Defining My Purpose In Life…Not Exactly

Here’s the funny thing.  I am sitting here after spending three days with some amazing people and discovering some new things about a pretty cool company.  I went into this weekend with an open mind and a bit of excitement.  Over the past few months I decided as some may know to try to help others reach the same goals with health and fitness that I reached.  I set out to make a change and share my story with others by being a Team Beachbody Coach.  Granted, I also use a lot of the products and the discount does not hurt.  However, the true reason was to help others try to find their voice with health and fitness.  I have even learned that I have made some mistakes along the way I need to get corrected.  Not in misleading people, but simply in not being the best I can be at helping them.

I also learned this weekend that these other Beachbody Coaches really are good, humble people.  They come from all walks of life and they strive to help others succeed.  They are genuine and the teams that are built are massive and stretch from coast to coast.  I personally was a little left to myself simply because how I ended up joining.  I was not really sponsored I just landed under another coach.  I am working to resolve that and I have made a promise to not let that happen to coaches that join my team to help others.

I have seen this weekend a lot about Beachbody the company and many of the people who are coaches making a good life through being coaches.  Not only financially, but with their own success stories of fitness.  I heard countless stories of people who started out over weight that found a coach who helped them.  They then became coaches themselves to help others, thus PAYING IT FORWARD.  Other stories were of people who hit rock bottom financially, and Beachbody’s Coach Opportunity helped them get up off their feet and reach new goals.  I saw a CEO dress up as Elvis and play the guitar on stage singing to the top coach of the year to honor him.  I learned from Seth Godin many things about looking inside one’s self and believing that you can do what you want as long as you believe it can happen.  I learned what it means to commit to something, especially that single move from P90X2 that I could never do……until I did 15 of them on stage with Tony Horton…. because I committed to it.  I have been trying to be a part of all that for some time now to those that want the help.  So you think it would have been a great weekend right?

Well, it had it’s downsides like anything in life.  Throughout the weekend I tried to make sure that others who could not make it to the event at least saw some of the things going on.  I did what many of us always do at things like this, we tweet, we post to facebook, we update our linkedin status.  We hashtag the event and we post it out there for people to keep up no matter what method they connect with.  It happens all the time at large events like this.  This one for the record was 5000 people strong….all coaches.  There is 85,000 of us across the US so I wanted to help those others plug in.  What ended up happening is it appeared to basically piss some people off.  Let’s not sugar coat it kids, that’s what happened.  I got nasty replies, I saw messages about what I was doing from people.  I lost followers, people unfriended me, they un-subcribed from my streams.

Yeah it got to me.  It is still getting to me.  Not that people made that decision,that’s their choice.  It was in some cases the complete disrespect for what I was trying to do to keep others who MIGHT be interested up to date.  I have always said, social media is like TV….if you don’t like the show…change the freakin channel for the time being!  What really got me thinking is that people seem to assume my only purpose on this earth is to speak about technology.  I’m going to let all of you in on a little secret.  I was not put on God’s earth to only do one thing in life.  This website you are reading is ChrisColotti.us.  It has various topics, of which many are about technology.  Others are about NASCAR, or sports, or just nothing in general.  People have a choice, and I respect that.  Be it known that if you do follow me and you do friend me, you are following or friending ALL of me.  The good, the bad, the fitness, the technology, that NASCAR, the ugly….you name it.  If you make that choice then you might learn about some cool stuff, if not, well it just might be your loss.

The best part is, many will not even read this as they already made the choice to ignore, mute, un-friend, or un-follow.  I don’t care, it is off my chest, I have said my peace.  I can sleep with a clean conscience, and maybe I will have a few less followers in the morning, but hey I am not a brand.  I am a human being that likes to talk about different things.  If you can deal with that, then I’m cool with it.  If not I am cool with that too.  This is me….being me.  Letting you know that what you follow is what you get.  I will not let the negativity that has dragged me down this weekend take over.  I will in turn, ignore, mute, unfollow, and unfriend if you don’t at least respect the fact I am not a brand…..I am a person.  I will seek out other people who think like me that I can connect with on multiple levels, or who at the least can respect my other interests.  I will not let others define my purpose, I will be the one to do that.  God Speed and Goodnight.

-Chris Colotti

About Chris Colotti

Chris is active on the VMUG and event speaking circuit and is available for many events if you want to reach out and ask. Previously to this he spent close to a decade working for VMware as a Principal Architect. Previous to his nine plus years at VMware, Chris was a System Administrator that evolved his career into a data center architect. Chris spends a lot of time mentoring co-workers and friends on the benefits of personal growth and professional development. Chris is also amongst the first VMware Certified Design Experts (VCDX#37), and author of multiple white papers. In his spare time he helps his wife Julie run her promotional products as the accountant, book keeper, and IT Support. Chris also believes in both a healthy body and healthy mind, and has become heavily involved with fitness as a Diamond Team Beachbody Coach using P90X and other Beachbody Programs. Although Technology is his day job, Chris is passionate about fitness after losing 60 pounds himself in the last few years.

7 comments

  1. Hi Chris, I’m afraid I’m one of the people who unfollowed you on Twitter.
    The reason I did that was because, at moments, you were really flooding my Twitter timeline with this P90 stuff.
    I understand and applaud that you are not a one-trick-pony, and that you have other interests in life besides virtualisation technology, but in your enthusiasm you probably didn’t realise that we got some real P90 storms from time to time 🙂
    On Twitter I try to subscribe to people that principally (note that I do not say always) post about technology, and try to keep a clean timeline.
    A suggestion, why don’t you create a new Twitter account for the P90 Chris besides the technology Chris ? And I don’t care if you occasionally tweet about the health stuff on the technology account 😉
    I would love to follow the technology Chris again !
    Luc

    • Luc, I highly respect what you do for the technical world for sure. I also respect that you are not interested in the same things as me. I have been playing with another ID, but I have found maintaining two is fairly difficult with an already busy life. That being said, my twitter is the same as this site. It is Me…CColotti, not VirtualChris, or TechnologyChris, it is my name. My brand is my name and everything that comes with it. That is one thing I will stand my ground on. I don’t fully believe in needing to following multiple persona’s of the same person just to hear about their different topics.

      That is my choice and my opinion. I respect yours for sure, but my brand will always be just me. There is no “Technology” Chris….There never was. That was the point of this whiole post…there is just Chris Colotti and everything he stands for. I’m truly sorry if that does not fit the mold, but something Seth talked about this week, was breaking the mold of what people want you to be.

      I just want to be me. I spent too many years of my life being forced to be just one dimensional.

      • Chris, thanks for the reply.
        Rest assured, I didn’t want to talk you into a split personality 🙂 People are not one-dimensional, and thank what ever supreme being there is for that.
        But I think you might be missing the characteristics of different social media.
        On your blog site I can select the VMware or Technology part and skip the Health and Fitness part (most of the time).
        On Twitter I can’t (easily) do that. Twitter is imho not like a television station. On my remote, I can switch channels, or switch the TV set off when they are airing something that isn’t appealing to me.
        Twitter on the contrary is one-dimensional, you get everything from the people you follow.
        I know tweets can be tagged, but that is hard for the tweeter to maintain, and hard for the follower to filter.
        And again, I respect your choice and your opinion, and more importantly I highly value your “technical” posts. It’s your blog and your Tweets, you decide how you make them available.
        Keep up the good work, in whatever of the areas that make up Chris.

  2. Hey Chris. I’m really glad you are passionate about lots of things, and of course you are allowed to express anything you want on any channel you want any time you want.

    But you know as well as anyone that social media is a syn/ack process, and if the audience you have doesn’t want to hear the content you are providing, they are allowed to leave. That’s not a judgment on your syn as much as it is an acknowledgement of what they are choosing to ack. Yes, when you mix topics you are going to lose people who are only interested in one topic. Some off-topic posts seem to be more accepted than others (i.e. my barrage of family pictures from time to time), but those that involve alternate lines of income and tiered marketing seem to be particularly unwelcome, no matter how genuine your involvement is. I bet if I started posting about Scentsy, PartyLite or Thirty-One that I’d get the same responses.

    Also, and I say this as a friend and a fan, there were a lot of people who started following you because you decided you were going to be one of the best vCloud Director resources on social media, and did a great job putting out content that was unique and relevant. For a long, long time you were 100% VMware, and as a VMware employee there were lots of people who followed you for those reasons, and not because you were Chris Colotti, all around cool guy who likes crazy colored cars and pushups too. The same way you can’t be mad when people choose not to follow you in the first place, you can’t be mad when they decide to stop. I bet there are people who have no idea what VMware is who are big fans now BECAUSE of your P90x involvement…

    Remember, content creation, no matter what the topic, is about you and the message you want to send. If you are happy with the message (and obviously you are) then relax about who chooses to be in the audience. If you want to maintain two audiences, then Luc’s idea about splitting your Twitter account like you’ve done with the blog might be a good idea. Of course, a new Twitter account wouldn’t have 1800 followers, but you might be serving the majority of those followers better. There are lots of people we know (@hpstorageguy, @commsninja, etc…) who have completely non-work social media personalities to speak to different audiences so that they don’t run into the same issues you are having here.

    In any case, I’m sorry this is hard for you. I’m happy that you have things you are passionate about, and I’m glad you enjoyed the event! See you at VMworld in a couple months.

    • It was hard, now it is not. I have lost enough sleep over worrying about what other people think. Seth Godin had a lot of really good points yesterday. I am weird….as he says. I do things a lot of people don’t do. I will always invite people to try some of those things because in the end it does benefit them….if they want to. However people don’t know there is someone who wants to help unless those people speak up. I don’t sell anything, I am always trying to help people live a better, longer, more healthy life. That’s not even close selling products. Some things are a means to an end to get to the healthy part.

  3. Chris,

    Thank you for taking the time to write this blog post as well as sharing your excitement of the past few days with the rest of the the world via Twitter.

    I started following you on twitter due to your VM knoweledge which I have found enjoyable. I am glad that you as many others do also share other aspects of your lives on Twitter.

    I have been interested in P90X for a while, but thought it was another infomercial, never knew anyone who has done it let alone have any success. Continuously seeing myself on camera in Telepresence and WebEx meetings highlights that I need to do something.

    Thanks to your posts this weekend, I am starting today.

    Again – thank you!
    Kevin

    • Thanks Kevin, I followed you back on Twitter and sent you a DM. Let’s chat one night this week about how I can help before you jump right in with both feet. The Certification alone taught me we need to make sure we map your goals to help you succeed.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *