Finish but never be finished

I remember completing my first marathon. It was the Cellcom marathon 2011 in Green Bay. When I crossed that finish line it was a great feeling and so painful at the same time, everything hurt. All the hard work, the hours of training and sacrifices had paid off.

Looking back on it now, I wonder what would my life be like if I would have just stopped there? What would my life be like if I limited myself to only doing a marathon and nothing longer? I know I would not be the same person I am today.

It has been the most glorious, difficult and rewarding journey of my life to push past my limits and live with no finish line. The secret is that I am no one special, I am no different than the rest of you. I only accomplished all of this because I decided I wanted to. I have never come close to winning a medal, placing, Kona or Boston and that is okay.

I talk to people who tell me that they will never do anything longer than a marathon and I am confused. I have no idea how 26.2 magnificent miles can be your limit, can be the absolute most you will ever allow yourself to run. This goes beyond running, it comes into every aspect of our life. How many times have you told yourself that you cannot be greater or do more? 

The finish line is just the start line to something even greater. You are unlimited in your potential, it will take work and it will be hard but you are unstoppable. To limit yourself because of your current situation is to limit your future.

Stop waiting for the finish line. You do not become a runner when you complete a marathon, half-marathon, 10K or 5K, you become a runner when you start to run. You become a leader when you start to lead and you become the best version of yourself not when you have accomplished A, B and C but when you accomplish A on your way to B and C.  Take a moment to realize how great you are in this moment. Take a moment to be happy for how far you have come. Take a moment to appreciate the journey and not just the finish line. You will spend your whole life on the journey, learn to appreciate it.

Crossing the finish line, accomplishing a goal or pushing past your limits is an incredible accomplishment. Take time to celebrate it and enjoy it but never be finished. 

Get Happy

My friend Brian Drury wrote a blog post a few months ago about “Asking the Right Questions” which got me thinking about our quest for happiness. While it is great to know what make you happy, it is equally important to understand what does not make you happy.

Often in life we make it harder on ourselves to be happy than we really need to. Think about a friend or maybe yourself that constantly complains about their job, significant other or how busy they are. The truth of it all, is it all comes down to three options.

1) Do nothing and stay miserable. When you choose this path, you have no one to blame but yourself, do not blame others for your choices.

2) You can leave or quit as well. This is a smart option if you really think nothing will change. It is movement and you are taking an active role in your life.

3) Work to make it better. Not a lot of people choose this path, not because people are lazy but because people do not believe that they can actually do it. They doubt their own potential. Trust me you can do it but it will require work.

Your life really comes down to how you see it and your perspective, here are some thing to think about to improve your life and increase your happiness.

1) Who do you spend your time with? I am one of the luckiest people in the world. I get to spend my time with are freaking amazing and inspiring. They make the most out of life. Happiness is up to you but it is a lot easier to choose to be happy when you have friends that want to be happy as well.

2) Who are you living for? I am always confused by the people who are driven by those who tell them that they cannot do something. It seems so backwards to me. Why would you focus your energy on someone that does not believe in us? I come from a family and a group of friends that have always supported me in everything that I do. These are the people beyond myself that I think about when I do incredible things, not the haters.

3) Get over yourself, seriously. If you have to tell me how great you are, that is my first sign that you are nowhere near great. Stop focusing on only living for yourself because your life is more than that. Stay humble and stay happy.

4) Choose that you have done enough. I always want to do more, it is a blessing and a curse. There are so many nights where I would come home from work, working out, writing and working on volunteer projects be dead tired and still not happy with what I had done that day. I always wanted to do more. The problem is that if always makes me feel less than. I never feel like I have done enough and so at the end of the day, I feel like I have failed the day and that makes me feel like crap. Realize that you have done enough as long as you have done something. You can always do more but that is fine.

5) Do not play the victim, accept responsibility. Taking responsibility is hard and it hurts but it is one of the most freeing things to do in the world. While it sucks to go through it, when you get to the end you feel free. No one is perfect and everyone screws up. Do not try and blame your shortcomings on other people.

6) Use perspective to gain clarity not to compare. There are people who have it worse off than me, who have bigger struggles than I do. When I compare myself to them I get nowhere but when I use what they are going through to gain perspective on what is happening in my life, I grow.

Happiness is something that we all screw up on, give yourself a break. Even people who are happy every day get upset, they just rebound from it. These tips I have do not come from a book but they come from my own struggle in happiness.

No One Gets What They Deserve

It may help us sleep better at night to believe that Karma will come back and bite the person that wronged us, however no one gets what they deserve.
If you do not believe me let me give you a few examples.

Tell that to the mother who lost her 13-year-old son to cancer. The moments that she watched him struggle, the pain he went through and the heartbreak it caused her. Tell her that people get what they deserve. As she watched her son celebrate life, give back to people and spread joy all while dying, tell her that everyone gets what they deserve. Ask her to remember the last time she actually saw her child and could hold his hand and he could hear her voice, tell her that everyone gets what they deserve.

Tell that to the family of the wife, mother, daughter, grandmother and friend that battled cancer for 11 years and never complained. When it came back for the last time and took her life, tell her that everyone just gets what they deserve. Tell her family, friends, husband, children and grandchildren that she just got what she deserves.

Take a look at me. I am stubborn, angry and selfish at times and yet I have so much. I have an amazing future in front of me, an amazing family and friends and so much more. I have given so little and yet I have been given so much. I have the ability to walk, run, swim, talk and move on my own, what did I do to deserve this?

No one gets what they deserve, life is not fair and just because someone screwed you over does not mean the world will come crashing down on them and just because you did a good deed does not mean you deserve anything, this is not how life works.
When we focus on us being the judges of what people deserve, we hold ourselves back from being the best version of ourselves. We cannot judge people and wish ill on people and still say we are at the top of our game. The reason is that every time we allow this for to happen, it is like a tiny weight being tied to us. It may feel like nothing at first but as we add more and more, it will hold us back from going further.

Tips to let go:

• Stop caring: Stop worrying about what everyone else is getting. We are not put on this earth to judge people, we are here to make the most out of our lives.
• Give your best because you want to: To give your best only because it will get you the best is a disaster waiting to happen. At the first sign of being less than great, you will give up, be great because you want to be.
• Realize the world owes you nothing: The world owes us nothing, no one owes us anything. Theo only person who owes us something is ourselves. We owe it to ourselves to be the biggest kick ass version that we can be.
• Stop playing the victim: In 90% of our life, we are not the victim, we choose to be. 

When most people hear that life is unfair they think of the negatives connotations behind it but the truth is that when life is not fair, it can be great. Everyone screws up stop letting it hold you back. The world is not fair, sometimes you are dealt crappy hand, deal with it, it is not a personal attack on you, you did not do anything to deserve it. Take it head on and create your own future. Your future is unstoppable.

Buy the Materials, Not the House

You can buy someone else’s home or build your own. Your life is the same way; you can choose to follow someone else’s life or you can build your own.

The problem that many of us run into is not that we are not capable, smart or driven. It is that we spend our whole lives trying to live in someone else’s “house” and we never feel at home. Think about the first time you were at a friend’s house. You had no idea where anything was. They tell you to make yourself at home, but you never really feel at home.

We live our lives the same way. We look up to the people that we admire, and we try to live their life, the problem, we never really feel like we are living. The harder we try to be like them the more it feels not right.

The world does not need a replica of your hero, what they need is you. Here are some tips on how to make that happen.

Build the foundation: You can have the best looking home but without a solid foundation a storm can come along and destroy it. Your life is the same way. There will be challenging times during your life and without a solid foundation you will collapse.

Not sure about your foundation, that is fine, everyone has to figure it out. What are the core beliefs for your life? What drives you? What sets your soul on fire? Do not over think it, write a list of your top 5-7 beliefs and this is your foundation.

Create the blueprint: Use your blueprint and your foundation together. A blueprint for a home creates the layout. The blueprint for your life helps you determine what you will focus on.  It is how you want to grow in your beliefs. Just like you can choose the size of your living room when you build your home, you can choose if your work life is bigger than your social life. The square footage is the amount of time, patience and drive you have to make it all happen.

Renovations:  People renovate their houses all the time. The same applies to your life. You are going to realize that some things need to be updated, removed or added. Stop worrying about the changes and just make them to improve your life.

Steal Inspiration: Just because you are building your own house, does not mean it has to be completely original. No one is truly original, we are all working off one another. What you need to remember is to make it your own. To be original for the sake of being original without it aligning with your foundation and your blueprint, will never work. It may look “neat” but it will not mean anything to you.

Move:  People move into bigger houses and smaller houses all the time. My Grandparents moved into a smaller house a few years ago because it was less work and less room. Stop worrying about the house or life you spent so much time building if it does not work for you. Build something that will serve you the best.

Your life just like a house is subject to disaster. There will be an event in your life that will make you question everything; it may even destroy everything you created. I guarantee it will happen to you at least once in your life. Do not let that scare you. It is an opportunity to

Do Great Work, Take No Shit.

A simple concept that will get you farther than you can imagine.

Go in every day and do great work, not just do okay work, do great work.

There is so much crap that can come into our life that will tell us to stop giving our best. Stop letting outside factors ruin not just the quality of your work but your reputation as well. Here are a few that I have noticed:

1) No one else is giving their best. While everyone else is just doing okay, stop settling and continue to push on. Your life and your worth is not judged by what others do. It is judged by the impact that you have.

2) I may not get credit. Greatness is not about getting credit, it is about doing great work to do great work.

3) It sucks: I did not get the raise or promotion I wanted. My boss is not the best and my company is not the greatest. This is not limited to just your work but every aspect of your life. While these all may be true, do not let them determine how great your work will be. Continue to be great.

4) I do not feel like it: I had this mindset; I do not feel like giving my best work. I just want to slack off. Please don’t. I know life gets hard sometimes, we get tired it is not an excuse to suck. The most successful people you know have been through a lot and times where they could have and probably did not give greatness; the difference is that they now focus on giving greatness every opportunity that they can.

One of our greatest fears is not the belief that we cannot be great, but we doubt how long we can be great. We see greatness as a gas gauge, that we only have a certain amount and once it is gone, it is gone.  Stop selling yourself short. You are unlimited in your greatness. The more you give greatness, the more of it you get. As Tony Robbins puts it, we live in a life of scarcity, a belief that we are not enough. Watch his amazing video.

Your greatness is unlimited. It requires work and it will be a struggle, but you can always be greater no matter who you are.  This is not an insult it is a compliment, an insult would be to say that you could not be any greater we are then saying that we cannot improve.

This goes both ways, stop expecting everyone to be perfect, especially your boss. They struggle and fail as well. They are humans; they and you can be great but not perfect.

Greatness is not a viral video. We have confused popularity with greatness, just because a video is popular does not mean it is great. Popularity is in the terms of others, greatness is in on your own terms.

Greatness comes before fame and success, not the other way around. Start giving greatness.

Take no shit

To be great, does not mean you let people walk all over you. It means that you define what is important to you.

If you are constantly looked over, after you give greatness, take no shit, find something better.

If people undermine you and your value, take no shit, find something better. Just never stop giving greatness, do not let the actions of others determine what you do, ever.

There are many things in our life that we cannot control one thing we can control is our choice to give greatness.

Why

I started this blog for a few reasons. First I want to help people from regretting what they did not do. I do not want anyone to ever to be on their death bed and utter the words, I wish I would have. I also want people to know that no matter what they will always have someone in their corner cheering them on to kick ass, live life to the fullest and experience everything that life has to offer.

The biggest mistake we make is that we never actually live. We put limits on ourselves. We do not have the time. We are not good enough. We could never become as great as we want to be. We believe the lies. You will never be completely ready, you are going to fail and it will hurt but it is worth it. Call me stupid (you wouldn’t be the first) but I would much rather try something once, realize I hate it than to never have tried it.

You can make up for what you did do but you cannot make up for what you did not do.

I want to put the fire back in people that society put out. I have witnessed the awesome power that comes when a fire is lit and the devastating effects when a fire is put out. As bad as society can be, there are people out there that will help keep your fire going. I know because everyone in my life has been there for me and I want to be there for you.

I have never had someone in my life that has told me to stop dreaming or to limit my dreams. I never have once have told someone my dream and my next big idea and have them laugh in my face and tell me how stupid I was and how pointless it was to try.

I see and hear stories of people being limited by their “friends” and their “family”. What was supposed to be their main support group is now their biggest critics. They tell them to limit their beliefs because what they wanted to do was crazy, it insane or stupid.

It frustrates. People have no right to limit your greatness.

The world is full of opportunities and all we just need the courage to take them. It is scary to look at yourself in the mirror and believe that you can do whatever you want. It is so much easier to belittle yourself into a person that means nothing and can do nothing. It gets easier because we now have an excuse to give up, to give in and to not see the light. While it may be easier it is barely worth it. Trust me I know. It is not starting or failing that we are afraid of but it is the belief in ourselves that we are good enough to even attempt it. To build up enough courage to even think about starting. I want to help people start something amazing in their life.

My question to you is how can I help you live an amazing live. Let me know in the comment section or email me at adam.lofquist@gmail.com

Finding Your Passion

You are in the standing in the ocean, looking at the beach and a giant wave comes behind you and drenches you in ice cold water. You become instantly cold, almost frozen. It is a feeling that you will never forget, it is just like finding your passion.

If you are never in the ocean, you can never get hit by a wave and if you never take action to feel your passion, you will never find it. We cannot just find our passion if we take a seat on the sidelines and wait for it, we need to be out in the ocean.

If you have ever been hit by a wave, it is a feeling that you will never forget and when you find your passion it is a feeling that you will never forget. The problem for many of us is the journey to find our passion because just as powerful as the feeling of finding your passion is, not find your passion is strong as well.

Have you ever lost your keys? You know the saying “They are always the last place you look.” The truth is that even if you found them the first place that you looked, it would still be the last place. It is not that you do not have a passion; it is just that you have not found it yet. Every place you try and find your keys, you become more and more frustrated. It is not long before it all seems hopeless and you begin searching where you first started. This happens to all of us as well when we try to find our passion, it is frustrating and it feels helpless but at the end of the day, you need to find it to take off.

You can tell someone that has passion from a mile away. They just seem more alive, they love life and they have such an intense and yet calming presence that it is impossible to ignore. That is what I want to help you do, I want to help you find your passion and the biggest advice I can give you is to keep looking, even when it seems pointless because you are going to find it.

How to love the life you have, to get the life you want (8 tips to get you there)

We most likely have something we want to improve about ourselves. To be in better shape, make more money, not be so stressed out are just a few. At times the improvements we want to make mount up against us instead of helping us. Growth is a key to success however it needs to be positive growth.

At times in our life, we think about all the things that we want, that we should be and how we are not where we really want to be and it gets us down. We start to devalue ourselves and so begins the slippery slope down the mountain side of self-worth. When you are sliding down, you sure as hell are not worried about how you will get to the top, you are just trying to not crash into the ground.

So what makes some succeed and others fall down the mountainside? It is not drive; we all have that or had it until we killed it in ourselves. The difference is mindset. Here are some ways you can shape your mindset to grow.

1) Be grateful for everything. This includes the good and bad times. Just because you are grateful for a bad time in your life does not mean that you liked it, it simply means that you learned from it.

2) Stop focusing on yourself: The unhappy people I meet are just concerned about themselves. They do not spend much time helping much less thinking about how they can help others. Truly happy people are always looking for ways to help others and make the lives of others better.

3) Stop being so entitled: The world is not out to get you, life is just not fair. The real reason you did not get that job, came in second or you were not admitted to the school you wanted is because someone else did a better job than you did. Entitlement is a self-debilitating disease. The worst part is that it feels so right to feel ripped off and to put the blame for our shortcomings on someone else. When we become entitled we give up our freedom and we lessen our impact on not just our lives but those around us.

4) You are blindly drinking the Kool-Aid: Fit in and be like everyone else and to question nothing in our lives. Go to school, work, have a family, retire and die. It may sound morbid but this is the current definition of a successful life. If you want to go to school, get a job, have family and retire that is fine but at least think about it. Is it really what you want to do or is it what you are told to do. If not do something different and pay no attention to what everyone else tells you.

5) You are not consistent or persistent: We all have dreams. We just get caught up in the daily execution of the small tasks that make up our future. If we want to lose weight we let it slip on day because we have six other days in the week to make up for it. Life is a cumulative event, the more you can do, the more often you can do it, no matter how small, and the better off you will be. Waste no moment.

6) You forget to ask for help: You want to kick some ass and change your life? You want to be a better version of yourself? That is freaking awesome and you can do it. Just remember that you do not need to do it alone. There are plenty of people out there that are more than happy to help you. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign of your strength.

7) You lack perspective: Rarely do we think about how great we have it because we think it is better for us to feel sorry for ourselves. We feel that if we feel bad for ourselves and we focus on what we do not have and make ourselves feel like crap about it will somehow motivate us to do more. Learn you’re your experiences; see the bright side and grow.

8) You have no goals to achieve: Goals are crazy and overwhelming. You have two choices you can let that knowledge scare you or you can let it inspire you. The work is going to be the same but it is all a matter of how you approach it. If you want to lose weight that is great but that is not a goal that will help you succeed. Make your goals specific. How much weight do you want to lose, when do you want to lose it by and why do you want to lose it?

Your mindset will triumph your life. If you do not believe that you can achieve something you will never achieve it until you change your mind. The ideas above are not just ideas they are lessons that I have taken from my own life. 

No More Days Off

“Everybody is working for the weekend”- Loverboy

If you only work for the weekend or for vacation, you are not living.

Stop living a life that you need an escape from.

What if you lived a life where you did not need another day off?

In 2012, according to the World Bank the average human life for an American was 78 or 28,489 days. When you live for the weekend, you only live 8,138 days, the other 20,351 days you are not alive. Let that sink in for a minute, for over two-thirds of your life you have made the choice to not truly live

You don’t need to love your job or boss. These are lies that we have been told, do they help, of course. Somewhere along the line, we were told we should have this perfect life. We will love our job, we will have all these friends, have a lot of money and our lives will be perfect. Stop buying in. You need to love your life.

Here are some tips on how to live an amazing life for the rest of your life.

Stop seeing work as a bad thing. It is an opportunity to learn, grow and become better. It is a channel to get you where you want to go.

Do at least one thing that is significant to you each day. Some days at work, no matter what job you have will seem pointless and that you never had chance to do anything significant. You have time before and after your work day to make an impact. Take a look at Bo Johnson, a boy who did not have a job, never held an official leadership position but he changed and continues to change the lives with his story. He did not wait until a job was there for him; he went out and did it.

Forgiveness: This is one that I have the most trouble with, not because I do not believe in it but because it is hard for me to do. When we hold on to hate, hold on to the ways we were mistreated, do not forgive those that have wronged us and more importantly the times that we have let ourselves down, we are holding back out lives. Forgiveness cuts the weights so we can come up for air.

Stop trying to get even and focus on getting better. When we try to get even with someone that wronged us, we do not become better, we just become even. We become on the same level that pissed us off. Why do we want to become even? What is that going to prove to the person that wronged us? If you are just living to prove that person wrong, you are living for them, you are putting all your effort on them and you are far too valuable to do that. You were made for so much more.

Stop complaining and be grateful: Life is not fair and sometimes it sucks. Not everything will go as you planned, it happens to everyone, it is not hate it is not God punishing you, it is life.  There are so many stories that I could tell you about individuals who had the cards stacked against them but they had a grateful attitude and they thrived. While we are at it, if you have done this in the past, stop letting it hold you down. It is in the past and there is nothing you can do about it. Focus on your future.

Help others: The best way to experience this one is to go out and do it but here is a caveat, if you only help people for the reward or karma, do not expect to feel anything. Give freely.

Remember how awesome you are. In an age where celebrity gossip, selfies and the number Twitter followers are the ways that we measure our life, it is easy to forget how great you are. You are full of so much potential, more than you can even fathom. We do not need to tell everyone how great we are, we need to believe it ourselves. Stop trying to impress people and start doing things that fulfill your life. We truly live when we do not need anyone’s praise to prove how great we are. It is a scary concept but until we get there, we are living for other people and we are not living. Go out there and kick some ass.

Passion and Skills

Passion and Skills are not on opposite sides of the equation, they are multipliers of one another.

When you are truly passionate about something you will stop at nothing to do more about it, to grow with it and to learn more about it. Your hunger for your passion fuels the need to develop more skills/do more work.

The more you work at something, the better you become, the more you will like it and your passion will grow.

As an example, I hated swimming but I love triathlons, I have a passion for the full-distance triathlon.  The more I worked on swimming the more I actually liked it because I could see improvement in my swimming, my passion for triathlons grew even more. Looking at the bigger picture I have a passion for how much both swimming and triathlons taught me, how much it made me grow as a person and how it changed my outlook on life.

We get passion wrong, we focus too much on things or ideas. We want to be passionate about leadership, education, poverty or fill in the blank and we end up spending our whole lives trying to find our passion as if it has to be limited to one idea.

When was the last time you had passion for yourself; a passion to see yourself grow, to challenge yourself to become a better version of yourself today than you were yesterday? Have you ever had a passion to improve your process, to learn more, just to improve? This passion is what will get you further than anything else. If you have passion to be the best, you can excel at anything.

When we try to find passion we become lost and discouraged. We have a nagging voice in the back of our head, asking us if this is really the right thing for us. What if we started to we decided to be passionate about everything that we did. If instead of looking for passion we were open to passion coming to us, when we worked our ass off. Attract your passion, do not try and find it. I know some of you think you cannot be passionate about everything you do, you are wrong, you can. The problem real problem is you have too many things going on in your life.

The problem with the way we work, is how we view work. We separate the work that directly relates to our passion to all the other work that we have to do. Everything that you do, every act that you preform, can help you become better at what you are passionate about, especially when you focus on become passionate about yourself. When you have passion, it rarely feels like work, not because it is not work but because you focus on the passion. If we are passionate about getting better, work will no longer seem like work.

Passion and work are like building a log cabin. You build on top of one another not against them. Start Building.

Happiness

There is a story about a man waiting on the top of the roof during a flood and he is praying to God to save him. Two boats and a helicopter come by and offer to rescue him but he refuses because he knows that God will save him. The water continues to rise and in the end he drowns. When he dies he is upset. He asks God “I prayed, why did you not save me?” and God responds “I tried, who do you think sent the boats and helicopter”

We put ourselves in the position of the man waiting to be saved. Every day there are opportunities for us to be happy but we pass them up because we are waiting for something greater and in the end, we kill ourselves and kill our happiness.

We do not take joy in our everyday life. We focus on everything that goes wrong, what we did wrong and the reasons that we cannot be happy and it ruins us. We spend our lives on the rooftop, waiting for something to save us, when we are the ones that can save ourselves.

Dreams are a powerful thing. Dreams can ruin your life if you do not put action behind them to make them a reality.

It is easy to fall in love with your dreams and I think you should fall in love with your dreams but what you need to fall in love with more is the process of getting there. The hard work, every day activities and the struggles that you face getting there. When we do this, we shift our mindset from waiting to being engaged and we truly start living.

When was the last time you fell in love with your life, exactly as you are? The same person that has failed, that is not where you want to be and still can improve? When was the last time you fell in love with your job, everything that is wrong with, everything that frustrates you and all the things that you wish you did not have to do.

We spend our whole lives waiting for happiness, expecting it to come to us once we reach a certain level in our life but in reality we need to find happiness at every level of our life.

Find joy in the life you have and you will find more.

How to Win

I have completed two Ironman distance triathlons, Wisconsin in 15:39 and Boulder in 12:35. At the surface it would be easy to say that Boulder is the one I should be the most proud of.

Ironman Wisconsin means more to me, than any other race I have done this far, it changed my life. I raced with two amazing individuals, Aaron Hunnel and Katie Neuman. Aaron and I had the amazing privilege of racing with Katie who has cerebral palsy.

Ironman Wisconsin changed my mindset on what it truly means to win.

Winning versus the want to win. I used to play video games against myself just so I could win. It never required me to be better. Everyone loves to win, not as many love, wanting to win. What I mean by that is, the people that truly have the desire to win, practice as much as they can, they put in the work, the long hours and have the drive to be the best because they know that winning is an outcome. This is where we as a society have it wrong. We want an absolute, did you win or did you lose because this is hard data, that lets us judge where you stand. We do not spend enough time focusing on the path that was taken to get there and this goes beyond athletics and into your personally and professional life as well. Stop measuring the wins you have and start to build up your want to win, you will get further faster.

Trophies, medals and titles are all meant to tell the world how great you are and beg for others to give you their approval. Why is it important to win, why is it important to prove that you are the best and better than everyone else? Stop competing against the world and start competing against yourself. When you let the world determine your value, you have no value.

Winning is typically a single quantitative outcome. We focus on getting the trophy so much that we forget what else we can learn on race day. The pain that we experience and the attitude we must embrace to overcome it, will get you further in life than a trophy ever will. Having the opportunity to compete and being a part of the race is an incredible feeling. When we just focus on the win, we miss all of the other lessons that life has to teach us both during a race and in life. I have no argument against wanting to be the best and dominate but do not forget to learn along the way.

7 Tips to Finding your Purpose

Following last week’s post I felt that there was something missing, that even though your purpose should be simple it needs to be explained.

1. Your purpose is not your job. Your job is an avenue to get to your purpose.  Although it may seem to be the same, understanding the difference is critical. Your job does not determine your purpose but it can help you get there.  Stop trying to find a job that fits your purpose exactly and bring your purpose to your job.

2. Your purpose can change. Too often we get caught up in the belief that we need to find a perfect silver bullet for our lives that consumes us and that we just know it is the right thing. This is what makes finding purpose so hard for so many people. We put it out there as the Holy Grail spend our whole lives trying to find it, dying of thirst when all we need to do is try and create something, and change it when the time comes.

3. Your purpose is simple. My purpose is to help people understand how amazing they are and that they have limitless potential. Just thinking about it, gets me so excited. Do not over think it, it is going to be simple, clear and concise. Listen to your gut or to your heart.

4. Your purpose is beyond you: If you truly want to come alive with your purpose, it needs to be bigger than you and impact and serve more people than you. Your purpose is not to make money, be popular or be a boss. Those all end with you.

5. Your purpose should excited you to do work. People that live on purpose and that have a purpose have to do work. I know, some of my closest friends excel at leading and living their life on purpose. They are not just eating bon-bons and Cheetos all day. It is hard work but that should excite you. It is long hours, days and nights. It is never ending because there are so many opportunities.

6. You are ready for your purpose. You are ready now, like right now. This very instant you are ready. No amount of training can make up for the ability to go and try.

7. You can never be too good: You always have an opportunity to learn and to become better. It may seem this contradicts six but it supports it. While you will always be ready, you can always be better and you should want to always get better. When an opportunity to be more educated about your purpose comes up, take it. It does not mean you are not smart enough, it means you want to get better.

What else would you add?

Productivity vs Purpose

There are a lot of articles that help you focus on being more productive, but one thing that they do not hit is purpose.

Without purpose productivity is pointless.

An example, email, everyone has too much and it is a never ending battle. For every email that you delete two more come in its place. There are plenty of very helpful tips and tricks on how to manage your inbox. What is the purpose? If you are doing it just to say you have a clean inbox while the rest of your life passes you by, then you productivity is pointless and is a huge waste of time.

However if you keep a clean inbox to help you stay organized be responsive and create traction than your emails have a purpose.

Purpose is a double edged sword; it is both a long-term and short-term goal that causes a lot of frustration, anxiety and self-doubt. Your purpose can change from day to day and over your life time as well. What matters is that you have one, you pursue it and you are open to change.

Use your purpose to define what you will focus on. There are a lot of great plans out there that help you focus what you should work on. I have tried a lot of them and what keeps missing for me is a purpose.

Grab a notebook and write your life’s purpose on it. Do not think about it, just write it on the first sheet and visit it daily. Each day write how you will help yourself live on purpose. This will become your daily purpose; it will give you the mindset to live in the moment and to be ready to live.

When you have a big project, it is easy to get caught up in everything that needs to be done and easy to get lost in the purpose of the project. We become so focused on getting things done and checking them off the list that we forget why we started and where the finish line is.

When you start a new project, write out what the purpose of the project is. List the tasks that you need to accomplish to complete this project. They key is to not think about an order or how they all fit together but to focus on getting as much as you can down. Keep going until you have run out of ideas. Take that list and put it in order of what will be the most impactful to the purpose and put that at the top and create a list from most impactful to least impactful.

When you do this at least two things should happen. You should gain a clear understanding of what will be the most impactful; giving you direction and you will also start to realize everything that goes along with the project.

Your purpose  should not overwhelm you, it should make things clear.

Weather the Storm of Life

The last few days in Minneapolis have been freezing. The highs have been around zero. It is the type of cold where you only go out when you have to, Cars won’t start, and life ceases to exist.

Often in life you will find yourself in these situations. Not the cold but where you feel so hopeless that going on seems pointless and that your life seems like it does not matter. You ask yourself how much more can I take, and then more comes. Much like a cold day, breathing hurts and you can barely catch a breath. You feel like you are fading away. Every breath that you take does not help you but suffocates you. Life seems pointless and endless.

Today there was a heat wave; it got up to 20 degrees. It was incredible.  Now 20 degrees is not that warm, but compared to zero it is tropical.

How amazing would it be if we never had to live through those days, the ones where it seemed harder to keep going than to give up?

Just like today feeling tropical because of the past few days, if there were no dark days in our life, we would never truly appreciate the light at its dimmest moments. We would have no idea what a great day felt like.

Imagine if you lived in a place where it was always 65 and sunny. Would you ever get tired of it? How long would it take you to take the day for granted? The mere fact that you would want to live in this weather, is highly affected by your experience of worse weather. You have had to deal with the cold, the rain, snow, sever weather, clouds and all of the other things we complain about. You appreciate the 65 and sunny not just because it is such great weather but because you know what it is not.

Just like the weather, you cannot control what happens to you. However here are some things that you can do.

You can control your climate: A personal pet peeve of mine is people who live in Minnesota that hate snow.  The get upset every time it snows and every winter. This is the definition of crazy. Minnesota is known for snow and cold, stop expecting it to be different. Apply this to your life. If you are unhappy with the direction your life is headed, the people in your life or being stuck, go out and change it. Change something about it because you are in control. You may not control everything but you can damn well be in charge of the direction your life is headed.

Be prepared: When rain is in the forecast, you grab an umbrella and a raincoat; with snow you get that shovel ready. Just like you cannot always control the weather, you cannot always control what happens in your life, no matter where you are. You can prepare yourself and control how you react. You can either deal with it or ignore it. Start building tools for yourself to help you through those hard times.

Many times all you can do is wait out the storm. I remember a scene from Twister, where the tornado is on its path of destruction, and they are caught in a field. The main characters frantically scramble to a barn only to find it hanging with knives, axes and cleavers yet they stay there because the twister is so close. They find a spot and hold on for life. At times in life no matter where you go, it is not going to go your way, in fact you may feel like your life is ending. Hold on, you can weather out the storm, you can handle it.

Ditch the New Year's Resolution

I was sitting down having coffee with a friend who I admire a great deal and they mentioned to me that they would like to be more assertive in 2016.  I first was happy for them but then it hit me, why the fuck do we wait for a specific day to get started, especially when it comes to being assertive? Why not start right now?

We wait for New Year’s Day as if our life will somehow magically improve and we will be ready. We may think not we are ready, but we are. Everything we want to achieve we can start now, not just today but right now. If you are reading this you can get started. If you have no goals or resolutions, what a better place to get started then to come up with one that actually means something to you.

Why do we put off making our lives better just because of a stupid tradition that no one questions or even thinks about? We want a clean path to success that is unquestioned, direct and easy. Life does not work that way.

There has never been overnight success. When we hear about overnight success it is not the work that occurred overnight, it is the awareness of the work that happens overnight. The success happens because that person worked their ass off. They did not wait for a certain time to make it happen; they kept working until it did happen. What makes New Year’s Day so special? A new year, how about a new life.

Stop thinking you need to have everything figured out. If you talk to anyone who tells you that they that they have their whole life planned, show them compassion. They are lying to you, they are not as self-confident as they would like you to believe. If they tell you that you need to have everything figured out, kindly thank them and remember that you do not. You need to have a direction, goals and aspirations but you do not need to know it all because no one does.

If you get started now, you will be even closer to reaching your goal. If you wait, you put yourself in this constant struggle of trying to figure out if this is the right move for you. “What if I fail?”, “What if I was meant to do something else?” “What if I give up?” I could go on and on and on about all the stupid reasons we decide to not pursue what we want. The point you need to remember is that, you are ready.

I have tried to publish blog post consistently for over a year and I failed numerous times, I still have not made it. Every time that I failed I could have given up, sometimes I did but I always went back to it. When we fail we take this as a sign that we should give up, it is the exact opposite, it is a sign to keep going. You are going to fail and that is okay. It does not matter when you start or what you are doing you will fail. If you do not fail, you are not doing something that is scary or challenging enough to truly grow.

If you are okay with waiting, you do not want it bad enough. If you are okay with letting it all be a dream, you do not want it bad enough. Your fear of failure is still blocking your judgement because no matter how good of a plan you have, your success will not go as planned. Fear is going to be there but it cannot take control. When you take that leap and decide to pursue everything that you have ever wanted, fear does not go away it gets magnified; you have to be okay with that and get ready to kick fear’s ass. We cannot wait around to get what we want, we must go after it. We need to be obsessed about it, relentless and ruthless towards it.

So undeserving

One of my favorite things to do is to watch inspiring stories of amazing individuals on Ellen. One day while browsing through there was a segment about a young lady that would be receiving money. In the interview Ellen mentioned that the young lady had to give up cable to be able to feed her children, this stopped me in my tracks.

I was mad, frustrated and upset. How could giving up your cable be considered like such a big deal. I live with cable and I am able to survive. There are plenty of people out there that live with so much less and in my opinion are so much more deserving. Then it hit me like a bag of bricks, very rarely do we ever get what we truly deserve and more importantly the idea that we have the right to judge the worthiness of anyone is wrong.

There will always be someone who wants it more, deserves it more and has suffered more. Yet for some reason that cannot be explained we get so much more than we deserve. I for one can say with absolute certainty that if I was given everything that I deserve, I would not be where I am today.
Far too often in my own life, I have held back kindness, words of encouragement or praise for someone because I did not believe they deserved it. I did not believe that they had done enough to earn what I could give them and what could potentially change their life and the true misery of it all is I lost far more when I did not share than I would have lost or potentially lost with sharing it, all because I did not think they were deserving.

The problem I faced and still face at times is the belief that I have the right and the need to base my actions on how deserving an individual is. I understand the fact that we need to choose who we spend our time with and make sure we spend our time with those that bring us up. This is a different concept. It is not about whom you spend your time with; it is about a simple action to choose kindness and to choose to give the best version of yourself every single second of your life.
In life we always have two options, to give the best version of ourselves or to settle for something less. When we settle, we do more of a disservice to ourselves than to anyone else. When we choose to not give the best version of ourselves we not only impact our current situation in a negative way but our future as well. Every decision we make brings us closer or further away to our goals and to becoming an even better version of ourselves.

It is the people that have chosen to constantly give the best version of themselves with blatant disregard to what was happening around them that stick out in our mind. Think of Anne Frank, and everything that she dealt with in her lifetime. Martin Luther King who lived in a time where it would have been easy to embrace violence, decided to give the best version of himself and inspire a nation. In my own life I think of two individuals who keep me going every single day and have inspired me beyond words, while I have many of these people in my life, this mother and son stick out. Their names are Annika and Bo Johnson.

Bo was diagnosed with a rare form of Leukemia at the age of 12 and sadly his life ended far too soon on September 28, 2012. While the news is devastating I do not think I am doing him proper justice by just focusing on the battle he had to endure, the real story of inspiration is the life he lived inspire of it all. Bo’s message is simple, Love each other, help each other, have your neighbor's back. If you see someone in need- even a stranger- reaches out and helps. This world can be a better place if we care and help each other. When he was sent home to spend his last remaining days with his family and friends, he did not focus on being negative because of the situation he was in but instead he decided to give the best version of himself and to change the world and the lives of the people around him. Then you have Annika, the mother of Bo, a women who had the most important and precious thing in her life taken away from her. To most this would be the start to living the rest of your life full of hate and seeing all the evil in the world. This is not Annika; she gives the best version of herself and continues to change the world around her. She cheers on every patient battling cancer with the hope that no one will ever have to go through losing someone they love like she did. I imagine a world where they both made the decision to simply not give the best version of themselves, it certainly would have been understandable, they certainly would have been deserving to do so but they decided not to, and instead of hiding from the world, they went out and changed it.

There are two messages I want you to get from this post. The first I hope is clear, stop judging people, yourself and your actions based on what is “deserved” and simply give the best version of yourself. The second is that I want you to realize that the only way you can change the world is by giving the best version of yourself. You do not need some giant plan, you just need to be yourself.

Life is too short...

We often use the saying “life is too short” or some variation of it to help us deal with an issue, put things into perspective or motivate us. While the saying has a lot of sentiment, we need to stop using it as a source of motivation and as an excuse. It puts us at odds with trying to do everything before we die. Here are some examples of that prove my point.

We often use “life is too short” as a mantra to no longer put up with negative people in our life. First let me say that I do not think anyone should waste any time with someone who brings them down. It is unhealthy and you deserve better. It does not matter if it is a relationship, friendship or someone you work with. Spend as little time with these people as you can and if you can get them out of your life, do it. If you lived to be 100 or 200 or even 500, would it be okay to spend your time with people that bring you down? The fact of the matter is, you could live forever and you should never spend a moment with someone who makes you feel bad about yourself.

“Life is too short to not take chances”, puts us in a place that we constantly need to worry that if we do not take a chance today or right now, there will never be another one. That we are somehow limited on the chances and opportunities that we have and we need to be sure we never miss one. While I am all for taking chances and making the most out of every opportunity, if we need to compare it to how long we could live, we miss the point. We should not take chances because of the limited time we have on this earth, we should take chances because it is something that we want to do and something we feel called to do. If you take a chance just because of limited time, you are more likely than not, wasting time. In fact the whole idea of chance is absurd to me, yes there will be chances of opportunity for you in your life that come along unexpectedly but we need to be in the mindset that every damn day is an opportunity to live the life you want.

My whole issue with the “life is too short” mentality is that it stops a lot more opportunities than we think. For some, life is too short to follow their dreams. Their dreams will take a great amount of time, and we never know when we could die. Following our dreams mean giving up things that we love and that hurts. Some dreams are long-term and pretty damn ambitious and so for those dreams, we could say life is too short. Life is too short to go and chase all of it, to spend countless hours working on a project and to not even know if it will all work out. Life is too short to not be “happy” and have the easy life. Some dreams mean letting go of other dreams, to stop being comfortable and to be scared at times. The real issue with telling people that life is too short is it makes them judge what they want to do based off of them dying and not based on what they really want to do and where they will have an impact. It is better to be in pursuit of your dreams and die then to not chase your dreams at all because there was not enough time.

We need to focus on the fact that there is so much opportunity. Opportunity is all around us. Fill your life with taking chances and following your dreams because you could live for 50 more years not because you could die tomorrow.

There is something that you need to know.

As I turned 29 I was flooded with birthday love and one message that kept coming across was that I was a source of inspiration for many people, while I appreciate the kind words, I think many times it is lost on people that I am no different than all the rest of the world. I am just one person who decided to take some chances, have some fun and live outside of my comfort zone.

Why I bring this up is that overall I see an issue and a mental barrier to those that we look to for inspiration. The problems is that we see those people at a different level than us, we see all the great things that they are doing and how “perfect” of a life they lead. When we start to see them in that light, we lose faith that we too can be that great and that we can be just as inspiring. We lose faith because we start to think of all the times we have failed and all of the “flaws” we have, so I want to share my story.

Here is the truth. I am stubborn, rude, mean and at times arrogant. I have failed more times than I can count. I am at times afraid, negative and dislike the world. I struggle and my life and my choices are nowhere near perfect. In fact many times in my life, I have had no idea where I was headed or what I would be doing. Far too often I let my anger run my how I think, feel and act. I am at times very unworthy of all the praise and compliments I receive. This is not me feeling bad about myself, it is just the truth.

We look at everything that is wrong with us and we see them as barriers to us being successful. We see them as things we need to hide, dirty little secrets that we cannot share, because who could possibly be worse than us? The voice inside our head, tells us that if we tell anyone these secrets we will become a fraud and unloved.

The truth is it is because of these things not in spite of them that our story can become so great, so powerful and so inspiring. These are the characteristics that we must overcome to become the best version of ourselves. It would be absurdly easy to live a perfect life, where nothing went wrong and you always got your way but it would be an uninspiring one. There would be no story, there would be no hope and there would be no greatness within you.

To me it seems that many times when we talk about accepting ourselves and loving ourselves, we only choose to love and accept the good parts. While I know everyone has an amazing gift and should celebrate how great they are, this type of thinking is flawed. It is flawed because it makes us hide and not love who we really are, with this thinking we only love ourselves when we are perfect and yet we never are.

The choice to embrace and accept our flaws is when we are truly set free, it is then and only then that we can deal with these issues and work on them. If we constantly ignore them, they will not go away but they will become bigger and bigger and take more control over your life.

I want everyone to realize how great they already are and that they need to share it with the world. It is easy for us to talk about all the good times but what really shapes us and creates us for who we are today is the times that we have struggled and where we fell short. We need to start talking about these times more often. We should stop being afraid to admit that we are not perfect, that we struggle and that we are normal with extraordinary gifts.  When we choose to no longer be afraid that is when we truly can be inspiring and embrace how great we truly are.

Stop hacking your life

If I have to see one more article about “hack” your life I may just throw up.

On the surface hacking your life seems like such a good idea, you save time and you can get “more” done. What more could you possibly want, you get to skip over all that “work” and just get the reward.

This would all be great except for the fact that it is all so wrong. Life is not about your accomplishments, it is about the journey and what it took you to get there. If you could just take an elevator to the top of Mount Everest would it still be an amazing accomplishment? The answer is no, and that is what hacking really is, it is a way to cheat yourself out of the work but to also cheat yourself out of some valuable life lessons and character building that go along with it. It stops you from having amazing stories that you will remember for the rest of your life. It lacks life.

One of my biggest accomplishments was completing Ironman Wisconsin with Team Katie. I can remember the finish line like it was yesterday and what I can still remember is all the work that went into it. The early mornings, Saturday’s dedicated to your workout and going to bed around 9:00 pm on a Friday night and it was all so worth it, it made the journey. If I had the chance to just be able to take a pill a day before and be ready, I would refuse because it lacks life.

Hacking your life seems like such a good idea because you can avoid all that “pain” that goes along with actually putting in the work but that is where the real magic happens. You see how strong you really are and how hard work pays off. You get to experience the thrill of living in those moments of pain and when you overcome them to move on.

One of the biggest selling points of hacking or in fact the main selling point is all the time you save and yet time is one of the main ingredients for success. It takes time to develop anything that is truly sustainable and powerful. If that time scares you, maybe you should not be doing it in the first place.

Stop missing life and start to really live life. Yes hacking your life is so much easier and there is less pain but it is nothing compared to the feeling you get when you accomplish something you never thought you could do and did the actual work.