2018 was terrible for The Friday Rally. Very little content, poor consistency, just plain amateur. I thought about it all year. I tried hard to figure out why.

Do I not have enough good ideas? – Probably true.

Am I a poor creator of content? – Sure.

Was I too lazy? – As usual.

These statements are all probably a little true, but, there was something deeper. It was rattling around my brain but to my frustration, it wouldn’t form a coherent idea for me to understand clearly. I felt like there was something there that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was a misunderstanding of the fundamental idea behind TFR. I was just posting haphazardly and erratically. There wasn’t a good flow. It wasn’t “inspired” whatever that even means.

I didn’t have a foundation of an intentional message and direction, so, the content suffered. It just wouldn’t come out right when it came out at all.

At some point in December of 2018, I focused up and tried to coalesce that idea, that message. I began to carve out a direction in my head. Then one day it jumped out of my brain and onto a sticky note all at once. I couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with my thoughts. I was actually worried I was going to miss something that my brain was telling me and forget it forever.

So, here it is. The foundational idea and direction of The Friday Rally…

I want to explore how we as humans can craft a life of discipline and great character to produce a life we deem successful. The development of our discipline and character will be practiced through hard work, athletic training (specifically for me, triathlon), taking bold and big action, reading about and practicing self-improvement, and general lifelong self-education. I believe that developing discipline and character through these avenues will produce results in the areas of our life that matter most to us.

For example, if I can do what it takes to train for and complete an Ironman then presumably my improved self will also show up in my career success and family success. It should also work the other way too. To do what it takes to have a successful career will influence my ideas and efforts in my training.

The actual posts and content that I plan on sharing will be how I feel about these concepts we explore. How I put them into practice. The results of the actions taken. How I plan on improving for the next time. Most importantly, however, I want to share the failures.

I am a firm believer in failure. Without it, there is no way to improve and reach the success we are striving for. Failure must come before success even though we all hate it. Failure sucks.

All of the sentences above can be broken down into one simple graph. This is the heart of what I want TFR to do for the world.

The X axis is our life from birth to death. The Y axis is how high we can go in regards to living our best lives.

The red line represents real life, ourselves if we just bounce through life with no direction or focus on improvement.

The blue line represents our absolute perfect selves. That line would be us if we were always 100% motivated, disciplined, and as successful as our genes and environment allow.

The Friday Rally lives in between. The goal of TFR is to try and raise us up from the red line to as close to the blue line as we can. When we close the gap between where we are and our maximum potential we will live a happy, fulfilled, and successful life.

That is what The Friday Rally is about, and now that it is clear to me and presented to you, I can’t wait to share more with you. Let’s build something big and let’s build it together.

 

Cheers,

-Chris