Twenty-five hundred visits to my gym in roughly 9 years. I was pretty impressed with myself early on that icy February morning. I knew this milestone was happening so I had my iphone camera ready to capture the evidence. I had a crazy thought that a parade would kick off or I would get a tiara to wear while I was on the cardio machines. But alas, there was no parade, no tiara so I just listened to episode #13 of Startup Podcast. Naturally, I posted the milestone photo on Facebook to share my good news and I will save the image in my new Evernote YAY notebook. (as suggested by Curtis McHale)

Todd Henry’s advice also helped me sort out this situation: “Make, Mark, Move.” The real accomplishment, as I see it, is not reaching a certain number of gym visits, it is the long standing habit (I think 9 years qualifies) of making a priority in my schedule to do something for the benefit of my physical and mental health. It is time for me to take Todd Henry’s advice and “move on” to next steps. Coincidentally, my gym is conducting a “change it up” health challenge starting next month. Normally I don’t participate in the gym challenges. I like to come and go from the gym as my schedule allows and not worry about times of scheduled events. However, this challenge seems to have enough flexibility built in so I can join.

The concept of “Make, Mark, Move” can also be applied to my participation in the Matt Report Pro members content creation challenge. The purpose of the challenge is to build a habit of creating regular content that can be used to foster awareness of my business capabilities. As I have created the new content pieces during the challenge, I imagined the same thing as reaching 2500 visits at the gym- something like a virtual parade or tiara to recognize my work effort. There is a prize for participants at the end of the content creation challenge, but that is not what is motivating my participation.

I am motivated to complete the challenge because it is good for the health of my business, will help me to be more sensitive to the demands on my client’s time, and recognize that it is not always easy for everyone to create a regular stream of new content. While I found myself expecting other people to celebrate my personal accomplishment of creating an article or short demo video, in the future I will simply press PUBLISH and momentarily celebrate in solitude.