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NBA Players Protest 150 150 admin

NBA Players Protest

For about a month, I’ve been watching the NBA players play their games inside what’s called the bubble located in Orlando, Florida to deal with Coronavirus.  The NBA administers lots of testing and has strict guidelines on who can enter and exit this “bubble”.

I was prepared to watch a couple of basketball games today on TNT, but those games have been postponed because the players have decided not to play today as a stand and protest to the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

I am proud of these players, and I will be even more proud if they continue to take a stand by not playing.  There are bigger things than basketball, and I know that many players, like myself, are frustrated after seeing police use obvious extreme and excessive force over and over again to kill black people who clearly don’t deserve to die.  Enough is enough, and it has been enough for a long time.

It has me questioning watching the NBA.  When I watch it, I help the ratings which helps the team owners who have political power purely from a monetary perspective. Team owners have political pull just by the sheer amount of money they have to influence elections and government officials through lobbying.

 

How to Have a Better Relationship With Money 150 150 admin

How to Have a Better Relationship With Money

How do you relate to money?

If you don’t naturally have a great relationship with money and you haven’t consciously worked on having a better relationship with money, it’s likely you’ll have a default, comfort zone relationship with money.

To examine your relationship with money, write a letter to it now.  “Dear money,….”  That will tell you.  (I picked this exercise up from You are a Badass at Making Money)

You might start it off with one of these:

  • “Dear money,  I never have enough of you.  You’re always moving to other people.”
  • “Dear money, you always slip through my fingers.”
  • “Dear money, I wish I didn’t have to ask my parents to give you to me.”
  • “Dear money, how do I earn more of you?”
  • “Dear money, why are you always on my mind?”
  • “Dear money, why don’t you stick around?  Do I have bad breath?”

If you wrote a letter, what would you want the letter to say?

 

How To Do Big Things In Life 150 150 admin

How To Do Big Things In Life

There is a tendency to dismiss the small like it’s not important.  It’s easy to dismiss the small amount of money your savings account earns, or the workout you do today, or the book you read this week, or the blog post you write, or the little thing you did to help someone, or the memory you created today, or the fear you overcame today.

Once you dig deeper, you find these things all add up over time and they pay dividends.  Just for Today was long these same lines.  When I was learning how to eat from this food group, I was told over and over to take it one day at a time because it was so different that how I normally ate.

So far, the best book on habits I’ve read is Atomic Habits.  Great book to read if you feel like your life is out of control – because it could be likely a habit issue.  At the top of the cover of the book it says “Tiny changes, Remarkable Results”.

Tiny changes – that’s how habits work.  If they’re conscious, deliberately chosen to benefit you and executed, they end up paying BIG dividends.  Isn’t it counterintuitive that if you want to do big things, they come from the small habits you do day in and day out?

When I see Youtube channels grow or musicians sound better or athletes become more skilled or someone lose a lot of weight I look at their consistency and their habits.

What habit would you like to add or develop that would lead you to doing something you feel is big?  What habit would you like to drop?  What habit could you start today?

Self Esteem and Career 150 150 admin

Self Esteem and Career

There was a time where I was feeling like I needed a job and would desperately seek any office job that would hire me.  My standards were pretty low at the time.  I’d take a job…any job if:

  • It paid at least $10/hr and
  • It wasn’t back-breaking labor and
  • It wasn’t fast food

This led to taking many bullshit jobs.  I would try to engage with the work I was assigned as much as possible because it seemed like that’s when time went by the fastest.  More often than not, my disdain for the work wouldn’t let me muster up enough engagement with it, and I would have thoughts like these:

  • “Fuuuuck this shit.”
  • “This is a waste of life.”
  • “I should be doing something more important.”
  • “How much longer til lunch?” (same question to myself 10-20min better)
  • “When is this gonna be over?”
  • (after being ordered to do something) “yeah…whatever”
  • “I hate that I’m getting good at this bullshit.  I’m not going to use this anywhere but here or other jobs like this.”
  • “hmmm…they just took all the credit for what I did.”
  • “I’m making them rich”
  • “They’re not even physically working.  Me and other people at the bottom of this pyramid are doing all the work and getting paid the least.”
  • “Fuck this shit!”  (Did I mention this one already?)
  • “How do I get out of this shit?”
  • “I’m not keeping any of the money I make here.”
  • “I just need X to make rent.”
  • “I need to be doing something more challenging.”
  • “I’m letting my ancestors down.”
  • “I hate when they bring other people in to look at us work like we’re animals at the zoo or something.”
  • “When will this end?”
  • “I’m just here because I need the money”

Add to this often daydreaming about entrepreneurship and vacations.

Fast forward to today.  I haven’t had a job in just over 2 years, but I have more money in my bank account and invested in crypto than I ever had before.  Why?

On June 26th…I said to myself – “no more neediness of money”.  I am free NOW.  Many things happened as a result of drawing that line in the sand.  I lived in my car for months.  I went through a voluntary repossession.  I started living with parents and started doing DoorDash for the little money I needed.  I couldn’t count the amount of times I heard or was nudged to “get a job”.  During this time, I actually started volunteering in a different way.  While I was doing DoorDash, I created a course.  I wrote 150+ articles.  I guest posted!  I actually did what I wanted to do and what I would do if I was completely free, and I’m still doing it.  I experimented with different ways to share this stuff.  I even learned some new songs to cover!  I realized that…I get to experiment with and choose how I want to work.

I also realized I can’t be attached to how money comes in – my job is to keep working and serving!  Having created a popular blog before, I thought I was going to get paid through advertisements or a sponsorship or something, but I got paid another way.  I can’t prove this for a fact, but I believe money came to me because I didn’t need money.  I stopped chasing it.  Now, when I feel like I need more money or I have to chase money, I try to volunteer.  It’s counterintuitive, but it works!

It wasn’t all good though.  I gained so much weight back that I’d lost!! but I couldn’t be happier with the work I’m doing.

Aligning with Your Values

If you look at this Linked-In post by Adam Grant (author of Give and Take) many of the thoughts I listed are reflective of Phase 1 – low self-esteem in career.  This is only part of the picture though.

“Living your life consistent with your deepest values is essential for you to enjoy high self-esteem. People who are clear about what they believe in and value, and who refuse to compromise their values like and respect themselves far more than people who are unclear about what is really important to them.” – Brian Tracy

Working on something you feel is important could be one standard, but why not have multiple standards for your work?  Aligning with your own values can not only raise your self-esteem in your career but across the board.

One value I hold very high is freedom.  My ancestors were slaves, so a big reason for the thoughts I listed above was due to not living consistent with the value of freedom I hold in high regard.  Early on, I didn’t demand freedom from my career.  I’d settle for working in a friggin box.  From the outside looking in, living in a car creating a course was weird, but I still look at that and I’m so proud of it – because I was free.  I was prouder than anytime I spent working a bullshit job in any office.  There is no replacement for living consistent with your own values.

I also don’t think I understood how to handle freedom responsibly.  No matter how free you are, there’s still work to do.  There’s still an infinite amount of ways to serve.

I feel thankful for the work I’m doing now, because I feel like even if I help one person have a shift that feels way more rewarding, fulfilling and more important than wasting time doing something easy, boring and repetitive as work.

What are your standards?

What are you not demanding from your job?  Do you like cubicles? Do you want months of vacations?  Do you want to work on something important?  What would that be?  Is there something you feel like only you could/should do?  Is your unique genius at work?

What are your values?  Do you value freedom?  Creativity?  Responsibility?  Skill-building?  Service?

Have you written down your values?  Values can definitely shift, but it’s good to keep some record of what you value and how they change over time.

How can you take one step today to move into greater alignment with your own values?

How to Cover a Song 150 150 admin

How to Cover a Song

This is a method I use to sing and play piano together fluently when I want to cover a song.

I really break this down into two main parts – the singing and playing of course.

Playing the Piano

I start with playing, and below I’ve listed my go-to’s for learning how to play a song.  Many of these things involve sheet music because I spent years learning to read sheet music from my piano teachers.

  • I go on Youtube to see if there’s a tutorial and/or to get some ideas on how to play things
  • I will go to Musicnotes to see if there’s sheet music for the song I want to play (they usually have beginner music, but the chords I need are still on there)
  • If I really want an in-depth, accurate piece of sheet music I’ll go and see if I can buy a transcription by the artist – basically a note-for-note record on how they played a song
  • Sometimes I might need to fill in gaps, so I’ll just listen to the song repeatedly and try to match the sounds up with the piano.  This is what’s called playing by ear, and some do this way better than others.

When I’m learning, I’ll learn in one hand at a time slowly and then put the hands together and repeat.  And repeat.  And repeat.  The name of the game is repetition.  You know you’ve repeated enough when you can play the song without thinking about it and the normal song speed.

Singing

I use my voice memos app on my iPhone and record until I get my sound the way I want it.  If I don’t like it, I don’t post it publicly.  Cardio helps with this also.  It’s a lot easier singing when you can breathe better.  Much of it is just picking up different things here and there from artists I like.  I feel like playing piano has really helped with accurate pitch while singing, but there’s so much more to it than that.  Singing is connecting with the audience, dynamics, vibrato, breathing, cardio and breathe control, warming up vocal chords, etc.

So…that’s what I do so far.  Any questions or anything you’d like to know feel free to leave it in the comments.  Thank you!

 

Be The Change You Want to See in the World 150 150 admin

Be The Change You Want to See in the World

The title of this blog is a quote by Mahatma Gandhi.

I’ve heard and seen this quote before, but I’ve never written down the changes I want to see in the world.  For every change in the world, it’s a pointer to my own character changes.

Changes I want to see in the world:

  • I want to see people be freer.  According to The Guardian, 1 in every 200 people was a slave (that article was written in February 2019).   WTF?  Come on!
  • I also want to see people accept more of the freedoms they have already.
  • I want to see different infrastructures and cities built up instead of jumping on the ones that are already thriving.  Let’s build up more spaces so we have more options on where to live.
  • I want to see people who aren’t expressing themselves express themselves more uniquely.  This means creating and delivering your work.
  • I want to see the world being more congruent in their character publicly and privately.   Be who you are in private in public…along the lines of Keep the Same Energy.
  • I want to see the world eating healthier.
  • I want to see people aligning decisions of money and financial abundance with oneness.
  • I want to see people have more forgiveness for themselves and others.
  • I want more people focused on personal growth.
    • I want a world more really to try new things, take on new experiments, and make more mistakes (easier when you live in a more forgiving world)
  • I want to see the world value oneness more.
  • I want the world to raise awareness of their habits.  The small things they do over and over that add up over time.
  • I want to see more intelligent and transparent leadership.  I live in Texas so…there’s been such a lack of leadership and consistent terrible decisions at both the state and federal level.

I look at this list, and I look at pointers to my own character and where I need to grow.  Right now I’d say expression and making expression a habit is where I wanted to do the most work this year – (hence the work on this site!).  I also want to do more work building up other infrastructures.

There’s a lot of work to do, and I take full responsibility for making the necessary changes in my character to get it done.

The Scale Scared the Hell Outta Me 150 150 admin

The Scale Scared the Hell Outta Me

It was pretty shocking to me to look down at the scale (after not having seen it for probably a year) and see that I weighed 379 lbs…at 5’8.  WHAT IN ALL THE FUCK?

Coronavirus + living with mom has not treated me well at all.  It’s emergency time.  Honestly, it’s been emergency time.  Too much consumption of junk food.  I conveniently used the excuse of not having access to a kitchen.  Looking back that was not an acceptable excuse.  I would have told my past self back then “find access to a kitchen…BEFORE you start eating junk food”.

I moved the scale around the place I’m living at in disbelief…thinking to myself…”nah it can’t be this bad”.  It is.

I’ve lost lots of weight before, and I have access to a refrigerator and kitchen now, so there’s no excuses.

Play With Your Heart, Not Your Head 150 150 admin

Play With Your Heart, Not Your Head

I was going to do a review on Jerry Maguire, but the clip below is one of the main messages I took away from it.

In the clip below Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) is a sports agent trying to get his client/NFL wide receiver, Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.), the bigger, longer, contract Rod is looking for and all the “quan” that comes with it.  After lots of feeding Ron’s ego throughout the movie, he finally bluntly tells Rod the truth in this clip.  That truth is that off the field Ron plays with heart (friends/children/family/wife).  On the field is a different story.

What areas are you not playing with heart?  Is it career?  Is it your love life?  Do what you must do to play life full out because giving 100% is badass.