Everyday Exercise: My Small Product Lab Experiment
Last week, on a lark, I signed up for the Gumroad Small Product Lab. It’s an initiative by Gumroad to encourage people to create small products to sell on their platform. It’s completely free to join, and takes the form of a series of daily lessons and steps, along with help from successful internet-famous creators like Nathan Barry – a guy I’ve been following for years myself – and a great private Facebook group full of lovely people undertaking the same process.
I never thought I’d actually follow through with it, you understand. This must be the fifth or sixth time I’ve told myself I’ll finally have a go at creating some sort of eBook and getting it out there. I’ve bought courses, books and domain names and yet not done a single tangible thing towards creating something. I never had a good enough idea, or believed enough in my ability to complete it. I’ve always let the resistance win.
Somehow, this free course from Gumroad has actually got me in motion, at last. I opened up the day one email and (gasp!) actually followed through. And then, amazingly, day two went much the same way. Day three was wobbly, and without the help of a friend I may not have made it, but here I am at day four, still moving.
In fact, I feel more solid than I did yesterday, more sure of myself. I’m doing this now. I can feel the ol’ engine starting to purr like it did during crunch time on the GroupVite MVP. I’ve had sleepless nights where so many ideas were spinning through my head that I couldn’t switch off without an hour feverishly scribbling into my notepad. I’m waking up early, mind racing, and reaching for that notebook again to carry on.
It feels scary and stressful and yet hugely exciting. Is it partly because of my work on GroupVite that I seem to have built some side-project brain-muscle at last? I have no idea – and it’s a question it may be worth exploring in the future – but for now I’m just strapping in and enjoying the rollercoaster.
On August 6th 2015, I will release a small product that I hope can help everyone. What product, you ask?
Everyday Exercise – The Daily XP Boost For Your Body is an attempt to give people a way to effortlessly integrate movement and exercise with their daily lives.
We weren’t designed to hunch at desks all day, only moving around during tightly structured one hour sessions. Humans are meant to move. It can do wonders for your mobility, strength and all-round health. And hell, it’s fun!
In Everyday Exercise I’ll give you some ideas for specific movements, and when to work them in, and also attempt to help you come up with your own ways to inject more activity into your day-to-day life. My aim is to make this an enjoyable, informative read that can really help us all to get healthier. Hopefully it won’t be just another “20 ways to exercise every day – you won’t believe number fourteen…” clickbait listicle.
Note to self: write 20 ways to exercise every day clickbait listicle.
Ahem, anyway, as James Altucher says, if we can all get better just 1% every day (give or take the odd Netflix-and-pizza day off), we’ll get markedly better every year. I like to think of it like video game characters levelling up with experience points (XP). You pick up 50XP here, 20 there, another 40 somewhere else and boom, you’re getting that sweet level-up satisfaction before you know it. It just takes constant small, easy, sustainable action that compounds over time to produce massive results.
With Everyday Exercise I want to help people to level up their body a little more every day.
The full blurb (this is a preorder link – get a 50% discount!) can be found here. Even if you aren’t interested, I’d love if you could share this with someone who you think might be.
If you are interested, please comment and let me know what kinds of things you’d like to see. Does this book description make sense? If not, I need to hear that, too!
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