Introduction

My name is John Carroll and I have decided to embark on a new journey through life.  The main emphasis of this blog is to show other people who I am and what I do and hopefully inspire others!

I will break this site into three main categories:

• Body
• Mind
• Soul

In each of these categories, there will be subcategories as well, that will go in depth as to what I hope to accomplish along my journey.

First and foremost I am a martial artist.  It took me a long time to realize that I was one though.  All throughout my life I have been looking for something to define me.  Many other people have hobbies, interests in sports, fishing, video games, comic books, and I always wondered what defined me.  For the longest time I thought I was a gamer, I played games and I was good at games, but I just couldn't let that be my defining characteristic.  So I had to stop and think to myself, "what is it that makes video games so exciting for me?"  It took me a long time to realize that what I loved most about games was the competition that came with them and this feeling that I was connected to past human experiences that no longer existed or that were made up.  I was always really into fantasy games, I loved the idea of being an ancient warrior or a person capable of wielding magic and the feeling of possessing some power that other people couldn't command.  I worked tirelessly spending hours upon hours in these fantasy worlds to become the best I could possibly be and all the time I was neglecting who I actually was in real life.  I didn't realize that there were ways to experience what I wanted to become in some fantasy worlds in real life.

That all changed a couple of years ago when I randomly watched a documentary on the life of Bruce Lee.  This documentary showed me a person in modern day society who managed to ignore social norms and focus his life on martial arts.  He didn't know if he would be successful, how he would earn a living, or what other people thought about him.  He was a man with a message and his dream was to share that message with the world.  Bruce Lee managed to influence my life dramatically and ultimately that documentary led me to where I am now.

For the longest time I thought what he wanted was for me to become him, as a matter of fact a couple of years ago I bought a domain called becoming Bruce Lee, but I never did anything with it.  During that time period I was teaching myself Jeet Kune Do via Bruce Lee books and from watching his movies.  I studied the same philosophers he studied, took up his workout routines, bought every book that he wrote, and essentially decided that I was going to become him.  Somewhere along the way something tragic happened.  After a 2 hour MMA session at my gym, I decided to go lifting at my university's gym and benched without a spotter.  My arms were more gassed out than I had thought and I dropped the barbell directly on my head.  Although the damage wasn't severe (concussion but no internal bleeding) the emotional impact it had on me caused me to fall out of my path.  I feel like that moment was one of those major defining obstacles that I've read about from ancient martial artists.  This took place about 15 months ago.  Up until about 3 months ago, I had lost all the motivation that was carrying me forward from the incident, my weight jumped from 185 lbs to 285 lbs in just 1 year with the majority of my muscle gone.

Three months ago I was going through my old pictures on my computer and I came across how I looked at my prime, a picture that was taken 3 days before I dropped the weight on my head.  From looking at that picture and then taking my shirt off and looking in the mirror, I made up my mind that it was time to change my life.  This time though, I felt different than I had on my original journey.  I have had multiple epiphanies in the past few months and each one has brought me closer and closer to understanding who I am and who I want to be and what I want to do with my life.  I realized that Bruce Lee didn't want to inspire me to become Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee wanted to inspire me to become John Carroll.  The best John Carroll that I can become.

The goal of this blog is to show what the human mind, body, and soul are capable of when given the right direction.  Everything I post on here will be my opinion, based on what I do on a daily basis.  If you randomly stumble upon this page, I hope you stick around for my journey.

Enjoy :-)