Jorg's Brain Log

Today I turn 33 years old. Where other people always use new years day to set new goals I’ve made it my habit to use my birthday to reflect on the past, current and future of my life.

Last year was an interesting year! On a personal level I learned a lot of new stuff about life and everything involved with it. I learned about trust, respect and honesty in good and bad ways. Not all were very positive experiences, but I can say that at least it made me a better person. Experience is key!

Now my 10+ year countdown timer has stopped and now that I’ve reached the big moment in my life, it is time to continue with some new stuff. I’ve set a total of 3 new countdown timers. Again all related to my age.

The first one reaches zero in 365 days, when I turn 34 and has a physical, mental and a task focus. I talk more about these goals in the next post.

The second reaches zero when I turn 35 years, 2 years, and has a professional and financial focus. And the third countdown reaches zero in 7 years when I turn 40 in 7 years and they consists of some major goals on where I want to stand in my life at that age and time.

Some people find it difficult to set long term goals, but it appears that those same people are also afraid to dream! I’m not saying that everything I set as a goal is succesful, but it is a way to get  focus in your life. And if I look back to when I was 21 and set some goals for my 33th birtday, it is nice to see that I’ve reached 80% of them. Now I only wish I set my goals somewhat higher…

The last of ten rules that I try to master in the program I’m following. And a very interesting as well as challenging one!

My goal with this rule is to keep connected to my friends. Friends is a definition that is highly arguable in these times. For me it means the people who I’ve got a personal relationship with. People with whom I talk about my family, hobbies, etc. It is no longer people who I’ve met in real life in this digital age. I also got friends who I have never seen in real life.

Different tools for different circumstances; my preferred way is of course a face to face talk to keep connected, but a simple phone call will work good as well. If that isn’t really an option, due to time differences or other reasons, I can always take the digital tools and send them a message on facebook, twitter them or use the plain old, but still best, email function.

Having friends around you that can help you grow and whom you can help them grow is a very good thing! Have friends who you can trust, have friends who have certain knowledge, have friends who are fun, … there are so many different people! Just enjoy the company of people and talk.

In Rule 84/3 Train Mind I talk how I can improve myself. One of the ways is to read. As an autodidact I read a lot. 2 books a week is normal, but I try to read around 500 pages a week, but for sure there are some weeks that I read more then 1000 pages. Why do I read? Mostly to learn. Because when I learn I get new knowledge and I can use this knowledge in my own life for improvement.

If I look at my own library which consists of around 500 books I’ve categorized them in the following main topics:

• Sports: Weight training, Track & Field, Running, Cycling, Swimming, Triathlon, Scubadiving, Freediving, Stretching, Coaching/Training, Martial Arts (around 200 books)
• Nutrition (around 50 books)
• Autobiographies (around 50 books)
• Psychology (around 150 books)
• Travel/Topography (around 50 books)

One of my favorite things to do is searching for new books to read. I can spend hours in a library or book store. Books are a good investment! If I could choose to do a psychology course of 5000 euro or to buy 2000 euro worth of psychology books, my choice would be easy!

If you want to improve, you just have to read books! Knowledge in its best form.

Not many people know this about me but nothing gives me more focus, concentration and relaxation at the same time as making music. Since I was 6 years old I started making music. In the first years I learned a lot of different instruments like Piano, Flute, Xylophone, Violin and some other basic instruments.

After that I started with the harmonica together with two other guys. We formed a group that was quite successful in the Netherlands and Germany winning many prizes. Some years after that it was time to add another instrument: The Guitar. Again I took some lessons and it’s just a great instrument. A plan was made to go to the conservatory for further guitar education, but somehow I ended up doing some boring ICT education.

All in all, music has been in my life since forever. During hectic times it’s easy to forget to play, that’s way I created this rule, to remember to make some music a few times every week, if only for a few minutes. Good thing is that my son wants to start learning the keyboard, so we’ve borrowed the keyboard from Sanne and as well as my son as me are playing around with the thing. Maybe when my son starts with his private keyboard lessons at home, I listen in and try to practice it as well.

In the last few weeks I’m doing a lot of writing again. Writing can be a lot of fun and rewarding if you can find the passion in it. And I’ve found it again. I thought I would give an overview of all my current writings and where to find them.

www.jorgjansen.com

My personal website with my own ramblings about the stuff I find interesting. I’m currently splitting up some stuff between personal and professional interests. So the current blog where you read this post will be personal from now on. Like an online open personal diary of my live. Think Jorg’s Lifestyle archive, or something like that.

www.shark-freediving.com

The Team SharkBait website with entries from our personal freediving experience and trainings. Sanne Buurma and I mostly alternate to write something for the blog as long as it has some of the following keywords in it: personal, freediving, training

www.shark-freediving.com

My website for your daily portion of freediving news. Competition coverage, record stories, national news, etc. Loads of stuff going on over there.

My Book

Inspired by Sanne after some talks I decided to write a book. I’m just in the first months of it, but for me it’s an interesting project by itself. I’ve never written a book before, so lets see how far I can come. What’s it about? Can’t tell yet, but I will let you know as soon as I know it for myself.

New Blog

As we speak I’m setting up a new blog on my personal website. It’s a blog were I write about my professional interests. At the moment I really want to focus on there, so I’m wrestling a little bit about the topics, because I’m interested in so many things. I’m also still deciding if I should write in Dutch or English on this blog. As soon as it goes online I will announce it here as well.

That’s it with regards of the writings. I hope to put my writings to higher speed when my new home office is finished. Concentration is key in writing, especially with my distracting mind.

I thought I would give an update again on what is going on at the moment in the life of Jorg. 2009 is already an interesting year and there is so much going on.

One of the things I’m the most proud of is that I’m really sporting again. Not like 1-2 times a week, but a real schedule with set goals and everything. On January 4th I started my ‘getting back in shape, start sporting and loose many kilo’s’ schedule and I must say it worked real well. I lost 10 kilo’s, did 4 fitness sessions a week, 2 times running and 2 times swimming and some freediving. All in all it felt great to be back in the gym, water and on the road.

3 weeks ago I tested my body in the snow: 1 week of snowboarding, and I noticed  that my body was again more ready for the task than 3 months before. But apparently I was not done yet; the week after snowboarding I was sick (it was a long time ago!). My throat hurt like hell and I had to cough every few minutes. So while I wasn’t really down, sport wasn’t an option either. Last week I still felt some pain in my throat but I decided to start with some cardiovascular work again: some running and swimming. While it wasn’t that easy as normally because of my throat I still managed to get some work done.

Stupid thing is, that once you get out of your schedule, everything get mixed up. Besides barely sporting for the last 2 weeks, I also dropped my newly build eating habits. And in conclusion I added 2 kilo’s, getting back to a healthy 118 kilo’s. You want to know what a healthy 118 kilo’s can do? Check this!

So physical activity was good in the last months, but not really in the last weeks. So time to improve again! From today on, I’m back on a good schedule. Rule: Minimum physical activity a day: 20 min

I will publish my whole sport/life schedule later on. It’s an intense but low volume schedule! More sport moments and less time spend on sport. So that I’ve got time to develop the mind as well.

In the last few weeks I discovered books again. When I was around 20 years old I did a speed reading course by Tony Buzan to get me through my study books. I used it for several years but afterwards I somewhat forgot about the technique. As I was reading again some books in the last weeks, I started applying the techniques again and speed went up big time again. I don’t really have as much time as I would like for reading but I still manage to do around 1000 pages a week. That’s around 2-4 books a week, and it’s a good schedule I try to keep up with. The last 3 weeks I read 9 books and 4 were really interesting and gave my some good new useful knowledge.

Due to some professional changes (I will write about this later) I also had the opportunity to spend a lot more time with my kids and girlfriend and learned the importance and pleasure in this again. Time with them is the most important thing in the world to me so it was good to be so close again and be in their 9 to 5 lives for a few weeks.

Sleeping has been terrible the last weeks. Where I normally slept for around 4-5 hours each night, I now regularly sleep for around 6-9 hours and still feel tired afterwards. Now, I’m going to give my girlfriend the fault for this because she needs a lot of sleep and she likes it when we go to bed at the same time. But damn, it’s so frustrating to go to bed at around 23:00 hours and get up at 8:00 and still like to stay in bed. This has to change big time, now! It just doesn’t work. So I’m going to set the sleeping pattern back to 6 hours a night (still much more than the regular 4-5 hours), and do a micro sleep in the afternoon. I want to sleep and not feel tired afterwards!

The above where just a few things I’m busy with improving. There are some interesting projects going as well, but that’s for another blog post later on.

Enough on me for now! How’s your life going on and how are you trying to improve it?

I’m a real Internet nerd, I have my complete digital life stored in the cloud. Some people will start arguing that that is not something very smart, or that it’s dangerous and I could give you my whole list of actions/thinking’s what I did to make it ‘safe’. But that’s not the point of this post.

Last week when I was on vacation, I thought thinking what was not yet in the cloud yet on my laptop. I opened my laptop and started looking what I had installed on it. Thanks god, it was a very short list. I remember the days that when I clicked on Start my whole page would fill up with lists of stuff I had installed on my pc. Here’s is the complete list:

Windows XP,7-zip, Belastingdienst (Software for sending my taxes directly to the dutch ‘IRS’), Dropbox, Evernote, Filezilla FTP-client, Foxit Reader, FTD, Google Chrome, Google Desktop, Google Earth, Google Talk, ID Software Quake Live plugin, K-Lite codec pack, Mozilla Firefox, Imageburn, Network Associates McAfee, Newsleecher, Picasa 3, Videolan VLC, Tweetdeck, Openoffice

Windows XP and McAfee came pre-installed on my new laptop 1,5 years ago and the rest of the software I use is all free. So all in all I say that 95% of the time I’m working on my laptop I do this in Google Chrome. My non working time mostly consists of using my laptop as a media player for my movies, music and photo’s. If my laptop gets stolen, or falls down the table and it breaks it hard disks… no problem. Everything I have on hard disk is back upped by dropbox the minute it is created or changed.

So instead of a big clumsy laptop I need a new and smaller Internet device/media player. I recently got myself a G1 android phone and I’m very pleased because of the easy OS and great functionality the phone has. If only it had a big screen and keyboard, I think it would already be enough as a laptop replacement.

My ideal Internet device would have the following features:

• Connectivity: WiFi, Blue-tooth, Giga-Ethernet, HSDPA
• Battery Life: at least a 6-cell battery that last for 8 hours or more. A whole working day without recharging.
• Good keyboard, nothing strange or too small
• Good screen that is viewable in every condition. Also directly in the sun. Think 1280 x 800 as minimum for ideal working environment. Think 9/10 inch max. Touchscreen would finish it to make it a good media player as well.
• Hardware that does the job: working in the cloud and acting as a mediaplayer. Oh and of course the mandatory web cam for videoconferencing.
• Good expandable solid state memory options, USB ports and HDMI.
• Doesn’t look like a toy! In other words: I can bring it as a business device to customers.
• Custom Linux OS: Android would do the trick for me. The tight Google integration is ideal for my needs.

At the moment the yet to be released Asus Eee PC T101h is the closest thing coming to it, but many other manufacturers are releasing new netbooks every month that come closer and closer. I still have a few months before I must buy a new device, so I keep an eye out to some new and interesting netbooks that come out and update about it here.

I don’t expect Android to be available on any netbook before the end of this year, but some people already made it possible to run Android on a regular Asus Eee PC. I just love open source and its enthusiastic community.

Everybody should follow his passions. So what are Jorg his passions? Let just start naming all the things I like. 60 seconds, go:

1. my kids
2. girlfriend
3. sport
4. family
5. friends
6. freediving
7. fitness
8. power lifting
9. nutrition
10. human powered individual sports (big list!)
11. books
12. movies
13. autobiographies
14. technology
15. innovation
16. future web apps
17. social web
18. people
19. body language
20. fun
21. parties
22. sushi
23. other good food
24. the sea
25. learning
26. presenting
27. coaching
28. teaching
29. vacations
30. snowboarding
31. cloud computing
32. mobility

Okay, it took me 1 minute 33 seconds to write it down. And if I take more time I can probably make the list even longer. Some stuff is in the same league, so when I categorize the whole list I come to the following passions:

1. People
2. Sport
3. ICT
4. Innovation

Funny, if I look at the list above and look at the slogan of the city I live in…

Eindhoven – Leading in Sports and Technology

That shouldn’t be a coincidence. Anyway, it’s good to know your passions! This way I can use them to make good judgement on future professional and personal projects.

From now on I publish my schedule each week, so I can look back at it and see how it went. Short summarizing of what I will do this week:

Mon: rest
Tue: Fitness Shoulders
Wed: Fitness Arms/Abs
Thu: Cardio 20 min
Fri: Cardio Swimming 20 min / Freediving / Fitness Chest/Back
Sat: Fitness Legs
Sun: Cardio 20 min

For nutrition I’m not doing a real schedule, just eating healthy. No supplementation yet and no calorie counting or writing down exactly what I eat. My first priorities are at eating healthy and doing four fitness routines and 3 cardio routines for the first 4 weeks. If that goes as planned I make the next step.

Same with stretching, this will be incorporated into the schedule after the first 4 weeks are successfully done.

2009 already. Time flies when I’m busy. Got some exciting stuff lined up for this year, as well in my professional life as in my personal life (which are interconnected to max at the same time).

I never made any new years resolutions, but this year I’ve written some down. And the first I want to share and put online is my mission to a healthy body. In short: in the next 84 days (12 weeks), I’m going to change my eating and sporting behavior. This in order to get back into my healthy lifestyle I was used to until something got lost somewhere.

My last post here I already talked about good habits, but unfortunately due to mainly personal stuff I didn’t have a change to really commit myself to the plan. This time I completely made the plan, looked if it would fit, and the committed myself to it.

To not make this post too long, I just give a summary of what I’m going to do, and get back on the different aspects each week as the progress continues:

1. Weight training: creating an athlete body by increasing strength and muscle mass and thereby increasing my rate of metabolism.
2. Cardiovascular training: for improvement of blood and the transport of it
3. Stretching: specific stretching excersises to increase flexibility and therefore strength and cardiovascular system.
4. Sport specific training: this will create the real fun part: snowboarding, freediving, athletics, etc. Also for improvement of balance and control.
5. Nutrition: you are what you eat. Because it’s stupid to be a pizza, it’s time to re-energize my body by eating like a caveman and following a paleolithic diet.
6. Rest: sometimes I forget to take rest, so I have to figure some stuff out first and this will be the most unexplored area for me personally. But it’s time to make some change to my 4-5 hours per night sleeping sessions.