What is Joker to King?

THE STORY

In December of 2012, my youngest brother (who was age 21 at the time) asked me to teach him how to be a man. It’s hard to say no to a question like that. I agreed to let my brother move in immediately after the New Year holiday of 2013. For his birthday that year, I designed a customized deck of cards, and gave him the Ace of Spades, along with an assignment that I wanted him to complete. He finished the assignment, and then the following week, I gave him another card with another assignment.

There are 52 cards in a deck, and there are 52 weeks in a year.  The goal was to build the complete deck by collecting all the cards and finishing all the assignments. In this project, he was moving from being a joker to becoming a king.

Those 52 manhood lessons were collected in a book and finally published in May of 2016. That book, Joker to King, was the grand prize winner of the Southern California Book Festival, and it was Amazon’s most downloaded self-help book Father’s Day week of 2016. Since then, the book and the brand have grown. A second edition of Joker to King was published in 2021, and the Tenth Anniversary edition of Joker to King was published in 2026.

The Explanation

The Joker to King mission is to help guys become healthier men.  

As a lifelong educator, I took on this project from a curriculum development perspective. The book and the lessons were all created with a deep foundation in male psychology and curriculum development. Each chapter is split into three parts: a personal story, an explanation of the lesson to learn, and an action assignment to practice the lesson.

The Action

There is an ancient Japanese saying: “To know and not do is to not know.”  My hope for you is that this website leads to information AND transformation. Click on all the pages here on this website. Then use the CONTACT link to send me a message.