Operation Treasure Monthly Report – February 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
It’s that time of the month again. When I break down what I’m doing to go from poor to wealthy and build an income online to free me from the prison of poverty and location-fixness I’m currently living in.
This month’s post is going to be short and sweet because I was on a semi-vacation in Las Vegas visiting my sweetheart for nearly the entire month. Not a whole lot got done business wise other than brainstorming and clarifying my vision further.
I did get most of a new design done for this site after getting feedback that the current design is, well, ugly. Later this week you’ll be able to see it. The design itself will constantly evolve as I learn how to design it better and have more resources to play with.
Blog Stats
This blog isn’t a business as of yet and has no way of making money any time soon, but it does serve as a launching spot for when I do launch my online business. For that reason, I’ll be sharing the stats each month on how this blog grows.
In February, this blog saw 514 unique visitors, for a total of 1785 visits and 7355 pageviews. Not a ton of traffic, but considering I only promoted it by posting a link to new posts on my Facebook page and commenting on a couple of other blogs, I’m happy with it’s current growth.
Once I get the new design up and have the website organized, I’ll begin promoting it from multiple angles and posting more “how to” informational posts, rather than the personal posts I’m now writing.
Income
The only income I did make in February was from selling a Home Study Course for the ACE personal training certification I got a while back. I sold the system for $300 on eBay and the timing couldn’t have been better for me because exactly a week later ACE came out with a newly created program making the older one obsolete and a lot less valuable. Not so great for the person who bought the system. Hopefully, they’re still able to use it.
I’m using this income to pay off the rest of the money I borrowed from my parents to buy the plane ticket to Vegas.
The Coming Month
In March, my only goals are to get this website fully updated, with all the pages current, and write all the foundational content this site needs. Once that’s done, I’ll begin writing informational articles and promoting them through social sites, other blogs, guest posts, etc.
Other than selling more things I don’t need on eBay to speed along my minimizing materializations goal, I project no other income coming in, nor any until around June, when I finally launch my online business with its first products.
It’s coming along slow, which is normal, and should start growing, exponentially, soon. I’m looking forward to the freedom it brings.
Operation Herculean Update – Week 4
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Just a quick update this week. I took off all of last week because my training partner got pretty sick from overheating in Bikram yoga and my upper left back around the shoulder blade was still bothering me from pushing myself too hard in a normal yoga class. I’ve been letting it recover and helping it along the way with self massage. It was starting to feel pretty good, then 12 hours of traveling from Las Vegas back to my hometown in Alaska jacked it up again.
So I’m taking another week to work on it and get it good enough to begin lifting weights seriously beginning on Monday, along with starting my real muscle building diet. This means I’ll start packing on weight from here on. My goal is to add 1 to 2 pounds a week to my frame over the next 4 months.
Currently my official weight stands at 172.2 lbs, only an increase of about 1 ½ pounds this month, but I also lost a couple pounds of fat from my waist. My main focus was to get conditioned to begin lifting weights seriously and besides my strained upper back muscle, I feel my condition is stable enough to begin.
Next week, Operation Herculean truly starts. Time to get rocking.
Jacob
Operation Herculean Update – Week 3
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Another fun event-filled week in Las Vegas and I still managed to gained 2 pounds while losing nearly another ½ inch of fat from my waist this week. Better results than I was expecting because my exercise and diet is completely unstructured right now.
Here’s a quick breakdown of what I did this week:
Monday
I did my first Zumba class ever, a type of hip hop/Latin dance cardio class. It’s a fun class for the right people, the girl I’m seeing loves it for example, but after trying it out I’ve decided I’m not really a fan.
I have two problems with the class. First, I have the opposite issue as most people in that I have a fast metabolism and don’t like stuffing myself full of food. Doing high energy cardio for an entire hour each day would quickly diminish my ability to gain weight and would likely make me even skinnier. And second, my energy levels are pretty low presently from being sedentary for so long, and the class is too high paced for me at my current levels (this should self-correct as I get fitter).
One thing I found very interesting is there was a few people in the class who go to nearly all the Zumba classes offered in the many different 24 Hour Fitness gyms around the city, yet they’re still fat after doing it for months. I found this out because they’re having a competition to see who can go to the most classes.
Apparently, my training partner was telling me, one lady looks exactly the same (looks like she’s hiding a mini elephant in her spandex) after going to nearly every class, sometime 2 or 3 a day, for 4 months. I noticed these same people were barely pushing themselves in class and most likely justified whatever they were eating after class by thinking they’re exercising hard in class. Very common theme: people think they’re exercising more and eating less. Bad idea. The opposite is usually the truth.
Operation Herculean Update – Week 2
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Another week, another quarter inch of fat gone from my waist while my weight and muscles maintained their own. This has been an eventful week full of joy, love, and passion.
I’m currently in Las Vegas until the end of the month and don’t have access to the same scale and picture setup I’m using to document my transformation (each scale is slightly different), so I’m not going to be recording official measurements and pictures during the two Sundays I’m here.
Instead, I’m going to record what I’m doing during my working vacation to improve my fitness and build my physical foundation to prepare my body for the intense weight training and muscle building in the month to come.
This week started with me missing my weight training session on Monday while I ran around getting everything ready for my trip. Then 15 hours of sleepy traveling on Tuesday to reach my destination left me no energy for the gym once I arrived in Vegas.
Finally, on Wednesday I reached the gym with my sexy current workout partner and we joined a PiYo class (a combination of Pilates and Yoga).
Whew, that was a core workout! I managed not to completely embarrass myself from my lack of flexibility and weak core and had fun in the process.
I remember when I was a traditional weight-lifting only guy and thought yoga/pilates/whateveryouwannacallit classes were for sissies. All these guys grunting and thrashing their bodies in every which directions attempting to impress their peers with their “big” bench presses are missing out on key aspects of health and fitness.
Of course, so are the Yoga/Pilates/etc people who think lifting weights will turn you into a meathead and won’t lift anything heavier than the pink 10 pound dumbbell. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Weights have tremendous benefits and so does yoga and Pilates.
How I Lost My Hearing
Thursday, February 11, 2010
This is a story that even I didn’t know until recently. The year was 1983 and I was just born and cradled into the world.
Like many newborns, I had jaundice, a common pathology that shows up as yellow discoloration of the skin and whites of the eyes caused by excess bilirubin in the blood.
However, unlike most newborns with jaundice, I wasn’t treated for it because my parents didn’t have medical insurance and the family doctor didn’t think my parents had any money to pay him and downplayed the issue.
My parents were sent home with me with just the causal advice to keep an eye on my condition. My mother watched me closely and noticed I was turning increasingly more yellow. She called the doctor concerned with my condition and he told her to wait another day.
The following day my skin and eyes were yellowier. Mother called again, getting ever more worried. The doctor simply asked if I was eating and sleeping ok. “Yes, I was”, said mother. “There’s no concern then”, he said.
The third day my condition continued to amplify. Mother again called the doctor, and again the doctor gave a run around. This went on until the fifth day after I was born, when the doctor, finally exasperated by my mother’s increasingly frantic calls, told her if she was that concerned, to bring me in for a bilirubin blood test.
The Test
So off we went for the test. Shortly afterwards, the nurse sent us home saying they would call immediately if the test came back high. No call came until the doctor checked in the next morning and asked us to come back in for another test. The first test had come back with a level 23 (to put that in perspective, my older sister was hospitalized at level 6 when she was a baby).
After the second test was administered, the doctor tried sending my parents home again, saying he’d call when the test results came back. My parents, sick of all the run around, were having none of that and refused to leave until things were taken care of.
When the second test results came back, the abnormally high level of 23 was confirmed, and yet the doctor, knowing my parents had no medical insurance and believing they had no way of paying for anything, tried sending us home again to wait and see if the condition would clear up on its own.
Frustrated and angry, my parents refused, so the doctor told them he would call a couple pediatrician specialists for a second and third opinion. With my parents sitting in his office listening in, he called two specialists whom both said I was at a very critical level and needed to be admitted IMMEDIATELY.
I'm a man named Jacob Cassidy on the path of personal evolution and world transformation, bringing those who want to join along with me. I was born and raised in the remote woodlands of Alaska by Mormon parents and lost most of my hearing as a baby. This created a very socially isolated and frustrated life for me. For years I felt extremely numb, depressed, and suicidal, and knew I had to break away from my old life or fade away in unhappiness. This is my ongoing story of transformation - my journey in a new life. My purpose is to live full of joy, love, and passion while showing others how to do the same.