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draw you line in the sand make a change

“When you really want something to happen, the whole world conspires to help you achieve it.” ― Paulo Cohelo, from The Alchemist

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Today I pose a challenge.

This small act that might change everything. You see, without a deadline many of us are nothing. We think and think about the things we want to do, like the dreams we have and the changes we know we need to make. Yet nothing happens. They remain in our future. They eat away at us - the things we wish we could do, but never actually take the action to make a possibility. And we wonder why we're disappointed they haven't happened yet... You're probably thinking of one right now. But why do we wait? We wait for the perfect time - which never comes. We wait until we're ready or when the next step feels certain. Unfortunately, that never happens either. How perfect is the timing of becoming a new mother or smoking your last cigarette? That's what I thought. But then again, perhaps that means it was right all along. Yet sometimes the smallest shifts can get us to take action on the things that have held us up for a lifetime.

Small changes can change everything

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Growing A Community Around Your Own Cause...

We've been talking a lot about the power of community in the past few weeks - both our community at Live Your Legend as well as the fundamental importance of the people in your own town. To take that a step further, today I want to give some very specific tools for growing your own online community around a cause you believe in. And it comes in the form of a special treat for you all - an insider's look into the workings of LYL. Whether you're currently building a career around your passions and the impact you want to make, or you're working towards getting there, building an online community is a huge part of making it possible. After all, nothing at LYL would exist without you all. So to teach us all a few things, I want to introduce you to my friend Derek Halpern. His site, Social Triggers, is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs use proven psychological principles to grow their business and communities. And he's damn good at it. In under two years he grew Social Triggers from 0 followers to a community of over 100,000 fans.

Supportive friends make you live longer

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"The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself."

- Mark Caine

Today's post goes hand-in-hand with our online presentation on: How to Find & Meet Inspiring, Passionate & Supportive People In Your Hometown. You can see the recording here.

Onward...

Is Your Community Helping or Hurting You?

The goal of Live Your Legend is to provide the ideal environment and resources for making your impact on the world. Everything we do is to serve that purpose for you all. By now we should all know that the people around us shape who we are. They will either mold you to change the world or cause the world to collapse on your shoulders. In order to do anything meaningful - be it lose 50 pounds, run your first marathon, or do the work and make the impact only you are capable of making, you must have a support network that helps make it possible. So I want to challenge you to ask what may turn out to be some hard questions.

Live Your Legend Live Event Field Kit banner

"Do nothing but put a group of passionate, inspired, crazy people in a room together, and the world-changing will take care of itself. "

- The Live Your Legend Creed

The Power of Having the Right People in the Same Room...

Today is a big day for all of us. We are launching a free tool that we think will dramatically change the impact that our community and this revolution has on all of us (and the world). It's been in the works for months and we're damn excited! As of this morning, the Live Your Legend LIVE Event Field Kit is available to download. And it's 100% free to all our community members (you can download it at the end of this article - and the kit also includes a graphic poster of the Live Your Legend Creed which has never been published on Live Your Legend!). The Field Kit is a very comprehensive step-by-step guide to hosting your own Live Your Legend Local meetup anywhere in the world. But more importantly, it's a tool for dramatically transforming your surroundings. If you're interested in hosting or attending an event, please leave your city & country in the comments! Now let's talk about why we believe this project has so much damn potential to help us...

love your work to live a long life

"Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease." - Hippocrates

The Health Benefits of Loving What You Do.

I believe doing work you love will change the world. But a lot of people still spend their lives filled with stress, anxiety and despair about how they spend the majority of their working and waking hours. As many as 80% of the world lives this way (although I'd like to think our Revolution here is beginning to push that number down). Yet despite the constant pain and frustration, we find reasons to push off change one more day. One day turns into a year, which turns into forever. But as we're about to see, there are serious risks in putting off the change you know you so badly need to make. The biggest risk of all? Life. Yes, there is real scientific and medical proof that doing work you don't enjoy will actually shorten your lifespan.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Sir Isaac Newton

Learning from Masters

TED is one of my favorite organizations on the planet. What their 2- to 18-minute-long talks and videos have done for the distribution of ideas, disruptive thinking and creativity is something I'll never fully be able to get my head around. I credit TED videos for much of the inspiration and ideas that have come to life through Live Your Legend - and just about everything else I do. They've helped me launch businesses, run ultra marathons, connect with world-changers and even kept me from having a breakdown from time to time... Aside from ideas and inspiration, I believe a good TED Talk is one of the fastest ways to start surrounding yourself with passionate world-class experts. That is priceless. I often watch at least a few videos a week and always have some saved on my iPad or iPhone for bus rides to the office, flight delays, whatever. The list below was very hard to make, as I've seen hundreds of talks and so many deserve our attention. So please look at this list as merely a starting point. Every one of the below videos have had a profound effect on my career and approach to the world - and for our purposes today I've only chosen the ones that cover the various steps of making the transition to doing work you love. Why more people aren't taking advantage of this stuff will forever baffle me. If TED hasn't been a part of your daily life before now, I hope that one of the people below will cause that to change. These are some of the best story tellers in the world (a skill that one is never done mastering). Pick one for now and follow up with the rest throughout the week. Enjoy the show... and share your own favorite talk in the comments so we can keep learning!