Making time for what you love February 9th, 2012

But first, a few house keeping items:

1.) On Tuesday night I launched the 10 Million Steps Challenge and already we have over 100 people committing to partake in the Challenge! YESSSSSS!!! YES YES YES!!! We will need every single person to do their part for us to hit, and pass the 10 Million Steps mark. This is a great opportunity to work towards some fitness related goals, to get out and move more, and to enlist some friends to do it with you. It is also a great opportunity to meet some accountability friends along the way. For more info and to sign up, please click here: 10 Million Steps Challenge.

2.) Thank you everyone for all the great feedback on  my updated website www.jessebrisendine.com .  I am really loving the new layout of it.  This will be the portal for just about everything I am doing.  I will still have individual sites and pages, but if you ever need to find out where anything is at just go to www.jessebrisendine.com

3.) Continuing on the update trend - my monthly newsletter is back up and running again (yea me!!)  I hope you all are enjoying it.  It will contain updates as well as my thoughts and insights into all the important components of life.  If you would like to sign up to receive the monthly newsletter, click here: Newsletter Sign Up  or go to www.jessebrisendine.com

4.) Time.  As the 1000 Challenge Community continues to grow I will unfortunately have less time to respond to all the emails, comments, and questions because of the volume increase related to the community growth.  I still do my best to read everything.  I am very excited and proud of our growing community and want to be able to interact with you all as much as possible.  To help with this I am going to start doing Ustream Chats more frequently.  More to the tune of every 2 weeks as opposed to once a month like we have been doing. To further support this, once I get my debt paid off (one of my goals this year!!!) I am going to sign us up for the nicer Ustream channel, the one that does not have the commercials, streams much more smoothly and appears in HD so we can all get more benefit from the chats. :)

On the topic of Ustream, remember - this Sunday, 7:30am PST we will be having a Ustream Chat.  I hope everyone can attend.  Please remember to vote on the topic on the 1 Year 1000 Challenge Page.

In addition I have received several speaking requests in the last couple of weeks.  I am very open to these and love doing speaking appearances.  If you have an idea in this regards please email me.  I am still working on getting seminar ideas put together so I can hold my first one this year!! :) :) :)

Thank you everyone for your patience and understanding.  Also thank you so much to those of you who have written in and asked my advice on deeply personal questions and are willing to share these questions during our ustream chats.  I promise you, WE ALL get something out of these types of questions. 

Now, onto the good stuff... Making time for what you love:


Last weekend I spent the morning taking photos at the butterfly perserve here in Santa Barbara and I had the greatest time.  I was with three friends which always makes things fun, but what made it even more so was being out and doing something I enjoy so much - taking photos.  It got me thinking just how important it is to make the time for the things we love so much.

We are all busy.  And it is so easy to get caught up in the rat race of life that we forget to slow down and smell the roses.  What is the point of it all if we are never taking the time to do the things we enjoy the most, the things we love?

I have been guilty of this the last few weeks.  I have been spending more time thinking about what I "NEED" to do next rather than what I "CAN" do now.  My thoughts have been preoccupied with "I need to do this to grow my business, I need to do this so I can do that, I need to answer these emails, etc..."  All that time focusing on my perceived needs left me lacking in fulfillment because I was not paying any attention to what I really wanted.

What I wanted was a reason to be outside in the warm air, running, hiking, taking photos, exploring the world.  I was neglecting these things because of all the excuses created by the "I NEED to do this attitude."

I went for a run today, the weather was beautiful, the run was strong, it was great.  After I got done there was a dead seal that had washed up onto the shore :(  I wanted to take a picture of it.  The surf was also much bigger than normal, I wanted to take a picture of it.  And there were these itsy bitsy birds that would run to the edge of the water to grab a quick bite to eat and run back away before the water ever touched them - I also wanted to take a picture of that. 

I thought to myself about my choices: run home and do more work that I "need" to do, or, I CAN take 10 minutes and do something I LOVE TO DO. 

I chose the later and I am so happy I did.  I got some great photos, I felt so refreshed from the combo of  running, sun, beach, and photos that when I got home, I was able to focus much more clearly on the work I no longer "needed" to get done.  Now I just simply wanted to get it done.  A much more freeing, more empowering mindset.

I watched this movie last night called "Final Destination 5" the 5th installment in the Final Destination series.  The movies are corny, cheesy, and mindless - I love them for this.  It requires zero brain cells to watch them.  If you are not familiar with the franchise, the plot is essentially this:  Some sort of disaster happens killing everyone involved except for a small group of people who escape because one of them had a case of Deja Vu and got away before the disaster happened.  The rest of the movie is then spent with "Death" coming up with clever ways to kill the people who "cheated Death." 

Anyways the point of me bringing it up is in the movie last night the remaining survivors are told that they only have a limited time to live.  Instead of going out and really LIVING, doing the things they love to do, they go to jobs they do not like, they go and get lazer eyes surgery (big no no when death is after you), and so on.  As this was going on I started thinking of what things would I do if I found myself in a similar situation.  What things do I LOVE doing so much that I would want to spend my last days doing them?

It is a good question to ask yourself.  Hmmmm, I guess "Final Destination 5" did require a couple of brain cells to watch.  Who would have thought it was such a deep, thought provoking movie?  :)

Be cautious of the "need" attitude.  We all have things we need to get done, but never fully sacrifice the things you love to do.  They are what make life worth living.

Enjoy the pics,

Carpe Diem,

Jesse