LegendaryLife Blog

I never heard of this band or the song before but being a fan of both electronic music and 3D animation, I was very impressed by this video. What I like the most is the originality, the sync between the music and aspects within the animation and the use of a “comic filter”. I would be surprised if they used anything but 3DS Max to produce this entire project… great job guys!

Mortality or Death (which ever makes you feel better) isn’t something to be feared nor used as an excuse for not getting what you want out of your one and ONLY life.

Cooking is easy, take your time and experiment and I guarantee you will be happier as a result!

Few skills are as important to a healthy, long and fulfilling life as the ability to cook your own food. Of course, baking your own bread, muffins and (healthy) deserts is just as rewarding as well!

Why cooking your own food is essential to happiness

If you spend all your time eating at restaurants, you may notice that it can get mighty expensive after a while, considering a typical meal is north of 10 dollars even the fast food variety. You eat three times a day (on average) with snacks in-between so you can easily spend over 50$ a day if you don’t know how to cook. If you do know how to cook, this is what your cost will be per week and I guarantee you that the food will taste better, be healthier and give you far more self-esteem. I think, unless you are independently wealthy and have your own chef, learning to cook is one of the easiest roots towards happiness and contentment with your life.

Cooking 101: It doesn’t need to be complicated

If you have NEVER cooked in your life or the extent of your experience is pressing a few numbers on the microwave, let me be the first to tell you that cooking nutritious, healthy meals is even easier! Go to your local library and in-between all those fancy “Martha Stewart” books, there is bound to be a book with the most basic of recipes. It isn’t hard making your own macaroni and cheese anymore than it is to slice some pork and cook it along with a can of beans. If you want to get a bit more fancy, slice and cook some streak, thrown in some pasta with some sauce and you have a very easy meal indeed that took very little time to prepare. The fact is, most foods are actually quite easy to prepare if you have an oven, a few stainless steel pots / pans and a willingness to experiment.

Creativity and Cooking

There a lot of creative things you can do with your time, but none so challenging as creating your own recipes that you LOVE and can’t get enough of. I might get a recipe from a friend and usually, within a few months, modified it enough to call it my own. I do a lot of experimentation in the kitchen, usually in the “adding stuff” department. For instance, you might buy a jar of pasta sauce well, beforehand, cook a mixture of onions, chunks of steak, shrimp, marbled cheese, garlic, green peppers, mushrooms and yes, some real tomatoes too… THEN add the pasta sauce and bring everything to a boil. The nice thing about creating your own recipes is you can modify them to suit your exact tastes. If you hate spicy food, no problem, as you are creating many things from scratch, you can simply omit it… this comes in very handy for food allergies as well.

Why don’t you cook?

My guess, other than a fear of fire, the second most popular reason for not cooking your own meals comes down to time. Cooking a fantastic pasta meal takes 20-30 minutes about the same amount of time as ordering a pizza but with the added advantage of being able to cook enough for 10 people! If you are alone, why cook for so many people? Well, you got a freezer don’t you? Freeze the extras and eat it during your lunch or other meals… it will save you a fortune and I am sure you feel much better eating your food than the crap that passes as meals your friends might be eating-out on.

The Bottom Line

Cooking is NOT difficult and can be a highly rewarding part of a healthy lifestyle.

Fear puts far too many people into a prison of their own making.

Fear and doubt have no place in my heart and they shouldn’t have a voice in yours neither!

Negative, self-limiting vocabulary

Few things astonish me as much as the number of people “out there” who try to find every reason they can come-up with to limit the joy and challenges they can experience in their one and only life. I can easily suggest that negative, self-limiting vocabulary is an epidemic around the world that is at its worse in developed countries which, to be honest, have the least to complain about. Words such as “I can’t”, “I shouldn’t” and “I’m scares” (and it goes on) should be banned from the minds of people, they would be so much happier for it!

Where do these thoughts come from?

Although some of these limiting words come from within, I have concluded that most of it is generated my media itself. Sadly, this has ruined far too many people, especially females who are told, constantly, on a daily basis that they are not desirable if they don’t have XYZ product, wear XYZ cloths or have XYZ on their face / bodies. Just look at your average magazine and you will see page after page after page degrading women for being too fat, ugly, wrinkled etc… and of course, the solution is the purchase of some useless trinket that will make everything OK again.

Why do we limit ourselves?

This is an incredible world that would take several lifetimes to explore, yet, with the advances that come with the modern lifestyle, few people take advantage of this! So, why do people, on purpose, limit what they can see, experience, taste and hear? The simple reason is FEAR. Fear of the unknown, fear of being stunned, fear of being killed, fear of being poisoned… basically, there are always more reasons NOT to do something than otherwise. I believe it’s in our human nature to explore and experience the world around us, if it wasn’t, we would all still be living in mud houses in Africa and never would have ventured past the Sahara desert those tens of thousands of years ago. It isn’t in our nature to stay in a little cocoon of safety but we have been taught to do this as we replace our emotional comforts with material ones. To put it bluntly, it’s too difficult for most people to leave what they have “accumulated” for any significant period of time as they have invested in things instead of themselves.

So what is the solution?

I have found the solution a long time ago, essentially ignore ALL media that is negative in any way. This is rather easy once you get the hang of it. For instance, I rarely read magazines and when I do, if there is something that is trying to sell me something I don’t “need”, I tune right-out. You do this daily already, how many TV commercials do you remember that you have watched today? I bet you can’t list more than a dozen and that was more due to repetition than impact. Another thing I do is watch NO TV. I get my news online, tunning out advertising is incredibly easy online. I get my video podcasts which have the added benefit of not having any commercials though my iTunes and even better, I am so busy working on my own businesses that I have little time to waste “vegging-out”. Throw-in a tough workout regimen to build-up self-esteem while burning off stress and life really can’t get any better. I am a firm believer that every year or two, you need to make some fundamental changes in your life to keep things interesting.

The Bottom Line

The link between self-esteem and limiting thoughts is a very powerful one that needs daily attention.