Author: Joe Kennedy

Last night I was super tired and instead of going to the beach to watch sunset, I went to take a nap just before 5:30.  I didn’t get out of bed until almost 12 hours later ….

Since today is the first day of Daylight Savings Time, it’s almost 6:30 in the morning – which is super late for me to wake up these days.  I went to check my email and was notified that there was a new video from Awesome Lifestyle Design – and it was from Stacia!  She finally decided to post one of the videos I shot of her last week – and it is a big announcement.

Some (many?) people may think that we are crazy (and we probably are), but this is something that we really, really wanted to do.  What do YOU think our Awesome Lifestyle is going to be like with a new addition?

BTW – you might want to follow @Monkey_Babys_Daddy on Instagram to see more of the journey …

 I was super inspired this morning by an article on the Seattle Times newsite about Kelli and Daniel Segars of North Seattle who run a fitness site at http://www.FitnessBlender.com.  Apparently they have over 2.5 million subscribers on their YouTube channel!  How Awesome!

I’ve been inspired to start doing a series of Young Old Guys fitness videos.  I’m looking for Eastside / Seattle area trainers, gyms,, etc to feature in these videos.  I’d like to be able to make videos of a wide variety of workouts including Crossfit, Spin, traditional weightlifting, bodybuilding, yoga, zumba, whatever is out there.

Put this young old guy through the paces and challenge me with your workout!

If you are interested, contact me at AwesomeLifestyleDesign@gmail.com, write a comment here, or contact me via social media.  Bonus points go to those who are extra interesting, challenging, and/or can help me get in better shape for the upcoming ski season!

Stacia with her Uncle Peter and cousin after our wedding.

I’ve recently come across a great site and podcast called Variety Seekers at HoneLife.com and on Facebook at Hone Life.  It is produced by Alex and Jessica Wood, who are brother and sister.  They are definitely lifestyle designers and proponents of following your passions.

Jessica recently wrote a post titled “Why I’m Not Married“, which has apparently caused some controversy.  It’s a short and introspect post, which examines choices that couples get to make – and expectations others have of couples …

She makes some great points and the post was particular interesting to me since Stacia Kennedy and I were married on the beach in Hawaii earlier this month.

While Jessica has some very good reasons on why she is not married, Stacia and I have even better reasons on why we did get married.  When first got together over 4 years ago, it was because we have a lot in common.  We are both very much into personal development, social media and are wanting a life much different that what society seems to expect.  We are working on designing our awesome lifestyle and making good progress.

Having been married a couple of times before (and being 19 years older than Stacia), getting married was not particularly important to me – EXCEPT that it was important to Stacia – making it important to me.

Although we have not been able to spend much time together in the time that we’ve been married, we are totally committed to each other and our marriage.  Although we have common goals, we each also have our our personal goals – and we support each other in achieving these goals.

We each have an awesome child from previous relationships, but are also planning on having a Monkey Baby (not a real monkey, but a human in the Year of the Monkey) and are looking forward to getting busy on that as soon as we can get some reasonably priced health care (although that might be a pipe dream as long as Obamacare exists).  We want to ‘home school’ our monkey baby, while traveling the world, living a laptop lifestyle (and skiing our asses off).

Marriage is definitely not for everyone, and not yet for Jessica – and that’s great.  On the other hand, marriage IS for some lifestyle designers like Stacia and myself and we look forward to continuing to design our awesome lifestyles.

What say YOU?

Along our journey to becoming Awesome Lifestyle Designers, we’ve definitely done a lot of reading, research, watching videos, etc to discover lifestyle designers who made it to the lifestyle design party before we did.  It’s really an amazing and eclectic group of people – most of whom are super whip smart.

One of those people is Natalie Sisson from The Suitcase Entrepreneur.  Natalie is a Kiwi (originally from New Zealand) and takes her business with her while traveling all over the world.  While now based just 3 hours down the road in Portland, Oregon, Sisson is constantly on the move – but keeping in close contact with her “Freedom Fighters” through her blog and podcast.

The Suitcase Entrepreneur podcast is one of the best in the biz and Natalie conducts great interviews with fantastic guests.  You will especially want to listen to episode 99, which I just listened to today, when Sisson interviews Greg Denning from Discover, Share, Inspire.  Greg and his wife Rachel now have 6 children and have lived in many different countries, driving from the US to Costa Rica to Alaska and are now back in Costa Rica.

I was super impressed with Greg, his story and what he and Rachel do to raise their children a new, right, way.  Along the way, they manage to makes others lives better in so many ways – take for example their Mayan Eco Homestead project in Guatemala.

While we have not yet met either Natalie Sisson or Greg Denning, I have a feeling that we will and regardless, they have become unwitting mentors to us on our quest to become Awesome Lifestyle Designers.