How to build up to a 10-minute plank

In the past year, I’ve been asked about health more than any other topic outside of tech and data. So, I decided to consolidate my responses to those questions in a series of four Lucky7 posts.

Specifically, I’ve been covering:
1. Nutrition (and my vegan power breakfast smoothie recipe)
2. The Cooper Clinic
3. OsteoStrong
4. Exercise and X3

I haven’t written Part Four yet on exercise and X3, and I want to take a quick diversion to talk about the benefits of planking. I’ll also reference this post in Part Four, so it is a good primer.

When I turned 48-years old on Feb. 14, I announced on Facebook that I felt like I was close to being in the best shape of my life and I had achieved a new health milestone - my first 10-minute plank. That got quite a bit of attention from my friends, including many texts to my mobile phone, so I wanted to talk about how I did it since I’ve received so many questions about it.

Four big learnings on health (Part Three)

In the past year, I’ve been asked about health more than any other topic outside of tech and data. I’ve decided to consolidate my responses to those questions in a series of four Lucky7 posts.

Specifically, I’ll cover:
1. Nutrition (and my vegan power breakfast smoothie recipe)
2. The Cooper Clinic
3. OsteoStrong
4. Exercise and X3

For Part Three, I decided to do something different as I cover the health benefits of OsteoStrong. The Austin franchisee, Deepak Suthar, is a good friend and used to work with me at Bazaarvoice. He agreed to be interviewed for this post, and I’ve had him speak about OsteoStrong and X3 at our data.world office.

For me personally, OsteoStrong has been a real game-changer. In April of 2018, I had the biggest workout injury I’ve ever experienced — I was at the TED conference with Debra and we were working out the day before the event started. I was doing a heavy bench press and it was my last set right before we went to eat breakfast. My body was tired but I needed to press on and make this last set count. On the third rep, I felt a massive rubber-band snap inside my chest and body and 911-level pain. Fortunately I had a spotter pull the bar off of me as I went to the floor, writhing around in pain. I knew something inside of me was really broken.

Four big learnings on health (Part Two)

In the past year, I’ve been asked about health more than any other topic outside of tech and data. I’ve decided to consolidate my responses to those questions in a series of four Lucky7 posts.

Specifically, I’ll cover:1. Nutrition (and my vegan power breakfast smoothie recipe)2. The Cooper Clinic3. OsteoStrong4. Exercise and X3

For Part Two, I would like to discuss the benefits of an annual comprehensive physical examination. Personally, I chose to do this at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas ever since I turned 40. Dr. Kenneth H. Cooper is the founder and I always do my best to book with him. The Cooper Clinic has over 40 years of data about patients like me, which provides them with a level of pattern recognition that is unusual.

Four big learnings on health (Part One)

In the past year, I’ve been asked about health more than any other topic outside of tech and data. I’ve decided to consolidate my responses to those questions in a series of four Lucky7 posts.

Specifically, I’ll cover:
1. Nutrition (and my vegan power breakfast smoothie recipe)
2. The Cooper Clinic
3. OsteoStrong
4. Exercise and X3

First, let’s start with nutrition. It is becoming increasingly clear that a vegan diet is your key to longevity and vitality. I’ve covered my transition to a mostly vegan (and sometimes vegetarian) diet over a three-part blog series, beginning in 2014. I pose that you will be more spiritually pure on a diet like this because of its benefits to our planet, your body, your mindfulness, animal welfare, and your fellow human beings. I cover what I’ve learned from reading many books and watching many movies. The most recent part, Part Three, covers the evolution of this movement to plant-based meats as well as clean meat (also known as cellular agriculture).

Facebook's defining moment

As I wrote about in The importance of an Always Be Learning Life, I go to the TED conference every year and it just wrapped up on April 19. This year was particular poignant and it kicked off with this amazing talk by Carole Cadwalladr, which set the tone for much of the conference. I highly recommend you watch it if you haven’t already before reading further.

Then I was having coffee with someone this week (I’ll keep them anonymous), and they are about to go work at Facebook and having some regrets. You see, around the Thanksgiving table they are now going to be asking this person about why they made that decision instead of them getting high-five’d… because Facebook is really in the arena right now. Their answer isn’t going to be as easy as it used to be. And also this week Facebook just reported an earnings beat, even accounting for a record FTC fine-to-be of at least $3 billion, and once again it stock soared. What’s going on here?

Revisiting Wikileaks, or "When you don't want to be right"

The news about Julian Assange being arrested two days ago reminded me of a blog post I wrote eleven years ago. I went back to read it today as I couldn’t remember what I said about Wikileaks that long ago. Prior to blogging at Lucky7, I used to blog quite a bit at Bazaarvoice. I felt a real sense of us creating history there, as I do today at data.world, with a power of Archimedes lever of working alongside some of the largest brands in the world. It is important to recall when you read this that at the beginning of Bazaarvoice in 2005 only three retailers in the United States offered customer reviews on their products, Facebook was closed to the public, the iPhone hadn’t come out yet (that was 2007) or Android (that was the next year), and there was no such thing as Snapchat, Twitter, and many of the other mediums, including Medium, that have moved more and more of social interactions - and in some cases transparency (certainly in the case of customer reviews) - online. I’m archiving the post here and will discuss it below, for now here it is as I wrote it on March 2, 2008 (note that I couldn’t recreate all of the links referenced as some have gone offline):

Thinking of my father, Brian Douglas Hurt, today

One of my dear friends, Julie Gilbert, said something very nice to me just now. It made me think about my parents, which I do often. I broke down crying watching the “Dumbo” preview a few days ago - I actually have tears in my eyes as I write that just remembering it. It is because “Dumbo” was one of the first movies I can remember sitting in my mom’s arms.

So, I’m archiving the original Bazaarvoice blog post about my father here, which I reference in the tribute I wrote about my mom. Here it is so I never lose this, as Lucky7 is my permanent blog (named in honor of my mom).

This was written on June 20, 2008:

Seven critical lessons learned in angel investing

I had dinner with my good friend and Bazaarvoice co-founder, Brant Barton, on Tuesday at the new Sway in West Lake Hills (yummy) and we talked about lessons learned in angel investing. It was on my mind as I’m doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) webinar with my good friend and often investing colleague, Josh Baer, on Tuesday, Feb. 5 from 4-5pm CT (you can sign up here). During my conversation with Brant, I distilled down to seven lessons learned (in the spirit of Lucky7, of course). Brant is reading Jason Calacanis’s book on angel investing and told me that many of these are in there (maybe all of these, I haven’t read the book), so you may want to turn to that to really dig in as I’m going to do my best to keep this post short. My hope in sharing these with you is that it ignites more angel investing in Austin - it is vital to our startup ecosystem here. We are doing better on that front in Austin than ever before, but I believe we are only scratching the surface here. And I hope these lessons have an impact beyond Austin angels and startups as well.