Can you remember the unity and patriotism you felt after September 11, 2001? Can you pass that feeling to other people in your life. Download the Podcast about Remembering 911 Where were you when the planes hit on 9-11? What did you feel that day? How did those feelings change in the following weeks? I want you to remember that feeling of unity the following couple weeks. How the country stood up together against one thing. Nothing else mattered. All the petty BS went away… even when the media t...
Sep 11, 2020•10 min
How do you deal with that overwhelming feeling? That feeling that the world is trying to crush you and there is nothing you can do? The last two days have been easy for me. I had family in town and friends over. I did the minimum activity in my business. I should be back to work and ready to go today… but I’ve got the overwhelming feeling. When I have that overwhelming feeling, like the weight of the world is on me and I can’t go any further, I just want to sit down, have some ice cream and beer...
Sep 09, 2020•10 min
Finish creating a self improvement plan with the last of the 13 Steps This is the second half of the 13 Steps to Self Improvement. You can find the first half of the steps to self-improvement here . You can also get your free 13 Steps to Self Improvement Guide and Worksheet here . Do you want to be better? Of course you do. You are reading this blog. This blog is all about making you better, so you can make the people around you better, so they can make the people around them better, and we can ...
Sep 02, 2020•30 min
How you can create a self improvement plan in just 13 steps. Do you want to be better? Do you know how to be a better person? How many things have you tried to be better? You are reading this so I know you want to be better. Me too! I know you have read, heard, and tried a bunch of different things to make your life better. Me too! I found this program from a survival specialist named Jack Spirko. He runs The Survival Podcast and I have been listening to him for years. Not because I’m preparing ...
Aug 27, 2020•19 min
How to stay positive when the world is tying to crush you. I just got back from California where I had to deal with my Mother passing away unexpectedly. As you can imagine, staying positive during that time was hard, to put it mildly. If you can’t stay positive in life, life will crush you. Part of the positive attitude is a can-do attitude. Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.” Over the years I’ve found a couple of things that help me stay positive....
Aug 12, 2020•19 min
Here is the secret to any life challenge you will face… keep going. If you get off course, start again and keep going. That’s it. That can solve any and all life challenges for you. But the question is how do you get back on track once life challenge kicks you hard enough to knock you down? Two weeks ago I was ready to knock it out of the park with my side hustle. I was ready to double down on working and making things happen. A life challenge kicked me square in the head. I thought I had my dre...
Jul 23, 2020•15 min
To become a hard worker takes practice, like anything else. You have to work at it and try to get better all the time. The 75 Hard Program is designed to help you become a hard worker and make you mentally tough. Mental toughness is required to consistently do hard work. You can get motivated. You can get pissed off. Both of these will help you do incredible amounts of work over short periods. I learned these two tricks in Boot Camp and SOI (School of Infantry) while I was trying to become a Mar...
Jul 08, 2020•12 min
You can always find a negative bias for anything, including the 75 Hard Challenge. From psychology, a negative bias is a proclivity to “attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information” ( positiviepsychology.com What is The Negativity Bias and How Can it be Overcome? ). We all do this from time-to-time. The problem with negative bias comes when you use it as an excuse not to act. When you actively look for the negative reason not to do something it will keep...
Jun 24, 2020•12 min
How do you handle life challenges? Zig Ziglar (the best book is Born To Win get it on Audible and listen to him read the stories) talks about how a doctor prescribes medicine. After the doctor has you take the meds for a couple of days he wants to know if your body is responding or reacting to the meds. You want to hear the doctor say your body is responding to the meds. This means the medicine is doing what was intended and the reason for prescribing the meds is going away and you are becoming ...
Jun 17, 2020•9 min
What can you do to help someone else out right now? What skills and talents do you have that you could use to help someone that needs it? Last weekend I helped train a church security team (that’s my other side hustle at ModernSelfProtection.com ) with firearms training. They needed the training but didn’t have the funds to pay me. With COVID going around I haven’t had much to do, so I went anyways and gave a half-day course for free. It cost me an hour drive each way, ammo that I expended, and ...
Jun 10, 2020•9 min
Learn to focus on what matters by doing the 75 Hard Challenge especially right now. At the end of March, I was halfway through my 75 Hard Challenge. Things were starting to look bleak all over. Covid-19 was starting to spread. My wife and I had already talked about limiting contact with the outside world afraid the news of millions of deaths in America might be right. On top of that, the oil market crashed in one weekend. I was working for an Oil and Gas services company at the time and all my p...
Jun 03, 2020•11 min
This is how to drink water to lose weight, eat better, and be healthier. I’ve learned this lesson multiple times in my life and learning it again now. I’ve been a fat guy. I’ve been an in shape guy. Right now, I’m back to being a fat guy. One of the big differences I can look back in my life and see what I did differently when I was in shape versus being fat was drink water. In 1998 I joined the Marine Corps and stepped on the yellow footprints on October 13, 1998. It’s a date a Marine never for...
May 27, 2020•25 min
The Slow Carb Diet has been working for me! My Reason for Using the Diet I’ve been fat my entire life… almost. Throughout school, Middle, and High School, I was fat. I liked sports when I was younger but it never stuck. I just gave them all up as I got older. During my senior year of High School I took a weight lifting class that changed my life. I discovered that I liked the gym. And became a gym rat for the next couple of years. That was the first time I lost weight. That catapulted me into wa...
May 21, 2020•28 min
This week I learned another life lesson from the 75 Hard Challenge even though I finished it 10 days ago. I learned how important water is to me. During the 75 Hard Challenge, I was on my diet every day and was rarely hungry. I got off the diet and started being hungry all the time. For a while, I could not figure it out. I looked back at what I did differently on the challenge. It was obvious when I looked. I was no longer drinking 1 gallon of water per day. During the challenge, I chugged wate...
May 12, 2020•11 min
My 75 Hard results aren’t bad. I’ve conquered my 75 Hard Challenge for the third time. My results: I lost 28.5 pounds. I started the challenge at 347.6 and ended at 319.1. The week before I ended I was actually down to 317.6. Don’t know what happened, but not that big a deal. My weight has always fluctuated five pounds all the time. It’s part of why I didn’t pay attention to my weight sneaking up on me. I gained about 5 pounds a year for the last 10 years. I was fat before and putting on five po...
May 04, 2020•7 min
I’m going to finish strong with lots of motivation. This is easy. The hard part is not screwing it up. It’s late and I’m finishing my post and have to practice still. I’m so motivated about the finish that I almost messed up the process. That’s the problem with too much motivation. When you can see the end or finish of any long hard project, you are ready to be done. When you are motivated all the way through the end just makes you more so. But you have to hold on. Everything is a balance. Too m...
May 01, 2020•5 min
The end is motivating me to get there. With just 3 days left in my challenge I’m just trying not to screw it up. I’ve been here in my life before. This challenge that I’ve completed a couple times and a couple times in my military career. The hardest was boot camp. I could see the end. But there was a coupe more days to go before graduation and a couple things that could set me back from my goal of being a Marine. At the time I just kept my head down and continued on. That is what I am doing now...
Apr 29, 2020•5 min
I’m almost there. I can see the end date on my calendar this week. But there is still 5 days to go. I have to focus or things could still go off the rails here. Most people want to sprint towards the finish at the end of a long race. And if you are running some kind of endurance race that can generally work. Everything else in my life it messes things up. With projects at work that take a long time, if I try and go faster at the end things slip through the cracks and don’t get done like they sho...
Apr 27, 2020•5 min
Over training is an issue on this program. This is the forth time I’ve gotten to day 68 and my body is just not doing it anymore. I’m over 40 now and the built up fatigue and muscle strain is real. I just feel like the day after I ran a marathon or something. My entire body hurts and training makes it worse. When I’m feeling just fatigued and soreness working out actually feels better. I get up, I get moving, and some of the pain and fatigue magically go away. I love it when that happens. Right ...
Apr 25, 2020•5 min
Today is day 66! Nine more days and a wake up and I’m done! I missed yesterday for this blog. Not that big a deal, but I did miss a goal I set. Are there important goals? Goals that aren’t as important or you don’t care about. I don’t believe in unimportant goals, even though I seem to set them all the time. But what happens when you miss? All I know how to do is do it again. I missed this post yesterday, but luckily it is easy enough to do it today. If you miss something on your 75 Hard journey...
Apr 23, 2020•5 min
Don’t drop your pack was a saying from the Marine Corps. In the Marine Corps all our back packs had quick connect features that allow you to dump your pack in an emergency. It was a great feature that no one used. Once you dumped your pack using the quick releases it was a time consuming pain to get the pack put back together so you could wear it again. Marines use the quick release as an analogy more than anything else because it’s that hard to get the pack back together. The analogy is at the ...
Apr 20, 2020•5 min
Ever feel like you are shouting into the darkness? That you don’t hear anything in return and you think that matters? I feel like I’m shouting into the darkness on the web site. I’ve done this for over a year now and the numbers just keep going down. Maybe not many people give a shit about making themselves better. I think I’m learning that the hard way. Ever feel like you are the only one among your group of friends that has actually read a non-fiction book since school? Me too. What I’m learni...
Apr 18, 2020•5 min
Today was a good day. I made it that way! What about you? Did you make your day go one way or the other? The famous motivational speaker Zig Ziglar used to ask the question in his seminars if you could do anything to ruin your life? Could you sleep around on your significant other? Could you rob a bank? Could you crash your car on purpose? Could you.. he had a long list of things that could ruin your day and your life. Everyone always laughed. Then he would stop, clap his hands together and say,...
Apr 16, 2020•5 min
Two great days will get you motivated again! I had two good days back to back after going through a couple bad ones. When you are in the hard times, it always feels like that is all there ever will be. When the hard times are over and you are into the good ones, you just feel a relief to be through. So you don’t always enjoy the good times like you should. I use to do that all the time. And I think the good times would just pass me on by and I would miss them. Now I’m stopping to look. I had two...
Apr 14, 2020•5 min
Today went easy… at first. Then got harder. I pulled my web site numbers and it’s painful to see everything keep going down. Before I didn’t care really. It wasn’t about anything but something I loved to do. Now it’s about trying to make money. To make money I need an audience. Building that should be easy by creating content. Well I’ve been creating more and more and getting less and less traffic. It sucks. If you are reading this, obviously you got here somehow. And I really appreciate you for...
Apr 12, 2020•5 min
Today was a good and hard day. I didn’t get everything I wanted to get done, done. My list of big three things fell away when my son flipped out about having to go for a walk with me this morning. I finally got him calmed down and we decided he needed another form of exercise. And I think we found one… We decided strong man style backyard training would be fun. So we went online and ordered a tone of stuff from the local Lowe’s. I got 300 pounds of sand and a bunch of 2×4’s and plywood. We are g...
Apr 10, 2020•5 min
I’m through the funk I had the last couple days and pushing forward. I think part of my funk is wait loss. A lot of horrible stuff you eat over the years gets stored in your fat deposits. And as you burn those fat stores it releases all of the stuff back into your system. I don’t know the science behind that, but read it in a couple different places. It was on the internet… I’m sure it must be true! In reality I have no way to check the above one way or the other. But because it is beneficial to...
Apr 08, 2020•5 min
Today is just another day… but not. Today is the first day I wanted to quit. I was bored this morning with the challenge and feel I have so much else to do in life right now that I was thinking of throwing in the towel. But I pushed forward. Now here I site in front of a computer wanted to quit again… I think the depression monster isn’t far behind. Which sucks even more then quitting! So I’m pushing forward. And simply writing what is on my mind right now. I don’t know what else to do at this p...
Apr 06, 2020•5 min
Today I sent most of the day answering emails and doing a little work. My wife woke up and declared it a day off. And I sort of went with it. Now I’m doing some work at night. I did get some really important things done and talked to a couple people that really needed help. It was emotionally hard, but I was able to help a couple people. And that was worth it. I’m finishing up my 75 Hard five things right now. I have this post and a bottle of water to drink. It’s hard to drink the water if you d...
Apr 04, 2020•5 min
I continue to move forward. Things in my business are taking way longer then I want them to. But I guess that is the first three rules of business playing out: It will take twice as long you think, cost twice as much as you think, and everyone thinks they are the exception to the rule. I’m not the exception. So I keep plugging along. I’m starting to worry about the hole ball out thing. Will I get any money from it? I guess I shouldn’t bet on it. That just means I need to get to work harder on my...
Apr 02, 2020•5 min
