Alter Your Jacket – The Program

Today is a big day for my friend Steven Aitchison. He’s launching his long awaited self improvement program called “Alter Your Jacket”. But before diving too much into the program details, let me rewind a bit and tell you more about this guy, Steven.

I first met him more than a year ago, when I started my own blog. I met him online, that is. I just stumbled upon his blog and stayed there for more than a half an hour. Which is way above the average for me, to be honest. I really liked what he wrote. He was already ahead of me with several thousands of subscribers and he was already monetizing the whole blogging thing. Quite a successful guy, I said to myself.

I started to interact with him, promoting his articles and commenting on his blog. A few months later, without even knowing how that happened, I realized we’re already talking by email.  Some times he was asking for my opinion, some times I was asking for his. A nice and easy opinion ping-pong.

Common Blogging Ground

I remember that one time he was very excited about a viral blogging project. He described the project in details in one long email and at the end of it he was asking me what I think. I was instantly contaminated by the enthusiasm which was literally exhaling from the whole project and I immediately committed to it. The project involved the participation of several hundreds of bloggers and I was happy to be one of them. We never did that project, but the idea is still there. And that’s one of the reasons I’m not telling more about the project in itself, because Steven may want to do this at some point.

Fact is that I discovered a lot of common ground with Steven. Although my blog experienced a very steep growth, he was still ahead of me. Which made me push even harder, because I love competition. In case you didn’t realize this yet, after reading my blog, I’m quite a competitive person. Give me a challenge and you’ll “relax” me for good. I’m addicted to challenges.

Apparently, so is Steven, because in January we did one of the craziest challenges in my entire blogging (and, for what matters, business) career: we planned to write 4 books in one month. We both decided to use CreateSpace.com to publish some of our content directly to Amazon and we decided to make the whole process fun. So, here we are, tweeting our progress, emailing every other day to check out the status and being totally immersed in writing several tens of thousands of words in one month. Apart from what we’re normally writing as regular bloggers.

For some reason, I won the January challenge. We also had another one in February, which I gloriously lost. But then again, what I recall from those challenges is not the feeling of being a winner or a loser.  It’s the enthusiasm and thrill of doing something I loved to. It’s the energy and passion that exuded from the whole process. It’s the feeling of overcoming myself.

Awakenings

And with that comes one of the most important things that happened to me during this year, a thing which was actually generated by one of the Steven’s posts. On March 11th, Steven published one of his most controversial, yet incredibly useful (and by that I mean really useful) posts: The Night I Gave Up On Life. In that article, Steven told the story of his suicide attempt when he was younger. Yes, you read it right: one of the most successful personal development bloggers was on the verge of self indicted death.

That post really shook me up. And I mean really. I wasn’t on a bed of roses either during the last few months (personal relationships melting away and an overall dramatic change in my life circumstances) so reading that was like a punch in the face. Yes, my life as I knew it was melting away. Yes, it wasn’t fair. Yes, I didn’t deserve all that shit that was keep coming to my face. So what?

Reading that post made me realize two things. First: just because all that shit that was happening to me wasn’t right, it didn’t mean it wasn’t real too. So, I had to accept it. And second, I realized things could look much worse, if I don’t take immediate action to change the course of my life. So, a few minutes after I read that post I literally started to take immediate action to get in the flow again. I don’t think it’s relevant to get into real details about my problems, I may do this later on, in a few months, when everything will settle for good.

Fact is that now, two and a half months later from that article, things are already looking incredibly better for me. All that personal relationships melting was alchemically transformed from a painful process into the prologue of something wonderful. The best thing about it is that I don’t know what would come up next and I find this incredibly exciting. And my overall life conditions are taking a slow but steady growing course again.

Yes, one of Steven’s posts can do that to you :-).

Alter Your Jacket

And with that, I finally come up to the core of this article, which is to announce that Steven is launching a video training course. Yeap, not a blog post, not a series of articles, but 45 minutes of video training with one of the most popular personal development bloggers of the moment.

You can sign up here and I would suggest to do it as fast as possible. Not because the offer will expire or something. Nope, this isn’t one of those offers. It is a plain, simple video course that will help you change your life for good. Sign up as fast as possible to stop losing time, not because you’ll save some nickels. In the bigger picture of life, a few nickels are nothing, compared with how much you can win aside, just by doing the right thing at the right time.

That’s it. Nothing more. Just go on, sign up and let me know in the comments what you think. I’d love to hear your jacket altering stories. 🙂