Hello Everyone,

It’s the seventeenth edition of the Live Life Love newsletter, which finds us almost at the close of 2011. First, let me open by wishing you and yours the best holiday season possible! This year please accept this email as a humble substitute in lieu of a greeting card. It has been quite an engaging quarter so there was no bandwidth to get out traditional cards unfortunately; as many already know my wife and I are expecting a baby girl come the New Year. I’m really excited to experience the changes fatherhood will bring and I’m fairly confident that more than a couple of the future quarter’s life experiences will include this new edition to the world. Hopefully she’ll be inspired to start a project of her own some day.

Last quarter I set the milestone of running a sub-nine minute mile pace in a half marathon. I missed that goal by 43 seconds, but in the process ran the first long distance race where the second half was faster than the first (referred to as a negative-split) and I still ran faster than any previous race (referred to as a personal record – or PR for short). These two events occurred while participating in the inaugural Walnut Creek Half Marathon. Although I would have enjoyed logging a sub-nine finish, I graciously accept a new personal record, and more importantly my first negative-split, as a victory and this quarter’s life experience.

Walnut Creek Half Marathon 2011 | Mike Rucker
Walnut Creek Half Marathon 2011 Finish | 1:58:43
 

For this quarter’s business interview I connected with Erik Allebest who is one of the founders of Exercise.com, a website that helps anybody improve their well-being and health through various innovative online tools. Among Erik’s specialties are Web marketing and building sustainable monetization models. He is also the founder of Chess.com. My interview with Erik Allebest about Web entrepreneurship can be found here.

My health and wellness interview this quarter is with Alex Gourley. Alex is a University of California, Davis alumni and one of the co-founders of Active Theory, the company behind BitGym, a mobile application that has been getting a lot of recent buzz including recent features in TechCrunch and VentureBeat. My interview with Alex Gourley answering five questions about technology and exercise can be found here.

Regarding contribution this quarter I was excited to use the platform Kickstarter to help a high school friend and a college friend get one more step towards their goals. Dean Yamada is an inspiring filmmaker with some significant success already under his belt, he is trying to “kick start” his latest film project Cicada (more details about Dean’s project can be found here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1816764310/cicada). Eric Quick has a history of success in inspiring people to eat healthy with more than a decade of executive experience in the food industry. His latest project is a mobile application to inspire kids to make better eating choices (more details about Eric’s project can be found here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2076972205/my-food-fight-mobile-app).

One of the powerful ideas behind the Live Life Love project is data. In one respect it is the data/information I’m able to share from some brilliant minds in my areas of interest. More selfishly, it is the data/information that I submit each quarter committing myself publicly to create a life experience and contribute to the greater good (at least once every three months). Success is never a result of the “start”, it’s a result of the “continue”. If you have yet to experience keeping a journal or log where you track progress towards a worthy goal I challenge you to give it a try (whether it’s publicly shared like mine, or kept private is your choice). As we embrace the information age we’re living in it’s clearly evident that we can harness and utilize data in limitless ways to improve our lives. (Check out this great TED video highlighting the power of data…

Chris Hogg speaks at TEDx Silicon Valley 2011

…it is specific to improving health, but the concepts can easily be applied to improving overall well-being too.) By committing to collect data against a goal, you enrich your “continue”.

Whether this method towards success works for you, or it is another of your own design, my hope is that 2012 is one of many years to come that you exceed all your goals. As always, let me know if I can help in any way.

Warm regards,
Michael

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