LegendaryLife Blog

It seems the news these days is all doom and gloom… you have an employment rate of 92% in the USA and instead of being proud of this fact considering how much stuff is happening in the world, the news seems to focus entirely on the 8% saying life is over, they lost this, they lost that.

Common treads

Generally, what I see from the stories of people who lost everything is that they did several big mistakes and instead of taking personal responsibility, they blame just about everybody else but themselves. I know there are other circumstances of course, some people just get wacked from nowhere due to medical emergencies and the like but I’m describing what I see as GENERAL trends, not specific cases.

Stopped learning

This is a HUGE factor as to why many people are unable to find jobs, they only know things specific to one industry doing rather specific things – sure, they can do it extremely well and probably better than anybody out there but instead of upgrading and broadening their skills as the economy evolved over time, they just stuck to that one thing. They got comfortable while the world passed them by. Essentially, they are 10-30 years BEHIND the current economy in dead-end industry with dead-end jobs that finally DIED. Remember the guys whose job use to be to weld car frames together? Neither do I, they’ve been replaced by robots!

Investing and studying the wrong things!

Would I go to university for 4 years NOW to become a newspaper journalist? Absolutely NOT… yet there are plenty of people doing this right now. Why? If blogging has taught us anything is that anybody and everybody is a journalist these days. Look at the YouTube top videos, these aren’t professionals, they are guys and gals doing something that builds an audience. Journalism IS a noble profession but guess what, it’s a dying profession – newspapers and magazines are going under all over the place, replaced with bloggers and online content aggrigators like the Huffington Post. Anybody can write a story, not well, but anybody can – there is no future here. When your skill set become a commodity, you are expendable.

All your eggs in one basket

I’ve done this once, I got screwed big time… that’s when I decided to diversify my income streams as much as possible. If you are living paycheck to paycheck with that income coming from ONE source… well, you are asking for trouble! Many of these horror stories paint a “romantic” picture of how a family all worked for ONE company their whole lives and got laid off when the plant or factory closed. I don’t know how they ever got comfortable with this arrangement, considering how global the world has become. At the very least, don’t get jobs at the same place and rely totally on that as your sole source of income.

Lived beyond their means

Poor people trying to live like millionaires, millionaires trying to live like billionaires… all on borrowed money. It catches up to you – again, I”ve done this myself and learned! If you are making 100K a year and spend twice that, you will lose everything and the economy has nothing to do with it! If you are a family with two drivers, surely you don’t need 4 cars (unless you can afford it without borrowing). Live within your means… actually, live BELOW your means. If shit hits the fan, you won’t lose everything because it will ALL BE PAID FOR ALREADY!

Not taking care of yourself

This is another HUGE one. You work at a job and never find time to take care of yourself, after 20 years, you look like shit and nobody will want to hire you. This is reality! Your past employer saw you decline… GRADUALLY (hence never noticed the change) but your future one will see this all in one shot. Maybe your past employer didn’t care if you were a chain-smoking-morbidly-obese-alcoholic-dickhead because he or she NEEDED YOU (or was one themselves) but don’t go to another employer expecting them to jump through hoops to hire you. Everyday, you are in competition with younger, smarter, better looking people who are more than eager to do your job for less money than you are. Your employer didn’t hire them because it would have been too much of a headache to fire you and hire them (value proposition wasn’t strong enough). When you are no longer employed and sitting at a job interview, guess what, you are at the bottom of the list even before you open your mouth!

Provide value!

What is your value proposition? Sure, you worked at XYZ for 10 years doing ABC… I don’t care – what are you bringing to the table? If all you have to show for the past 10 years is that you worked at XYZ for 10 years going ABC – as an employer, you are bringing nothing (unless this is high-demand specialized skills). People get complaisant, it’s easy doing the same repetitive task and at the end of the week, pickup your paycheck. As an employer, this tells me that you aren’t willing to learn new things (unless I push you to do so) – hence your current predicament. It tells me that your life is most likely stagnant and that your vision of the future extends as far as your next paycheck. Sure, I’m willing to assume you will be loyal – of course you will, you get yourself in a groove and stayed there for 10 years doing the same thing! Your past is a very good indicator of your future unless there has been a change in your life recently (death, marriage, kids etc.)

Willing to take chances

The very fact that you are alive if a gift onto itself, the best you could do with this gift is to take chances to achieve the life that you are now capable of dreaming about. TAKE CHANCES! If you have an opportunity, jump on it before somebody else does. Our entire species tends to want to keep itself down, keep us comfortable, stable… those who fight against this are the winners in life. Tired of working minimum wage? Well, go to school, switch employers, make dramatic changes in your life! The comfort of a life or job keeping you down in order to pay the bills one more week isn’t worth doing your entire life. This is throwing the gift of life that your parents gave to you into the trash. Successful people succeed because they FAIL far more and harder than they ever succeeded… the reason they are successful is because they eventually hit onto something that didn’t fail. Never forget that success comes from lessons learned in failure! You cannot succeed if you never tried, you cannot succeed if you never failed.

Harsh reality of employment

At the end of the day, you have a job because you MAKE more money for the employer than they SPEND keeping you there. The moment they SPEND more than what you are worth to the organization – you are OUT. You should always think of your job under these terms… and realize that any change in the economy (locally or globally), your health or that of your employer or anything else… your job is on the line. This happens regardless of whether you worked there for 5 months or 50 years.

Employment isn’t a right, it’s a privilege!

So, what happened in the vast majority of these cases? The employee thought that their job was a RIGHT, not a privilege. What do I mean? They took their employer for granted. Well, be happy you HAVE  a job, work everyday to bring VALUE to your employer and always strive to LEARN new things both inside and outside of your industry should something threaten your job. The way I see it, being on both ends of the stick as an employee and employer is that as an employee you are always one paycheck away from a pink slip while as an employer, you are always one contract away from having to give said pink slip. Scary? This is the reality that sadly, if you are unemployed, you found-out too late!

Good employers look for rock stars!

People are good at answering straight questions… what is your date of birth, what are your hobbies and the list goes on. As an employer, I want to see your PASSION! If you don’t care about this job and are looking for a paycheck – go elsewhere. That simple! If your resume is impressive and you are over-qualified… instead of worrying if you are a flight risk or that you will make me look bad (you being better than me) – it means as an employer, I want YOU. Why? Because employees can learn as much about a business as employers from who is working for them. If you hire a rock star and he or she bolts after a few months, you are richer, your staff is richer… everybody gained valuable insight and were most likely highly motivated by this individual while they were there! Any boss can hire a person, but can you hire AMAZING PASSIONATE employees?

The Bottom Line

Instead of blaming others for your state of affairs, take it upon yourself to make changes to create the life you wish to have. At the end of the day, you are your own worst problem or best solution regarding the circumstances you my find yourself in.

I’ve been learning Mandarin Chinese on/off for 15 years… each time, making great progress then life getting in the way – usually in the form of a business that takes over all my time (WoodMarvels.com didn’t grow from a lack of work!). This has happened to me several times so far – and will continue probably until I retire. I actually moved to China and lived there for close to two years in the hopes I could finally get this long term goal of mine accomplished!

What I saw while there surprised me and then I realized how little education I actually got both from various books / tapes / CDs and even my year learning Mandarin Chinese at my local university about anything beyond the language. There was so much that I didn’t have the opportunity to learn about that was just as important to me as learning the language. China and the Chinese people are fascinating and complex, I wanted to show this to others trying to learn Chinese while, at the same time, having a book that took this into account and improving based on my personal experience, all the shortcomings of what others had done.

Learning a language is very difficult, it takes at least an hour a day, everyday – even when you are living in a country surrounded by this language – for it to sink in. I felt there was so much I didn’t grasp, hence how both the website HowToChinese.com and the book that was written came about.

My wife and I built a resource that I wished I had when I was in university – it’s by far superior to anything I’ve ever used previously to learn Mandarin Chinese and unlike the other systems, you have live video that will help you throughout the learning process. Lucky really enjoys making the videos and I doing the post-production… it’s great fun and I hope you can also see great benefit to the system we have developed for you to benefit from. Lucky worked extremely hard on this book and I’m very proud of her for how she has developed HowToChinese.com… there is a lot more coming in the very near future regarding this business to make it all the more educational and fun.

Book Information

Experience Lucky’s passion for teaching Mandarin Chinese to students around the world through her comprehensive and professionally produced online video series to help you build fluency in record time!

A fantastic book for both beginners and advanced students!

• Step by step learning process with each chapter building onto the next
• Multiple in-chapter exercises to reinforce new learnings along with real-life conversation dialogs
• Pinyin and Simplified Chinese characters throughout
• In-book Chinese <—> English mini-dictionaries
• Comprehensive video series tie-ins to help with your pronunciation and fluency
• Chinese history and modern cultural notes
• Over 170 photographs taken across China!

As we all observe the events happening around the Middle East, it becomes blatantly obvious at how much was sacrificed by those living in those totalitarian countries simply to provide the rest of us with cheap, dependable oil. We all traded our morals and values for a fatter wallet.

What I find most ironic of the whole circumstances is how fearful the “outside” governments who played a very very active role in this suppression of a whole swath of our “inside” Brotheren by, at one side of their mouth, telling them the benefits of democracy yet from the other, telling the these inside populous that it’s not alright for them to live the same way as the rest of us.

To add insult to irony, it just happens that the world’s economies have crashed and gone into stagnation… the worst time to deal with yet ANOTHER problem. This is why I always believe in dealing with little fires around your life before they become big and out of control.

The world’s politicians should all be fired for their lack of foresignt, ignorance and complacency… passing the buck to the next politician in line while mortgaging their wealth onto future generations to pay down. When will the world wake-up and realize that stability is only an illusion… whether you are looking at human history or geological history, I can’t think of one period of extended stability that didn’t end the wrong way for those who believed in it.

How to solve the world’s problems in six easy steps (this is inevitable so might as well do it now):

1. Abolish all countries and set-up one world order with one currency used worldwide. Countries become regions, but all share the same laws. Not only will this equalize the value of products, environmental standards and lead to a far more productive world but it will also equalize standards. Meaning, a product made in China or made in America would cost the same after raw materials are factored in. Right now, many of the world’s inequalities are artificial, trade is not on a level playing field, it’s a race to the bottom (or top) with little left in the middle. I know of the problems with the EU for trying this on a limited scale but the issues that arise are due to emotion (legacy?), not logic. Take the emotion out and many of the problems wouldn’t exist.
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2. Bring the world’s population down, I’m guessing the wars during step #1 will do a good job at this (people fear change and fight for the status quo) but afterwards, we need to bring things lower. Why? Well, many of the environmental problems that will hit us very soon are caused by  inequalities in food production/distribution and the other resources on this wonderful planet. This is caused again by artificial barriers to keep certain people in their social place for the benefit of others. Short of a virus spreading through the human population, we need to learn that yes, we do affect the environment around us and yes, we need to progress enough to realize that we can’t keep growing our numbers without consequence.
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3. Abolish the practice of corporate marketing to children. Why? Well, do you honestly thing we are born wanting to eat chocolate cookies and becoming couch potatoes? There is a serious problem when children are told that being fat and eating unhealthy food is something to be idolized. Even worse, think of how much wasted time and energy is spent by the vast proportion of our society on irrelevant things. Fashion? Gossip? Honestly, I couldn’t care less about what xyz person is doing half a world away… yet so much wasted brain power goes into this mental garbage production. The fact that junk food is even sold to children boggles my mind… we don’t let them smoke until they are 18 but we let them eat as many Big Macs as their bellies can stuff in and we think that’s fine? I’d prefer to have a smoking kid going to the gym than a junk food, couch potato one.
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4. Grow some common sense. I’d love to find-out the real reason why alcohol is sold in almost unlimited quantities while cocaine is illegal. More people die ever year from the effects of alcohol and more families broken by this substance than anything cocaine can do YET one is considered a cultural norm while the other isn’t. I don’t like any kind of drugs but the way things seem to be organized across several societies don’t seem to be based off facts or logic but perceived ills. Did you know that it’s impossible to die from a pure cocaine overdose? Chewing on leaves (it’s origins) only helps suppress appetite, it’s all the cutting agents (to increase profits) which lead to health and mental problems… the same cannot be said about alcohol. Cocaine is so benign that it used to be used by the Coke company, hence the name!
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5. A proper education should become a human right! With the advent of the internet, these is no reason why each and every citizen on this planet, regardless of social, economic or geographic location can’t get a full education. Education leads to smaller families, a higher knowing of self and a stronger personality willing to stand-up to nonsense. The only reason why education isn’t a right is because it’s to the advantage of many rulers to keep their population dumb so they are easier to control. They fill them with religion which answers each question with “God made it” instead of finding-out the REAL reason why things are the way they are. They fill their citizen with brain garbage for the same reason (see above) and without knowledge, how can you possibly understand things that you do not? Nobody wants to be cutting t-shirts 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for little pay… but if you know no different and have no opportunities to escape this slavery, you are stuck wasting your life away. Sad.
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6. We need a global vision (see #1) that will give us all a goal to strive for. It has to be crazy but possible… such as the successful colonization of Mars or developing technologies that will improve the environment, not damage it. This will not only give purpose to many people’s lives but also direct institutions in a similar tangent. Right now, we have one country doing one thing, another doing something different and there isn’t much sharing of knowledge between the two. Imagine has fast we could evolve (yes, Evolve) ourselves to defeat the REAL evils of our lives such as poverty, mortality and sickness if all of us, collectively, worked day-in and day-out towards solving these very real problems.

Here you have it, a great way to set things back onto track though I doubt it will happen by choice for anybody involved… we will be FORCED one way or another by nature to do so… sooner or later. I could go-on, there is a lot left-out of here, but this is a good start.

I was watching a video showcasing an up-and-coming Anthony Robbin’es prodigy and over the course of 45 minutes, he kept repeating one key phrase. “It’s not your fault.”

Importance of personal responsibility

I fully realize that people like to hear that it isn’t their fault that they threw their lives away, allowed their body to get so out of shape that they suffer from chronic disease or were lied to by the marketing elite but let’s be honest… nobody cares as much about yourself as YOU and giving other power over your lifestyle, no matter the intent, is just a very bad idea!

For instance, we all know that alcohol is BAD for your body, no matter the amount but people still enjoy (?) getting wasted and pursuing other unhealthy habits. When the consequences come to the light, it’s always nice to blame others for your circumstances but the buck must always stop at yourself. You are the boss of your body, life and ultimately, what you leave behind… nobody else.

Why “it’s not your fault” sells

There is a lot in life that really is not our fault, genetically speaking but I believe we are all on an equal playing field (more or less) when it comes to finding ultimate happiness given what we have. Sure, being born in a 1st world country is an extreme privilege brought about by random chance and life is much easier when your parents are gazillionaires but given what you have in life, it’s up to you to make the most of it. I believe telling somebody “it’s not your fault” when in all actuality, their decisions in life are what lead them to the circumstances they are stuck in doesn’t do them a favor as they are not given the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. If you can’t see what you did wrong in the past, how can you change your lifestyle so it doesn’t happen again?

The importance of self-study

I try on almost a weekly basis to try to improve my life, how ever minimal, in one way or another. Whether this is tweeking an exercise regimen, replacing things in my diet or planning my next adventure… the importance of studying what you did in the past and improving upon it should only end once you are 6ft under. An active brain with a capable body, however you wish to define them, can do incredible things when given the right drive, ambition and passion. If you have hobbies that are detrimental to your life, replace them with good ones, if you have friends who waste your time, show them the door. I believe life should be about exploration and learning… and things that prevent you from getting the most out of these experienced need to be weened away.

The Bottom Line

Some things are really not your fault, but most of the things that are can be traced back through earlier decisions that were detrimental to your goals in life.

I started on my second book, part inspirational, part workbook and all passion. I originally started on this book on Feb 8th of this year and it has taken me till the 26th to get it proofed, laid out and a host of other changes before it became available on Amazon! (read about it here)

What did I learn publishing this book?

A hell of a lot, my first book, WoodMarvels.com: Top Sellers took about as long to publish and in hindsight, this one blows it out of the water regarding what I learned.

• Get your proof proofed several times and double-check it digitally before requesting another one! I went through 6 proofs of this book because there was always one small thing that was missed which added well over two months to the publishing date.
• Colors are a pain in the ass! My cover and inside was originally all full color, color correcting over 70 images isn’t any fun so I simply did everything in full color but decided to get it printed in gray scale to save me the trouble except for the front cover.
• Have a good internet connection! Uploading a 200mb file several times isn’t any fun.
• If you are not an American, you cannot get your book released on Kindle! Originally this book was to be Kindled but a few days ago, I was told this was no possible… I guess somebody forgot to tell this to J. K. Rowlings.

Why is this book special?

Other than the fact that there is a heck of a lot of work, which I did all myself, from layout, publishing, graphics, comic strip etc… I’ve read more than my fair share of self-help and motivational books out there and this one is the only one I know that has a mixture of humor, comics and simple task based projects.

Why is your name not on the cover?

Well, this is a book to help YOU transform your life… I though it would be silly to stick a big picture of ME on there with my name in bold letters. I’m taking a different approach towards self-help books… in that the focus is 100% on YOU, not the author.

Can I view a sample?

Absolutely, follow this link to view inside the book – be warned though, as of writing this blog, Amazon seems to have stuck a very early proof in the book in the “Look Inside” feature. I’ve just uploaded the correct versions of all these with the inside in gray scale and the cover looking far better, I figure it will be a few days before they update it. Somebody screwed-up somewhere and it should fix itself soon enough.

Transforming Your Life From Blah To Legendary!: A Guide For Massive Positive And Lasting Changes In Your Life

Is that it?

No actually, I’m less than a month away from releasing my second volume of WoodMarvels.com with 4 pages shy of 200 and a wicked upgrade from my first one… using what I learned from my first volume and this one has taught me how to do things right in the publishing world! Also, my science fiction story 2847AD is slated to be moving along in a few weeks as well. Stay tuned!

The Bottom Line

Publishing your own books is fun!