Let Me Reintroduce Myself
I wrote my first blog article in 2013, while I was still attending chiropractic school in St. Louis. I didn’t know it at the time, but dipping my toe into the water of digital media would change the way in which my practice and my life would playout for the next decade. Fast forward to the present day, while I’m not running a digital media empire, I have established a decent digital resume.
I’ve built multiple websites, grown a YouTube channel to over 14,000 subscribers, hosted many different podcasts, written a book, delivered a TEDx talk, and spent countless hours idled away on various social media and other digital experiments, over the course of the last few years. Through all of that, I’ve always been at odds with what I really wanted to say about certain topics, and what I felt I SHOULD say based on being the face of a small business. Many times over the course of starting and developing The FARM, my wife has appropriately kept me in check when I wanted to go on a tangent on a variety of topics or threaten to turn our YouTube channel into a satire-based look at the health and performance-based profession. Thank you, Sloan.
I’ve now come to realize that as long as I’m respectful, tactful, and well thought out in my attempts to dismantle some of the currently held dogmas surrounding human health and performance, I should only receive approximately 50% negative feedback. Whereas, if I went about my rants with reckless abandon I would probably receive about….well…50% negative feedback. That’s the rub, isn’t it? Social media and the digital landscape create a non-physical-based relationship with information interaction. Some of that digital buffer zone is great, as it allows people to get ideas out to the masses, while at the same time it opens up Pandora’s box for just plain crap information to permeate the interwebs.
All of that to be said, my main goal over the next few years via my YouTube channel, this blog, and social media is to try to demystify, deconstruct, and reframe many concepts around health and performance.
I guess I’m officially old (still not wise) because I recognize that I look back on parts of my life and compare them to how different it was compared to modern-day. For example, when I was growing up it was extremely uncommon for children to be under physical therapy care unless they sustained an actual traumatic injury. Nowadays, kids are getting treated for not only bumps and bruises that probably could have used a bit of dirt and a short walk, but they are dealing with more chronic pain than ever. Every 1 out of 9 youth experience chronic pain worldwide (The prevalence of chronic pain in young adults). Around 20% of the world’s youth are classified as obese, and approximately the same percentage of children deal with at least one chronic health condition (Chronic conditions in adolescents).
I look at these stats and my hair feels like it’s on fire! The future of humanity isn’t even getting off on the right foot, because that would require them to actually get off the couch first. In my opinion, we need a major shift in how we think about health and really how we live our lives overall.
As humans, we go about our daily lives barely aware of the amazing machine that we operate. Our body is THE most advanced technology the planet has ever encountered, yet we are more apt to read up on how to maximize the hotkeys on my Mackbook rather than learn how to optimize our health and performance.
This lack of awareness, and along with it may be a heaping tablespoon of IDGAF attitude has led our species to unchartered waters. I believe that the only way to navigate out of the health dilemma we’ve gotten ourselves into, is not to seek health, but instead go beyond health. As W. Clement Stone said…
“Aim for the moon. If you miss you may hit a star.”
If we aim for ‘health’ we will continually land short, because as humans we are not programmed to live a holly-jolly, bubble-wrapped life. We are designed to deal with struggle, adapt to the many environments, remain robust, and live for a purpose. We have to use our health, our bodies, and our minds, for something. That is WHY we NEED to be healthy. To be of use to mankind, to be creative, to be of value. In order to get to this place we cannot operate within normal limits, we must go Beyond Normal Limits.
I’ll be diving into the principles of the Beyond Normal Limits movement in a few upcoming blogs and videos, stay tuned.
