Secrets to Staying Young…My Crystal Ball

For me, the last year has been a roller coaster ride where everything changed except my family and friends. Professionally, I moved from a job I loved, to not having one, to co-founding a new business in less than three months. While going from making a comfortable living to bootstrapping a business was a huge shock financially, I feel like I’ve learned so much and have become more resilient or resourceful in the process. During that time, I moved out of my dream apartment, got rid of practically everything, moved out of the state and in with my family. 

People don’t like change, especially not that much change in a short period of time. I used to pride myself on being able to adapt quickly and still over-accomplish. Being forced to slow down bored me to tears, until being challenged with creating a new business, figuring out how we would make money, finding data to support it all while learning what I didn’t know I needed to learn. Yet after the holiday downtime last year, it was hard to be disciplined. I started a project to wake up early to jump start my old work ethic and that ended in an epic fail whale bigger than Twitter’s in less than two days. I thought that would be an experiment I could document until I realized I am more focused and creative in the middle of the night so I trashed the waking up early project. Daytime then became devoted to research, social media marketing, going to the gym (a lot), and conference calls. Nighttime was for focused work and writing.

New habits are formed when you enjoy doing something regularly. The unexpected benefit of working with my own clock was I started going to the gym regularly, ate healthy more frequently, and timing for opportunities in travel or business was perfect. I realized, despite the cards I was given I could choose how I lived my life. I could choose to be bored or to have amazing experiences everywhere or create something amazing out of the mundane.

If I looked in the crystal ball today, can I say for certain what my future holds for tomorrow, the next year, or the next five years? Probably not, I do know that my life is going to be an adventure and that my real life will be better than anything I could dream of because I am making it happen. This is not to say I’m in the backyard wishing on stars, all my goals, whether it relates to relationships, fitness, or business are clear in my mind and mapped out so that I can do a little everyday to make them real. Being humbled by adversity, change, and uncertainty made me realize that a positive mental attitude attracts opportunities. Acting on the opportunities and being creative brings about the results…the trick is sticking with it until it happens.