At some point during my pre-teen or early teenage years, I became aware. Astutely aware. I became aware that I was on this planet for a reason, and that my life had a purpose (beyond being an example for others not to follow). I had no idea what that reason was, how the purpose had been assigned, or how I was supposed to go about fulfilling it.

Fast forward 7-10 years later to the current day. As I look around at the world and its most “advanced” inhabitants, I see an eyesore… to say the least. Here we humans stand, as the only species possessing a brain capable of studying itself, yet we haven’t even managed to live peacefully without dividing ourselves into territories (and even then, we still have our quarrels). People are murdered simply for being different; money is stolen not for a greater good, but for an addictive psychotic high. The rich grow richer, the poor grow poorer, the powerful stay on top (until a scandal sends them crashing to the bottom) and the oppressed remain so. We pollute our only home like it’s a dime a dozen, all in the name of “productivity.” Our societies are run not by love, joy and peace, but by greed, fear and anger.

And every bit of it pisses me off.

I still have no idea what exactly I’m doing on this weird planet known as Earth, but I’m slowly beginning to figure it out. My mission, should I choose to accept it (and believe me, I do), is to make it all work. Not necessarily “make it work” as in tangibly be a part of every effort to improve the world, but rather see to it that major changes take place. Whether I’m spearheading a given effort, working behind the scenes, or gazing in the audience doesn’t really matter to me — just as long as it happens. Although, admittedly, not many other people have the blind audacity needed to tackle a pursuit of this caliber!

I’m not trying to be God; that’s God’s job. On the contrary, I believe that God is the one responsible for sending me on this mission in the first place, and I have no intention of going about it without some divine assistance.

Delusional? I never claimed to be normal. Normal is for the weak.

A mission like this can only end in one of two ways — spectacular success or spectacular failure:
1) By the time I’m finished, this world (and this universe, if necessary) will be a place that anyone would be proud and honored to show his/her children. We will be united with each other, not against each other, and we will have learned how to live without decimating our homes and our bodies. (Success)
2) By the time I’m finished, I’ll have realized that my original perception of the world was completely flawed, and that the world we now live in is, as nearly as possible… perfect. (”Failure”)

I am fully willing to accept that we may be far better off than I imagine. But mark my words: If the world does indeed have problems, I’ll be damned if they aren’t going to get fixed. Failure in that respect is not an option.

But here’s the kicker: I can’t do it alone. Rest assured that someday, I will be asking for your help… or maybe it’s you that will be asking for mine. Maybe it’s not my mission after all…

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For more information about my year-long Resolutions project, check out this post and this one.

For May’s update, we’re going to try something new and give you all of the bad news first. Read on, and you’ll see why…

• 20 Hours (of Productivity): 3
• The Bad: Despite getting a “free” 8 productive hours five days a week, the rest of my time has pretty much been wasted.
• Finances: 3
• The Bad: My co-op ends in less than three months, and I will have absolutely no income after that. Not that I’m completely broke, but it’s going to take some willpower to sustain myself until I graduate college.
• Fitness: 8
• The Bad: … Building muscles takes time. Lots of time. (Yes, I could have included some good news here, but I had to stay with the theme, right? )
• Social/Relationships: 1
• The Bad: Sometimes I’m pretty quiet, but my summer roommate is even more of a hermit. Combine that with the fact that I’ll be in work/class for over half of the day, and the social prospects are looking pretty dim.
• The Good: The theme of the month is “it’s in the works.” April and May were both fairly rough for a number of reasons (I’ll blame it on Spring Fever ), but things will improve… for your sake, if not mine! For starters, I’m going to keep better track of time, if for no other reason than to prove that I really am taking the “20 Hours” thing seriously. The Fitness Project will be ramped up even more, and a number of new projects will come into existence (I’ve got at least three on the cards right now). One of the summer’s big challenges will be seeing if I can combine the Financial and Social/Relationships areas into one really cool project… but you’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you?

The only thing missing now is a kick in the pants… but that’s most effective coming from you!

Changing the world is no small task. Every day, many people engage in “world-changing” activities such as performing community service or preaching an inspirational message to a church — the little things. These things can have an immediate and powerful positive effect on those nearby. Unfortunately, “nearby” is the key word in that sentence. As much effort as you may put into organizing a community cleanup day or serving at a soup kitchen, and as beneficial as those projects may be to your area, they do little to help the oppressed citizens of China or the starving children of Africa.

Any truly world-changing movement would require some level of service to local communities — you can’t do everything from Washington, D.C., as some say. However, you certainly can’t do everything from the comfort of your own home, either. In short, the philanthropic activities in which we most commonly engage are necessary but not sufficient to achieve the goals to which we aspire… or at least those to which Don’tASQ aspires.

Thinking big requires more than just an expansion of our current thoughts into new real estate. We can’t use the same strategies to affect one million lives that we use to affect one life. Let’s say, for example, that we’re strolling through an African desert on a camel (call it a low-budget safari). We come across a starving homeless man who begs us for something to eat. There’s no sign of civilization anywhere (we decide not to ask how he got here in the first place). The first solution which comes to mind is probably to give him some food and wish him well, right? But upon further consideration, we realize that we don’t have enough food to keep him alive indefinitely, and it’s pretty unlikely that any other low-budget safari adventurers will be traveling this way anytime soon. We have no choice but to take him back to our camp and point him in the direction of the nearest town.

Looking at the real world, we see a similar scenario for millions of Africans as well as people on other continents. Logically, if we extend our solution to the one starving man, we come to the conclusion that we must migrate every starving family to a different part of the world. It doesn’t take much thought to point out the reasons why that would go terribly wrong.

Our current solution to the large-scale case seems to be to throw food and money in their general direction and pat ourselves on the back for being altruistic. (Disclaimer: This is a very simplistic and only partially-realistic example. I have no idea how large the actual “feed the world” efforts are nor what methods are being undertaken.) This doesn’t work for the same reason why we wouldn’t have given our homeless man food and left him alone — we can’t give enough for an indefinite period of sustainability. Our starving beneficiaries will become dependent on our aid while we work doubly hard to generate enough food to feed them as well as ourselves.

As kind as that is for us to indefinitely provide for the rest of the world, it’s not exactly efficient. The best solution for long-term sustainability of any system is for that system to sustain itself with no reliance on outside effects. In other words, we need to teach these impoverished nations to fend for themselves.

In the case of our starving children in Africa, it may be difficult to teach desert agriculture if we ourselves don’t know anything about it. To solve this problem, we could invest more money into the research of arid-zone agriculture, and provide a solution to Africans once we’ve discovered something feasible. Hey, that’s simple enough, right? Just funnel millions of dollars into R&D, wait a few months, and watch the solution hatch!

Unfortunately, as we all know, it’s not nearly that trivial — hence providing us with another “opportunity” to think outside of the box. To feed Africa, we need research. To do research, we need money. To get money, we need a miracle- I mean, uhh… help from the government. To get help from the government, we need to convince some very stubborn people that our cause is worthwhile. And to do that requires a bit of charisma, a bit of word-twisting, and a lot of luck. Of course, any step in this process could be circumvented by a sufficiently altruistic person (e.g. the researchers could work for free), but then we’d still have to worry about convincing someone to personally invest in that manner. Who’d have thought that feeding a starving man could be so complicated?

Regardless of the specifics, any world-changing movement requires a fundamental shift of thought if it is to succeed. We cannot scale the solutions for a small region to the entire world, just as we cannot feed one million people in the same way that we can feed one. One of my reasons for launching Don’tASQ was to instigate major changes in thought, such as thinking from a global perspective rather than a local one. This will likely be a topic about which we write consistently (”we” meaning either myself or other writers), because I feel that it’s an important one.

Until next time… think big!

Starting today, I will be making drastic changes in the way I undergo the Fitness Project… and it’s all because of what’s known as the Colorado Experiment (with a few tips from Tim Ferriss).

Here’s the Colorado Experiment in one sentence: Participants gain large amounts of strength and muscle mass (and lose fat) in a relatively short time period by upping their workout intensity by about six notches, performing repetitions until exhaustion, and doing exercises correctly with a full range of motion, while decreasing the total workout time.

… And here are today’s results:
Bench Press (28)
Shoulder Press (12)
Bicep Curl (13)
Tricep Extension (7)
Neck Press (12 — Stopped here for monotony reasons; will find a better exercise)
Iron Cross (13)
Calf Raise (25)
Sit-Up (32)
Bent Over Row (25 — Stopped here for monotony reasons; will find a better exercise)
Dumbbell Deadlift (15 — Stopped here for safety reasons)

A few of the notations probably deserve comments…

Neck Press: Yes, it’s taken me an embarrassingly long time to realize that, well, the Neck Press just isn’t doing much. What I perform is called an Isometric Neck Press, in which the neck doesn’t actually move, but tries to prevent itself from moving while pushed on from any direction. Great for preventing serious injury — not so great for exhausting muscles.
Bent Over Row: This was a decent exercise until I reduced the weight following an injury. I may increase it and see if it becomes more challenging.
Dumbbell Deadlift: After 15 repetitions today, I had a feeling in my lower back which was indicative of an impending injury. I will need to take the back exercises very slowly, and will probably not exhaust those muscles nearly as much as the others.

I should add that the attitude I’m taking toward the sets has changed as well. I define “exhaustion” as the point when I must pause before doing an exercise correctly — if I need a breather, or if I can no longer perform correctly, the set is done. Also, you’ll notice that some muscle groups are exercised over consecutive sets; this is to further increase exhaustion. It would also explain why, for example, I could only perform seven tricep extensions today (an exercise which is normally easy for me).

If you have any comments on your own “Fitness Projects,” I’d love to hear them. This is, after all, a cooperative website, not a preacher and his pulpit!

This ends today’s episode of Exercise for Busy People.

For more information about my year-long Resolutions project, check out this post and this one.

The fact that I’m writing April’s update on the sixth day of May ought to tell you something about how the previous month went.

• 20 Hours (of Productivity): 5
• The Good: In the month of April, I wrote a total of seven entries in the Blurblog, which is the same number as February and March combined.
• The Bad: It’s still not enough. I haven’t put nearly as much effort into writing as I’ve been hoping for, and I’m definitely not hitting that 20-hour mark (ten hours if I’m lucky!) Perhaps some more concrete goals are in order…
• Random Sidenote: The two projects I’ve previously hinted at are still in the works. They were delayed due to various constraints — mostly beyond my control — but you can expect more information on those toward late May/early June. Yes, I’m just building hype. Sue me.
• Finances: 4
• The Good: I’m still working. 40 hours per week. Doing the same thing. Making the same salary.
• The Bad: Rather than focusing my efforts on increasing my income, I’ve resorted (well, not really — I’ve thought about resorting) to simply spending less. However, nobody ever changed the world through frugality, so I can’t be satisfied with stagnation.
• Fitness: 7
• The Good: Fitness Project. ‘Nuff said.
• The Bad: I’m still a twig, and there is still a mystical force preventing me from waking up early to run.
• Random Sidenote: I’m considering switching up my workouts a bit. Here’s something to chew on.
• Social/Relationships: 1
• The Good: A 1 is the lowest score on the scale, which means I’m not obligated to come up with any positives about this aspect. Unfortunately, I may not be able to, anyway.
• The Bad: I’m just too darn introverted, and I hate it. Not that introversion is necessarily a bad thing, but in my case, it’s a barrier, and it’s a barrier that will need to be removed. Coming up next: The Charisma Project! (No, this project is not a reality, but maybe it’s a good idea…)