Need to try harder.

I think that every­body hits a plateau in their life and they become com­pla­cent on what life has to offer to them.  In the past three years, with the bless­ing of my son, I have had to restack the pri­or­i­ties in my life.  I have been work­ing for a income instead of enjoy­ing what I do, I have stopped work­ing out and put on extra weight because I did not have time to PT (mil­i­tary term for phys­i­cal train­ing), worked an obscene amount of hours because of over­ly com­mit­ting myself to the wrong pri­or­i­ties, and neglect­ed the rela­tion­ships that are impor­tant to me.

Why am I mak­ing excus­es for myself?

I have this arti­cle filed away in Ever­note called “From Vet to Vic­tim — and Back Again” that I have been read­ing and reread­ing late­ly.  The crux of the arti­cle is about a Marine that gets put through the meat grinder and after the meat grinder, devel­ops a men­tal­i­ty of vic­tim hood and that his life sucks.  What made it worse, he knew that his life sucked so he did things to make it worse.  Until one day, he fig­ured out his life was steadi­ly going in the wrong direc­tion and with the prop­er moti­va­tion, he stopped being the vic­tim of the sit­u­a­tion and slow­ly over­came it.  This includ­ed the fail­ures and progress.

By no means am I com­par­ing my sit­u­a­tion with the Marine.  I would not insult the Marine.  What it does do is gives me a gut check on what am I going to do.

The plan.

I want to com­bine the philo­soph­i­cal mind of Joe Rogan (if you have not lis­tened to his pod­cast, do it), the work smarter not hard­er men­tal­i­ty of Tim Fer­riss (one of my dad’s favorite say­ings), and the over­all gen­er­al awe­some­ness of the  “Art of Man­li­ness” blog.

So how am I going to do that?  I do not know yet but I am plan­ning to write it down in this blog and use this blog to track my progress and my fail­ures.  Why in the hell would I do that?  The prin­ci­pal actu­al­ly comes from Tim Ferriss’s book “The 4‑Hour Chef”.  If you write it down and share it, it cre­ates account­abil­i­ty.  Sec­ond­ly, the fear of God of me pub­licly fail­ing.  That in itself should be moti­va­tion itself but when my son get’s old­er, I want him to be able to read this blog and under­stand that you have to own your life.