SFH #67: A story today - How I decided to do a daily blog
Origin Edition 😉
I love movies. I do. I challenge anyone to a game of the original Scene It?. I played it once at a friend's house (Colin, Matt, and Kari—for my DC crew), and they were super annoyed with my playing after about 10 minutes. 😂 Okay, I'm not a cinephile to the degree that I relish the AFI 100, though I've probably seen 70 of them. After watching the likes of Citizen Kane and Casablanca, I can understand and appreciate the films contextually, but I care about the quality of the story landing on the screen. It's why I loved Tarantino in college (side note: I found Kill Bill online in 2001/02 and read it when both movies were a single long 3.5-hour run time, and the studio made him split it up). It's why I know the only reason you might know Christopher Nolan from making Batman movies (Christian Bale), Inception, and Dunkirk. However, he directed those successive opportunities because of his work from Memento and the Following. I read the script to Following in 2002 when I believe I found it on the shelf at Barnes and Noble somewhere in the US. 🤔
I traveled on the Nascar circuit in a Marketing Coordinator job in 2002 at the ripe age of 23. I was testing out the Atkins diet on 7-11 Diet Cokes and Protein Power Bars while eating salads from Subway on the highways of America. I was also trying to learn Spanish, reading about screenplays (wrote a script 🤪), and managing my way through the cultural education I was getting as a spry young professional living on the road and seeing Nascar America. I got a keen understanding of the unique, diverse, and complicated history of this country. I'm proud to be here; I'm also nervous at times. It's additionally another reason why I write this blog. Maybe a part II edition to this? 🤷🏼♂️
Coming back to the screenplay angle: I learned why I loved to write and why I was intrigued to learn more about film and the story making behind it. It's magical. Watch La La Land or LA Confidential or Hot Tub Time Machine or Avatar or Full-Tilt Boogie. I love the craft of storytelling. I believe I'm a total amateur at this point. People tell me to hurry up my story. I see some people squirm as I provide unrelated and innate details. 😜 And I love to learn how to get better. What better way to get better at writing than writing? It's what they teach you in most any writing course. As you study your craft, you practice and refine. Maybe three different people reminded me that most human beings wouldn't even notice how bad my writing is initially. It's just about getting it out there and getting better. If anything, I get to document my progression for myself and my future, discerning audience. 🎥
Courtesy of Powerbar.com and PowerBar™. It was definitely different packaging in 2002.
I love my health. I value my healthy lifestyle. I feel like I've lived a very fulfilling life because I have the gifts of energy, movement, pain, growth, and experience. I write what I know about, or care about, or want to learn on a deeper level. I like creative expression. I like full self-expression—that's still a great work in progress. 🙌🏽 Writing daily about my health and my experience, I realized could bring potential value to you and myself. Last summer, I ran a group coaching program as a trial run on a concept that I pivoted on after COVID hit. In the program, I wrote long daily emails. I'm talking about 3-5 times longer than this blog at times. The feedback was that I had good content, but it might be too much of a firehose or missing the mark. I wrote it as though I still had an audience of people like me, an ex-athlete or health enthusiast. I knew I had something good from most of the feedback though I needed to figure out what I had exactly. Then one day, it hit me (10 months and several influential guides later), and I decided to go for it with this blog. I had prewritten at least 15-20 good starting pieces within the emails. And more importantly, I understood and had a process in place. I love consuming and evaluating health ideas. And I am compiling on top of 20+ years of curriculum and learnings in my improving health pursuits. It lights my fire and hopefully stokes some flames within you. I'm working to a point where we both have something if we use the Jerry Seinfeld Strategy of checking off one day after the other something worth doing for ourselves. 😘
Courtesy of screenrant.com. I personally think Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is better than anything else he’s done on TV. 😳