wildly inspired.

* Santa Fe, New Mexico. I learn to worship the night sky (while running my communications & marketing company by day.) I see Leonard Cohen at the Paolo Solari—religious experience.

* I discover Rothko. I commit to having more patience with my art.

* Jane Campion’s The Piano, and Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves—I am beginning to consider what it means to be free.

* Psychedelics in San Francisco while helping authors self-publish. Rilke, Rumi, Jim Morrison’s American Prayer fill my nights.

* Dharamsala, India for a private meeting with the Dalai Lama. Soul satisfied.

* Resign as the executive director of a DC-based future-studies think tank. I realize I’m more interested in the present.

* Rejected from art school.

* Vancouver 2004. Give birth to my son at home. Realize that if I’m going to tell him to go after his dreams, I better fully go after mine. I have no idea what it will mean, but I commit to live my life as an artist.

* Co-found a lifestyle media company. Write Style Statement: Live By Your Own Design. Raise a bunch of capital. Oprah producers call. First well-paid speaking gig.

* Make one of those Top 40 under 40 lists, which just adds to my complex that there’s so much more to do before I die.

* I discover Jaluddin Krishnamurti and feel so fucking liberated by his viewpoints that I ease up on my to do list (kinda), and realize that all I’ve ever wanted is freedom.

* Speaking of freedom… in a coup d’etat, I’m fired from my own incorporation. And then it hits me: creative sovereignty rocks.

* Launch WhiteHotTruth.com—later re-named DanielleLaPorte.com—visit sixteen cities in one year to do group “Fire Starter Sessions”. Come home full of great stories.

* 2009. Launch digital edition of The Fire Starter Sessions.

* Alexander McQueen Exhibit at The Met. Decide that I want to write like McQueen designed clothing: light. dark. light.

* First spoken word piece to a live audience.

* November 2011. Launch Your Big Beautiful Book Plan.

* April 2012. Revise and launch The Fire Starter Sessions in print, e-book and audio with Random House/Crown!

* The Dinner Series in NYC with James Victore & Co.; Alighiero Fabrizio Boetti at the MOMA; Matisyahu, Spark Seekers.

* Resist urges to shave my head and burn everything I’ve ever made.

* November 2012… DanielleLaPorte.com major re-design, which makes way for: THE DESIRE MAP.