Yearly Archives: 2012

My weekends are usually spent chilling out with K or visiting friends and families. Sometimes I lose my motivation for the things I’ve been doing during the week, whether that’s work, play or fitness stuff.

So I thought I’d maybe start sharing some of my favourite inspirational videos each Saturday to keep myself motivated and, hopefully, to offer a little kick-up-the-backside to anyone else who often gets deflated by the break from routine that weekends provide.

Don’t get me wrong – I love my weekends: chilling, relaxing, catching up on a bit of TV and not thinking about many of the things that clog my wee brain during the week. But I do need a quick jog to get back into it on a Monday morning.

Here’s the first in the series, Casey Neistat’s kind-of-commercial for the Nike+ Fuelband. The thing I love about this video is that not only is it kinda cool and inspirational, it’s also a brilliant commercial (undoubtedly intentionally) because by the time it finishes you have no idea what a fuel band actually is, but you want to go buy one.

Check it out, be inspired:

One of the few blogs that I follow posted a great piece this week about get-up-and-go. When we’ve had too long a break in what we’ve been doing, it gets harder and harder to get ourselves started off at it again.

Something I’ve very acutely aware of this week.

It doesn’t bother me if I have an occasional off-day—I can’t be perfect—but I notice that if I let it go too many days in a row, it starts to get easier and easier to make “off” the new normal. Then, I have to fight hard to get the drive back; it isn’t easy anymore.
Tyler Tervooren, Advanced Riskology

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Over the life of this blog, I’ve written quite a lot about CF, it’s affects and my life as well as the lives of others with the incurable condition.

I’m one of the lucky few to have survived and thrived after a double-lung transplant that saved and transformed my life four-and-a-half years ago, but this week is CF Week in the UK and I wanted to see if I could tell a different story.

On Sunday night, a wonderful adopted-Aunty of mine posted a heart-felt, inspiring and moving message to her Facebook friends about her daughter, who has CF. I immediately asked her if I could re-print it on the blog to share with everyone who’s not connected with her.

Happily, she agreed. This post is her words, in full, which are far more eloquent, emotive and impactful than I think I could have managed and, as you’ll see at the end, they sum up everything that SmileThroughIt represents.

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It’s fair to say that the last few weeks and months have been an uncertain time for me. Giving up a well-paid job, striking out on my own without any guarantee of income or success, trusting just my self-belief and abilities will get me through.

It started as a deeply fearful period. The initial levity of being able to work in my PJ’s if I so desired soon dwindled back into the freelance reality of no work, no money.

Yet even as I faced this most uncertain of times, I started to see and appreciate the world around me again. Over the last few weeks I’ve been reading a lot more and helping to shape and form my ideas about how I go forward from here.

I’ve already written about how reading people’s bucket lists has inspired my own, but it was another book entirely that helped me reach a key realisation in my life and pin down the biggest mistake I’d made.

It’s all a matter of perspective, really.

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There is a lot written all over the ‘net about getting started. Often including the wonderful Lao-tzu quote:

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu

My journey will only be 26.2 miles, but my single step happened incredibly quickly.

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Some people say it’s impossible to be truly happy with everything in your life. As the first noble truth of Buddhism tells us:

If you are alive, you will suffer.

While that may be true – and may make life sound unappealing – it’s also true that the best way to get closer to true happiness is to know yourself.

Not merely by identifying your wants, needs and ultimate goals, but to really dig deeply into yourself and understand what drives you, what de-motivates you and what causes you to go running for the hills.

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Getting started can often be the toughest step in creating or achieving anything.

For me, fitness is always hardest habit to get in to – I have all the best intentions, but there is always a good reason for me not to start today.

Writing can be similar – you’re just not quite at the right point to start filling in the blank page yet, you need to take more notes, research more source material, create more mood boards.

Anything and everything we want to achieve in our lives, from creation to life goals, needs a beginning, that moment when we decide “Let’s do this”.

For anyone else who struggles with this in the same way I do, check out this slightly odd but seriously brilliant video by Ze Frank:

What are you going to start today?

I’d planned a post for today about something completely different ((Truth be told, I’ve no idea what it was)), but that’s been thrown out of the window by the devastating news that our friendly local pharmacist in my sleepy little Northamptonshire village died in a car crash on Tuesday – an incident I happened to see the aftermath of as I drove down the opposite carriageway.
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I’ve been reading a lot over the last few weeks about people’s life goals, projects and passions and trying to form my own ideas about where things go from here, following on from my commitment to forging my own path on the blog last week.

Joel Runyon over at Impossible HQ recommends making a list of impossible things you want to achieve – his logic being that only by reaching for the impossible can we achieve the remarkable.

Others focus on awesomeness, bucket lists or things to do before you die.

All of these pages are great (and truly inspiring), but I’m don’t 100% side with any of these. For one thing, I’m a strong believer in the English language and that impossible is exactly that – 100% not possible. However, I also strongly believe that there is very little in this world that is genuinely impossible; most of the time the things that we deem impossible are just very, very hard.

What my week’s reading has done is to inspire me to create my own List of Infinite Possibilities.

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