Nostril Cheese Chase started as a simple idea: what if a kids' game rewarded persistence instead of perfection? Here's what we built, and what it's teaching thousands of young players.
I want to tell you about the most ridiculous thing I've ever made.
It's called Nostril Cheese Chase.
Yes, really.
It's a mobile arcade game where the basic premise is — and I'm not going to oversell the sophistication here — you chase cheese through nostrils. It's colorful. It's absurd. Kids love it.
And I built it on purpose to teach perseverance.
Let me explain.
Why a Game
I've spent years writing books and giving speeches about resilience and adversity. I believe in those things deeply. I think stories have the power to change people, and I've seen that happen in real time — with adults in auditoriums, with young people in classrooms, with readers who send me messages saying this book found me at the exact right moment.
But there are kids who don't read books yet. There are kids who aren't going to sit through a speech. There are kids whose entry point into any kind of learning is play.
And if play is the door, you walk through it.
One of the things I've noticed working with young people through EHAS is that a lot of them have developed an avoidance relationship with failure. They don't try things they're not sure they can succeed at. They hold back from risks. They'd rather not play than play and lose in front of someone.
That's not laziness. That's a survival skill that developed in an environment where failure had real consequences — social, emotional, sometimes physical.
The problem is, that skill doesn't scale. It works as a child's coping mechanism and then it becomes an adult's ceiling.
What Games Do That Nothing Else Can
Games have a built-in relationship with failure that is unique.
In a game, you fail, and then you immediately get to try again. The feedback loop is instant. There's no prolonged shame, no consequence that outlasts the moment. You fall down. You respawn. You go again.
That mechanic — try, fail, retry, improve — is exactly the pattern that builds resilience in the real world. The problem is that in the real world, the consequences are heavier and the retry button doesn't exist in the same way. So you have to build the muscle somewhere safer first.
Games are that somewhere.
I didn't build Nostril Cheese Chase because I thought the video game industry needed another absurd mobile title. I built it because I wanted to create an experience where kids practice — in the most low-stakes possible environment — the fundamental lesson that not getting it right the first time doesn't mean you stop.
You chase the cheese. You miss. You chase it again.
That's the whole game. And underneath the silliness, that's the whole lesson.
About Gospel Unfiltered
The other creative project I need to talk about is the podcast.
It used to be called Stories to Create. I renamed it Gospel Unfiltered because that name is a better reflection of what it actually is.
Unfiltered is the key word.
I am not interested in a podcast where everyone performs wellness and success and has their three takeaways neatly organized before the outro music kicks in. I've listened to too many of those. They sound good and they don't change anything.
Gospel Unfiltered is for people who have a complicated relationship with faith — people who believe and have also been through things that make belief complicated. People who've prayed and been disappointed. People who found God in the wreckage and aren't sure what to do with that.
I want to have the conversations that don't usually happen in public.
Because in my experience, those are the conversations that actually help people. The ones where someone says something true on a microphone that a listener hears while they're driving somewhere and they have to pull over because that sentence landed somewhere nobody had reached before.
That's what I'm building toward.
Why Creativity Is Part of the Mission
I get asked sometimes why I do all of this. Why the books and the speaking and the nonprofit and the game and the podcast. Doesn't it pull focus?
Here's my answer: I don't think it does. I think it's all the same thing.
The books say: your story matters, here's how to transform it.
The speaking says: your adversity can become your greatest leadership asset.
EHAS says: young people need safe spaces to be human and grow.
The game says: failure is practice, not the end.
The podcast says: the truth is welcome here.
Same message. Different doors.
I've learned not to make assumptions about which door someone needs. For some people it's a book. For some people it's a speech. For some people — especially kids — it's a ridiculous mobile game about chasing cheese through a nostril.
Whatever gets you through the door.
Download Nostril Cheese Chase and listen to Gospel Unfiltered — conversations about faith, adversity, and the things nobody usually says out loud.