#findkevin

Writing this reminds me of what I wrote a couple days before I left a month ago. Click here to read it.

I still remember the complete fear I felt walking into LAX after giving my Dad a hug goodbye. I’m surprised I didn't faint!

I have never experienced emotions quite like that before. It was surreal. Pure exhilaration and then utter terror! Will Smith has an amazing quote, “God put the greatest things in life on the other side of maximum fear.”

Even though I was completely scared and had no idea what I was getting into this has been the best month of my entire life. The growth you experience by being completely self reliant while being outside of your comfort zone is remarkable.

This has also been the most challenging month of my life.

This trip is 24/7 outside my comfort zone! Which is actually the most positive part and at the same time the most negative part. There’s no timeouts out here. There’s no feeling safe by hanging with my friends and family. I don’t have my comfy couch and 65’ TV anymore and Netflix has been cancelled.

There are no longer any safety nets out here.

We all experience challenges that make us feel uncomfortable. Most people give up, but in order to feel comfortable you have to stay the course.

My biggest challenge so far is I love to let things come to me, I've been that way my entire life. I expect to walk down the street and have every local and every traveler come up to me and want to hang out!!

I know being 6′5 and a man, with tattoos and a shaved head, no one is really going to approach me. It’s up to me to approach locals, tourists, and other travelers. No one is going to make this easy on me and I wouldn’t want them to.

The people I’ve talked to back home ask me about loneliness. I am not going to lie and say that I haven't felt lonely at times. The reason is I left such an amazing group of friends back home and I miss them and my family. However, the thoughts of loneliness are very fleeting.

5 years ago, if I had to be by myself this much I would have drank myself to oblivion because I couldn't stand the person I was. Wayne Dyer said "You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with." The starting point to the happiness I experience on a daily basis is the love I have developed for myself.

“Live every day as if it were your last and then some day you’ll be right.”

I have been brought to tears about 30 times so far this trip. The beauty I've experienced and the people I've met will be with me forever.

I get teary eyed more for how grateful I am that I took this opportunity. I was living a lie for years and kept convincing myself it was normal. I am so grateful my dream is now a reality.

Life is too damn short to be doing something you don’t want to do. Telling yourself you don’t have a choice is the worst part.

You ALWAYS have a choice. You just have to be brave enough to make it.

I am so proud of myself for taking this leap. I start laughing sometimes when I think about where I am. It still blows my mind that I’ve been to 9 countries in 30 days and I’m writing this in Prague! I pray for that feeling to never go away!

There is nothing better than knowing you are living your passion day in and day out. It's unbelievably freeing.

Every single person, whether you have money or not, have kids or not, are younger or older, it doesn’t matter, you can still have whatever life you want.

It's whether you believe you can. That's it.

What is the real reason we complain so much?

Why do we settle in life, when we have the potential for so much more?

Why do we give up so soon after we are so excited for our New Year’s resolutions!?

Are we in control of our minds or is it the other way around?

I believe for the vast majority of humanity, their minds are controlling them.

Try and see if you can shut off your head. Stop reading this and try and not think for 1 minute. If you’ve never tried this before, you are going to be floored by the results.

Not only did your thoughts not shut off but you either started planning something or remembering something that already happened.

Our head either wants us in the future or in the past. It is up to us to practice living in the moment.

That leads us to MEDITATION, the biggest gift I’ve acquired for getting peace of mind.

I still haven’t figured out how to shut off my thoughts completely, or if that is even possible but what meditation does for me is it turns down the volume.

It keeps me in control.

2 men are sitting on the same bench in Laguna Beach, overlooking the ocean. One of them, is complaining that its too hot, the sun is too bright. He hears the kids playing in the sand and thinks how loud and obnoxious they are. He is stressing about a work project that’s not due for another month. He is completely in his head and doesn’t notice the beauty around him.

The other man is sitting in awe of how beautiful it is. He feels the suns heat warming his face. He hears the kids playing and he remembers how freeing it is to be young with not a care in the world. He smiles and he feels grateful for being alive.

This is the best way I can describe the results of meditation.

How often are we stressed out?

Or feeling guilt or remorse for something that happened yesterday, last week, or even 5 years ago?

How often are we the first person I described who has all this beauty around him and doesn’t see a damn thing?

When I stopped focusing on the past and the future my vision completely changed. I began to witness the beauty that is all around me. We don’t have to be in a picturesque place like Laguna Beach to notice how beautiful the world is. We can notice the beauty no matter where we are.

All it takes is one breath!

One focused breath to bring you out of your head and into the now, thats it.

Have you ever said, “I will NEVER do that again or from now on I will start doing this” and you did that one thing again or you stopped doing that one thing you said you weren’t going to stop? I think it’s safe to say that we have all done both of those scenarios.

Why does this happen?

A better question is why do we continue to let this happen?

Most people will go through life with absolutely no clue that their minds are controlling everything they do.

So how do we take back control?

The first step is to learn how to turn down the noise in your head that constantly tells you lies and wants to hold you back.

Meditation is the key to a life beyond your wildest dreams. A life of true happiness, contentment, and complete freedom.

Why doesn’t everyone meditate then?

Its because they aren’t in as much control as they think they are.

Tim Ferris has a book called ‘Tools of the Titans’ where he documents hundreds of his interviews with extremely successful people from billionaires, entrepreneurs, athletes, actors, you name it. One characteristic between 95% of them is they do some form of meditation everyday.

I dare you to try it for 30 days straight for 5 minutes a day and just see what happens.

What do you have to lose?

“If you can’t find time to meditate 20 minutes a day, you need 2 hours.” -Russell Simmons

***If you have never meditated before, here is what to do. There are thousands of different ways but this is a great way to get into it and will give you all the benefits I’m talking about.

Get to a comfortable spot, make sure you are sitting down, not laying down. You can sit in your bed, against the wall, in a chair, it doesn’t matter just make sure you are comfortable.

Close your eyes and the only thing I want you to focus on is your breath. Thats it.

Focus on your breath going in and going out.

Thoughts will arise. When they do your mission is to become aware of them as soon as you can. When you recognize a thought, try and get back to your breath.

Breathing in and breathing out, slowly and deeply.

Every time another thought pops up, do the same thing and get back to focusing on your breath.

I like to meditate in the morning before I get out the door to start my day, but as long as you get 5 minutes a day it doesn’t matter when you do it.

I paused and said, “fuck that! You jump in!”

They all laughed and then one of them, dove in head first over the sharks.

I gulped, took a deep breath and dove in after him.

My typical reaction to things outside of my comfort zone, is to say “fuck that”.

I can’t imagine all the things I would have missed out on if I didn’t push through my fear on a daily basis.

I definitely wouldn’t be writing this, staring at the blue water with Greek Islands as my backdrop.

This is what I believe FEAR really means:

False Evidence Appearing Real

Think about this. How is it possible that two people can look at the same situation differently?

How can one person skydive, bungee jump, go approach a member of the opposite sex, take a risk and start a business, follow their dreams and the other person can’t.

The answer is perception.

Our circumstances really don’t matter. The only thing that matters is how we perceive the events that are happening.

Our brains have a survival instinct that makes us want to feel safe. It’s evolved tremendously from the days of telling us fire is hot, don’t touch!

Now our survival instinct wants to keep us trapped in jobs we hate. Relationships that aren’t right for us. It keeps us in our comfort zone. It keeps us “safe”.

Away from risk, from adventure, from truly living life.

My biggest fear was being myself around other people. For the first 25 years of my life I was extremely uncomfortable in my own skin and I didn’t like who I was.

My survival instinct told me to isolate. It told me I wasn’t good enough. It told me to not go after anything worth while because I would fail.

Being myself was a crippling fear I had.

I now love the person I am. I’m traveling the world by myself. Meeting all types of different people. I am writing genuine thoughts for other people to read. I am being who I really am.

My fear that I once had is gone. I now realize I only had that fear because I told myself over and over again that I had to be afraid.

FEAR is bull shit, it isn’t real.

When we think about going after that job we really want, starting a business, asking that girl out, jumping out of that plane, following your true passion, not caring what people think, getting out of your comfort zone, loving yourself, and in my case quitting your job, selling everything, and traveling the world and that fear arises, we can look at it and laugh.

Because we know there is no basis for that fear. If one person has done it before you, then you can also do it.

Do not let your head tell you otherwise.

Do not put limitations on yourself or this beautiful life we GET to live.

Do not let fear hold you back from what you truly want to do.

Because there is no better feeling than looking fear in the face and pushing it to the side!

Every weekend was filled with thousands of dollars spent and an unrelenting amount of guilt and shame.

You couldn’t pay me enough to go back to how I felt waking up Monday mornings. I feel sick just thinking about it.

It was 8 in the morning on a Wednesday, I was standing in line at 711 behind people getting their coffees before work. I was buying beer and still awake from the night before. A few hours later I remember staring at myself in the mirror. I was disgustingly skinny with a beer belly, bags under my eyes, skin was yellow, totally unemployable, and incredibly lonely.

I remember thinking what are you doing kevin? Is this really your life?

I was a college athlete. I was great in sales. I was raised the right way, yet I was not a very good person. I was unemployed, in serious debt, and had a major drinking problem.

How did I get to this point?

My mom died a couple months before, I finally got fired after countless second chances, I was using my credit cards like free money while moving from a weekend partier to an every day drinker/drug user.

It was not long after that moment that I was overdosing in the back of a taxi cab at 430 in the morning on my way back from Hollywood. I remember praying in the back of that cab for my mom and whatever God I thought was out there to save me. All I wanted was to wake up because I honestly thought I wasn’t going to.

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist”

-Oscar Wilde

As I reflect on my life on my 31st birthday, it is almost as if I went from one end of the spectrum to the polar opposite.

I went from a life that had such darkness to a life that is beyond my wildest dreams. I am someone who now sees just how precious life is and it shouldn’t be wasted.

I was the ultimate time waster but now I am DONE wasting time.

By some miracle, I have 5.5 years of sobriety. I recently walked away from a job and industry where I made nearly half a million dollars in 2 years because I didn’t believe in it anymore.

I don’t believe you should work in a job you hate just to make money and that was the only reason I was there. What kind of life is that?

We only have a limited amount of time on this planet, I don’t want to look back at a life of what ifs. A study said that 85% of the workforce is unhappy with their job. That’s ridiculous! There has to be more to life than working, watching TV, waiting for the weekend, and paying bills.

Here is a terrifying statistic. In a 65 year lifespan the average American will end up spending 9 of those years watching TV and another 4 years looking down at their phone!

The point I want to make by sharing some of my past, is for you to look at areas in your life where you are wasting time.

Life is short, way shorter than we think and we don’t have an unlimited amount of time to finish our “bucket list”.

On our deathbed are we going to wish we had more money or that we had more time? We would wish for more time! We would trade it all to have one more minute on this beautiful planet.

Fortunately, we are here now, we don’t need to be on our deathbed or to have near death experience to wake up. We can wake up right this second! And when we get to the end of our lives we can have a smile on our face because we stopped wasting time, we got everything out of life we possibly could, we have zero regrets.

If there is a passion or a dream you have and you just haven’t done it yet because the conditions aren’t perfect, stop waiting and please from the bottom of my heart go do it.