Our Story
The why behind Life Hack Tees is pretty simple but it began several years ago when I wanted to teach my oldest daughter, pictured here, some philosophy.
Back in 2012 someone had handed me a series of CDs that opened a whole new world to me. I had never really known about personal development or what that really meant. According to Wikipedia Personal Development or self-improvement consists of activities that develop a person's capabilities and potential, build human capital, facilitate employability, enhance quality of life, and facilitate the realization of dreams and aspirations.
Now that’s a lot of words, but up until that point I had never known that you can work on yourself to learn and improve yourself, making you more valuable in the marketplace (Jim Rohn describes marketplace as Reality). If you have not heard of Jim Rohn, I highly suggest that you go to YouTube and look up Jim Rohn and watch, “Jim Rohn Increasing Your Value to the Marketplace”.
As my knowledge grew about person development I wanted to share this knowledge with my oldest daughter.
Now, I am not a teacher, nor did I know how to share the knowledge that I was gaining. So I would do things like, “here, Read this Book.” Or here. “Listen to this CD.” As you can imagine that didn’t go over very well and I became frustrated that I couldn’t share the knowledge that I was gaining and not having or thinking of a way to share this with her.
Fast forward to 2020. My oldest was now no longer at home, she was married and out on her own. Though, during the pandemic while the world was shut down I was reading a book and it kept referring to life hacks. Life hacks!!!… That’s what I was trying to give my daughter. I was trying to give her ways to improve her life, but I didn’t know how to do this. And as the term, “Life Hacks” was swirling in my mind I wondered if sharing Life Hacks was a way to get my middle daughter interested in personal development. Then I had an epiphany, what if we started a T-shirt company that had life hack quotes that shared the philosophy of personal development on them?
That was the day I looked at GoDaddy and the URL, “www.lifehacktees.com” was available. I bought it on the spot. It was also the same week I asked my middle daughter to look up the quote, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, either way you’re right”. I had made a deal with her, that if she looked up the quote, told me who said it, what that person did, and gave me three references, I would give her $5. She came back some thirty minutes later and said, “Did you know that Henry Ford invented the car?”
I laughed and told her that Henry Ford didn’t invent the car, but he did invent mass production. I also asked her to put everything into an email to send to me and add one more thing. I asked her to add what the quote meant to her.
That was the beginning of Life Hack Tees and my idea of how I was going to share some of my philosophies with her. That was four years ago and many hours later. My youngest daughter in now interested in helping with this and we’ve been wearing the shirts and enjoying all the comments we get.
Not sure if this will be a tag line, but we recently came up with a disclaimer… WARNING:, Purchasing this shirt may cause conversations.
A note about our Co-Founder.
This is Delilah, she is truly an inspiration. It was Delilah that helped me spawn the idea of Life Hack Tees.
It has been almost four years since we first started talking about creating a T-shirt company. It was with her help that we created our very first quote, “Whether you Think you Can or you Think you Can’t, Either way You’re Right”
I remember her coming to me with a quote of her own. She said, “Trust Yourself”
We later found out that that quote was actually attributed to Benjamin Scott, but it had a big impact on me. I knew I wanted to make Life Hack Tees work and I knew that I had faith in what we were doing.
I knew that I had found a way to teach my daughters a little philosophy and have fun while doing it.
Since that day, Delilah has continued to grow into a young woman that is killing it in school and in life. I love watching her learn and take pride in seeing her happy with the person she is becoming.
I am hopeful that what we started will be the beginning of some amazing things to come.
At Life Hack Tees, we'll continue to grow and learn together and we’re looking to invest some of our earnings to the betterment of children all over the world. Especially when it comes to critical thinking. Some more on that below.
Critical Thinking: Building a Key Foundation for Language and Literacy Success
Did you know that school curriculums around the world are increasing their focus on critical thinking skills? Experts on early childhood development agree that the basic skills of reading, writing and math are no longer enough – children also need to learn to think critically if they’re going to be successful in today’s complex world.
At Life Hack Tees we will be looking at ways to help as many children learn this skill as possible… stay tuned for more.
