“Diligence is the mother of good fortune.”
(Benjamin Disraeli[1])
In my book, Turning Inspiration into Action, I introduced a concept that I believe is one of the three critical steps to personal transformation: Carefree Diligence. If you’re wondering, the other two are Personal Responsibility and Kaizen,[2] and you can definitely read more about them in my book, if you’re feeling curious to learn more.
In the meantime, a little on carefree diligence.
In his book, The Tao of Joy Every Day: 365 Days of Tao Living, Derek Lin says that diligence means having the “discipline to progress in a purposeful direction with consistency.” He continues, “It’s taking one step after another, without stopping but also without a frantic rush. The body may be in motion, but the mind is perfectly relaxed” as you enjoy the journey to your absolute best life.
The key words here are motion and relax. It’s important that you keep moving on your journey, but RELAX about it. Keep doing, but stop stressing. Enjoy the process, but don’t cling to outcomes. Trust in yourself that every small effort is a step on your journey (and in the right direction!), regardless of any immediately observable result.[3]
Carefree diligence feels like the best way to describe how we are continuously transforming Happy Living, too, and our embodiment of that concept is how we’ve captured the attention of Olympic gold medalist Joe Jacobi.
We started Happy Living with a simple goal: writing to inspire others to believe that a better self is always possible – today, every day, for the rest of their lives. My daughter Kaileen penned our first post, Hello, We’re Happy Living, on April 10, 2014, and a few months later, I joined her, after wrapping up the sale of my previous company. My first post was titled, What Happens After Dreams Come True? For the first year and half, that’s how we rolled—the two of us just kept writing, trusting that every post was one step on the journey of creating Happy Living.
Then came news that Kaileen was leaving the company to focus fulltime on her family. Her announcement caused me to rethink the way ahead. On March 2, 2016, I posted Exciting Changes Ahead for Happy Living, and introduced a new concept: Happy Living Experts. We brought in experts in specialized fields of health and wellness, adding their voices to the pages of Happy Living: Stephanie Dunne (Personalized Nutrition), James FitzGerald (Personalized Fitness), and Dr. Tom Sult (Personalized Medicine). We also brought on my son Kyle as our content manager and a contributing writer. Our team had changed and grown, and we kept writing to inspire others regardless of any immediately observable results. In other words, while it wasn’t clear that we were improving the health and wellbeing of the world, we kept writing, trusting that we are inspiring one person at a time to improve their life.
Then came A Creative Little Accident Called Blog Theatre when I reconnected with my friend Scott Barry, a college football teammate. It turned out that in the three or so decades since we last saw each other, he had become a critically acclaimed writer/performer. As we explored the synergies between us and our work in the world, Blog Theatre was born. Scott literally added his voice to our pages. You can listen to his ten-minute bursts of inspiration as he takes ideas from our blog posts for what he calls “a test run.” “Hopefully,” he says, “They’ll inspire you as much as they have inspired me.” We kept writing to inspire, and now Scott was performing to inspire too.
And now, Joe Jacobi. A few years back, Joe and I were introduced by a mutual friend and had talked on the phone. About six months ago, I happened to see a Tweet of Joe’s about his program called 5 With Joe ~ Gold Medal Mastermind.
I responded, because his message “to get your ideas out of your head and into action” sounded incredibly similar to the theme of my book, Turning Inspiration Into Action.
A few days later, we had another phone conversation and quickly realized we were like-minded. We agreed to explore synergies too. Joe started reading my book (he loved it and gave it a wonderful review!), and I took his on-line coaching course, Start Line (I thought it was great).
I took pages and pages of notes as I devoured the course.
It became clear to us that we shared a goal: using our lives to inspire others. Our means of achieving the goal were different, but synergistic. I want to write and publish books to inspire others to believe a better self is always possible, and Joe wants to teach, coach, and show others how to create their better self. So, we agreed to collaborate for an event in Portland called the World Domination Summit (WDS).
At WDS, we co-hosted Turning Inspirations from #WDS2017 Into Action In Your Life, and it was great. Our messages played well together and the audience loved it. We captured the essence of the hour-long workshop in this video.
In Portland, we made the decision to work together moving forward. Exactly how our partnership will develop remains to be seen, and that’s ok, we’ll just keep making progress in a purposeful direction with consistency and see where it leads us. For now, it is my honor to announce that my friend, Olympic gold medalist Joe Jacobi, will be adding his voice to the pages of Happy Living as our expert in the specialized field of performance coaching.
Please welcome Joe in the comments section, and follow him, too…
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Disraeli
[2] Kaizen is the Japanese idea that small, incremental improvements will add up over time to yield big results.
[3] Excerpt from Turning Inspiration Into Action, Chapter 15, First Steps
Image via Unsplash | This post may contain affiliate links, which means if you click and then purchase we will receive a small commission (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for reading & supporting Happy Living!