It started with a question.
Then a t-shirt.
ChoiceUp began as one person’s question about how we choose. It grew into shirts, activity books, and a framework for making choices that last.
ChoiceUp founder Michael Prues didn’t set out to build a brand. He set out to answer a question: what if we thought more carefully, and much earlier, about the choices that lead us where we end up?
That question became a name.
The name became a brand.
And the brand became a nonprofit.
Read where the question came from →ChoiceUp.org
Long before there was a framework, there were t-shirts. Michael wanted to put a simple, hopeful idea on a shirt and send it out into the world.
That idea was:
We are our choices.
An early ChoiceUp line said it plainly, and it still does:
If a choice serves you, others, and the planet, it’s probably a good one.
The day a rock legend wore it
Rick Wakeman, the keyboardist for Yes, once sat down for an interview with Rick Beato wearing a first generation ChoiceUp t-shirt. Michael had nothing to do with it. The interview reached more than a million views. People noticed the shirt, and they ordered their own.
It was a good reminder that a simple idea can travel further than you’d expect.
A decade of building
For more than ten years, Michael built ChoiceUp on the side. He read, he wrote, and he kept asking how people make choices, and how they could make better ones.
Along the way, he created the ChoiceUp activity books for kids. He also shaped his thinking into the Authentic Decision Field (ADF), a science-informed way to see the whole picture before you choose, without judging yourself for what you find.
What we believe
We are our choices. Not any single decision, but all of them together, adding up over time.
And no choice stays put. Michael calls it the thread: pull on one part of it, and something moves somewhere else.
That’s why ChoiceUp doesn’t grade choices as good or bad. It helps you see what’s driving them, so you can make choices that do less harm to you and the people around you, and that holds up over time.
“The same forces that turned stardust into atoms, atoms into elements, and elements into a planet and every person reading this page are still at work in how we treat ourselves and each other. I call it the thread. Pull on one part of it, and something moves somewhere else.”
— Michael Prues, Founder, CEO & CVO, ChoiceUp
Meet Michael
Michael Prues is the Founder, CEO and CVO (Chief Visionary Officer) of ChoiceUp. He’s a big-picture thinker who has spent years with the deep questions: how everything is connected, and why people choose the way they do.
ChoiceUp is how he brings that thinking down to earth, shaping a lifetime of big ideas into a few clear questions anyone can carry, whether they’re five or eighty.
One idea he keeps coming back to is on the back of many ChoiceUp shirts: Life + Humanity Thrive at the Equator, Not at the Poles. In nature, the poles are frozen and extreme. The equator is where life grows.
He sees people the same way. When every issue gets pulled to one side or the other, we stop listening. In the middle, there’s room for everyone to grow. That’s the heart of how ChoiceUp approaches a choice: see the whole picture, and hold both sides long enough to learn from each before you decide.
Help us bring awareness to the mission
Moved by the mission? Support ChoiceUp’s nonprofit work at ChoiceUp.org