Books, tools, and a community for men rebuilding after the worst chapter of their life. I’m one of them.

Ellis Morford didn't set out to be a writer. He was a mechanic, a warehouse guy, a truck driver and heavy equipment operator who put millions of miles behind him, through the mountains and cities of Colorado and coast to coast, the kind of man who fixes things with his hands and figures the rest out on the road. Then in the same short stretch of years a divorce and a back injury took away most of what he was good at, and he had to figure out who he was when none of that was left.

What put him back together wasn't a program. It was a men's group that told him the truth whether he wanted to hear it or not, a video game controller he used to find his way back into his kids' world instead of hiding from it, and the stubborn habit of showing up anyway on the mornings he didn't feel like it.

He started writing about that, and it turned into Broken But Built: a YouTube channel with over 12,000 people who've pulled up a chair to watch a broken life get built back better, a library of books built out of the same wreckage, and a growing community of men doing the work together instead of alone.

His books include Take My Advice, built around the mentors he never had and the counterfeit voices that move in when the real ones don't show up; Level Up Together, on turning a controller into a door back into your kid's world; and Keystrokes, on rebuilding a life one key at a time when the system crashes.

He's not a scientist, a therapist, or a theologian. He's a dad who did the work, kept the receipts, and figured somebody else stuck outside a door they used to walk through could use the map.

He lives in Colorado, and he gets his two daughters two nights a month. He's learned that thirty real minutes beats three hours in the same room without being there, and he's spent every one of those nights since proving it. None of that prepared me for the chapter that actually broke me. Nothing does. You just end up standing in the wreckage deciding what happens next.

When asked about his work, he replies:

I wrote Take My Advice because I needed the mentors I never had, men who tell you the truth instead of what sounds good, and I couldn’t find enough of them in one place. So I built a council of them on paper: twelve mentors, seven anti-mentors, fifty-three chapters of the conversations I wish someone had handed me twenty years ago.

Keystrokes and The Christian Journey are not books about how to fix your life. It's really a book about what happens when your life is already broken and you have to figure out what's actually yours to rebuild. I used a keyboard as the whole frame for it, because that's how it felt. There's a Delete key, a Backspace key, a Ctrl+Alt+Delete moment. Some things you can't undo, some things you have to force-quit, some things you just have to save before you lose them for good. I wrote it out of my own divorce, my back injury, losing my son Ben, the whole stretch where I didn't know who I was anymore. And I didn't leave God out of it, because that'd be dishonest. He was in the mess with me the whole time, not just standing at the finish line waiting for me to clean up. This one's for a guy who's still in it — not looking back on it from somewhere safe.

Level Up Together is about gaming, but it's really about connection. I've got two daughters, and gaming's how a lot of our real conversations happen — not across a dinner table, but sitting next to each other with controllers in our hands. I wrote it because I don't think anybody's told dads that the console isn't the enemy, it's a door. You just have to walk through it with them instead of handing them the controller and walking away. It's part memoir, part guide — what I've actually learned sitting next to my kids, not some weird theory about screen time.

Broken But Built is what came out of rebuilding. Books, a growing community, and this website, all built for men who are done pretending the break didn’t happen and ready to decide what they build after it. If that’s you, you’re in the right place.