Jason Baker has a message:
“For anyone struggling, you are [expletive] worth it, and don’t you ever forget it.”
Spend a little time with Jason Baker and it doesn’t take too long to figure out that he doesn’t mince words. If you were to live through some of what Jason has, it’s safe to say that you, too, would find no reason not to speak from the heart.
It’s no wonder, really, when you consider the life he has led, the hardships he’s lived through, the internal and external obstacles he’s overcome, the kinds of struggles he’s surmounted that might grind a less-determined human being into a fine powder.
While he is by all metrics a success, Jason has seen many of his business ventures fail. He spent the better part of a decade addicted to cocaine; in his words, “anyone that knows me knows I do nothing half way.” He was severely injured in a hunting accident not long after he kicked drugs, and it’s amazing—as well as a testament to his fortitude—that he both survived the ordeal and managed to maintain his sobriety during the painful recovery. Most recently, and perhaps the most devastating, he lost his wife of nineteen years, Sara, to terminal cancer earlier in 2025.
Jason does not use his experiences as an excuse to set himself apart from others. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: it’s brought him closer to the grit of life, and through that, to other human beings. Because he has seen firsthand how tenuous and delicate life is, how fragile we often are, how prone to failures large and small, he knows he is one among many. He genuinely wants to help others navigate what he considers four pitfalls (shame, doubt, fear, and regret) that can be ubiquitous in life if we are not diligent to counter them.
“Shame said I didn’t deserve sobriety. Doubt convinced me I’d always be this way. Fear kept my mouth shut. Regret told me my life was a waste,” Jason says. “When I couldn’t talk about my addictions, it was tearing me up inside. Why in the world are you gonna bottle that up inside? Is that not a cancer?”
While real estate is Jason’s official business, he has also been out giving talks and otherwise speaking up about his life experience, with the hopes that his hard-won wisdom can be of use to those that need to hear what he has to tell them.
And, again, he does nothing half way: he wants to, and will, tell you in detail about the depths to which he has traveled, and (this is the more important part) that there are always steps someone can take to come back to the surface. He never shies away from the darkness that he and so many others have faced, but the point of his story is not the darkness. It is the light that is available to us all, the light that disinfects, as the old saying goes.
“My marketing coach tells me, ‘You need to tell your story,’” Jason says. “The ulterior motive is not money; my goal is encouragement. My main focus is just to make people feel better after I meet them. That’s the number one thing that I care about.”
“Using some of the dumb stuff I’ve done in my life, and some of the circumstances that were unforeseen, to show them that I’m not up on a pulpit pretending I’m great, showing them a Ferrari, you know, the typical egotistical person,” he continues. “I’ve just been down in the dirt for most of my life, and how to get up out of that. Because everybody’s down in it at some point in their life. Each failure, addiction, and injury, and loss strengthened me, and showed me where to aim.”
One of his goals is to help people see their inner strength, to harness it and to follow it, in contrast to the often-faulty messages the wider world sells us about what “success” or “goodness” looks like.
“The world is trying to tell you to be this perfect thing,” Jason says, “I don’t know if it’s a parent, or some religion. When I talk to groups about overcoming addiction, I talk about how I went from that to be a fairly successful business person. I don’t say that in an egotistical way, because I’m still a screw-up; I’m showing them that nothing’s perfect, nothing’s easy, but you can go from ‘here’ to ‘here.’”
“You look at peoples’ Facebook posts and they’re always talking about wins.” he says “For me, life is totally the messy middle. How do you learn from just bragging?”
“The only thing we have in this world is each other and our experiences,” he continues. “If you hide that thing you went through, how does anybody get inspiration from the fact that you made it through? Because someone is going through the same thing.”
“If you hide that thing you went through, how does anybody get inspiration from the fact that you made it through? Because someone is going through the same thing.”