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”. 

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:


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 ;)