Fast forward a bit and now not so much. Due to when the various tae kwon do clubs are open around where I live, I don’t really have time to do that anymore, and not living next to a canal or in gorgeous countryside, I’ve not been running either. However, that’s about to change.

Making Shit Happen

Over the next few months, I’m going to be running, working out and generally getting back in shape. Which brings me to the point of this post. If you want to make something of your life, you can’t just idle through it. The people who have great bodies don’t have them because they live an ordinary life, and just happen to have great genetics. They live like people who have great bodies, working out and running and generally being a fit, fast and strong human being. Not a human lounging or a human gorging or a human lazing, but a human being. A human doing things and making it happen.

Similarly, those people you admire in your career? They’re making it happen because they live it. They don’t do a 9-5 and go home and that’s it; they do the job and go home and think about it and research how to get better. It’s more than what they do, it’s who they are. If you asked them to stop doing it, they’d look at your blankly, because they can’t help it. It’s what defines them.

Becoming That Person

If you want to have a great life, live like someone with a great life. It’s just that simple, and that hard. Nothing worth doing is easy. Want to be fit and have a great body? Fantastic. Go an change how you live and never look back. Want a great career? Awesome! Now go and spend the rest of your working life living what you do. Want an amazing partner? Be an amazing partner. Want to learn the piano? That’s cool. Now go an practice it for about a thousand hours over the next few years, and you’ll be pretty decent.

Unfortunately, that’s what being great at anything is. Doing it now, and forever, because it’s what means something to you. If you’re not prepared to give up how you are, you’ll never become what you want to be.

So get your shit together and make it happen, or don’t.

1. Life hacking and optimisation
2. If I have kids one day, they can see what their Dad has been up to

I imagine most people reading this will know me from either business or marketing. However, for the benefit of those who don’t know me, or for the future, here’s a brief summary…

The Work Stuff

I’m a mid-20′s marketer, designer and programmer. I work for an awesome company called Strategy Internet Marketing. What I do there is kinda hard to define, but it’s loosely a mix of heading up the R&D, occasional design, some programming, and a whole lot of digital marketing strategy.

I’ve been in the digital industry now for around 8 years, I’ve got experience in SEO, PPC, email marketing, affiliate management, social marketing, coding (mostly L/WAMP stack with *SQL & Mongo & AJAX) and other such things.

The Personal Stuff

I listen to too much music (currently Def Leppard, Love Bits from Mirrorball), enjoy watching films and reading. I study taekwon do, I’m learning salsa and I’ll be re-starting running around Februrary. I’ve also recently started working out again, with the goal being to be a fitter, healthier human being by March-ish.

I’ve also got a huge interest in technology, as you’d be able to tell if you could see me now – this is being written on a 37″ TV/monitor, hooked up a custom built gaming rig (Silverstone HTPC case, AMD 6870 GFX, Intel 2500 i5 proc, 8gb ram, 3tb HDD space & 120gb SSD), all plugged in to an Onkyo TX-NR609, with sound running through a Tannoy HTS101 5.1 setup. The idea behind all that is that it’s all (when bought), cutting edge kit that won’t need replacing for some time. The first thing to go will be the TV, when 3D reaches an acceptable level of awesomeness. Aside from that, the AV kit should last a few decades, and the computer maybe 5/6 more years.

Thoughts on Life

I was recently chatting with my Mum, as I’m currently clearing out everything and trying to decide what I want to keep, and what came out of it was to buy the very best of what you can afford, and to only buy it once. Hence the AV stuff above. However, means that I’ve been looking around at a lot of stuff that I’ve got. So here’s my current plan:

1. Been testing LoveFilm and Spotify for a while and have decided that they’re far superior to actually owning CD’s or DVD’s. So they’re going out soon
2. Just bought new kitchenware, (this set in fact) which is wonderful, replacing some old, and somewhat beaten up cookware. So the old stuff is going to be going as well
3. There’s other bits and bobs too that’ll be off. I’m not particularly sentimental, and I’d quite like to not have a lot of the crap laying around that I’ve seemingly accumulated over the past 26 years

Beyond that, I’m starting to look at how to go about building a house, somewhere outside of Bristol. It’s a lovely area, and I spend a lot of happy hours doing things around the city, and it’d be nice to start putting down some roots. If you’re a hacker/start-up founder/designer/developer/marketer from around the area, give me a shout – I’m not that hard to find online.

Well, that’s all for now.

Signing out…