Cold Remedy: 15 Real-World Lifestyle Design Case Studies (Now It

Cold Remedy: 15 Real-World Lifestyle Design Case Studies (Now It’s Your Turn)

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The Dash

What will they say about me when I die? That I lived? or existed?

Shane McConkey Lived.... Here's a tribute video

Cool Base Jumping Video

This looks like a ton of fun.

Cold Remedy: Free Flights Anywhere in the World (Plus: Live Q

Article Below is from the Blog of Tim Ferris, the author of "the 4-Hour Work Week".
Over the next few months, I will be looking to implement his ideas into my life.
Enjoy!

Cold Remedy: Free Flights Anywhere in the World (Plus: Live Q&A Tonight)


Where would you go if you had a free ticket anywhere? The island of Bohol in the Philippines? (source: WisDoc)



Not long ago, I received the following comment — edited for length — from Ryan N.:



I hate you Tim. I had a secure future ahead of me, and I left my job, my reasonably well paying professional career all because of your book. Best thing I’ve ever done!!



I was wondering if you might be able to put up a blog post where people could post their ideas or muses as case studies. I’m sure there are a lot of people like me who would like to share their stories and listen to others living the 4HWW.



Here’s to 2010 being the year everything changes.



Indeed. Here’s to 2010 being the year everything changes.



I decided to take Ryan’s advice. Below is a post of just a few select video case studies. This is also where you can win a round-trip ticket anywhere in the world.



That would be a nice way to start 2010 with a bang, right?…

I’m sure you’ve dreamed of taking that big trip, but it’s been put off due to the million things that interrupt and overload all of our lives. The fact is this: there is never a convenient time to do the most impactful things, whether having a baby, quitting your job, or taking a dream trip overseas. It’s something you pull the trigger for despite imperfect circumstances, not because of perfect circumstances.



Let’s end the wait.



Here’s how it works – simplicity itself:



1) Upload a video to YouTube of 5 minutes or less where you describe how you’ve most successfully applied techniques or tools from The 4-Hour Workweek to your life or business. Be sure to tag your video with “4hww success” in quotation marks. Click here to see what it should look like when you are uploading your video.



2) Leave a comment on this post with a link to your video and a brief description of what worked for you (no need for more than 1-2 short paragraphs). Do all of this no later than 5pm PT this Saturday, December 26th. Early responses get bonus points.



3) I and a few secret judges will select our top favorites, and then you all will vote for the winner.



4) I will then provide a roundtrip ticket anywhere in the world that the 25+ airlines in the Star Alliance fly.



In the meantime, find below some fun examples to get your juices flowing. Included are:



- Electra, a mother who uses batching to run her business while making time for the kids

- Michael, a father of two who’s lived in Argentina and explored both international and home schooling while earning full-time income.

- Harris, a father who can take his kids to the zoo on a Wednesday or take the entire family to Barcelona for a month.

- Jed and Chelsea, who quit their previous jobs, moved to another city, and are reinventing themselves one step at a time.



Last but not least, we have Aaron Carotta, who was diagnosed with cancer but still achieved the four-hour workweek in 60 days and documented it all on video. Here is the cliff notes version, in his words:



-Diagnosed with cancer

-Lost wages

-Accumulated medical bills

-Received the book as a gift

-Documented his interpretation of the book

-Achieved goals to free up his lifestyle

-Successfully opened and sold a business in another country

-Generated automated money

-Now successfully runs a company that allows his to travel for a living, The Seven Wonders Tour [with sponsors, Vibrams!].

-Continues to live healthy, travel the world, and be happy



I’ve included a 3-part video diary compilation of Aaron’s experience at the end of this post after the other case studies. Total viewing time is just around 20 minutes.



Enjoy these wonderful examples and don’t forget — your own video submission and comment on this post must be up no later than 5pm PT this Saturday!



Question of the day: where would you travel if you had a free round-trip anywhere in the world?

















###



Get the brand-new Expanded and Updated 4-Hour Workweek for the holidays, published 12/15, which includes more than 50 new case studies (including families) of luxury lifestyle design, muse creation, and world travel. Amazon can still make it in time, as can bookstores near you.



Odds and Ends – Live Q&A Tonight at 6pm PT (9pm ET)



6-8pm PST (9-11pm ET) tonight, I will be doing a 2-hour live question and answer session for readers. I’ll be using Ustream.tv here. This is the page you should visit tonight. If you can’t find it, search “tferriss” from the Ustream.tv homepage.



I also created a Google moderator page where people can submit and vote on their top-10 questions. This is important! I won’t be able to answer all questions from the chatroom firehose on Ustream, though I’ll answer a lot, so I want to get an idea of the most important questions people collectively vote for. Submit and vote here.



We’ll do our best to record the session, but there have been bugs in the past, so no guarantees.



Hope to see you there!

No More Excuses

Count me in on this one. I'll have my "muse" product up and running within the next 10 days. Read the post below for more details.
No More Excuses – How to Make an Extra $100,000 in the Next 6 Months

The Wilburns have created a multinational from their home.(Photo: Dana Smith)


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Winning has it's rewards. | TweetPhoto

Winning has it's rewards. | TweetPhoto
Bella won a gold medal 8-0 at her tournament this weekend. Great job girl.

12 weeks Post op and all is well

I just left my orthopedic surgeons office ( the best doctor in the area, in my opinion, Dr. Ted Gregorius www.empireortho.net ) for my 12 week post-op appointment and everything looks great. Physical therapy has been doing its job and I am healing on schedule.
Dr. Gregorius says that I can start in-line running on a treadmill next month and should be able to be back to full activity, including cutting sports ( read: Muay Thai Kickboxing ) at month 6. I'll get fitted for a custom brace that I'll have to wear for a year after that when exercising and we are trying to figure out a solution to what I will wear while rolling jiu jitsu as no one will roll with me with a fiberglass brace on my knee. We'll come up with something.
The best part of today's appointment is that I can start pushing a little harder know to work on growing the muscle mass back in my leg. Weeks 8-12 are precarious weeks with an allograph ( tendon harvested from a corpse)while it attached to my body, but know that week 12 is past us, I can start putting more strain on it. Yeah! I can really start working on getting the muscle mass back that I lost while being on crutches for 6 weeks.

So, things are going well and according to schedule and perhaps this blog will return to a blog of crazy athletic endeavors again, soon. Cheers!

A great video on Leadership

Here is a great video on Leadership featuring Mike Singletary, coach of the 49ers. Wow! Simple, straight forward and real.

10th Planet Jiu Jitsu

A great new video from Eddie Bravo.
10th Planet Jiu Jitsu

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Walking without crutches

Today I woke up and decided to ditch the crutches. The physical therapist said I could as long as I keep them around in the event that I have to do a lot of walking or prolonged standing. I am able to walk, albeit tentatively, pretty well. I have to fight the desire to limp and try to use the leg corrrectly, but all-in-all, it is going well and I am excited to be on the path to recovery.
Jiu Jitsu classes start back up next week. Not really. 5 more months until that is even possible, but at least I am able to start building back my legs for now.

I go for a walk ( sort of )

I had my 6-week post-op appointment today and am officially able to start weight bearing on my right leg. I get to start with my brace on and crutches wtih a goal to be crutchless and braceless in 7 days. My first steps were scary and painful. Every step burns my foot since it hasn't been stepped on in 6 weeks and after only a few hours, my leg is exhausted. I am heading to my first physical therapy session in my new status as soon as I finish typing this and will let you know how it went.

Chris

I think I like this guy!

I saw this Video Blog from the CEO of Go Daddy and thought the info it contains is really good. It is about being successful in business and since a secondary goal of this blog for me is to pass along things that I've learned about success, I thought that I'd post it.
For your viewing pleasure.......

Exactly how I blew my ACL

For those of you that have asked, I thought I'd post the video that shows exactly what I was doing when I blew my ACL. As you watcht this video, I would have been the guy in the red/black top. At 1:38 in the video he taps due to the pressure from the submission. Because I was pretty flexible, I did not tap. As soon as I realized that I didn't have to tap, I attempted to yank my right leg out of the lockdown that he had on it with his legs. Because my ACL was already torn pretty significantly ( a fact that I did not know at the time), and because he held the lockdown perfectly and straightened his legs to tighten it down even more when I tried to pull out ( the perfect response), my knee dislocated momentarily and blew the ACL. This would not normally have been the outcome and I beleive that if I had a proper knee at the time, it wouldn't have been the case. I thought this video would better illustrate what I've tried to explain to many of you.

Range of Motion Study*

An interesting study that I just saw on the Mona Vie site ( really, it was the first time that I had seen this study). If you think this would benefit you, let me know.


During a 12 week study on MonaVie Active, all participants showed a statistically significant improvement in range of motion with regard to the lumbar region and knees. In addition, participants noted a significant decrease in perceived generalized discomfort at weeks 8 and 12.

* This study was conducted in a relatively small number of healthy adults. Further studies with larger sample sizes are needed before these results can be generalized to the population at large.

http://www.monavie.com/Web/US/en/monavie_active.dhtml

10 minutes on the bike trainer yesterday. How silly that 10 minutes would make me proud, but in my current state, it does.

Back on the bike! ( sort of )

Friday's physical therapy session put me back on the bike. Yep, I was able to jump on their recumbant bike and pedal with the following directions; only use your left leg for power, your right leg ( the repaired one) is just along for the ride and the range of motion. Easier said than done.

I have practiced one-legged pedaling drills for years to smooth out my pedal stroke and get the most out of every rotation, but I've always had clip on pedals and the right shoes. There at the PT office, I had neither, so it was an exercise in brain-to-foot communication to force it to pull up on the upstroke and push over the top of the stroke. I was able to do it, but I was sure that when I had the right shoes on at home.

So this morning I pumped up my bike, which is currently on a bike trainer device

and carefully got onto my bike, which was actually very tough with the use of only one leg. I strapped myself into my clip on shoes and almost immediately had a religious experience as I turned the first full rotation of the pedals. It turns out that my triathlon bike puts my knee to at least 120 degrees of reflexion as it comes around. Bear in mind, that I can get to 120 degrees with the help of my physical therapist pushing on it. And, I'm it hurts. So, repeatedly hitting that 120 degree mark as I pedaled involved cussing, sweating, and prayers to God for help- repeated over and again in various order. I was able to stay on the bike for 5 minutes and will make it a daily happening from now on, while trying to increase my time each day. What it did make me realize is how far I still have to go before I am "normal" again. I'll need to be able to pedal without pain in each stroke and I know it will happen, but getting from here to there seems like a long way off. Wish me luck.

Stir Freakin Crazy

As of tomorrow I will be 3 weeks post surgery and I'm going crazy. I know that patience is a virtue that I need to work on and maybe this is God's way of helping work on it, but I'm not sure I'm going to pass this test.

3 more weeks until I get to put my foot down. I'm watching my upper thigh atrophy and I haven't broken a real sweat in 2 months. I know it's only temporary, but I can't wait until this is behind me. I think the physical therapist said that I get to start soft pedaling a bike next week. If that is the case, I am going to type a huge "Yahoo!" when that happens. I have my bike on the trainer in the garage and the minute that I can start using it, I will. I'll never take working out for granted again.

Yesterday, I worked out in the garage. I did 3 sets of bench press and some crunches. Since, I haven't done any working out in the last couple of weeks, I stopped there knowing that I'd be sore. I was right. Sure enough, I woke up this morning hurting. That would normally be ok, but now that I am using my arms to walk around on crutches, it just plain stinks. And the best part, tomorrow should be more sore. I am considering working out tomorrow night again, but can't figure out which body part won't be too bothered by the crutches.

2 1/2 Weeks Post Surgery

Ok, so I am 2 and 1/2 weeks post surgery now, so I thought I'd give you an update.

Aside from the fact that I am on crutches for 3 1/2 more weeks and can't put any weight on my right leg until then, everything is going great. The reason that I am 6 weeks of no weight bearing is that the cartilage repair that they did with the microdrilling is the thickness of a postage stamp and they want to make sure it is healed properly.

The physical therapist is good and has my knee bending to about 120 degrees of motion. It hurts when he does it, but I can tell that everyday it is getting looser. It sucks to watch my, already skinny, quad muscles atrophy. But that is par for the course when you don't use them for 6 weeks. Our goal is to have them equal size again by month 6, then I have been instructed by the doctor that he wants 20 percent increase in both of them in the next year. Hah! I say. I've cycled thousands of miles trying to grow these legs and it doesn't happen. But I will give it a try anyhow.

All in all, things are going great. I am enjoying some time off from work. I still work from home, but I don't have to go in and deal with the day-to-day office crap that goes on in there. I've been able recently to focus in more on developing our Mona Vie distribution team, which is where I'd ultimately like to derive the majority of my income anyhow being that it is passive, residual allowing for a way more flexible schedule, and the top out income is significantly higher than the radio station. I have been drinking my two 2-ounce glasses daily knowing that good nutrition will be instrumental in the healing process.

My amazing wife has been lived up to her billing in all of this. She's a taxi driver, super helper, and listens to my whining like she cares. God bless her, she's had a whole bunch of extra duty added to her plate and hasn't skipped a beat. She rocks!

Well, that's it for now. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and will appreciate working out more than ever when I can get back to it. Tomorrow morning I'll head out to my gym in the garage for my first upper body workout since the surgery so I can start fulfilling my need to sweat.

Talk to you soon.

More post surgery comments

Today is the 5th day after my surgery and my first real day of physical therapy. I spent about 45 minutes with the therapist doing leglifts, stretches, toe raises with an elastic band and most importantly bending my knee to a 90 degree angle with his help. Thankfully someone gave me the advice to take my pain medication so that it was max effective during the PT session. All things considered, it went remarkably well. I've got really good extension on my knee and getting to 90 degrees didn't hurt too badly. I think that being in really good shape going into this surgery and a pretty nutritionally complete diet, complete with Mona Vie shots daily, is gong to really help me pull through this surgery well. Today, during the therapy session, I was picturing myself being back to running, cycling, exercising better than I ever have. If we are right, and this ACL has been broken for a number of years, then I should be a stronger and better athlete than I've ever been. If I've been in the best shape of my life in recent years, with only a partial right knee, I can only imagine what I can do with a uncompromised knee. I am actually very excited and that is what is fueling my therapy sessions right now.
Here's the other fun part. I am going to try to get off the perkoset today and go back to the lower level pain meds that I had the first day of my surgery. So, I am living on ice today and trying to make it to tonight so that I will have cleared out the oxycodone and can move to the lower level stuff. That is the plan and it would have been better to make this decision on a non-pt day because the therapy session is put some extra strain in today and I sure would like a pain pill right now. Hopefully, this will all be behind us by tomorrow and then hopefully they'll let me move to high strength Ibuprofen where I don't feel so loopy.
Here's to my new knee!

Post Surgery

Here is my disclaimer on this post- I am under the influence of some pretty strong narcotics in order to block the pain from the ACL surgery I had 2 days ago. So, if this post rambles, seems disjointed, offends, or just sounds plain dumb, it's the drugs talking.

Wednesday morning, Yvette took me in for surgery on my ACL. Dr. Gregorius tells us right before surgery that while he is in there replacing my blown ACL with one from a cadaver, he was going to check on the break and the patella. If he needed to he'd trim the patella and if necessary drill some holes by the break in order to help that heal better. Worst case scenario he said and if he had to take these measure, it would mean 6 weeks of no weight bearing on that leg.

So, I put on the sexy gown, get wheeled into the surgery room where the anaesthesiologist slips some drugs into my IV while asking some questions. That was about 7 am. At 11:30 am, I hear them say that Yvette is free to take me home and I hear Dr. Gregorius tell her that he had to trim the patella and drill the holes. Yikes! Worst case scenario realized.

I've had surgery 3 times now and each time I distinctly remember thinking that they should never send someone home in the shape that I am in when they discharge me.

Nonetheless, Yvette and some rookie nurse dump me into the front seat of the Honda for the ride home. I spent at least the next 10 hours somewhere between moaning and screaming outright because of the pain. Wow! This one hurt.

My follow up appointment with Dr. Gregorius was at 1:30 the next day and the first thing he said to me was "How was last night?" He really didn't even need to ask. He's had 3 of these surgeries and knows what he did, so it was more of a "welcome to the other side of surviving that hell." He immediately upped my prescription from Hydrocodone to Perkoset ( about 2 times the strength).

I went in to my first round of physical therapy right after that appointment, a mere 26 hours after surgery. The PT seems like he's going to be ok and he's been through this surgery too. That means a lot to me, because I know he understands the pain. We worked on a couple of exercises for about 30 minutes then he sent me on my way to fill my new prescription.

The new drugs helped but it was still a tough night on Thursday.

It has progressively been getting better although there are bursts of crazy pain. However, I can't help but be excited that now I get to start the recovery process and when it is done, I'll have a knee stronger than I've had in probably over a decade. Everyone tells me to make sure I do all of my physical therapy and the harder I work there, the better I'll be. Anyone who know me, would know that those words aren't even necessary. Nobody outworks me at anything and I am the king of following through on commitments, so by the end of all of this, I will be in great shape.

Tomorrow, I am going to attempt to dial back the medication and hopefully get off of it all together by Monday. I hate the feeling out of being out of control and this stuff certainly provides that sensation.

Thanks to everyone who prayed for me or sent well wishes. I really appreciate it.

I blog more later this week, but right now I am drifting off to sleep.