Russell Keppner . com

Jamie Hastings died last Thursday. I don't know any of the particulars, other than what was in the obituary (attached below).

I first heard about it late Tuesday night, and at first it didn't bother me much. We hadn't had any contact in 20 years. But on Wednesday, I found myself in a lot of pain and pondering on the frailty of life and the amount of wasted potential in the world.

The funeral is taking place now, but I live in Arizona and am not able to attend. I still want to do something, though.

One of the topics I want to write about on a regular basis is diet and exercise, mostly because I struggle with it a lot. One of my biggest hurdles in building a business is having the energy and focus to do all the work required. There are a number of things that go into that, but today I just want to focus on what I eat and whether I'm getting enough (or any) exercise.

I'm almost scared to post again, even though I set a goal to write daily. I got a huge amount of responses on Facebook yesterday, but I'm worried that a lot of the posters thought my blog entry was just a status update, and so didn't read the whole post, which would have left a very negative impression without the ending paragraphs. Ah, the dangers of a socially networked world, but here we go anyway.

So, I've decided to seek full-time employment, back in Arizona. I'm trying to decide if that means I've failed at what I attempted. Certainly I haven't (yet) built a business that comfortably supports my family and allows me to live anywhere I wish, and that was the goal I had when I moved back to Idaho. But plans change—mine certainly do—and that's no longer my goal. So do I need to worry about achieving it?

Recently I've been watching the weekly webinars put on by OneCoach. They've been quite good, though mostly the same material is presented each week, regardless of the title subject. That's fine, since it tends to take me quite a few repeats to really knock an idea into my skull, so it's been worth my time. I may even have to take them up on that free business growth assessment.

But the one thing that really caught my attention and rang true with my opinions and experience is the idea that the single-page, twenty-screens-long sales page is dead, or at least not nearly as effective as it once was. I was glad to hear this, since they annoy the bejeebies out of me as a customer, and I hate writing them as a marketer. Don't get me wrong, sales copy is still very necessary, I just don't like to have to read it for half-an-hour.

I came across an interesting quote in my early-morning reading of Wild at Heart today, and it really got me thinking.

Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

So as I headed out the door for my morning walk, I asked myself (repeatedly) "what makes me come alive," but I couldn't come up with a decent answer. It was all just fuzzy stuff.