rbudding

3-30-18 Woke up at a decent time even though it was my day off. I could have slept in, but I wanted to be up to keep mom company and help with anything as necessary. She has always been there for my bouts of mental illness, now it is my turn to step up for her. Went to town to pick up some laundry detergent. I came home and ran two loads of laundry. Cleaned quite a bit of the basement which was very much needed. Then my mom got the phone call, the oh so dreaded phone call informing her that she has cancer. I feel weird about it, but I am actually glad that we know and aren't in suspense any longer. At least now we can get to treating it, now we can fight back. The waiting and wondering was painful in itself. Do Differently: Less screen time. I spent a lot of time in front of the computer and television. Spend less time doing that and more time up and moving. Daily Gratitude: I am glad to have a job that I relatively enjoy. It is good exercise and keeps my mind busy. Plus I get great health insurance and a cheap gym membership.

CHANGE Well, things have not gone according to plan since I was last posting here. I have found that life rarely, if ever, does go according to our plans though. Don't even remember what my goals for the New Year were. Probably something along the lines of "have the best year of my life". No pressure there. Not daunting or overwhelming at all. I am just not so good at starting out with manageable goals I guess. The "best year of my life" thing has quickly gone out the window, as unfortunately my mom was informed today that she has cancer. It felt like a throat punch for me, or at least what I would imagine one would feel like (aka not very pleasant). I don't plan on talking about that much here as I think I will need a place to escape every once in a while. If you are interested, check out my website at www.rbudding.com for updates on that front. On this log I just want to record my daily "tasks of meaning". I recently watched a good TED talk in which the speaker said that a good question to ask ourselves is "what have I done today of meaning?" This question really resonated with me, so I started journaling on it before bed. I find it to be a very good gauge for how my day went. At the end of each post I will list ONLY ONE thing I would have liked to do differently. It is so easy to place all the focus/emphasis on the stuff I am not pleased with as opposed to appreciating the good. Will end with one thing I am grateful for. Whatever your personal preference, be it prayer, thoughts, or just general positive vibes, please send some my Mom's way. I know you've never met her, but she could really use all the positive energy and prayers she can muster for the fight that is coming. I researched her kind of cancer (don't EVER do that, trust me) and it is not good. Now I'm freaking out bigly. BREATHE. BREATHE. Center myself. It does me no good to get worked up into a panic attack. All we can do is take it one step at a time. So I will try to focus completely on the current step. I can only do my best, so that is what I will do.

New Year’s Day I hope you all had a wonderful (and safe) New Year’s Eve! Hopefully you didn’t rage too hard. I know that I had a quiet night. Watched a little bit of television and went to bed. -15 degrees here today in Iowa. Needless to say we weren’t doing a lot outside. Make sure you take some time to evaluate how your year of 2017 went and how you want 2018 to go. Today was a bit of a lazy day. I was not going outside if I did not have to. Spent a lot of the day reading. Received a Kindle Paperwhite for Christmas and I love it! Also thoroughly enjoying a library book I checked out, “The $100 Startup” by Chris Guillebeau. It’s a wonderful book for a guy like me who is trying to start a side-hustle. FITNESS: Walked on the treadmill for 15:50 minutes and 0.66 miles before nearly falling off the back. I just wasn’t paying that close of attention apparently, or I’m just not used to a treadmill. Was listening to an “Impact Theory” podcast which I just discovered. That is some great advice on how to level up! FINANCE, MUSIC: None. As I said, today was not a great day. Not the way I want to start the year. BEST EFFORT: Really dove in and did some reading. Also cleaned for over 40 minutes and made a conscious effort to get on the treadmill and move. AREAS OF IMPROVEMENT: Still spent way too much time in front of the TV. I want this to be an amazing year. Sitting in front of the TV is what I did too much last year, it won’t change anything.

Christmas Day What a wonderful and enjoyable day it was! I love Christmas. I love the lights, the food, the time with family. It even snowed yesterday morning, so us midwestern folk actually had a white Christmas! I sure never thought that was going to happen the way the weather has been going. Bodybuilding: None. The gym was closed but that is not a valid excuse. I could have walked on the treadmill, stretched, and/or done bodyweight exercises. As it was I just ate a lot of food and basically went in the opposite direction of anything that resembles fitness. Finance: Did not spend any money at all today! Sure, all the stores were closed, but I will still take that as a win. Music: Yay! The one area that did go very well today was music training. I trained for a good solid 35 minutes, which is no slouch of a practice session for my first time back. I focused on hand stretches first. I have always thought these would be a good idea but have never implemented them. Ran through variations of alternate-picking warmups as well. I am so glad I did this. It was awesome! Did My Best: Practicing guitar was great. I was focused and learned some excellent stuff. Despite my anxiety issues, I stayed upstairs and tried to socialize. Even went to the Christmas Eve service with Mom and Dad. Gave what I felt were well thought out gifts. Areas of Improvement: I got pretty testy with my mother about cleaning this morning. The reason is not important. The fact is that I should have helped without creating a fuss.

I realized I never actually mentioned what exactly it was that I will be focusing my efforts on for the next three months. A good reason for this was probably because I couldn't even decide what they would be for myself. I have so many things that I want to do and so many areas I could focus on. Spreading myself too thin is a guaranteed way to not make meaningful progress. I know this because I have tried it at least 100 times over the last eight years and have very little to show for my efforts. That is what prompted me to finally narrow it down. After some thinking, my three areas of focus are: 1. Fitness 2. Finance 3. Music Training Every day I will update with how I moved forward in each of those three areas. I will also include any other points of note that seem relevant. This is all an experiment in personal development. Changes can be made as necessary.

Hello, and welcome friends! This is going to be a bit of a different battle log than the others you see posted here. It will not be a collection of workout records, but rather a log of efforts put forth to transform my life in a few focused areas. I have tried to keep a battle log before and always stopped after about a week. Hopefully this time around will be different. I am structuring this off a goal/work tracking method that I like to call "three by three". I heard about this in a podcast and was so intrigued that I made sure to jot down the particulars as soon as I stopped driving. The idea is to focus on three goals (or goal areas) that I want to achieve/improve. Work every day on these three areas over the next three months. Every day I will write down how I did and post it here. It is a modified version of the system proposed by Zig Ziglar, though originally it was designed for four goals. I found this to be too many. I was not getting to all four in a day. This made me feel down on myself which is definitely not the goal with this. I thus bumped it down to three and will see how that works. That is the plan! BTW, I love this forum. I love how it inspires people to make positive changes and take action to level up their lives. Now, time to work!

Starting over again! Hello everyone! Glad to be back. I started last new year with the goal of making it the best year ever. I was going to track all of my actions. 2017 was going to be different. Long story short, I didn't keep up with that and it was not different. It was more of the same. I gained more weight and had a year of struggle. Ready to make a change. This time around I will be tracking the positive actions I take each day and what could be done differently. I am ready to start living the life I have always dreamed of.

I have a bachelor's degree in Environmental Science. My intention all along was to become a veterinarian though, so I went to vet school for two years before deciding it wasn't for me. It was very difficult going from the veterinary field where I had thousands of hours of experience to the environmental field where I didn't have nearly as much. But it looks like I finally made it. Thanks for the support!!

I have finally got a couple things going my way and it feels absolutely fantastic! I have had a difficult couple of years battling depression and I think I may be getting things figured out. I was going through what essentially amounted to a full career change but my lack of experience in the field made things incredibly difficult. I kept revising my job application and after sending out probably 50 applications I finally got a call back for an interview. I must have taken care of business in the interviews because I GOT THE JOB!!! I will finally be using my degree and getting paid for it too! Huge step in the right direction. On top of that I recently weighed myself and I have hit 26 pounds of weight loss since August. This is over halfway to my goal of 43 pounds. I did this by cutting out alcohol. It has been 109 full days without a drop of alcohol, and 379 days since I had my last cigarette. Major life improvements there. Clearly things are heading in the right direction. I am excited to keep this momentum rolling and see where it takes me. WOOT WOOT!!

3 Day Weekend Had another good week at work, but because of fairly low order numbers we have Friday off yet again. I would much rather go into work for the day and get the money but it’s not like I have much of a choice in the matter. As it currently sits I have a 3-day weekend. I can get a lot done during this time so I have to use it wisely. Here are a few of the things I would like to see happen: 1. Call Collin (my old scout leader) to catch up and see if he would like to go fishing 2. Completely hook up Eventide H9 guitar pedal and test. 3. Get bedroom completely clean and organized. 4. Fully pack up first box of books for Amazon FBA. 5. Meditate each day. 6. Finish reading one of my books. 7. Very first weightlifting session. 8. Reach 12 active eBay listings. That is a lot to get done, but I don’t think it to be too much. If I can get those things done, not only will I be closer to my dream life but I will also have done some serious hustling.

GOAL COMPLETE: Open Business Bank Account Ahh yes! Finally got this bad boy taken care of. I opened an LLC a few months back to protect me when selling online and I had not done much with it. I needed to have a business account to actually keep the transactions separate for accounting purposes. I applied for a business account with a major online bank and they said I needed some more paperwork to finalize the account. I had to call into the IRS to request this paperwork. They were very helpful, I just had to wait on hold for a long time for an available representative. By the time I received the necessary paperwork the account request had been closed. Tried again and that time I was ready. I used an awesome new iOS app to scan in the paperwork. Sent in the scans and BOOM! Within a few days my account was open and ready to rock. Really showed good perseverance with this goal. Now I just link my accounts and I can start running this like a proper business.

Thursday, March 23 Lazy morning. Did take some eBay pictures and read my book for a good 40 minutes. No workout, no music training, no meditation. Work was ok, a little easier than usual. What I don’t understand is why I give a full 100% when I am at work and then when I’m at home I give MAYBE 40%. It just isn’t good enough. These are the kinds of days that keep me stuck exactly where I do not want to be. To achieve my dreams I have to focus on doing better, especially in the mornings.

That's amazing! That's huge progress. I know for me the habits started to really fall into line when I lost enough weight that people started commenting on it. Such a good feeling!

So awesome! I just moved to the second round of interviews for a job myself. Such a great feeling! Great work!

Amazing work! I'm on a weight loss journey myself. Such a great feeling when my clothes start to fit better. Keep up the stellar work!