A friend put the question to Eric on a podcast a couple of years ago. Could you coach me? Coach you in what, Eric asked. And the friend said: Eric, you own four companies and you don’t work. I know you. Our daughters are friends. You have more time than anyone else I know.
He answered without reaching for it. “I’m a billionaire in time. I built my life. Like I didn’t have a childhood. So I am living my childhood now.”
He plays volleyball with his friends on the weekends. He plays video games in the afternoon. He drives his three kids the whole four minutes to school, because he moved next door to it on purpose, and then he gets back in the car and calls someone he loves. Some weeks it runs to three calls. Some weeks five. A brother in the middle of a move and a divorce picks up every time.
The businesses he built still run. He put the people and the systems in place so they could. They make less money that way, and he has done the arithmetic on that exactly. “If it cost me five million dollars a year to never have to be told I’m remarkable for working really hard again, I’m good with it.”
This is Eric Farewell, forty years old, in Austin, Texas, coach and mentor to founders, husband of seventeen years, father of three. He woke one morning in February with the plain sense that if he passed that day, he had lived well. He had loved enough. He had been loved enough.
The seven-year-old who learned that hard work made people call him remarkable
He was three when his family began travelling half the year in a motorhome, five children packed in, driving three or four days a week to sell books to homeschoolers. He was seven when he found the thing that changed everything: work. His great-grandmother had a country inn, built in 1931, and Eric would guide tours of retirees around the property. They thought his eyelashes were beautiful. They thought he was kind, and interesting, and that he knew so much. For the first time, someone patted him on the back and told him he was good.
He grew up in a hyper-conservative homeschool Christian faith he now names plainly as a cult, in a home where the only affirmation on offer was for what he produced. He produced. By eight he worked a cash register as fast as any adult, an apron of cash tied around him. By thirteen, in 1999, he had built his first business with employees, selling airplanes on the new thing called the internet. Nobody else was doing it. People kept telling him he was remarkable.
“From the age of seven on, I became obsessed. I became absolutely obsessed with receiving the love I wasn’t receiving at home from other people telling me I was doing a good job.”
That was the loop. Work, remarkable, more work. It followed him into an internet marketing and speaking career through his teens, and it followed him into the flight school he built with his wife Nelle after she looked at him at twenty-three and said, Eric, you hate this, I don’t care about the money, why don’t we just do what you love. Aviator Paramotor grew to nearly thirty employees and around thirty million dollars in revenue, told through nothing but their own story on YouTube. And still Eric worked one hundred and ten hours a week. Three months straight, then sick, then three days of sleep, then again. His children got up as he left. They slept before he came home.
When the pain went to a ten and stayed there
Eight years ago, several things arrived at once. His younger brother James died at twenty-two, ejected from a car a mile from home, gone on the operating table an hour later. Eric arranged the funeral. He managed the food. Four hundred people came for a boy who had made that kind of mark. And Eric believed he had grieved, because he had cried, and everybody cries at a funeral.
Six months later he could not walk.
“My pain had gone from a six or seven to a ten at all times. I couldn’t take a full breath. My nervous system was fried.”
He went looking. Surgeons, chiropractors, Reiki masters, an emotion code therapist who asked him, quietly, whether his pain might be emotional. Eric laughed, and then he began the work: therapy, EMDR, somatic practice. Slowly the pain eased, and slowly he understood he had never truly learned how to feel. On Good Friday of 2020 he told Nelle every secret he had carried since he was eleven, and he lived out of the shame for the first time in his life.
What the stillness gave back
What he found, when he finally stopped, was a way to be present with whatever came. Not to cope with it, or mask it, or work himself past it, but to sit in it. He learned this in community. He keeps a running count of the hours: forty or fifty a month in circles with good men and women, leading or receiving, sharing his heart or hearing theirs.
His way of holding grief came out of it, plainly said.
“Grief is a contraction of our spirit. And in order for us to fully expand into love, faith, joy, peace, we have to stretch the muscle.”
When his father-in-law died last year, and when Nelle faced a health challenge, Eric told her: honey, we’ve been training for this. And they had.
What he has built, and who it is for
Today Eric coaches and mentors founders, and he leads a community he calls Royals, for men and women who want to step into their higher self, the king or queen version of themselves. The work is systems and hiring and numbers, and it is also this: how do we honour our trauma, how do we honour our fear, how do we look at the hard things from our childhood. He counts a client’s restored relationship with her children as worth exactly what revenue is worth.
He has a test for who a king or a queen actually is. “It’s not about what they have. It’s about what their boundaries are.” His own boundary is the one he lives by now: he will no longer perform to receive love.
He knows what he was raised to feel, and what he was not. “The only emotion I was not told to button up was anger,” he said, “and the last thing we need is more angry men.” So much of his work is teaching men to feel the rest.
There was a client, a founder who had done remarkable things, and Eric asked her when she was last in her feminine. She turned to him with tears in her eyes. “I think I was eight.” Eric wept telling it. Katherine named what she saw in him: the ability to see through the layers to the soul, what A Course in Miracles calls true empathy. The client, he said, is back in her feminine now, running a life of flow rather than force.
What his life is asking us to see
Eric was told he was remarkable when he worked, and never simply because he was. So he chased remarkable across four decades and several reinventions, until his body refused to carry it any further and his marriage nearly ended and his brother was gone. What he built afterward is a life arranged around presence, love and time instead.
There is a three-self model Katherine returns to: the lived experience self, the physical and inherited self, and the essence, the soul underneath. Eric saw that essence the day his eldest was born. He looked into the baby’s eyes and found perfection, and his inherited beliefs began to crumble, because he saw the glory of God there rather than anything to be corrected. He has spent the years since trying to see himself the way he saw his child, and to help others do the same.
His wish for the world is unadorned. Beneath the skin we all look the same. If we could meet each other with love in our eyes, the love a person makes because they have felt the grief of its absence, we might learn to let one another in. That, he says, begins with doing the work to love yourself. His purpose is to help people overcome the fear that keeps them from being present with who they truly are, because fear is only the antithesis of love, and love is all he wants to be remembered for.
He no longer runs from what frightens him. Fear, now, is a signpost. When he feels it, he reads it as the direction he is meant to go.
This is the kind of leadership our moment requires.
It is the kind of leadership Sincerely was built to honour.
A few hours with Eric
This is a warm, unhurried conversation of a little over an hour, interrupted at one point by a Texas thunderstorm that Katherine received as the divine putting an exclamation mark on the talk. Eric speaks openly about work and freedom, about grief and community, about masculine and feminine energy, and about building a life around love. Settle in with a coffee and stay a while.
There is no hurry. The library is always here.
Three things Eric said I am still sitting with
“I’m a billionaire in time. I built my life. Like I didn’t have a childhood. So I am living my childhood now.”
“My purpose on this planet is to help myself and others overcome fears to become present with who we truly are. All that fear is, is the antithesis of love.”
“All I wanna be remembered for is loving. So if I can instill that into others, to teach them to love themselves in such a way that they have an abundance of love to give to the world. That’s where the best missions come from.”
About Eric Farewell
Eric Farewell is a coach and mentor to founders and the builder of Royals, a community for men and women stepping into their higher selves. He built his first business at thirteen, selling airplanes on the early internet, and went on to found Aviator Paramotor, a flight school that grew to nearly thirty employees and around thirty million dollars in revenue. Today he owns four companies while keeping his own hours, describing himself as a billionaire in time. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife Nelle and their three children, and recently wrote a book about his life. His work centres on helping people overcome fear and become present with who they truly are.
Find Eric: Eric Farewell | When Financial Success Is No Longer Enough | Royals | Freedom, Purpose, and Legacy Beyond Financial Success
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