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 Neither do I, they’ve been replaced by robots!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!

There are two kinds of companies out there, the “me-toos” which see how successful others are and try to replicate it with a few changes in order to enjoy the same amount of success and the “what-the-___” ones who create their own unique niche and take years to get steam. I’ve had a very bad habit of creating “what-the” since I was a kid, always thinking of the world in a very different way than most others.

I use to deliver newspapers and much to my customer’s puzzlement, would only collect money from them on a bi-monthly basis ONCE (if they weren’t home, it would be another 2 weeks before they saw me) after I realized the more customers owed me, the higher the tips were. Giving 10 cents tip out of 3$ is too easy, not having change for a 20$ when they owed me 17$ was more profitable.

I began a 3D animation studio when most companies had no clue what it was (ironic considering how much “3D” type articles you write about now) and in vain tried to acquire 3ds.com but Dassault Systèmes beat me to it – hence i3DS.com which is starting to sound like a lot of the names of 3D systems out there. Convincing the DELL phone sales rep that I was an industrial company needing a 10K workstation for CAD so it was fine selling it to me.

I was given a line of credit while in university which I promptly cashed-out a few months later (giving my parents two weeks notice in the process) to travel abroad alone for two months to Japan, Australia and Malaysia! I even got another line of credit to help fund my business while learning how to fly!

Since September, WoodMarvels.com has really been on a tear… in the most positive sense of the word. Sales keep going UP, people are more and more offering me great opportunities which, based on my past, I don’t say no to. I still remember the time when I first started WoodMarvels.com, there was just me and my computer (that hasn’t changed much) but the pictures of the resources available all showed hand-crafted toys with guys wearing mustaches showing their handywork. There were screws, nails, extensive material lists and MEASUREMENTS (I hate math!). Suffice it to say, I knew there had to be a better way, computers, 3D animation, no measurements… this seemed like the path forward! Back then, I didn’t even know about lasers, on-demand manufacturing… I was designing things using wooden dowels meant for jigsaws but kept looking for a modern equivalent. I had visited industrial companies around North America and they showed me what was possible… so I designed based on what I saw, not on what I knew.

Barriers to entry where steep, I had no way of cutting much less knowing if my designs worked other than what my computer told me but I didn’t let that stop me… I plowed through. I didn’t know how to design toys but that didn’t stop me. I couldn’t draw but I didn’t let that stop me. I didn’t have any money! That didn’t stop me either! Basically, I saw a door and come hell or high water, I was going to open it!

I wanted others to join with my company as well, and to this day, I still actively look for other designers to have their stuff on my site – nothing worse than going to a store that sells only one style of things… and after each of those collaborations, I learn a little something that helps me improve on my designs!

The more I design for WoodMarvels.com, the more it surprises me that there are no equivalent sites to it. Sure, there are a few hobby places here and there but doing things the way I do? Nope! The cost of entry is huge – you need to get a full time 3D artist (not cheap especially now!) or learn yourself (very steep learning curve), build products out of thin air (easy for me now but incredibly difficult for me when I started), build a brand and partnerships (again, very difficult without an extensive portfolio) and even if you have all of this… finding customers to make it a profitable enterprise! If anything the barriers have only increased, not decreased with time.

Suffice it to say, I believe I created my very own niche and for however a short time I dominate it, the ride has and continues to be fun! That being said, I’m always trying new things… I really and truly love what I do here at WoodMarvels.com and anything I can do to grow the audience and customer base – I’ll give it a try.

There is a motto that I feel myself living through quite often, there is nothing to fear but fear itself – when you realize you have nothing to lose – and go for it… the journey might take a few years with challenges along the way, but taking the initiative and jumping off the diving board without knowing how high or even if there is water in the pool… makes life worth living!

I’ve been checking my Autodesk subscription account for 3DS Max 2012 and it’s now downloading… I’m anxious to get working on this major 3DS Max upgrade. I spend easily a few hours EVERYDAY in this incredible program.

I really hope that it also features faster (higher quality) rendering within MR so that I can blow through these rendering bottlenecks… I also hope it fixes a few SuperSpray bugs which hangs-up when rendering every once in a while (when most needed of course).

I use this program to make all the animations found at WoodMarvels.com and 3DMarvels.com… and every once in a while, HowToChinese.com (animation below). I read yesterday Intel will be releasing a 10-core Xeon chip (for servers) with HyperThreading… this makes me drool as it would allow me to blow through the limitations I’m always stuck in when it comes to rendering.

I really have a lot to learn, including integrating greenscreen which I’ve finally nailed-down after the video below. Things going well!

The New Frontier in Mandarin Chinese Exploration

I’m constantly reminded at how important it is to be well diversified, financially speaking. If you learn only one skill that provides but one stream of revenue, you are ASKING for trouble should that stream become a trickle or worse, be damned upstream.

Now, more than ever, learning isn’t something just done during your school-age period but over your entire lifetime. Unlike the “old times”, you are never too old to stop learning new things to keep yourself relevant in the global economy we all find ourselves into. Competition isn’t locally but worldwide so people can no longer afford to remain stagnant in the head when it comes to knowledge and expertise.

I’m to the point now in my life where I have money coming from several buckets, any one bucket dries-out I’m still fine financially… this is the way to live in the future. The nice thing about having several buckets is the freedom it affords me in making decisions that are relevant to my aspirations and goals in life. I know what I want, and increasingly, have the financial confidence to pursuit it without worrying about financial “what-ifs”.

Diversification, especially in the area of financials, is essential. The more buckets you have to pull from, the more water you can devote to any one idea… increasing the chance of any one planted idea growing into a money tree!