• Measuring and tracking the data
• Being accountable

So, I decided to try something that I’m uncomfortable with, and make my journey to physical fitness a public one. Starting today, I’ll be tracking and occasionally posting a myriad of data, including:

• Diet
• Workout schedule, weights, times, etc.
• Weight, body fat percentage, measurements, etc
• Photos (probably NSFW )
• Results of physical fitness test (details below)

I’ll try and keep the actuals posts on the subject infrequent, probably once every few weeks or so, but I’ll have an area on the site where I detail all my efforts and what’s working, what isn’t, etc. I’m sure I’m not the only one out there who’s interested in this stuff, so hopefully we can learn from each other. I’m still working out all the details, but right now I’m planning on this workout schedule:

• Monday / Wednesday / Friday run to the gym for weightlifting (1.5 miles roundtrip)
• Tuesday – Run
• Thursday – Swim
• Saturday – Run or Swim if I feel like it

I’m giving myself one flexible “freebie” day per week where I’ll skip my workout if something comes up, as I’ve previously done the “workout every single day with zero exceptions” thing and while it’s doable, it gets really old. I’m currently working out 3 days per week and it’s much better to be able to fit exercise to my schedule.

I’ll be tracking my workouts and all the details, but I also want to get a bigger picture look at my progress over time, so once per month, I’m going to take the Navy SEAL physical fitness test, which consists of:

• 500 yard swim in 12:30 or less
• 10 minute break
• Max pushups in 2 mins (minimum of 42)
• 2 min break
• Max situps in 2 mins (minimum of 52)
• 2 minute break
• Max pullups with no time limit (minimum of 8 )
• 1.5 mile run in 10:30 or less

I chose this test because I’m familiar with it, because it’s challenging, and because I think it represents a fairly well-rounded approach to fitness. I’ll take it the first time within the next week or so, though I doubt I’ll be able to pass. Hopefully I’ll pass at the end of Feb or March, though.

Anyway, I hope that someone out there will find this interesting. Believe me, my intent is not to brag or show off in any way, as I think you’ll see when I first start posting my times and workout details. But I truly believe that you can’t grow inside your comfort zone, and I’m excited to see what kind of improvements I can make over the coming year. I hope you’ll join me.

I recently read Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk and I enjoyed it enough that I thought I’d post a short review.

For those of you who don’t know, Gary is a very successful entrepreneur who has really pushed the limits of social media and proven that you can build a powerful brand in a short period of time with nothing more than hustle and imagination. Gary started his social media empire with Wine Library TV, an online video show about wine that helped grow his family’s retail wine and liquor store into the beginnings of an empire that does tens of millions per year in revenue. Nearly 100,000 people watch the show. He later expanded into blogging and videos on social media and personal branding. He has hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook and nearly a million followers on Twitter. Impressive, to say the least.

Crush It! is the first book of a 10-book deal that Gary signed with HarperStudio and covers how to get started with social media and personal branding, no matter what your interests are. It’s a short read, maybe an evening or two, and it’s more motivational and strategic than tactical, though there’s definitely some practical advice. The three primary points of the book are:

• Find your passion and talk about it, relentlessly
• Build an audience, which may take time
• Be yourself

Gary’s primary point in the book is that social media has broken down the traditional barriers to building an audience so that now anyone can make an income off their passion, no matter what it is. This claim seems dubious, but he illustrates it with the example of worms. Say you love worms more than anything…you could do a blog and podcast about worms, and you could do so from several angles: fishing, the study of worms, worm farms, whatever. His point is that you by being passionate and authentic and creating an audience of other worm-lovers out there (and they are out there), you can make a good living off of it.

I tend to agree with him, partly because I’ve seen an awful lot of bloggers making a lot of money over the last few years writing about tiny niche topics, and partly because there are more than a billion people online and more joining everyday, and it just stands to reason that for almost anything you can possibly be passionate about, there’s a market-size group of people out there who care about it too.

Gary talks about how Wine Library TV only had five viewers when he started, but he just kept creating good content and engaging whatever fans he had, and today you can see the results. Another of his big points is that you may have to spend years working at it to really build the audience you’ll need to live off your passion. This might sound like a long time, but if you’re doing it because you love it and you’re having fun, does it matter?

One of the points he comes back to most often is the idea of just being yourself. Users can smell people being fake from a mile away, so the only way to build a valuable audience is to be honest and authentic. The only real question I had that the book didn’t answer was: what if you’re not the type of person who a) has a passion, or b) enjoys developing an online personal brand. However, I don’t fall under either of those categories, so I enjoyed the book. However, if you’re not really into Twitter or Facebook or blogging or online video or whatever, then maybe the book won’t appeal to you like it did to me.

The book has inspired me in several ways: first, I’ve renewed my efforts to stay engaged in the current communities that I participate in. Second, I’m going to be revamping my personal brand and making this site simpler and more expressive this year. Finally, I’m going to relaunch Bounteo.com, a site I started almost three years ago to talk about personal finance, investing, career development, and entrepreneurship, all from the perspective of young adults in the 20-35 age bracket. Unfortunately, I let the site languish and haven’t done anything with it for the last 18 months or so, which I really regret. I wonder what it could be right now if I had really focused on it. Maybe more like this. However, there’s no time like the present to turn things around, so stay tuned.

And buy this book.

And that’s depressing.

I want out of this machine
It doesn’t feel like freedom

This ain’t my American dream
I want to live and die for bigger things
I’m tired of fighting for just me
This ain’t my American dream

“American Dream” by Switchfoot

Short version: we’re launching a new web application called MightyReach that lets you create a customized dashboard of all your web and social media stats. Check it out and sign up to be notified when it launches!

Longer explanation:

We’ve had a blast working on MightyBrand over the last few months and we’ve got a new set of features that we’re going to be launching soon that we wanted to share. The idea is that we’ll be allowing you to create a customized dashboard where you can view all your web analytics and social media stats in one place. You can track visitors to your website, subscribers to your RSS feeds, followers on Twitter, views of your videos, etc. The best part is that we’re integrating with all the 3rd-party services that you already use, so you don’t need to change anything to use our solution.

While we were working on this, we realized that there’s a lot of people out there who might want this stats dashboard in a standalone app, so we decided to launch it as a new web application. It’s still in progress, but if you head over to MightyReach.com, you can get a feel for what we’re working on and sign up to be notified when we start opening up the beta program. And as always, we’d love to hear what you think about the idea and how we can make it better.

In mid-2006, Ben Lew, Ben Rasmusen, and myself all started working on a social network aggregator called BlueSwarm. The idea was to allow you to easily see what your friends were doing across all the different social networks. We launched it in July 2007 and got some decent feedback, but we weren’t sure how we were going to monetize it, so we started thinking about different ways to use the technology.

In April of 2008, we got the idea to build a social media monitoring service for brands. We started coding in May of 2008, using a lot of the existing code from BlueSwarm. We kept the name BlueSwarm and launched our prototype in September 2008. For the next few months, we gathered feedback from our alpha users, tweaked our business model, built out a slew of new features, and renamed the company to MightyBrand.

We launched as MightyBrand on Jan. 22nd, 2009. Since then, we’ve worked on MightyBrand full-time, helping companies and individuals learn how to build strong brands online using social media. If you’d like to know more, check out the MightyBrand blog and follow us on Twitter.

The last five months have been challenging and exhilarating and I’m gathering enough blog post material to get me through the next ten years. I’ll post some of my lessons learned later, but in the meantime, if you have any questions, please post them in the comments…I’d love to hear from you!

Anyway, I was thinking about this problem for a new service we’re thinking about launching in conjunction with MightyBrand and I had a thought: what if you had a contest where people could predict your pricing? You could either give the closest person (or a few people) a large prize, or award anyone within 10% of the correct answer a free copy or subscription of your product or service. People seem to enjoy those “how many jellybeans in the jar”-types of contests, and the advantage to you is that you get people to tell you what they think the value of your service is, before you set your pricing model. People could intentionally try and mislead you by telling you a really low number, but then they’d reduce their likelihood of winning the prize.

Brilliant idea or just really clever? Tell me in the comments

PS – If you use this idea, be sure and let me know how it turns out.

Hypothesis 1: As the popularity of a brand grows, its perceived quality grows to a point, then begins to fall, while actual quality remains static or grows.

Example: Microsoft software gets better and better, but as they get more popular, people begin to dislike them more and more.

Hypothesis 2: The difference between internal perceived quality (what we believe the quality to be) and external perceived quality (what we say we believe it to be) grows as the brand gains in popularity.

Example: people say they hate Wal-Mart and would never shop there, but they would be more likely to if they knew no one would find out.

My favorite examples that I’ve thought of so far: Microsoft, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart. Three of the most successful companies on the planet, yet many people I know love to rail on them, despite the fact that they’ve had a huge positive impact in the world. You may not agree on that last point, but I really don’t care…that’s not the point of this post.

PS – It occurred to me while writing this that perhaps this is a reflection of my friends more than the world at large