by Jimi Hunt
It’s 7am, it’s cold and I have to wait for the film crew to set up. Not a bad spot though.
Photo: Bertrand Remaut
‘The Squeeze’. A hot waterfall in a cave. Stunning.
Photo: Bertrand Remaut
I broke my hat jumping off a bridge. Boo.
Photo: Philippa Hayes
Some of the amazing people that came to float with me in Hamilton.
Photo: Bertrand Remaut
Sometimes you have to ignore the signs and keep going…
Photo: Geraldine Clermont
The end of the day.
Photo: Bertrand Remaut
Just chillin’.
Photo: Bertrand Remaut
At Finlay Park Adventure Camp, I am happy, just shattered.
Photo: Philippa Hayes
Still tired. But tired in style on top of our amazing bus donated for use by Kenn Henderson. (P.S. It’s for sale, you should buy it . . .)
Photo: Philippa Hayes
Tuakau. Second to last day. I got in very late and was in terrible shape.
Photo: Philippa Hayes
Setting foot on the beach at Port Waikato, greeted by my dog, my mother and a bunch of amazing people.
Photo: Bertrand Remaut
The image I sent to all my Facebook followers from my phone. It’s over, I did it!
Photo: Philippa Hayes
PART THREE:
WHAT NOW?
LIVE MORE AWESOME
When you do something epic, like Lilo The Waikato, it must eventually come to an end. People forget about it, people move on. It wasn’t as if I had climbed Everest for the first time. I had done my thing and then there was a really simple question to ask. What now?
Lilo had made me healthy. I had trained for it. I had reached my goal, but it had also got much bigger than I had expected. It was like a sugar high—the attention from the media, the congratulations, the thanks. After the event and interest in it waned, all these things went and I was left wondering what to do. Do I still go to training tomorrow? What am I training for? Do I stick to my diet? What’s my next goal? What do I do right now?
‘So, are you going to Lilo The Amazon next?’
‘Lilo The Nile?’
The only thing I knew for certain—I didn’t want to Lilo anywhere anytime soon. What then? What now? Something equally as crazy! Something bigger and better! That’s the problem. When does that stop? I can’t afford to do crazy things every year. Lilo The Waikato had almost bankrupted me despite financial support from others. I need to work to make a living.
Going back to my normal life was a very sensible and easy option to take. To succeed with Lilo I had relied heavily on other people. I couldn’t keep asking friends and strangers to volunteer their time for my next idiotic idea!
I knew I needed something though. I didn’t want to stop the momentum. I didn’t want to go back to my normal life. I needed something to keep me on the path to wellness. I needed something to keep me exercising, eating properly and motivated to become a better person.
I knew it couldn’t be an event—it had to be something with its own momentum to keep it going. I knew, for example, that the 21,000 people on the Facebook page for Lilo were only there for Lilo. I needed something that would last and that would be forever encouraging me to do better and be better. But what was it?
Dan and I went out for lunch to figure out the answer. Dan had suffered from depression, too. We both wanted to do something that continued to raise awareness for depression and helped people lead better lives. We figured that no matter how much work John Kirwan and the Mental Health Foundation do, there is always more to do. We had something to offer, too. Different approaches work for different people. Lilo had proved that!
So we decided that it wasn’t as difficult as we’d thought and the answer had been staring us in the face all along. The founding principle for our next venture would come from the best of the Lilo experience. We would continue to raise awareness for depression and help people lead better lives.
I believed as long as I was consistently doing awesome things I would never go back into the state of depression that had ruined my earlier life. If I was continuously doing epic shit, eating well, being active and being social then I would be living awesomely. In line with that, if I was consistently living awesomely then I could never be depressed again—simple scenario and simple objective. Dan and I pledged to live more awesomely from now on than we ever had before.
As designers and web geeks our next move was to check out domain names—www.livingawesomely.com, taken; www.liveawesome.com, taken. Finally we typed in www.livemoreawesome.com, not taken. Sorted!
Live More Awesome—LMA for short—our next endeavour. It’s not the Queen’s English, but who really speaks the Queen’s English these days? Anyway, it’s a brand name, not a dictionary entry.
An ethos that was primarily for ourselves, it was there to help us stay healthy and beat depression. Hopefully, we thought, if we do it right, then we’ll drag a whole heap of people up with us. The cool thing about us is that two days later we had completed the full brand for Live More Awesome and built an entire website for it. It was now alive.
We started writing articles for the site, followed by figuring out ways to get ourselves attention to highlight the massive amounts of depression in New Zealand and get people to do what was fast becoming our tagline, ‘Ask for help’.
We started getting a great response from people; they wrote in saying how much they’d loved following Lilo and now LMA. Because of one thing or another they’d seen on LMA they had asked for help. It was amazing. It felt wonderful.
The funny thing was that again, just like Lilo, LMA wasn’t originally supposed to be for them. It was wonderful that they were getting something out of it and it was wonderful that it was helping people and that was one of our major goals, but the real reason LMA even existed was to make sure that Dan and I never got depression again.
I needed something that kept me in line. This is the thing that I have discovered—people are never ‘cured’ of depression. It will always be there. If I went back to the way I had been living my life before, that blackness deep inside me would start to grow again. If I didn’t drink plenty of water, if I didn’t eat protein in the morning, if I didn’t set myself amazing goals, if I didn’t constantly strive to Live More Awesome, then it would get me again. Setting myself up to be an example for others means that I can’t stop. I have to keep going. I have to stay well.
Live More Awesome is what is going to keep me healthy and I love it. I have a new motivation, like the day I came home from Dr John’s office after my first visit. I want to be better and I want to help other people to be better, too.
JIMI’S LESSON #17: 99 per cent of the population is simply existing. You need to be living.
THE PERFECT LIFE
There is a process based around achieving your perfect day.
The idea is that you should figure out what your perfect day is and keep changing each day until you end up with your perfect day. I like this, but I prefer to think in terms of my perfect life.
What’s your perfect life? Most of us have thoughts of cars, boats, houses, businesses, fame, perfect relationships . . . If I left this chapter right here you would forever have that picture of perfection, but how many of you would achieve it? I’m guessing not many.
The more important question is ‘Why don’t you have it yet?’ The answer is probably because you haven’t done anything about achieving it yet. Most of us spend 40 hours a week on our jobs, perhaps more, but how much time do we spend on ourselves and achieving our goals? I wanted to be amazing, I wanted to have purpose, but I hadn’t really done anything to make that happen. I had just expected it to. That had to change. I had to change.
JIMI’S LESSON #18: Work as hard on yourself as you do on your work.
Now I have goals. Goals are pretty amazing things. Before Lilo, I had never really had a goal. I seemed to get what I wanted withou
t them. There were things that I wanted to do and achieve, but it was all a bit vague and open-ended. Like most people, I was simply cruising through life wanting more but never achieving it. Now I knew what I wanted to achieve so I wrote some stuff down:
I want to have a charity that changes people’s lives and makes a massive difference in the world.
I want to have the financial resources to be able to make all of my ridiculous ideas a reality.
I want to find an amazing, caring, loving, energetic and inspirational wife I can have two children with.
I want to have a TV show that encompasses my charity and my ridiculous ideas so that I can spread the ideas and love as far as possible.
I want to spend more time with my amazing friends doing wonderful and amazing things.
These are some lofty and noble aims. There are some other important things that need to be sorted in order to make them a reality though—to turn them into goals that I would actually achieve. When? And how? When was easy. Pick a reasonable date in the future and tell everyone about it. Done. That is actually a key step. Open-ended goals never get achieved.
JIMI’S LESSON #19: A goal without a timeline doesn’t get achieved.
When you have a goal with a timeline you actually start doing things towards achieving that goal. It’s quite simple and quite clever all at the same time. If you need to find people to help you, ask for help. Lilo was my goal and I could not have done it alone. I needed help from a lot of people, before and during the adventure.
Making Live More Awesome a reality was my new goal and Dan and I needed people to help us with that. We shared our goal and that did a couple of really cool things. Firstly, our friends knew what we were up to and, best of all, once they knew they wanted to help us. If you do that with your goal, your friends will probably want to help you, too. Awesome.
Secondly, you now have to be accountable for your goal. You have told people you are going to do something and if you don’t get it done then you will look like a failure. You don’t want to look like a failure, do you? No. I didn’t think so. It’s genius.
I don’t care about your excuses. Your excuses are yours. Your excuses are why you are still in that job you don’t like. Here is my checklist for achieving goals:
Make a list of your goals—be specific.
Give them a timeline—make it realistic.
Make them public—tell the world.
Get your friends to help you—ask for help.
Live More Awesome—there’s nothing to stop you.
I’ve written my goals earlier. They have timelines. They are now most certainly public. My friends are helping me. If you can help me with them I’d love to hear from you, too. And yes, I do now Live More Awesome.
A final note on goals—don’t just make big ones. Think about yourself and what is right for you, including mind matters, fitness, nutrition, partnerships, style. Make big and small goals, from the very small like ‘Keep my desk tidier at work’ to the very large like ‘Have my own TV show’. It’s not as if you’ve never thought about having a tidier desk or your own TV show, but it’s only when you write it down that it becomes real.
Then set a goal to check your goals once a week and evaluate how you are doing and maybe add some more goals to your list. I can’t overstate how much I hated setting goals before, but now I know they are a part of my life that will drive my success. It’s strange. But don’t take my word for it. Try it and see.
EPILOGUE
On 2 August 2012, I turned 32. The year 2011 had simply been the worst year of my life. I wanted to forget it forever. In a move that took me full circle back to the start of Lilo The Waikato, I turned to my Facebook status to tell everyone I knew how I was feeling:
Jimi’s State of The Nation 2012:
2011 was fuckin’ shit. Exactly one year ago today I was arguing with my ex-wife about a guy she knew who had committed suicide, I was in the middle of severe depression that was ruining my life, my marriage was disintegrating, plus a bunch of other really shitty stuff I won’t get into.
Today, on my 32nd birthday, I sit in a 5 star hotel in Chicago with the best girlfriend ever. Fullstop. A girl who has taught me so much about so much and made me a better person all round. I am about to watch two of my favourite bands EVER play at Lollapalooza, one of the best music festivals on the planet. Lilo The Waikato was/is a massive success with the documentary coming out this month and the book next year. I’ve got a super awesome job in October that will be the most fun thing I’ll ever get paid for, I get to front a national ad campaign and spend 7 weeks driving around the country doing every cool thing New Zealand has to offer.
But most important of all to me is Live More Awesome, an idea with my best friend that will be the most important thing to happen for depression in this country ever. I guarantee. It’s going from strength to strength and is actually getting me very excited. We’re about to become an official charity, we’re about to launch a thing called Gimmie5 which will raise huge amounts of money and awareness for depression. Plus, I’m about to embark on an adventure that I’ve been dreaming about for 5 years, I am building the World’s Biggest Fuckin Waterslide, in Auckland, next February. It will be over 650 metres long.
That. Is. Awesome.
Everything is awesome.
My point though is not to tell you how fuckin awesome my life is, my point is actually this . . .
If you are not happy with where you’re at right here, right now, don’t cry, don’t get angry, don’t complain and definitely don’t do something you can’t ever take back. There are always solutions. There are always people that can help. There is always something that can be done.
You CAN be a better person. Happier. Wealthier. Kinder. Fitter. Whatever you want.
Just look at the difference 12 months can make.
But most importantly, Ask For Help.
People are a lot nicer than you give them credit for.
And you have more friends than you know.
A very big thank you to everyone that helped me get here.
But we’re not fuckin stopping . . . This thing is going worldwide.
Lots and lots of love,
Jimi
WHERE TO GET HELP
If you are feeling distressed and need to talk to someone immediately, please call LifeLine in New Zealand on 0800 543 354, or in Australia on 13 11 14. They are available to help 24/7 every day of the year.
You can also talk to your local GP, psychologist or psychiatrist. It is good to get recommendations as some are more helpful than others. I can personally recommend Dr John McEwan. Call him on +64 9 522 6723 or head to www.drstress.co.nz. He saved my life.
Go to www.livemoreawesome.com to get lots of general tips on treating depression, living your life to its fullest and join a group of like-minded, amazing people ‘asking for help’.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to all the wonderful people in my life who helped me through all of this: my parents Paul and Virginia; Dan; all the fantastic crew who helped me make Lilo possible; Jo, who put up with me at my depressive worst; and Libby, without whom this book would never have been written, for many interesting and crazy reasons including chicken sprinkles.
