2014 Phase 1 Day 1

As you may have noticed, the calendar year has clicked forward yet again. We’re starting a new year and for many people this time also includes attempting to start a new life. Reinvention of self, personal challenges, and resolutions are just as common at the beginning of January as failure to follow through with any of those good intentions is by the end of January.

What I’ve put together is one month of exercises designed to make me very aware of where I am and where I want to be next. I’ve built this for me and I’ve built this for you.

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It’s broken up into three parts. 

In Phase 1 we will be looking at where we are in every are of our lives. Taking stock of what is and becoming very present to the reality of our present is key when looking at building towards some dream or goal. 

In Phase 2 we will be looking at where you want to go. I have been surprised at how often I’ll be talking to people who are dissatisfied with some aspect of their lives but have no idea what they’d like instead. Whether you do or not, Phase 2 will be an opportunity to make those visions crystal clear and to make sure that they’re harmonious with the kind of life we want as a whole and compelling enough to spur us to action. I like to picture this kind of work like I would a physical journey. If you know your starting point and your destination, all that’s left is planning the route. 

In Phase 3 we’ll be planning the route. How do you get to where you want to go? How to you integrate the things you want to do in your life in a way that they’re doable? 

We’re not looking just for momentary inspiration or a few good ideas, we’re looking to create lives we love and to be Life Athletes. This will require some work to do but I’ll break it down so that the most time you’ll have to spend on any given day will be about 20-30 minutes.   At the end of the thirty days we should have a clear idea of how to get from where we are to where we want to be in every area of our lives, and the strong desire to get started. So... let’s get started. 



Daily challenge: 

Commit to following through with this program for 30 days.  Post and make public your commitment to be a Life Athlete in  2014. 

Hacking Life is after all, just travel hacking extended over a longer period of time.

“What’s your best travel hacking story to date (where you scored a free upgrade, used miles or just got a bonus perk) OR Name 2 ways in which you’re going to become a savvy travel hacker in the next 6 months”

Phew...


This is the weakest part of my traveling game. I see the term “travel hacking” and I think “that’s a way to try to make cutting coupons sound badass”.

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Somewhere along the way I've developed an aversion to filing out forms and looking for deals ... I’ve dismissed it as "counting coppers" (Hooray for GOT references!).  I'd much rather be doing... ANYTHING else. Calculating how many air miles I can get if I pay for this with that card, or for that with this one makes me tune out really fast.

I know that it’s an important skill and I suppose I’m in need of a reframe here because I just haven’t been able to get excited about that aspect of travel. 

My secret traveling tool has been to piggy back on the research others have done. That sounds HORRIBLE when said out loud but it’s true! 

I seem to have friends who love doing this type of digging and if we're traveling together I do my best to provide value elsewhere. Praising them for their cleverness, ingenuity and ability to find us a great deal also seems to be appreciated. 

I have no idea where this aversion to deal hunting comes from. I know consciously that I could be traveling more and for less if I just followed a few key steps and yet...

Maybe it's a sense that It's too good to be true that people will give me something for "nothing". If I just fill out this form and get this card and sign up using this code... all of my dreams will come true. 

Likely it's my resistance to being led. I see signing up for these kinds of deals and discounts to be similar to jumping through hoops. I think that there's a deep dark part of me that remembers a past life as a circus tiger or something and those hoops they made me jump through were on fire! 

Regardless, it's this kind of work that I don't like, the small detailed kind of things that really make everything else function.

This is that skill I’ll be working on over the next 6 months... doing things the right way from the start. 

This website was built on the platform it’s been built on because Wordpress seemed too involved at the time and I wanted to launch something right away... honestly, I’ve switched blog formats twice in order to save myself a bit of struggle in the early stages. 

Really, Life Athletics is built on an area that I personally struggle with. I’ve put this all together in an attempt to train myself into this one good habit: practice and preparation. 

Malcolm Gladwell says that the key to becoming great at something is to practice for roughly 10,000 hours. I however have an internal reaction to hearing that that’s more Allen Iverson than I’m comfortable with now that I’m becoming consciously aware of it. 

In my first interview for Life Athletics Stu Turnbull talked about how practice made his success on the court possible. 

Putting in the advanced work made him not only capable of making that shot in those conditions but it made it probable. That's powerful. 

This is not: I think that I’ve seen doing advanced preparation almost like... cheating. As though it was an admission that I wasn’t very good and so I had sneak in extra work to compensate. Not that I don't put in work at the start of things but... I know I could do more.  As I typed that, some faint memory, of being satisfied as a child for understanding what others didn’t at school despite not doing the homework, popped up. 

Even then, however, it was not a sustainable system. I fell behind in school and frustrated my teachers by being the clever kid with potential who didn’t put in the work. 

Is this a stretch as a response to a question about travel hacking? Maybe but since I’m overlaying everything over the more general topic of “life”, I think it works. 

Now, I’m training for two races and an Ultimate Frisbee tournament, building a wordpress site with the help of a friend and focusing on doing things the right way. Hacking Life is after all, just travel hacking extended over a longer period of time. 

Being a minimalist is simple but not easy.

Years ago I backpacked through central america. I didn't have any plans beyond just going. My cut-rate airlines flight changed the destination of my flight to mexico from... I don't really remember.... to Cancun, and it didn't matter. 

I was aiming for simple and that meant that I had to simplify myself as well. I'd looked up ‘travel essentials’ so that I didn't take anything superfluous. My wardrobe was sparse, versatile, utilitarian and yet stylish. I did take a white dress shirt with me, which was a bit luxurious for what I was up to, but they're versatile and can dress up a pair of shorts or jeans pretty quickly should need arise and I had no idea if I’d want to be a little more respectable at some point on the trip.

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Thinking of that experience and how easy it was to just be unburdened of all the extra stuff I usually have with me, makes me think of a quotation from fight club: "The things you own end up owning you".

The Blog challenge question I’m working with today is “Could you live a minimalist lifestyle?”

I'm unsure about what I want to do next, I really just want to spend my time working on graphic design projects and the Life Athletics site but it’s not making enough money for me to exist off of quite yet and my savings would vanish faster than I’d care to admit.

The contract for my day job is almost done and the thought of leaving this situation is at once exciting and daunting. 

I'm in a very comfortable spot. I like my apartment and my motorcycle. I have accumulated fitness gear that serves me well and I wouldn't want to walk from all of this to put myself in a position where in a few months I’d be scrambling to again situate myself in a place with a regular pay check. 

The dream of living off of Life Athletics is still a little ways away. This is not at all a terrible place in which to find myself but it is not a place of total freedom and carefree fancy. 

Traveling minimally is a wonderful concept but it very much depends on the level of connection you choose to have to a place, to people and to things. 

I’m sentimental and form attachments to mementos. 

A friend of mine once burned all of his old writing, poetry, drawings and photographs in an effort to become free from the past. I was impressed and aghast. 

I’ve stepped away from places, people and stuff in the past, and while that’s led me to where I am now, there have been things I’ve missed. 

Thoughts, projects and ambitions are also difficult to streamline. Wanting it all often leads to having nothing and being a minimalist must also include an elegance of purpose and thinking. 

I’ve often marveled at people who could leave their apartment or home for a vacation and rent it out for a week or more. Everything in it had a purpose and the personal items packed away neatly into a box and were stored somewhere unseen, off site or taken with them.  

Having everything that matters to them be portable or easily secured while their decorations were more replaceable and impressed me as everything around me has a memory attached and would be hard to walk away from. I know I will be doing just that soon and that I’ll be making my life and myself more minimalist once again but It will not be 
easy. 

Four Key Areas to Being Location Independent

I've decided after my last post to stop being so darn stubborn when it comes to this blog challenge. I’ve already fallen far behind and really it serves no purpose other than to make me feel momentarily right about issues that often don’t often matter all that much to me. 

I was resisting the travel aspect to the challenge because of, or despite, the fact that it's been three years since I've been home.. and that visit had only been for a couple of months after six months spent in India.

Being dismissive about the travel aspect is just arrogant of me and I'm not here to try to impress anyone, I'm here to learn, share what I know and to grow. 

Inside of a context of “what skills I need to develop”, I’d say that being open and coachable should top the list. A close second should be getting things completed and shipped. 

With that said, today's challenge follows the travel theme of the blog challenge's third act and I have to say, it's a great question. It's also a question that applies to anyone, traveling or not: "What skills do you need to build or refine to be a happy Suitcase Entrepreneur?"

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Despite dropping my resistance, I will twist the question to apply not just to being a suitcase entrepreneur but also to my goal of living as a Life Athlete, I believe that they overlap anyway.

Natalie Sisson (THE Suitcase Entrepreneur) listed four attributes that she felt were key to maintaining her productivity on the road.

They are:

Productivity

Staying healthy

Keeping up with clients

Keeping in touch with your network

It's hard to fault the list. I'll adopt it and go over what each one means to me.


"Productivity" is one that I think is great as it's measurable. Often in the past I've take "working a lot" to mean the same thing as being productive but I've recently adopted an axiom that my dad stole from somewhere "Keep shipping”. Seth Godin talks about this too. He cites his prolific nature as the secret of his success. He just keeps going and eventually his content has improved and found an audience. 

I’ve been viewing productivity in terms of what I’ve been able to ship or complete and take off of my desk. Obviously with larger projects this takes longer but the closer I get them to that point, the more productive I’ve been. The caveat has been that sometimes I’ll go in a direction that truly doesn’t work and I have chosen to view those moments not as a waste of time but rather as learning experiences. Still, ranking those lower gets me to not just run in circles thinking I’m learning. It’s better to move projects and ideas forward than to not, inside of my current way of thinking. 

Staying healthy is one that matters to me on a number of levels. The main, and overlooked, key to this is energy. Energy is often seen as this odd term that doesn’t mean much but it is essentially one’s ability to do work. 

No energy, no nothin’. 

Staying healthy isn’t about going to the gym a lot, or eating certain foods, or practicing yoga... at least not exclusively. As I’ve said recently I’m an exhaustion addict and so doing those things can be detrimental to me if I allow myself to OVERdo them. 

Under-doing isn’t any better. Laying around sleeping won’t make you more energetic unless you’re also building capacity by pushing yourself and allowing recovery. The food we eat, when viewed as an energy source also makes a difference. Are we looking for short term, medium term or long term effects from our food? Chocolate, or french fries might make us feel good in the short term but those feelings don’t tend to last. Choosing to push only as much as I need to in order to grow and then finding foods that fuel me in three-four hour bursts and also provide a good base for longevity is key for me. 

Also naps or meditation often allow me to recover and prepare me for bursts of effort and have been things I’ve been putting in place lately. 

Another aspect of health is this. When my body feels badly, the rest of me does too. I find it difficult to maintain a positive, balanced and patient mental outlook when I’m tired, worn down or hungry. I often joke that I can handle ANYTHING when I’m fed and rested and lament how rarely I find myself in those states. And there’s the rub. These are states which have to be managed. They don’t usually happen by accident. 

Keeping up with clients is obviously an important aspect of having a business, whether you’re running it from the road or not. 

The trap I fall into is wanting to have all of my correspondences be brilliant and insightful and so I have been known to put off responding until that mythical moment where I have “more time”.  

Practicing forgiveness has been the key to getting over that worry; and from there focusing on conveying the most important message.

Keeping in touch with my network is another one that often is sacrificed to the beast called “being more productive”.  Attempting to fill every free moment with work hasn’t proven to be very effective and yet it’s the default I fall into if I’m not careful. I’m clearly at my best when I work in controlled and predetermined chunks of time separated by activities that refill that focus on joy and refill the batteries... and yet I constantly find myself just trying to plough through projects. Not only does that rarely work but it also leads to me not being overly communicative with my networks as I’m burnt out by that point. Being more aware of these patterns has allowed me to choose more effective options. 

For my money the most important of all of these ... the one without which the others could not function ... is energy.  

When I manage my energy, everything else falls into place. In general I know what to do most of the time and yet when I’m drained, choosing the right actions rarely happens. On the other hand, when I manage my energy, all of the things I’ve filled my head with over the last 10-15 years come to the surface and everything becomes that much easier. 

Success: Knowing what to do is half the battle, then just do it.

Never is it so clear that success is the natural outcome of “right action” than when I’m not taking those actions. After hurting my neck last week, I stopped all forms of, training, no weights, no yoga, no biking, running etc. I also stopped sleeping well, my emotions went a little wonky, I had a falling out with someone close to me, I stopped journalling as it hurt to sit, I stopped posting here because it hurt to sit and I was feeling badly about the falling out and a week later I’m amazed at how quickly things can snowball. 

The ship can be righted. I went on a bike ride to a beautiful park with a great wooded workout area last night. I ran a little, did a few pull ups and just got my body moving again. The night before I’d had dinner with a buddy of mine and we started talking about this idea. The idea that despite knowing what we have to do in order to maintain ourselves as the people we want to be, it’s easy to slip into a routine where these elements are not included.

He’s been visiting Korea for about a month. When he arrived, he’d been meditating, training, doing breathing exercises he’d learned in a recent trip to India for an hour a day. Now, he had stopped doing those things and didn’t really remember stopping. We know hat we have to do, but we haven’t been doing it.

Like G.I. Joe said, “knowing is half the battle”, with the other half covered by Nike’s slogan “just do it”. 

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We both agreed to take action and mine was to make a list of the things that I do that build me up, recover energy, heal the body and emotions, on a daily basis. I won’t do them all every day but as long as I’m hitting some daily and rotate through them, I find that I’m pretty golden. 

The blog challenge has veered into territory where I’ve quite honestly felt like dismissing it.  It’s not that there’s no value to it but it’s not the value I feel like I need right now. That said, “a doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient” and I’m guessing that the same can be said for a few other disciplines. 

Because the blog challenge is through the Suitcase Entrepreneur it is designed to train us to be suitcase entrepreneurs ourselves. 

The question of the day is this:

What are your travel essentials for your chosen destination(s) ?

The blog challenge has been excellent so far and while this question isn't a bad one, it's more geared towards a specific goal than I'd like as that goal isn't exactly one I have for myself at the moment. I’ve traveled and feel comfortable doing that, what I want is to become financially free to do that on a regular basis. 

It's a danger of naming yourself... it narrows your field. Naming both creates and eliminates possibilities. Creating a niche is an important thing in terms of marketing yourself but it can also be tough as you essentially now have to push forward a certain concept.

With the Suitcase Entrepreneur I see this playing out by the need to emphasize the "suitcase" as much as the entrepreneur.

Lulu Lemon Athletica suffers from the "athletica" part, as their street line is explained as being for "to and from the gym" as opposed to just clothing for an active life.  Some of it is great, but I think that many of their pieces would be better if they were straight shirts for example rather than something built for a sport. Because they’re a sporting line however, shirts have multi coloured panels or pockets for golf tees or other design features that I personally don’t need or want. 

Life Athletics might suffer from the same problem. Many people see the "Athletics" part of the name and think that this is a site about health and fitness exclusively, or think that it's just for jocks, and that's simply not the case.

I’ve thought of renaming it but I like the name and others seem to as well.  

Other variations sound a little too "self helpy" and that was something I wanted to avoid. "Life Training", "Life Building" and so on, gave me a feeling of drudgery or the need to fix something that I didn't get from the name "Life Athletics". 

The problem remains that it evokes images of gym classes, sweat, scraped knees, being picked last and other unfortunate connections to possibly bad memories for some. 

All I can hope is that Life Athletes are able to get past whatever mental blocks they might have and embrace the idea that "training" just means doing something repeatedly that is designed to help you improve in a given skill, attribute or task, and that this can be a fun thing.

That said... I suppose that I’ll be pushing an athletic element in any future challenges I do and I do love travel so... I’ll stop resisting and answer the question. 

It’s actually kind of tough to answer this simply as there are so many places I want to go to BUT at the moment, my main desire would be to go somewhere tropical where I could SCUBA dive, swim, sail and maybe finally learn to surf. A place with a good internet connection would be ideal so that I could work on the site in the evenings. 

What I’d need to bring, beach clothes, my gymnastics rings, (cabins usually have GREAT beams to hang rings and all of a sudden pullups, dips, rows and pushups become a lot more fun. Throw in squats, the occasional sprint session on the beach and some stretching and ... well you know what I’d like to be doing now.), I’d also take my ebook reader and some note books. 

From my answer, I see that the daily routines that make me healthy, happy and productive are second nature to me while I travel and I see them as additional tasks while at home. Okay, okay... the travel angle was beneficial after all ;) 

We’re back, game on!

I've been MIA for a few days and when I saw the title of the blog post my mind went in one direction but when I saw the actual question, it went in another. I’ll address both here. 

The title of today’s challenge is: “The Key Qualities and Characteristics you Will Need to be a Suitcase Entrepreneur”

As I see it, the qualities and characteristics needed to be a Suitcase Entrepreneur are similar to those needed to be a Life Athlete.

Once you choose the life you want, it's a matter of going for it, and making it work. No matter what you call it, it’s an inspiring level of existence. 

There are lots of excuses for why I’ve fallen behind with the posts.  I’ve had visitors for the last couple of weekends, I've had good times with friends as well as some bad times that took a lot out of me, I've completed or nearly completed four graphic design projects (for an event and a couple of blogging friends... all will be unveiled soon!), and I pulled a muscle in my neck making impossible to turn my head to the left.

I allowed all of these things to slow me down a bit and wear me out BUT they're not why I haven't posted in a few days. I haven't posted because I’ve got a twist in me that needs to be kneaded out that I’m going to call myself out on. 

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I like to be a frontrunner, I like to be in the lead. I don't like to feel like I'm in a position where I'm behind at all to the point that I’ve quit when I’ve fallen back in the past. It wasn’t conscious or obvious to me but that’s what’s up. 

Perhaps it's because I was the youngest (but the tallest) kid in my class growing up but I have a distaste for feeling like I'm behind at things. 

It doesn’t really matter where it’s come from unless that’s my access to releasing it; What matters is the impact it’s had. 

It's caused me to hold back from starting some new things until I felt comfortable that I could excel right away and it's made it so that if I've tripped and stumbled I've sometimes just given up.

I saw the same thing in my brother and sister when they were young (they’re 13 and 15 years younger than me) and visiting me in Montreal.  I was able to clip it in them during a bike ride up Mount Royal in which they had wanted to quit. After a a talk that rallied them, they made it to the top now remember it as a triumphant moment in their lives. I didn't see that I had the same thing in myself and didn't make the same intervention. I've of course made it through lots of tough things in my life without quitting but that doesn't mean that this isn't still a pattern at work in me. 

I started this blog challenge 12 hours later than I'd intended due to the time of the first posting and the time difference where I am in the world.  I had waited to see what the first post would be but I didn't see it before it was time to go to sleep and so I saw it in the morning my time. I posted a response and that evening there was a prompt for the one for the next day. I was already on the edge of falling behind. 

My window to be productive in my personal pursuits isn't huge and so if I don't fiercely protect it, it’s easy to find myself behind in my projects and there's really never a good time to catch up.
It can feel overwhelming to see all of the things I’ve agreed to do on top of the things I’ve promised myself. Sacrificing sleep is the easy solution to finding more time I’ve fallen to in the past but as Admiral Ackbar said “It’s a trap!”

It’s one I’ve fallen into often, staying up until 4am working on projects and then waking up a few hours later to start working again, while trying to also workout, be social and go to my day job just kills my ability to really shine. 

Working smarter instead of harder is the key. Managing my energy allows me to be far more productive than when I’m exhausted. It’s one of those easier said than done things for me. 

If I was to say what my main opportunity for improvement is, what key characteristic or attribute would make the biggest difference in my pursuit to be a Life Athlete, it would be being unstoppable.

The funny thing is that this often means that I must stop so I can recover my energy and not fall into exhaustion. 

The combination of maintaining my energy and being unstoppable in terms of my production are they areas that I’m training currently. 

I've already talked in a previous post about how we're only as strong as the thing that stops us. Letting a few delays stop me sets my bar a little lower than I know I'm capable of.

Even worse, fear of looking bad by posting late is also not a reason to stop. People give in to their excuses all the time. Being abel to brush them off and take action, even if it's slightly delayed, is a triumph.

Wanting things to be perfect, immediately and with the fewest hangups possible is normal. I'm aiming a little higher and so here I am, a little late but standing before my readers to say that I will not stop, you will have a system you can use and count on in Life Athletics, and I'm going to have fun as I go.

Now, to answer the actual question... “What’s your level of location independence and your nomadic quotient?”

I have been to twenty countries and have livd outside of my own more than I've lived in it over the last 8years. That said, I've now lived in the same country for nearly three years and I've only been out on vacation once. 

What my nomadic quotient looks like is this, I'd like to have a home, a base of operations with a big soft bed, a good home gym and a fantastic kitchen. It doesn't have to be huge or showy, just well located and comfortable with a good internet connection.

The main difference to my vision and what I have currently is that I’d like to be in a place I can see myself living in for the next 10-20 years. 

With that in place, and income coming from an online business, I'd like to do courses around the world or participate in initiatives globally that inspire me. Ideally this would be on a three months at home and one month away, loop.

I'm a firm believer of building a life you don't need a vacation from but I'm also a huge proponent of travel and growth opportunities and I see this as an ideal set-up to balance those two aims.

Everyone stumbles but getting up, laughing and continuing on your way is whatLife Athletics is all about. This is just a game, and so I choose to enjoy and keep playing! Game on!

Jamming the switch in the “on” position.

“If you chose to live anywhere in the world, where would that be and why?”

We've entered Act 3 of the Suitcase Entrepreneur's blog challenge which is ostensibly about being homeless, or nomadic, or free to wander the earth as we see fit. The realization that I'm hit with as I ponder where in the world I'd like to live is that I've felt homeless for quite some time now. I have an apartment... but I don't consider it a home. I'm living in a loft in Busan South Korea. By the standards of most of my expat peers, it's a nice place. Roomier than most and only a short walk from the beach. It's a fine place, but it's not where I want to settle and I've known that for a while.

In fact, I've known that about every place I've been for quite some time now. 

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It's easy for me to imagine where I want to be, because that's really where I've lived for a long time now. Existing inside of my imagination has laid out a pretty clear path and now I'm ready to take steps. 

It's very possible that I could have started with the stepping much earlier but sometimes it takes going through the journey to realize that we had everything we needed at the start.

Dorothy had to travel through Oz before she knew to click her heels and I've had to go through what I've gone through.

Entering into situations that I thought of from the start as temporary means that I've treated everything associated with them in the same manner. I haven't put down roots because I've been preparing to leave most places as soon as I arrive. I've been in my current apartment for almost two years but it's still decorated in such a way that I could walk away from it pretty easily. My couches and furniture were gifts or purchased on the cheap second hand while I dream of a time when I can start putting together a home "for real".  I dream of quality pieces that create a layered and textured aesthetic that conveys comfort, quality and style. I do this while living like a slightly well heeled college student.

There's nothing wrong with my life other than that in some areas it's not the one I've wanted and so elements have been neglected while I wait for my real life to start.

It's been my silent belief that I would suddenly “turn it on” when it counted but if now doesn't matter now, why would it matter later?

Dave Smart has had unprecedented success as the head coach of the Carleton Raven's Men's Basketball team. During the two seasons in which I covered the team, I believe that they were undefeated through the regular season and in the second year, through the playoffs. Iv'e only seen them lose one game.

Many of the other teams that they play are nowhere near their level and sometimes this leads to lopsided scores.

Regardless of the competition though, the Ravens always seem to play as thought they were down by five points with less than a minute on the clock.

They've been looked down on for this with critics accusing them of bullying lesser teams. Dave brushed those sentiments aside and simply stuck to his assertion that they were just respecting the game and trying to play the right way. 

He knew that there would be better teams to play against and if they ever played down to a lesser opponent they would be setting themselves up for defeat down the road. "It's not a switch you can turn on and off" he once told me about the intensity needed to be great.

From the point of view of that metaphor I've been stuck in the "off" position and ignoring Dave Smart’s sage advice believing that I could switch it on later.

The dream? I want to live somewhere inspiring and comfortable. In my mind that could be Barcelona or Montreal but I’m not limiting it to either of those places. They just represent some things that I like. 

I’ve lived in Montreal while I’ve never lived in Barcelona but both exist in my mind as charming places with good food, art, and culture. They are their own places but also having access to international airports so I could visit family or go on adventures easily.  

I also like the people I know from these places and if I were to have kids, something I do want in my life, I’d want to be somewhere that produces good people. Whether it takes a village or not, I think that the surroundings sure play a large role in raising a kid. 

Another place I haven’t been to plays heavily in the fantasy. I’d vacation in Bali often and partake of yoga, sailing, scuba diving, hammock napping, great food and Ninja Camp. 

All that said, I rode my motorcycle home along the coast and stopped to eat at a Japanese restaurant on the beach. I wrote half of this post while waiting for my grilled tuna... "here" is good when I let go of frantically trying to get "there". 

The challenge will be being who I think I’ll be in those places, when all of those elements are set up, now.  

I’m taking a breath and flipping the switch. 

Building even without the “right” tools and minding the gap.

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that I’ve been doing this blogging thing all wrong for a while now. Through this blog challenge I’ve been forced to be face to face with the realization that I’ve been trying to reinvent the wheel. The blogging platform I’m using is limited, I’m using Twitter ineffectively, not using Pinterest at all, I don’t have a squeeze page and the list goes on.  

This is all good news by the way. 

Once again, Life Athletics is at it’s core a diagnostic tool. When you start to improve something and you’ll see what needs to be improved, a.k.a. “the gap” ... although it sometimes arrives as what I’ve been doing “wrong”. 

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That’s how it feels much of the time anyway. The first reaction is “I’m doing this wrong” when I see that you’re doing something less than perfectly. The problem however is when this is followed by some version of “I’m such a(an)...”. 

The fact that I’m not going there at this moment speaks to the effectiveness of my efforts to strengthen and develop those parts of me. 

That I used to slip into that thinking helps me relate. 

Becoming aware that I’m doing something in an ineffective way is my first access to being able to start doing things well. 

This reframe has proven to be incredibly powerful for me. It was in looking at things that I, and others, did well that I was able to see what was missing in the areas where I was struggling.  

When I draw for example, I have to basically scribble first. I then refine, erase, redraw, erase, redraw some more and eventually I might come up with something I like. It’s a process and I allow it to be one. 

It’s the same with anything I’ve done successfully. I’ll try it and then allow myself to improve. It sounds so simple and yet there are so many other areas in which I’ve pressured myself to be better than I am immediately. That doesn’t work, in case you were thinking of trying it. 

What’s encouraging is the growing interest in Life Athletics based purely on my writing and ideas. With very little being done “as it should”, people are still being very supportive and excitement is building. 

This question for this entry from the Suitcase Entrepreneur is: “State your top three tools that you will use (or already use) to save time and money and make your online world more seamless”. 

Natalie Sisson, made a great list of tools that she uses and I’ll be using a few of those as I move forward. I’ll also be looking at Pinterest and how to use Twitter and Facebook more effectively. 

Seeing how I’m in a revamping stage, I’m not really in the mood to trumpet any of the things I’ve been using as I’m planning on changing many of the tools I use. 

Also, the idea that it’s a poor carpenter who blames his tools is ringing in my mind. I’ll keep hacking away with what I’ve got refining, rebuilding and retooling as I go. 

It’s hard to admit publicly that not everything I do is perfect but, that admission sets me free. 

In admitting what I have to work on however, I’m allowed to grow, which is what this is all about. 

Building influence.

"Which methods do you want to use to build your platform and increase your influence?"

Being influential strikes me as the same as being socially powerful. There are different ways to achieve this of course but my way is to place Life Athletics at the centre of the personal development world. 

Yeah, I’m not aiming at the middle here, I’m aiming for the top. By constructing a structure that has people developing their whole selves using parts of other people's programs, Life Athletics will become the hub of the giant wheel. 


I know that sounds hugely egotistical but it’s not the time to be self effacing. I have big dreams for Life Athletics and you should know about them. 

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The reason why I think Life Athletics can be huge in the community is that I am not trying to compete with anyone, I'm only interested in what habits of thought and habits of action combine the best.

Someone with more resources could sweep while I’m building and do something similar but I think that there’s enough that’s unique and special that I’m dropping my fear of announcing my intentions for fear that they’ll be stolen. 

Coming from that place, my mind is open and this all becomes a fun, giant experiment. 

Crossfit does this on the physical level. Crossfit founder Greg Glassman is big on measurable results and once said that if what you do works better, they would adopt that. 

My bias is towards Crossfit as being a great way to train but it’s not about me. The goal is to set up the site so that whatever you’re into has a chance to be featured. 

If you’re a MovNat fanatic, or are into Parkour (PARKOUR!) or just walking in the park, it’s up to you. 

Building a system that essentially invites people to prove that what they do works will turn Life Athletics into a proving ground for those looking to be the best as well as provide a valuable launching pad for those looking to be the best them. 

It will also be a way to show if certain modalities work in conjunction with a full life. If you can meditate for an hour a day, exercise, have a job and a relationship, eat well, read, have some sort of hobby and sleep for 8-9 hours a night... good for you, but many people struggle to string together all of the things they know that they should do while living a normal life. 

Body building for 3-4  hours a day works to build muscle but that much time spent in the gym means that you're limited as to what other things you can do. If that's your chosen lifestyle then, rock on and sculpt those delts, but if you're looking to be fit but not at the expense of the other areas of your life, body building might not be the right fitness modality for you.

By taking these various elements and putting them on stage together people will be able to find systems that work for them. 

Those with the most effective and efficient systems will thrive in this environment. 

Through giving people that opportunity, Life Athletics will be influential and be able to positively impact the lives of people around the world. 

People won’t come to the party if they don’t know that they’re invited. Building an affiliate team.

Teams, and more teams. I think that Natalie Sisson, is making the point that being an army of me isn’t going to cut it if I want Life Athletics to reach its potential. I can say that this is fine as the plan is to have MANY people involved but the reality is currently far removed from the plan. 

It’s kind of like I’ve been treating this like I’m a neurotic host of a dinner party with lofty aspirations hanging from it. I want everything to be just so before the guests arrive.

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When I have people over I’m much more relaxed than that but even as I type that I see that there’s still a snag in how I am when I host. 

I like to cook for people. I like it a lot actually. When I do it though I tend to turn down help if they’re over before I’m done and offering. 

I like to think of it as I’m pampering them a bit, offering them a chance to feel taken care of and catered to for a moment in time. Where I live, there aren’t a lot of home cooked meals on offer and so I like creating that space. 

What’s landing as I write is that’s all very much about me. Yes, they get the experience that I just described and if that’s what they were in the mood for, that’s great. For some, however, the true “home cooking” experience is only created when they come together and help make a meal in collaboration with others. 

It’s not about the perfection of the food, it’s about the shared experience and the connection to another person this generates. 

Life Athletics is envisioned to be a giant potluck banquet buffet. When fully built it will allow people to share their favourite trainings in every area of life for others to sample, enjoy and take home with them.

The blog question for this installment is “What does your dream sales team look like and how will you 
ensure they help you build your business?” 

As of right now, the only thing I have for sale is a t-shirt and an idea. 

The idea is something I want spread and this will be talked about more in the next post on how to become influential. 

Still, this is what I envision. The people using Life Athletics will self identify as Life Athletes. They will be proud of themselves for looking at their lives in a way that allows them to take daily actions to become stronger, more flexible and more powerful in every aspect of their world. 

The people who live to provide others with tools and ideas for building themselves in a variety of ways will see themselves as Life Athletics partners and recognize the value of being part of a community of people training their lives and the lives of others. 

I don’t believe that there’s one way of reaching our personal goals. If we want to get in shape, there are many ways to do that. If we want to have great relationships, there are many ways of doing that too. The trick as far as I’m concerned is to not let any one area drop below where we’re comfortable having it and doing SOMETHING to grow ourselves in each area as stasis isn’t possible. 

From there people will want to direct others to Life Athletics because I’ll be using Life Athletics to direct people to them. I’ll be using the platform to let people tailor their life training to themselves. 

I believe that this will be a win, win, win, situation and therefore a successful one. 

Now, before the platform gets built and before all of the tables are set and the decorations are hung, how do I build a team of people all looking to join, and help build the Life Athletics community? I guess a good place to start would be to ask. People won’t come to the dinner party unless they’re invited. 

Engaged by a member of the tribe.

So the “How to Engage Your Tribe Online by Building Trust & Providing Value” entry of the blog challenge I’m doing comes up and what I think of first is how I’ve already mucked it up. Last night I was out at a crowded bar filled with friends of mine and one of the nicest girls I know, smiles, comes over, gives me a hug, and then tells me that she has an issue with my last blog post. 

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She was on the squad I talk about and referred to as the “all star” team in that post. She was curious about my use of quotation marks and wondered if I’d been mocking them. Because she knows me, she gave me the benefit of the doubt and assumed the best. I’m glad for that trust as I indeed didn’t mean to run her team down at all. I used the quotes because I was keeping the name of their team secret for some reason. 

They were called “Rainbows and Butterflies”, they’re friends and, they were and are great. 

Another thing she wanted me to know that she had an issue with, was implying that the “B level” was more fun. She wanted to make clear that there are various forms of fun and that competing as hard as you can in an attempt to win is in fact fun and rewarding. 

I agreed 100%.

Life Athletics is about YOU determining what level you want to play at in every area of your life and going for it with as much zeal as you want. 

A friend of mine who used to play for the Carleton Ravens, and won 4 national titles while at University, said that one of the things he was looking forward to as he faced the end of his basketball career was the chance to no longer maintain his fitness at an elite level. 

It’s not that he wanted to become fat and lazy, he’s not built that way, he’s going to be active his whole life. He’ll also be the fittest guy in almost every room he’s in but, he’ll be a step or two down from his peak... and that made him very happy. The effort needed to push from a high level to an elite one was more than he wanted to give. It was also more “fitness” than he needed to live a full life and stepping back would allow him to enjoy more of his life. That was his choice and it made him happy. 

I knew what my level was for the tournament I was playing in... not my potential level, but the level I was willing to play at and so did the players in the “A” bracket. 




On the sunday of the tournament, I went to the field earlier than my team’s games were scheduled, because my girlfriend at the time was volunteering as a scorekeeper, and I wanted her to feel supported. 

What I saw there, long before any games started, were the top players at the tournament warming up, doing sprints, throwing and just generally preparing themselves. 

Half of my team arrived hungover as the party Saturday night had been fantastic. They had had a great time, played as hard as they could and were happy with their choices. Knowing what your kind of fun is at any particular time makes it more likely to happen. 




The point is that this discussion happened because my friend in the bar last night trusted and respected me enough to come over and have a discussion with me about my blog post. 
 




What I want to do now is have more and more people have discussions like that on the actual site or on the Facebook page. 


This interaction happened because my friend is a Life Athlete and the article spoke to her. 

Now... maybe it spoke to her because she was in the events that I was talking about but hers is not the only feed back I’ve been getting recently from people reading the blog. Messages, texts, emails, and phone calls have been coming in from around the globe (considering that I’m on the other side of the planet from a lot of my friends, this isn’t quite the feat it sounds like it is) telling me that they’re enjoying what I’ve been doing with the blog lately. 

The thanks goes in large part to Natalie Sisson at the Suitcase Entrepreneur for putting together an outstanding blog challenge and to Brene Brown, whose work on shame resilience and wholeheartedness has contributed to me just being me on here now. 

Being consistent is going a long ways to generating interest in the site and it’s something I’m going to keep going after these 30 days are through. It’s letting people know that Life Athletics is going to be around and so it’s letting them get as excited as I am about it. 

Being vulnerable is another thing I plan on continuing on here and in my life. I resisted having the site be about me for a long time but what I’m finding is that the more I drop the pretense about it being about anyone else, the more other people have access to themselves. It’s like when I look at them, they just want to know more about me but when I’m open about me, it allows you to be open about you. 

Giving value and showing how life can be lived and improved by knowing what you want and training yourself to a level where you can get it is key to the growth of Life Athletics as well. 

My friend was equally as enthusiastic in telling me that she’d shared the video from that last blog on the league’s captain’s page and a discussion was generated about the best ways to build team culture. I was so thankful for that discussion and I can’t wait for many, many more. I love my “tribe” because they’re people, and people are great. 

Team Building Exercise '99!...'13...

Once again I'm faced with a question that I have figured out for the abstract future, but have no clue about in the real now.

This installment is about building a team, and all I can think of are excuses for why I can’t. 

Since the challenge started talking about hiring people the thought was that since I'm not really making any money off of this yet, I can’t afford to hire anyone else. Also anything I do make is slated towards programming the new site... so, that was the first thought, I can't afford a team. 

I can't really afford not to have one either. 

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When I stopped and realized that the challenge was to build a team, not necessarily to hire one, I had a workaround for that particular mental block and I started to wonder what positions there even were.

That’s how my brain seems to operate first... in sporting terms.

I built my first sports team recently for an Ultimate Frisbee tournament. It was my first time captaining a team. I got the gig mainly by being the guy who started putting a team together first, but I quickly loved having the role, other people seemed happy with me in the role and so I ran with it.  

At first I went in casually just talking to friends and avoiding people I knew were being drafted by the local "all star" team that was entering in the A bracket. I did this out of respect for the people I knew who were organizing that team, but learned later that it was just me being overly nice. 

There were three brackets divided by experience and skill and I was putting a team together for the B bracket, right in the middle. I was going to the tournament to play hard and have fun so this seemed like where the team should be placed to strike that balance. 

I left those “A level” players alone because I felt that they’d want to play at the top level if they had the chance and again, I thought that the people putting together that team would be angry if I poached “their players”. I thought all of this without actually asking any of them. 

I learned a lot through the process of building the team, not the least of which was that this concern of mine was pointless and silly. I didn’t really understand the format of the tournament going in, but how it worked was that the top teams in each bracket had a chance of moving up while the bottom teams were moved down. 

We ended up playing against this “all star” team and they beat us in Universe Point. Ironically it was one of the players I didn’t take, to not step on anyone’s toes, who scored the last point of the game against us.

Regardless, the team I had was awesome. I immediately targeted the players who I thought would be fun but who could also play. What was amazing was that this “fun team” started to be filled up by really good players, really good. Two ex-captains of mine joined, as well as some ridiculous athletes. Some players who had “A level skill” but just bought into the philosophy I was setting down for the team jumped in when asked. 

There was another trend too... we were a TALL team, the men anyway. It wasn’t like I’d had a height requirement, but it was something people noticed as soon as we stepped on the field. This is even after one of our handlers who is 6’5” dropped out before the tournament. 

The size of the males on our team did lead me to coming up with the name for the team. I felt that something super-heroically-themed and so the Just-Disc League was born. 

All characters shown are the property of DC comics, I don't own the rights to their images, I just love them... don't sue me!

Because of a video interview I’d done talking with Spencer Wilkerson, the captain of the team that won the last championship in the league I play in, about team building and observing and interviewing Dave Smart for two years, I had some ideas that I wanted to implement with this team. 

First of all, I knew that I didn’t want it to be “my” team with other people on it. I had no illusions about what was going on with the team. I’d drafted strongly and I was the least talented male player on the team. 

What I wanted to do was to create a situation where each person felt ownership of the team and found their self expression there. I had leaders and I had jokers and I had people of solid, but quiet character. It was a good mix and I saw that my only job was to provide a framework for them to shine. 

At a pre-tournament team dinner attended by all but one of the team members (she’d had to catch a later flight to the Island where the tournament was being held)  I set up a situation where I laid out my vision for the team and gave everyone the choice to buy into it or to suggest another direction. 

Since my vision was to primarily have fun while respecting the game and play “Just-Disc League Ultimate”, it wasn’t a hard sell and everyone at the table ended up saying a few words about why they thought this was the best direction to head in. 

With 100% buy in, the table was set for an epic weekend. We didn’t win every game but we competed and challenged some top level teams who had been built to win the tournament. 

Also because of the framework we’d built together, we had a great time and made sure that our opponents did too. Players on our team came up with “spirit games” and other activities that ended up winning us the “Spirit Award” which had secretly been my goal from the start. 

I was over the moon. 

Now... This was easy in my mind because people had already wanted to play in this tournament. All I was doing was creating an attractive framework, or team, for them to do this inside of. When it comes to Life Athletics, and as previously stated, I’ve been able to see how that worked in the future, but right now? Not so much. I’m missing the understanding of what’s in it for someone else, and if I don’t see it, ow could anyone else?

I’d actually been thinking of this for a while and I even started by writing “Life Athletics Team” on one of the 5 white boards I have around my computer. I did this months ago and the only name I put on it was mine. I wasn’t even able to think of a title for me and so roles for other people never became clear. 

People help me by editing and I’ve had contributors but it’s always just been “my thing” that they’re helping with. I’d love for this to not be the case. In my grand vision for Life Athletics my role will diminish greatly and others will find their self expression through sharing their training programs and experiences developing themselves in various areas of life and I’ll just have provided the framework. Once again, going from here to there is an unlit path in my mind. 

The blog challenge question is really “How will you build a team around your vision and work smart instead of hard?”

What I see is that, just like with the Just-Disc League, a vision is really the place to start, a vision that includes a space for others tomorrow and not just down the road.

Ignoring the key elements of something is a sure recipe for... something you wouldn’t want to eat.

The Suitcase Entrepreneur’s day 15 Blog Challenge question: “How are you building your email list?” 

My glib answer: I’m not. Yay! I’m done, woooo!!!! that was easy I’m going to the beach... wait... (keeps reading the challenge) ...what’s this?

The Suitcase Entrepreneur: “Top Tip: If you’re not at this stage you can instead choose to answer what the purpose of your email/ newsletter would be, how often you’d like to send it and the type of content and value you would provide to readers. In fact this is good to include in your blog response regardless!”

Me: “SO CLOSE!”

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When I started Life Athletics, I’d heard that it was important to have a mailing list and so I made the site require a login that you could get for free by signing up for my list. 

I was very happy with myself and people did indeed sign up, but at that point I really had no idea what to do with the list I was building. I was like a large puppy that chases a rabbits and eventually catches one and has no idea what to do with it at this point. My dog did this... it was mostly terrible as the bunny was hurt and Caspian (his name was Caspian) looked ashamed and I was left trying to figure out what to do with the dying bunny he’d dropped at my feet. 

With such a lovely metaphor running through my mind I quickly stopped collecting e-mails, and stopped mailing to my list and haven’t done anything like that since. 

For a long time my concern was that I didn’t want to pester people. 

I sign up for e-mails and see them come in and think “that’s something valuable that I should read but I don’t have the time” and then I feel guilty for not opening them. Unsubscribing feels rude and so I rarely do that either.  Not wanting to put my readers through that sort of dilemma, I just stopped. 

Flashing forward to now I realize that it’s silly to feel like I’d be bothering people to send them a newsletter that they asked for and that they’re perfectly capable to stop asking for it if they’d like. 

A mailing list would be a great way to start people on their way to Life Athleticism. Discussing each training area and how I approach it and how you can craft a program it to fit the life you want is something best kept for people who ask for it. Until someone’s ready to ask for that kind of content, they’re usually not ready to follow it. 

I could see the mailing list being used for a combination of things. First, it’d be a way to reach the readers who had bought into the concept and who were hungry for more. 

It would also be a way to test the concept. Natalie Sisson, the Suitcase Entrepreneur, gives the example of how she developed one of her products through a program she built in through a mailing campaign. The Life Athletics website and book could be crafted to truly serve the community of Life Athletes if it were built in conjunction with the feedback they were giving. 

More and more, people are reacting to discussions about the future of Life Athletics by telling me that they want to use the system I’ve described immediately and then telling me the best way to tailor it to them. On a larger scale this would be quite useful. 

What’s amazing about this is that the “list” is a key element to blogging. Everyone talks about it, Natalie calls it “non-negotiable” and yet I’ve slacked on it completely. 

Again, this is one of the things that led me to starting Life Athletics. I’d see people slack on key elements of areas where I knew what I was doing and then I started to see that I was doing the same in areas where I was not strong. 

The new Life Athletics site will be designed around the idea that if you do the key actions necessary for success in the various areas of life, you’ll have success. You don’t even have to know why they work, taking the steps is often all that matters. It’s like Yoga... what gives you more benefit? Knowing why it works, or doing it? 

So, I will set up a system to start collecting e-mail addresses and I will give people a compelling reason to sign up and then I’ll focus on delivering solid content. I’ll worry about understanding why it’s such a valuable tool later. 

My millionaire habit for the day: Manage your energy because being tired and grumpy costs you.

One of the realizations that led to the concept and the name for “Life Athletics” is that I saw how terribly I handled things either athletically or in my life when I let my body get tired. I saw that there was very little difference between the preparation needed for a game-day as there was for a Tues-day. Regular life is demanding if you’re trying to do something with it, and often it’s demanding even if you’re not. 

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Jim Loher and Tony Schwartz talk about this in a book that felt like it was written for me,  The Power of Full Engagement.  The subtitle, “Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal”, tells you pretty much what you need to know but if you’re like me you might have to write it backwards on your forehead to remember the importance of it. 

I’ve been focusing on implementing concepts from the book lately and it’s been working. I’ve had to focus on it though because like a lot of people I know I’m an exhaustion addict. Rest and recovery seems to come naturally for many people, I’m not one of them. 

Think of it like someone who comes into a sudden financial windfall and feels like the extra money is burning a hole in their pocket. When I’m energetic I feel like I have to spend the energy, or else. A friend of mine, also an exhaustion addict, posted to facebook recently that after 16 hours of sleep he felt like he was ready to “ride a dragon into a volcano”... like being energetic was going to lead to something reckless and possibly destructive...the feeling didn’t last long, he was back to overworking and undersleeping almost immediately. 

I enjoy what I do and have been enjoying how much more productive I have become in the last year especially. The trick is managing my energy. I’m not likely to stop pushing forward, nor do I want to, so being smarter about my rejuvenation efforts is necessary. 

The problem with energy in relation to this post is that today I don’t have any. I was going to blame it on the heat and say that it was making me sleep badly but really, that’s just an excuse. The real reason I’m tired is because I stayed up until 4 am working on a couple of projects for friends that I felt like I needed to move forward.. and was woken up by a text at 7. 

How this relates to today’s blog challenge is this... I have resented the challenge all day. People have been sending me lots of messages lately telling me how much they’ve been enjoying what I’ve been writing lately and that’s wonderful because I’ve been loving it myself, but today I didn’t care, I was just annoyed. 

I was annoyed because there was a study element to today’s challenge. I had to listen to a podcast by Natalie Sisson and Jaime Tardy, the Suitcase Entrepreneur and the Eventual Millionaire. They’re lovely women, sharing a lot of valuable tips gained through experience and effort, and it frustrated me, it was too slow. 

I went and worked out on the roof taking 4 times as long to get through my session than I had planned but I was dragging and this just added to it. 

Being tired shot all of my graciousness to hell. I was rushed with what I had already scheduled for myself and a 40 minute podcast (39 minuted and 24 seconds) was apparently too much for me to work around.  It didn’t help that because I was tired it took me three tries to actually get through the whole thing with any retention of the information whatsoever. 

Here’s where my rant meets today’s challenge. About a decade ago someone told me “you can tell how powerful you are by looking at what stops you.” I had all sorts of reactions to that when I first heard it (and pretty much every time I repeat it) but it’s true. It’s how strength is measured... how much can you lift? Oh that much? That’s how strong you are. A little more than that and the weight is glued to the floor and, voila! you’re stopped and you’ve discovered how powerful you are. 

Being a little bit tired has long been my excuse for many things. Essentially it’s been me saying “this is too much for me” and then shifting blame onto some state that I can externalize, in this case “being tired”. It’s an easy excuse as most people are dragging themselves around exhausted and are willing to buy into my story. 

With the right audience and the right excuse one can make getting through the day while needing a nape sound heroic and... that’s the ah ha moment for me. 

Often we do things for the secondary gains we get from them, and often we’re not aware of what those gains are. 

One thing that I’ve noticed in others (many others) is that they often make simple things difficult so that they can feel, and look like, they’ve done something far more impressive than they have. 

In the EXCELLENT King, Warrior, Magician, Lover the “Hero” archetype is said to be one of the shadow sides of the Warrior. It is the Warrior that cooly and calmly gets the job done and gets home. It is the Hero that trumpets his charge over the hill seeking glory, and likely gets shot first. 

So back to today’s blog challenge... yesterday’s really, at this point... the topic was about building a blog that matters (me being cranky because of lack of sleep... that matters!) and monetizing it.  

We were meant to extract her “three habits” from the podcast but because I was tired ADHD boy (no I have not been diagnosed with this and I apologize if that joke offended anyone or any reason other than it not being overly funny) I only caught one of the three and had to go to the Eventual Millionaire website, sign up for the mailing list and get the free PDF that they’re written on in lovely detail. 

Spoilers!
I’m going to list the three here but you really should take a look at the PDF where I got them, it’s very well done! (again, these are not mine, all credit for them goes to the Eventual Millionaire)

Habit 1: Work Hard
Habit 2: Maximize Opportunities
Habit 3: Invest in yourself

The blog challenge question is: “What are two key ways you could use the habits of a millionaire to monetize your blog in the next month?”

Looking at the question and then to the list of habits that I finally gathered and back again I’m left thinking that I’ve made a simple exercise difficult. What a hero :) 

I’m going to say that without energy, hard work becomes busy work, opportunities are missed and the way around that is in investing in myself. 

How this translates to Life Athletics the web site is this. For right now, the site is tied to me, the goal is to build it into a tool that functions independent of me where the users drive it as a community but for, if I stop, it stops. 

I’ll continue with my efforts to build and grow my energy levels and to monitor my exhaustion addiction. I’ll also start building a mailing list with a PDF of my own seeing how that seems to be a great way to serve a community and begin monetizing a site. That’s all from me for now. Have a great day Life Athletes! 

Looking down from the horizon to navigate the road directly ahead.

Awww... Man! This is starting to feel like therapy! 

I’m someone who prides himself on being pretty self aware but it’s amazing how often something about me, which is obvious to others, will slap me in the face, totally surprising me. Again, it’s part of Life Athletics... once you take on bigger challenges, you’ll see where your weak points are, but come on.

Today’s blog challenge question is simple enough, “What three things would you most like your website to have and how will you go about getting them?”, and yet it caused me to shake my head at myself with an exasperated smile.

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The blind spot that I’ve caught a glimpse of here is that for as much time as I’ve spent imagining and planning Life Athletics, I’m doing it all 1-5 years out. I’m not looking where I am, but where I want to be.  To be clear, looking ahead is great! You need to know where you’re going but then you have to look to what is in front of you. 

It’s like I intellectually understand that projects have to be built incrementally but I really just want to be playing with a fully formed version of this one, NOW. 

Matt and Cherie Chan talked about exactly this thing in an interview I did with them. They talk about the expectations people have and that these expectations are often what’re holding people back. People burn out and become frustrated by not being able to get to their goals as quickly as they think they should. 

Things take time, I know that. My physical and emotional training has been following that lately and it’s been going well, with people noticing changes on both fronts. I’m getting back to a chilled and chiseled version of myself... okay, chiseled is still a little ways off but I’m showing signs of improved fitness and that’s due to a slow and steady approach. 

I’ve handled “Life Athletics: The Business” differently. I’ve handled that like someone walking into a gym, fresh from their couch, with very little training experience and wanting to do handstand pushups... on rings.  

It’s doable, don’t get me wrong, I can get there... but not tomorrow.  This is a project so big that when I describe it to people with any programming background, deep breaths are taken and heads are nodded solemnly. They’ve all loved the concept but know that it’s quite the undertaking. 

Again, it’s where I want to be working because I think it’ll provide the most value for the people using the system and put me in a position to be living every day, helping to cause massive growth in the lives of people around the world. 

So, yes... I believe that I have a good, idea. Well so do lots of people. Now the question is what version CAN I build tomorrow that will lead me to this vision that I have for the future? ...good question. 

Picturing the ideal is pretty easy but it’s often the next step that seems blurry to people... well to me at least. This ties into yesterday’s post. Letting go of the ideal and the grandiose in favour of the the immediate can seem... defeatist, but it’s the only way I know to set myself free to actually move towards some version of that ideal. 

As I’ve said before on Life Athletics, I have to ask “where am I?” and “where do I want to be?” and resisting the answer to the first question will slow my progress towards the second. 

So, paired down, what are the elements I most want on Life Athletics? I want people to have a way to clearly look at and evaluate the ten pillars of life in their own lives.

I want them to be able to plan their training in any areas that are not where they want them to be. 

I want people to be able to request assistance to a community of Life Athletes and to give assistance as well. 

I’m looking at switching to Wordpress and the feasibility / is there a point to ... setting up a multiuser version where people can create their own profiles. 

I’d be VERY curious to know if this would be of use to YOU. Also I’d love to know if there’s something else you’d like from Life Athletics. I really am building a platform for YOU to train yourself to have the life of your dreams because a part of that is my dream. 

I am a beautiful and unique snowflake... and so are you.

I've been helping a friend of mine plan a video application for an internship with VICE magazine. The first thing that came up in the process is that it's often hard to talk about yourself without feeling like you're bragging. In response, this quote came to mind:

"It's not bragging if you can back it up."
                             -Muhammad Ali-

My friend is amazing and VICE would be lucky to have her and I'm ... Well, I'm pretty ok as well ;)

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Coming up with answers to questions like "What are you better at than anyone else?" brings up another quotation: 

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.  You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile."  ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

While this quotation might at first seem harsh it speaks to my journey, to who I am and to what makes me unique. 

I'm a guy who's come a long way to find out that what makes me great is that I'm just like everyone else. My power comes from surrendering the desire to be the greatest and adopting a belief in a shared greatness. 

Like many people I have spent a lot of my life striving to be something special, the irony is that there are few things more common. I don’t think that it’s a stretch to call it a universal desire in human beings.

The problem is that while we strive for “specialness” we know that everyone else is doing the same thing and nothing we do is ever enough. Brene Brown talks about this in one of her TED talks. She says that the challenge many people face is not that they don’t think that they’re good enough, it’s that they don’t feel extraordinary enough. 

It amounts to the same thing and it’s a crushing and debilitating state. 

It’s in recognizing our shared state that we can truly be with our own little corner of the human experience. Being special is an alienating state as it compares to others and demands that you not be similar to them. It is a state that demands that you be set apart. 

Being great however has a little more leeway. Are you great because you’ve done something others can’t do or haven’t done? Perhaps, but I think that greatness is found in people striving to grow themselves and push at the boundaries of their experience and their potential.

 A baby taking its first steps is doing something almost every other human being on the planet has done and yet it’s an exciting moment, every time.  We don’t have to be world beaters to be worthy, we just have to be us and once that sets in, we’re free to be great. 

Once we surrender to our sameness, we are freed to be fully ourselves, ‘a beautiful and unique snowflake’. 
Now... how does that play out in who I am?

A friend who I hadn’t spoken to in nearly a year recently wrote this to me after we had a short talk: 

“You know, Sometimes I think you are an angel sent to me from on high. You pop your head up out of nowhere when i am at my darkest and soothe my tortured soul.”

Another friend called me “the most stubbornly open bastard he’d ever known” after being a stand for him to take care of something in his life that led to a renewed relationship with his mother after a period of them drifting apart.

In both instances, all I did was show them who they were through my eyes. I mirrored their higher selves and they saw it for themselves. I saw the greatness in them as I see it in others.

I don't think that everyone is BEING great but I'm a stand that they have greatness in them. 

Now on to the blog challenge questions from the Suitcase Entrepreneur:

Q: What are you better at than anyone else?
A: I’m better at connecting random elements than other people. I see connections where others don’t and then I make bridges. 

Q: What do you enjoy doing the most?
A: Next to sex, sailing, and SCUBA diving, I enjoy seeing people stepping into who they really are and being a part of that process is my favourite thing in the world. 

Q: What do (or could) you provide that no one else is providing?
 A: One thing that sets Life Athletics apart is that I’m not pushing any one particular agenda other than that life is yours to craft and it can be trained just like a muscle. I don’t have to run down anyone else’s system for getting fit, or handling finances or building relationships, because any system can work inside of the Life Athletics model. 

Q: What annoys people the most about your industry or blog area?
A: What annoys ME the most is that advice givers are fighting each other with smiles on their faces. There’s a lot of chest thumping in the “self help” industry as people are trying to carve niches out for themselves by claiming that their methods are better than others. I also dislike the connotation that something’s wrong with you if you’re seeking “self help”.  People are great and are entitled to work on every area of themselves, be it mental fitness, financial fitness or relationship fitness the same shameless way that they might train their bodies. 

Q: What is remarkable about you?
A: I’ve been weak and I’ve been strong and I’ve been weak again. There’s strength to be found in going through a range of human experiences and continuing in an effort to grow and develop. In the face of crippling self doubt I have built myself into someone I’m very happy to be.

Q: Do you have an unusual combination of elements?
A: I’d say that this is my defining characteristic... I’m an athlete/artist, Half Nicaraguan, half Canadian, giant kid. 

Q: Do you have a big personality?
 A: I’m 6’6”, everything about me is big. When I want to, I can fill a room with my personality, but I also like to stand back and observe.

I am unique and different because I provide a mirror for people's greatness which no one else in my field provides. No one else can or will provide this because they reflect the world in a different way. I an a beautiful and unique snowflake... and so are you. 

Getting out of my own way to model a business

This phase of the Suitcase Entrepreneur’s blog challenge has been a fascinating experience. It’s not really a surprise that it’s been the most confronting as it’s dealing with the area that I’ve known to be the weakest for a while... generating revenue. What’s fascinating is that I’m seeing how many mental and emotional blocks I have regarding generating revenue through my efforts.

It’s something I touched on in a previous post when I said that I’d stopped painting after people started asking me how much I’d charge for one of my pieces. It was such a confronting question to me for some reason that the only thing I could think to do was to stop painting... even though it had been something I loved to do.

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The thing that I saw was that, because it was something I loved doing, it felt easy and therefore taking money for it was ... wrong in my mind. It felt like I was taking advantage of people if I charged for something that was so easy for me and the last thing I wanted to do was take advantage of anyone. That they didn’t see it that way didn’t really factor in for me at the time. 

I see that the same thing is still at work in my mind for Life Athletics. It doesn’t matter that a number of people have already thanked me for the great contributions the site has made to their lives, it’s easy and fun for me, therefor it’s not something I can charge for. I see the twist in the thinking and now it’s a matter of transforming it. 

When looking at what business model I want to establish for Life Athletics, a combination of Active and Residual makes the most sense. I’ve touched on these already in the last two posts so I’ll keep going with the personal stuff that’s floated to the surface in looking at this. 

One of the things I could do to generate income quickly would be to offer coaching or running workshops. People have shown interest and it would be fun. The issues of charging for something I find fun came up as soon as the idea was tabled. It was actually difficult for me to imagine setting up a workshop and charging for it. If someone else charged for it, I could do it easily, I love working with people and leading groups. I’m not sure if it’s a fear that no one would show up, or that they wouldn’t get value... I know that once I got started, people would come. I know too, that it would be nearly impossible to spend time looking at ways of setting people’s lives up to match their dreams for themselves and not have it be of supreme value so and yet there’s something that’s catching the thought before it moves forward. 

It’s exciting really... it’s like finding a weakness or tightness in the body, it’s an opportunity to train and grow and by working on a weakness, our strengths get stronger. I see Life Athletics as a diagnostic tool for life, as you push your levels up, you’ll find where your weaknesses are faster than through any other method. At that point, it’s OBVIOUS where the work needs to be.  

There are many ways to work out this knot of an emotional block that’s in the way of charging for things connected to my passion projects. What I know is that often these things are often strategies that were built to serve us in the past... things we developed to keep some part of us safe. I’ve now grown to the point where it no longer serves me and it’s not required and so I’m going to thank it and let it go. 

An amazing thing happened while I was typing this... I received a text from a friend asking me if I’d  design a logo for them. I’ve been doing lots of graphic design projects lately as it’s been a way of seeing people in the world loving products that I’ve made and to do it in an easy way. Well, she asked how much I’d charge and I said, that because she wasn’t making any money from her project yet, I’d do it for free. In my mind it was a chance to support someone building their brand and that she could contribute to Life Athletics in the future. She was thrilled at the thought of contributing to Life Athletics but something bothered her... she WANTED to pay. 

She doesn’t have a lot of money and was very shy about the amount she offered. It was not a lot of money but it represented something large for her as it was her investing in her future and in herself. I saw that not letting her pay would be to deny her that experience and that letting her pay actually made her happier and more comfortable. It’s not the first time I’ve been paid for my graphic design work but it’s the first time I saw it like this. 

The walls are dropping already :) 

Streaming Revenue streams

It looks like I jumped the gun slightly on day 9 by not only answering which business I admired, but also getting into the types of revenue streams I'd be looking to create with Life Athletics.  While I did talk about it somewhat, it is the central theme for this installment of the blog challenge and so I'll happily go into it a bit more detail.

The one revenue stream I didn’t go into in the last post is the I'm the least focussed on at the moment but perhaps the easiest to implement immediately... coaching. People have sought me out for this lately, I've done it before, I'm good at it, and it's not where I think I'll make the biggest difference for the most people. Even from the start, I didn’t want to set myself up as the guy with all of the answers, and yes... I’m well aware that coaching is not about having all of the answers. 

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That said, I do love working one on one with people and for some that's the only way they'll take coaching and so, that's one revenue stream I might open back up.

A second one would be offering products. I already have T-shirts that people seem to like a lot, but the profit margin is minuscule under the current system that I'm using.  Still... it's an option that allows me to continue my love for design. Unrelated to the Life Athletics website, I’ve had quite a number of designs made into Jerseys, shirts, shorts, stickers and discs and so going to a local tournament is a little like seeing a runway show of my products. Many people have no idea that I’m the one who designed what they’re wearing and I see that as the highest compliment of my work, they’re just wearing the stuff because they like it.  

Affiliate marketing makes a lot of sense as Life Athletics revs up, as I'll essentially be creating a platform that highlights other people's training systems. While I believe this is the best way to ensure that each Life Athlete is truly free to create the life they love there will certainly be room to highlight certain favourites. 

A book is also something that I think would be quite beneficial to people. Fully laying out the Life Athletics philosophy and model for creating a life you love would be a lot of fun for me and quite the resource for readers. It would also have the added benefit of making my mom ridiculously proud as she’s been pushing for a book for quite some time now.

Moving forward, the idea is to build the site up and then add elements that would generate revenue as we go. Again, the plan is that clients and customers see so much value for themselves that the natural response is to want to contribute back by buying products and services that are offered. 

I believe that with an eye to creating massive value, Life Athletics will be able to build a solid following of Life Athletes, with appropriate implementation, revenue will flow from that. 

PS. This post was mainly written via portable bluetooth keyboard and iPhone while on the beach on the way home. I had to use the iPhone to take the photo but it rested on top of my Motorcycle helmet quite well thanks to a stand made out of binder clips :) 

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The Suitcase Entrepreneur on the three ways to make money on-line.

On-line businesses that I admire and want to emulate in some way.

The blog challenge has entered its second act and this is where the proverbial rubber hits the road. Envisioning idyllic scenarios has always been easy for me as I’m sure they’re easy to imagine for most people. A perfect day might be a slight challenge for some but people will eventually come up up with some combination of “I’d do something I liked, in a place that I liked, with people that I liked”...

Today’s challenge is, for want of another term, challenging!

“Whose online business do you admire most and why?” -The Suitcase Entrepreneur - Blog Challenge Day 9

Again, this is a challenge in part because of what my mind is adding to it. As I am someone who wants to have an on-line business, choosing one that I admire feels like I’m choosing the kind of business I’d like to have.

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The real challenge for me, but also the opportunity, is that no one is doing quite what I’d like to do. This is exciting as I have the chance to break new ground but I will freely admit, figuring out how to turn Life Athletics into a business has felt like my weakest area and this has limited its growth. 

I’m able to see what I’d like the site to look like fully formed, but even then I’m not exactly sure I  know where the money would come from, and so I certainly haven’t known how where it’d be found prior to that point. 

Fully formed, Life Athletics would provide multiple training options from multiple sources for the main areas of life. You’d be able to choose from a virtual menu of advice givers and tailor a daily, weekly and monthly routine that targeted every aspect of yourself that you wanted to develop, picking and choosing elements from different sources, in a way that suited your tastes and your needs. 

A subscription would make sense but I do not believe that it’s the best way to go. I think that giving away massive value is important on-line and since my main goal is to be a part of the transformation of as many lives as possible, I don’t want to turn Life Athletics into something that only the select few willing to pay up front can use. 

I’ve been hesitant however because I believe that anything that I offer for free has to stay free and so I feel like I have to be careful not to offer anything that I might want to offer as a premium subscription later. 

In this respect, Crossfit.com is a model for what I’d like to do. They give away a workout every day, along with some basic instructions articles and videos. Anyone could go onto that site and start crossfitting.  The do have the Crossfit journal though for people who wish to go a little deeper into their study of that discipline.

This is what I want for Life Athletics. For anyone to be able to come onto the site and have, at least, all of the basics that they would require to start training themselves in every area of their lives. After that, if people wanted more, offering a subscription element would be appropriate. 

As there would have to be a large number of collaborators in order to make this project really work, a subscription from the start would also be tricky in terms of who to pay and to what level. 

Affiliate marketing is an angle that has been suggested and I think might be a good option. Promoting products and services that Life Athletics users would be interested in, is in integrity with what I’d like to do. 

Extended out, I have envisioned a number of extensions to Life Athletics, including a clothing line, and fitness resorts. Lulu Lemon would be a model I’d want to follow for the clothing and Ninja Camp Bali is awesome and very similar to my vision for the resorts. I’m keeping these things on the periphery for now as the main site is my main focus first. 


Other sites I admire... There are blogs I like but as far as on-line businesses... my brain just keeps jumping to how there are elements of what I want to do in existence but nothing fully formed. I like them but I want to change them to fit a more holistic approach. 

Bodybuilding.com has the ability for people to post workouts that can be used by anyone in the community. Dailymile.com has the ability to track your progress and train in an online social environment. I even see elements of what I want to do in Songza, and Grooveshark... Services in which playlists can be chosen and plugged into your profile, customizing an experience through something that someone else put together for you. 

How to go from where I am currently to the place where I have the online business I’ve envisioned? 

As far as I can see, I have to take it in stages. First, I can start testing the program by contacting those who train people in various areas of life and having them start to build programs to fit Life Athletics. Then I can start having the new site designed and built. This still doesn’t answer the question of how to turn Life Athletics into a business.  An online business needs people to thrive and I have the feeling that “if I build it, they will come”.  The online community of Life Athletes that I believe will flock to the site will make many things in the business realm possible. If they don’t come, the point is moot as all of the money generating gimmicks in the world won’t make a difference. 

Online businesses that I admire are those that give away so much value that a feeling of excitement and reciprocity are generated in their users.  I have paid for a crossfit journal subscription for years and bought the books of Tim Ferris and Natalie Sisson (The suitcase Entrepreneur) among others, because they have provided me with value before ever asking for a cent. Giving them money for their work was a pleasure and and I’ve done it while happily promoting their sites for free. 

In the end, what I admire in any business is when the focus is on delivering quality and massive value along with an enjoyable experience... and the bottom line comes next. 

More tools

I wanted to do a follow-up to yesterday’s post on tools to maintain mindset. I didn’t feel like I had properly addressed the question. It’s an off day for the blog challenge but I had a video in mind that I wanted to post and was very excited.

The video was an interview with the man who placed 6th in the Crossfit Asian regionals Ben Thompson. Right after the entire competition was over and people were clearing the floor I hastily set up my rig and conducted the interview. 




Well apparently they’re right when they say that “haste makes waste” as I didn’t record the interview. I messed up and recorded the chatter before we started the formal part of the chat and the bit at the end where I’m thanking him for the great stuff he shared. Apparently I paused the camera during the interview. It’s all very embarrassing.

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So... why am I telling you about this great interview that I can’t show you? Because THIS is when tools to help maintain a positive mindset are needed. In the real world, in real time, when we screw up and the mind wants to punish itself, what we do matters. I interviewed Thompson because his mental fortitude was apparent through the competition. Here are some takeaways... from memory. 

-Competition, like life, is about the “top two inches” Thompson said while pointing to his skull. He knew that he was a smaller athlete in this field and used his grey matter to his advantage. Knowing that everyone was sizing each other up, he focused on making his strengths look easy (he was chatting with the judge while doing toes to bar during one of the events) and his weaker areas look less painful than they were. He figured that if the guys who looked like monsters saw a little guy holding his own on the elements where they were meant to excel and breezing through the movements where they, themselves were struggling, it would give him the mental advantage. “Lot’s of guys are all show and no go” he said. 

-He also used an expression that is apparently common in his native New Zealand, “take a spoonful of cement and harden up”.  When talking about what’s needed to get over adversity. 

-He’s also funny and uses humour to his advantage. He wore a flash costume for his video entry into “13.5” a workout in the Crossfit Open. 


I’ll post a video the Crossfit organizers did with Ben at the bottom of the article. 

Other tools:

So, releasing shame when I make a mistake by not hiding it and then forgiving myself are two of the tools I use to maintain my mindset. 

Another is positive self talk. 

I have done affirmations and see some benefit in using them to program your unconscious mind but I like the direct approach as well. I read an article in Sports Illustrated years ago which said that pitchers who talked to themselves out loud are more successful than those who don’t or those who keep it all in their heads. So I tried it. 

The way I do it is to pretend like I’m my own best friend and come from a place of support. It felt really silly at first but I was surprised to find how easily I was able to maintain a dialogue with myself and how my mental self was willing to listen to my voiced self. I was able to alter thought patterns in response to the good suggestions put forth by this trusted voice. It is something I really have only done in extreme cases but it’s very calming and I have found it to be very effective. 

Another tool I use is tip I got from Tony Robbins which is simply that thoughts are state based. What this means is that you have to be in a certain state to have certain thoughts. The popular exercise to test this is to throw a giant fake smile on your face and to stand up with your head up and shoulders back and then to contemplate how awful things in your life are. It’s incredibly difficult verging on impossible. This is not a challenge by the way, just a reminder that we have the power to alter our state quickly through posture and by moving our bodies and our thoughts to a position where the likely outcome is a state that is beneficial to us.  

One exercise I picked up from Tony Robbins that I LOVE to have people do is to have them walk as though they were wearing a superhero cape. Fell the weight of the cloth as it’s picked up by the wind and pulled back feel how it forces your chest up and out and enjoy feeling awesome. 

Yet another tool that I love is one I adapted from something Wayne Dyer said. Do not remember where I read or heard this but he talked about two of the meanings of the word appreciation. One is “the recognition and enjoyment of the good qualities of someone or something” and the other is “an increase in value”. He linked the two by saying that when we appreciate something, we ourselves appreciate in value. I maintain my mindset by stopping and finding things that I appreciate about ‘now’. 

I’ll end off here by saying that asking myself “If I was truly being a Life Athlete here I would...” is probably the best way I’ve found to maintain my mindset. Finding a place to anchor to, one that reflects the best of you, allows your thoughts, feelings and actions to flow from that place. Being in integrity with my vision for myself is the best way I’ve found to maintain my mindset. And now dear Life Athletes... what are some of your tools?