The following is a great passage that I read today about the benefits of taking risks and getting out of our comfort zones.  I hope you enjoy it!

-Nate

The first time anything new and creative is proposed, it gets labeled. And the label put on these novel things is likely to be “risky.” Can’t you just hear it?

“Let me get this straight, Orville. You and Wilbur are building a machine that will do what? Heavier-than-air flying machines are the riskiest hoax anybody ever palmed off on two gullible boys like you Wrights. Get a real job!”

Or maybe it was somebody’s harebrained idea of talking pictures, black and white children attending the same school, or people walking on the moon. More than one person was berated simply for giving voice to such “silly” ideas.

It turns out that some of the people who dared to propose such outlandish possibilities are now regarded as geniuses – revolutionaries – heroes. And it was only because they dared to question others and to question themselves. They challenged the limitations others were willing to take for granted.

There is something in your profession or business, your family or church that could be done better. A situation could be more productive. A relationship could be healthier. An objective could be clarified. Some lofty ideal to which all in the group give lip service could actually be implemented. But I warn you up front: Like restoring a car or house, it will take twice as long as you thought, cost far more than you anticipated, and strain every important relationship in your life!

Only you can decide if it will be worth it to undertake something so ambitious and costly. There will be false starts. There will be embarrassing mistakes along the way. But the potential outcome could be as important to your personal situation as the achievements of the Wright brothers, Rosa Parks, and Neil Armstrong were to their time and place.

The problem with our world is not that there are no more frontiers to challenge and conquer. It’s that there are too few explorers. There are too few people willing to ask the obvious questions and challenge the traditional wisdom. In a word, too few of us want to take the risks that could make us look stupid.

If you are fortunate enough to have a dream in your heart, be willing to make mistakes in pursuit of it. Be a risk-taker. You just might change the world.

-Rubel Shelly

Hello LIVIN’ family! This is my first official post and update without the help of Phil, so bare with me if it doesn’t look right…or sound right for that matter

To catch you up on my “goings on”, 2010 was a beautiful year of serious growing pains. LA is not an easy place to start over. It is a place where people come to build their dreams, so it is full of brilliant, talented, motivated people, and in this economy that means the competition for anything and everything is fierce. They say if you can make it in LA, you can make it anywhere. I can attest to that. I almost packed up six months into this endeavor, and moved back to Colorado, where my life was full of wonderful friends, laid-back vibes and a place i will always call home because that is the way it feels to me. I feel like Coloradoans are my tribe, my race, my family. It’s the feeling i get every time I enter that special territory of the Rockies.

But Venice was calling. My soul was restless. I had fallen into an easy flowing pattern of mentoring and enjoying the bliss of simplicity. I had reached that summit and was enjoying the most epic of views. I had the perfect girl, the perfect job, the most loving and accepting friends, an incredible playground of all my favorite activities and views, and the time and money to travel to and experience anything that was missing. But it wasn’t enough.

So I set off on an adventure around the world with the perfect girl, and enough monies that neither of us had to worry about any “have to’s” our whole trip. We were looking for that ever elusive experience we call FREEDOM!

Not many people have this opportunity in life. Freedom is something that sounds way more blissful than it actually is. Don’t get me wrong, it has it’s most blissful moments, but much the same as TRUTH, it can really hurt sometimes. (Sorry if it sounds like I’m going off on a tangent, but it is all related and is the foundation of all blogs going forth and any programming I will be doing through LIVIN’

My point is, that the last three years of my life have been a very important, transformational mid-life re-evaluation and I am finally coming out at the next level. Freedom brought me the truth about me.  Every fear and insecurity that I had locked up in safe places when I was in my comfort zone just came out, like bats flyin’ out of a cave at suppatime! (I still have the beautifully haunting vision of an endless flow of bats flying out from their den straight over my head for what seemed like a half hour solid in Byron Bay, AU)

What was holding me back on some level? What was missing in my life? It was my purpose. It was my belief in myself that I could do something special. Better yet, create something special. Something bigger than myself, that had great reward for much more than myself, or even others. I realized i was meant to assist in creating connection back to nature, community, and the health and happiness of everything living. I needed to lead by example and I needed to develop a new pattern in myself so I can be more productive in this endeavor.

Since moving to Venice, I lived in a van (not down by the river, but in the back of a house), then a POD (cross between a tiki hut, a yurt and a lean-to) with open air flow on the front and back sides, and finally into my new POD built by Dustin and JP of O2 Treehouse (pics of all three below). The cool thing is that i was able to live and experience each of these “homes” at each different house ran by the infamous Bobbyi. Each house is considered an upgrade on some level, but i wouldn’t trade my moments in each place for anything. Learning to live in an intentional community house has been one of the best growing and fulfilling experiences of my life. I am a free spirit at heart, and will probably never settle down anywhere for good, but for whatever reason, moving into this latest POD, living in a house that has a clear higher intention that is not only in line with my vision but that I get to help create, and that is full of people that I feel connected to but are very different from me with their own vibrant dreams and visions for themselves and this place……..

I feel home.

H2Om

Heath

99% re-purposed materials shanty on the side of a garage

Van down by the backyard fence, 25 people living in a normal size house.

POD sandwiched between two orange trees

Peas

The creators of LIVIN’ are always looking for exciting, cutting edge, FUN and new ways to exercise and interact with people on a physical level.  Yesterday morning I had the opportunity to demonstrate ViPR, the hottest fitness tool of 2011, on 9 News.  Check out the link below to see a quick video:

ViPR Demo on 9 News

Enjoy!

Nate