TV update

You may get to my point where you come in on Monday and hear people talking about all the football game outcomes from the weekend and you remember that football is actually on and that you don't care that you missed it.  I had my first child born this last week and we had to go to the hospital to put her under observation for high bili levels.  Being in the hospital a couple days last week watching tv was just a reminder how huge of a waste of time it is and how pointless it is and mind numbing.  It is striking to watch tv once you haven't in a long time lol.

I’m going waste time right now cause I want to and can though I know its not good for me by writing this blog post.

I had an interesting conversation with my brother about the businesses/lives we’re currently leading.

I’m a wimp.  This morning I was at least and was very uncomfortable about it.  I didn’t realize I was being one until I was talking to my brother about it hours later.  What I’m referring to specifically is that I was learning some things about how to get inside my customer’s head and the wimp/victim inside of me was saying, “I’ve never been a great salesman.  I’m not sure this stuff will work for me.  I’m not going to be successful in business.”

How lame is that!?!?

As with all addicts, I consider myself to being addicted to being an employee and being small and not successful in business and to those previous thoughts I had, one of the first very crucial steps is to recognize you have a problem number one.  Number two that it is a big problem.  And number three that I’m the only one who can deal it and me alone.

Lucky for me I have conversations with my brother and wife and dad and others that help me see this stuff that I’m doing/saying to myself and can help me change it before it does more damage that it already has.

I know this is going to be a very uncomfortable thing to admit again and again in the future that I’m a wimp in business and need to replace it my inner herculean beast, but I already know what the alternative is if I don’t, i.e. being crapped on as an employee and with no equity to make the getting crapped on portion bearable, and that is not acceptable to me and I won’t stand for it.

That was a big part of my brother and I’s conversation, i.e. making excuses for not being successful in business.  He’s got a girlfriend.  I’ve got a kid on the way.  He’s working out (tired) and so do I and so we don’t want to expend even more energy on things we know we need to do.  I’ve already cut out having a tv.  He’s doing bomb.com things with his health and personal introspective life.  I could keep on going, but the point is we’re always going to have many easily available and seemingly legit excuses (lies) we’ll be able to tell ourselves for why we’re not successful.  I have another kid.  He gets married.  Interest rates are too low.  Interest rates are too high.

I don’t want to admit that even blowing just 3-4 hours on weekend playing my mom’s ipad mini is an issue even though I hardly ever play video games.  I don’t even have my own financial freedom yet via cash flowing assets or a hoarded pile of money that even with the most extravagant amount of spending would not be dented.  Why don’t I?  Cause I don’t want to be accountable for the time I’m spending on that stuff and do things I know are better.  I also don’t want to admit that I’m vastly exaggerating the amount of down time I really need when I do stuff like that and simultaneously want to be successful in business.

One thing I’ve had rumblings of is that I don’t want to be constantly checking out doom and gloom stuff as far as finance goes.  I know its going to come crashing down.  I don’t need to know the minutiae though of how rising interest rates exposed the London Whale fiasco and subsequent speculation about what fiasco is being hidden by the even bigger interest rate rise we’ve seen since.  That is one self truth telling thing I’ve had rolling around that I haven’t vocalized till today.

Instead what I’d really like is to be analyzing my own businesses growth and financial numbers.  So there I go.  I’m going to stop checking out finance stuff all the time.  I need to detox from it.  What I’m going to do is only run a custom macro I have saved in my excel to find out what I really need to for my investments and that will be it.  I’m going to do this detox for a month and see how life is.

Movies and lunch and time spent

I went to lunch with a coworker the other day and he boasted about how he has over 800 movies stored on an external hard drive that he and his family uses to watch films.  I was not impressed. 

At 120 minutes per movie and 800 movies that is 96,000 minutes.  That is 1,600 hours, which is 66.666 days, and 2.22 months.  If I know people like I know myself all those movies would have already been watched at least once and by having them on the external hard drive again I have to imagine that saying they’ve been watched a second time isn’t too much of a stretch.  That’d be 192,000 minutes, 3,200 hours, and 133 days, and 4.44 months of movie watching.

Needless to say that is a lot of movie watching.  That is a lot of no interacting with other people.  That is a lot of time that could be spent doing other things. 

Even if it is just leisure reading for the same amount of time I believe if someone did a survey and asked which of these two things is more appropriate that there would a resounding response saying that reading that much is a better use of someone’s time, though they’re both essentially a form of escapism, and when done in moderation and not at the sacrifice of urgent and important things is ok I think.

I poised the thought to him of “Imagine if you started at 27, like me right now of filtering movies and cutting out tv watching, how different your life would be at your current ripe old age of 37.”

Just an interesting thought. 

The latest thing I’ve been able to do since cutting out tv/movies is that I’ve been able to legitimately update my resume.  Since doing so I have already gotten one offer for employment even though I didn’t even apply for the job and the pay was quite a bit lower than what I already make.  I’ve also had a recruiter contact me to see about potentially interviewing for a position as a manager at another company.

This past weekend I found out I could download the lessons from treehouse and work on my projects without even needing to have access to the internet, which is awesome if I’m going to be working on building sites for other people and need to see how it is all looking when I update things.

Before you go into business with someone…take them to lunch and call them a bad parent!

Why do such a terrible thing? 

My wife (many others) is going to hate the title to this blog post and its content.  Why I am writing about it though?  Cause of this quote I came across.  “You can say what you think, or you can have people like you.”  So if you hate this just move on.  In this defiant light I love this quote too.  “What other people think of me is none of my business.”

Often when people go into business with someone they’re both putting their whole heart and soul into it.  They’re putting TONS of time into it.  They’re putting their family on hold.  They’re pouring tons of money into it.  I know several people who went into business with someone to only end up getting screwed out tons of money, sanity, and respect.  This is one approach to circumvent all that.  How do I know?  I shall tell you.

My brother is interested in 3d printing.  I happen to have a co-worker who sold and was deeply involved in 3d printing for years.  I thought it’d be cool to go to lunch all together to discuss it.  We discussed quite a few things amongst which was 3d printing.  What was interesting/revealing about this lunch was my coworker.  How do I even begin?

As soon as we started talking in line while waiting to order our food my coworker went off.  First it was claiming that his buddy had more production/manufacturing capabilities than my brother’s buddy who was/is helping my brother manufacture an idea of his.  Problem with this is that my coworker had NO idea how much capacity/ability my brother’s guy had in the first place and yet he claimed it no matter what.  Wtf?  Do you want to go into business with someone who thinks they have the best contacts when indeed they may not?  No.  Alright…further on down the line we went to get food.

Eventually we sat down and continued the conversation.  My brother is a fan of making bets, as am I.  He is also a fan of James Altucher.  Recently James did a blog post on answers to 100 questions readers posed to him.  One was whether or not to get a patent and another was whether or not to get an NDA, both of which my coworker “shoulded” on my brother to get.  Now I don’t know if these things were going through my brother’s head as we were discussing things during lunch, but they were going through my mind.  The answer James gave to both was an emphatic NO!  Well why not?  Especially if you have an amazing idea?  “Someone might steal it!” (scarcity mentality) 

Cause, as a whole…we’re friggin’ lazy.  Like Mike Rowe says on Dirty Jobs, “People shun opportunities because when they show up it’s dressed in coveralls and looks like work.”  I love that.  What was interesting is that my brother then asked my coworker what his best idea was.  It took him a second to drum up a couple.  Then when he spoke he legitimately had some good ideas.  What was interesting is that while these ideas are legit he’s not even close to beginning to work on them though they seemed pretty legit in my opinion.  Now for the next interesting part.  Notice how I said I thought the ideas were legit?  Notice how I have no real desire to implement and pursue his ideas?  Well if you didn’t now you do.  And noooow you see why James says what he says.  Forget this “traditionally” smart entrepreneurship crap and just go go go! 

People are very reluctant to let go of old paradigms and are able to embrace new ways of thinking and again I blame this on the scarcity mentality.  This is an especially interesting mentality to be found amongst the LDS community as we often hear in church how the earth was prepared to have enough for everyone/thing and to spare.  I just came across that thought as I writing this.  Sad.

In a lull in the conversation I told my brother that I sold my tv last night.  My coworker found this really interesting/surprising.  He revealed that he’s got over 800 movies on his external hard drive that he loves to just plug into his tv to watch whenever he needs to relax.  That is the “thing” his family “does together”.  Trust me watching a movie is not an interactive experience one has with another human being.  He also revealed that they’ve got several laptops, Netflix, hulu, internet, all the kids have smart phones, and two xbox 360’s.  I don’t even remember if he said they have ipods/pads, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.  He said that when the internet goes down that, and I quote, his kids “freak”.  I told him this was a problem and asked him if he thought that that was normal.  His response was mumbled and unintelligible. 

We then talked a little more about schooling and how I was planning on having my kids home schooled.  He couldn’t believe that either and started saying that kids are missing something when they don’t get to go to school.  Yes he would be right.  They’d be missing out on all that great indoctrination.  Not to mention all that bullying that we’ve been hearing about that has been so good for those kids killing other kids and committing suicide on bridges in front of their “friends”.  He said that he thought that getting pushed around/bullied was a good thing and helped them.  I wholeheartedly disagree. 

If someone berates me and is rude to me when I have the ability to stop or change it do I continually go back and ask for more?  Heck no.  That would be ridiculous.  In a de-briefing phone call with my brother after the lunch he correctly stated that that was indeed not necessary and that kids will get plenty of that w/o having to deal with it in school.  He also wasn’t probably too far off with his statement that it was a defense mechanism of sorts since he was probably picked on in school and that nobody was there for him and to protect him and so he was saying what he was to validate his crappy experience in school.  Sad diagnosis, but I think it isn’t too far off of one.

What I got out of this exchange is that my coworker wouldn’t have even remotely listened to my reasons for home schooling, which are many, even if I presented them in a non-bias factual manner because his experience was “good” and couldn’t possibly be improved upon.  Why is this a problem to have in a business partner?  Say I want to present my partner with something new and innovative that will cut costs and boost revenue.  Problems though might be that he started the business, been there longer, is the president, etc and could give a rat’s behind as to what I’m saying because what is working currently is enough to survive and is “good”.  Consideration for something better though wasn’t considered and that is a problem when you’re trying to win and innovate in business.

On the way out of the restaurant I confirmed that we don’t have internet at our home and we don’t have smart phones.  He could not believe this.  Later on down the road he tried to mini-shame me by saying, in response to my saying that I’ve cut off violent and sex movies, “Are you a monk or something?”  My brother pointed that out to me.  Why is that a problem in business and a business partner?  In this case my reasons for getting rid of my tv and smart phone and what not is for improvement and progress.  If in business I tried, with my business partner, to try and cut waste and focus on more productive activities and they were shaming me the business would flounder quickly and slow to a crawl.

We talked about his kid’s electronics usage.  He said that we don’t have kids and couldn’t possibly understand what it is like.  We don’t understand that you just need to shut them in their rooms or in the basement so that mom and I can have some time to ourselves.  Well…actually I do.  One, I was kid.  Two I grew up with two parents, thankfully.  The amount of time his kids were/are putting into electronics though boggled my mind and he deflected responsibility for it (and his 800 movies previously mentioned) as a way to escape.  That is when I called him out...“You can say what you think, or you can have people like you.” 

I straight up told him that he was a bad dad and needed to fix it.  I then quoted the above quote.  He deflected his responsibility and doesn’t want to own up to it, and unfortunately it sounds like, to a degree, that his wife is the same way.  This is a problem in a business partner because if you can’t rely on them to handle their portion of the business, if their contribution is vital enough, you may well be out of business sooner than you think.  If they blame their lack of performance on the weather, the internet being down, the game was on, or any other million things that could go wrong how are you ever going to survive and thrive?  You’re not.

The last thing we talked about was how he’d come across questionable material on his kid’s phones.  He then said he had taken things away.  I laughed and said that that totally futile as even kid addicts can get things they want with or without the monitoring of their parents.  He asked us both, rhetorically, mind you what one was to do then if you can’t always monitor them and control them?  We almost unanimously responded saying that you must teach them correct principles and let them govern themselves.  In a business partnership having a controlling, micromanaging partner will very quickly erode the trust and growth of the parties involved and the business will flounder.  You do not want this.

You do not want any of this.  So what I want you to do before you go into business with someone is to go to lunch.  Then while you’re there say something provocative, even if you really don’t mean it or believe it, to see what kind of response you’ll get out of the person and then compare it to my notes here and see if you’ll still be ok going into a partnership with this person.

What happened this weekend when we turned off the tv? Homemade strawberry jam tastiness with just three ingredients!!! I shit you not!

This weekend there were a few moments when we both could’ve easily just turned on the tv and plopped down for the evening for a few hours on Saturday afternoon/evening and been perfectly content to watch a RSL game or perhaps one of my favorite shows, Psyche.  Instead I pushed through the lull of the afternoon and thought of other things I could do to with my time.  One of those things was jam.

And boy am I psyched (pun) out of my mind that I did jam! 

Over the past several weeks/month or so I’ve gone back to eating healthy with just a few cheat days.  I cheat currently with cheese, dairy, processed foods, sugar on holidays, birthdays, and one free day a month.  This way I don’t want to blow my brains out when there is a legit celebratory event going on.  I peaked out on my weight gain at 176lbs right after the binge-eating spree I had for the two-year anniversary on July 2^nd.  Since then and since going back to eating healthy this morning I clocked in at 171 and touched a low of 170.5lbs.  Our scale reads in half-pound increments. 

What has sucked about my general healthy eating business is that I miss out on sweet treats, which I’m kinda obsessed with as most who know me can attest.  One of those things has been jam in general, but I’ve always been a strawberry jam kinda guy.  Unfortunately jams we’ve bought with no sugar in them at the store or the farmers market taste like crap or have crazy, unsafe ingredients in them.  The ingredients thing is a big one for me.  Unless I know the ingredient or what exactly it is for and that it is safe I don’t eat it…except when I cheat.  I quickly looked up the ingredients for a couple sugar free jams and got the following lists:

Water**, Strawberries+, Polydextrose**, Maltodextrin**, Contains Less Than 2% Of Fruit Pectin, Citric Acid, Locust Bean Gum**, Natural Flavor**, Potassium Sorbate And Sodium Benzoate (Preservatives), Sucralose (Splenda Brnda)(A Nonnutritive Sweetener)**, Calcium Chloride**, Red 40**, Blue 1**. **Ingredients Not In Regular Preserves. +Adds A Trivial Amount Of Sugar. Allergy Warning: May Contain Traces Of Milk, Eggs, Anchovies, Peanuts, Wheat And Soy.

Water**, Strawberries+, Polydextrose**, Maltodextrin**, Fruit Pectin, Locust Bean Gum**, Natural Flavor**, Citric Acid, Potassium Sorbate (Preservative), Sucralose (Non-Nutritive Sweetener)**, Calcium Chloride**, Red 40**. **Ingredients Not In Regular Jam. +Adds A Trivial Amount Of Sugar.

Apparently a “trivial amount of sugar” is still sugar free on this last list.  What the?!  That seems eff’d up to me, especially with all the diabetics out there.  Hopefully they’re reading the ingredients…sheez.

I googled homemade strawberry jam and found this recipe. 

http://www.foodstoragemoms.com/try-it-tuesday-how-to-make-strawberry-jam-a-healthier-way-with-honey/

So we made it this weekend.  Why?  Cause I can still eat alllll the sweet honey I want!  Honey is really good for you in case you're wondering.

Six cups by the way is six pounds as far as it pertains to which packages and how many you should buy of strawberries were you to make this recipe.

So how did it turn out/look?  It looked exactly like the link (I would’ve included our own pics except I didn’t think to take any…duh). 

Our blender worked just fine for pureeing the strawberries so no you don’t need to go out and buy some fancy food processor just to make this recipe.

I bought 12lbs of strawberries, or 6 2lb packages, as I wasn’t sure before how much 6 cups of pureed strawberries would be needed weight wise.  Because of this we essentially doubled the recipe, which made 8 pints* of jam so this recipe would make you 4 pints of jam. 

We cut off the stems, pureed them, mixed the honey in and did the required boiling time, then mixed in the lemon juice and stored overnight.  We bought these jars to store them in. 

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Ball-Wide-Mouth-Jars/16213254

So here is the breakdown of our cost.

1 jar = $1.25 after tax

1 lemon is interestingly enough almost exactly ¼ cup of juice and I think lemons are like $.50 per one.

I think 1 cup of honey is 1 lb and the honey we buy is like $18 for a 5lb pail of it.  So for each pint of jam the cost was $2.70 for the honey. ($18/5 lbs = $3.60 lb. $3.60/lb X 6 lbs = $21.60.  $21.60/8 pints = $2.70 per pint)

The strawberries I bought were on sale for $5 for 6lbs.  So the breakdown to that on a per jar basis was $.62.

So per pint the cost of ingredients would be like $5.08 a pint. 

What is nice about that from our perspective as repeat offenders for remaking jam later is that our cost will go down to just $3.83 per pint.

Considering that the ingredients are very easy to recognize and very very very VERY tasty this was a home run thing for me and the wife.  We’ve got 7 jars on jam in the freezer to handle all our jam needs for the foreseeable future. 

What I think I loved about this experience is 1) spending time with the wife 2) finding a kick-a tasty/safe/super easy recipe to make later with my wife and kids forever more and 3) being able to use this as a real consumable needed skill in the coming collapse.

*1 pint = 16 ounces in case you wanted to price comparison shop…to me price doesn’t compute when it comes to true safety and quality

T-1 Day till TV is gone…

We finished watching the tv show Friends last night and now it is on to selling the tv.  I just gotta take some pics and do a little bit of research to find the right price point and then it’ll be up for sale for hopefully just a short period of time.  I get a little freaked out just thinking about how we’re really about to do this, but when I step back and actually think about it I know that for us currently this is the right thing to do.  I shall keep you posted.

I’ve given up bad movies

A few months ago I read an article by a guy named Gerald Celente. 

 The guy is a forecaster of trends and has been doing it for a long time.  In it he talks about how violent movies are.  His points really struck me and made me think of some other things I’d read and thought and had even written myself and so I decided that I wanted to be the change I wanted to see in the world and stop supporting those movies that really didn’t represent what I believed and wanted to see in the world.

In the same vein of giving up TV, giving up my movies is in part to free up my time and follow people like Ralph Little in my previous post and make some big leaps forward in my life.

One thought I had was whether or not the type of movies (pg 13 even) that are coming out now will still be coming out during the Millenium when Christ is ruling personally on earth and my answer to my own question was no.  I don’t think there will be gratuitous violence, deaths, tortures, sex, swearing, etc.  I don’t participate in those things now and don’t want to support them either and that is a big reason for ditching those types of movies.

What we did with our movie collection is gave away a lot of them to others who wanted them.  I would’ve been fine just throwing em out, but whatevs.

Previously I was renting one, sometimes two or more, redbox movies a week.  In the last several months I think I’ve probably rented 5.

Summer blockbusters and youtube.  I loved them both.  I’d watch a lot of upcoming trailers for all the newest movies.  I’ve cut way back on my youtubing and that has helped with the transition.  Watching tv also sucked when I made my switch to no bad movies cause they were constantly being advertised there.  Now that we don’t have the antennae plugged in and will soon sell the tv outright the draw will be even less here soon, which I’ll be grateful for.  It has sucked hearing about how action packed and cool the new movies looked when they first came out, but now that they’ve been out and the buzz isn’t around I don’t miss the movies and am not looking forward to them coming out on redbox.

What I’d like to do is start replacing movie time with more family/friend time and make more memories that are in person and where we connect and do something memorable.

Books have also replaced a lot of my movie watching.  I finished reading the following books lately/since I’ve kicked my movie habit.

I'm currently reading this one

As info I visit this site for movie reviews to check that it doesn’t have anything that doesn’t agree with me.  http://parentpreviews.com/  You could also try www.imdb.com if you wanted, but I find they have some sketchy stuff on their site and so I try to avoid that one.

Like my previous post on quitting tv I'll try to remember to provide updates on how its going for me and new things I'm doing that I wouldn't otherwise do.

We’re quiting tv land…forever?!?

As part of my post indoctrination life, i.e. time outside of the schooling system and public/American way of thinking in general, I’ve learned about things like government being jacked up like here, internet being a “poor” source for legit information like here, or less is more here.  

One thing I’ve come across as something I’ve toyed with in my head with embracing is getting rid of our tv.  

I wanted to do it only if there were positive reasons and not negative ones.  I didn’t want to do it to show that we were/are whackos, to prove a point, or to make any feel bad or awkward.

There are many reasons I love tv.  I love that it is a very convenient release from thinking about life and owning up to what I really want to do, but not doing it.  I love pro sports and especially playoffs of the NBA and NFL.  If fills my free time when I can’t think of anything better to do with it.  However there have been some things though that I’ve thought about and come across over the last year or so that have made me think that tv maybe isn’t the best idea for me.

I don’t know if any of you know anyone like this, but my dad sleeps six hours every night and has for years and years and years.  Man how nice would that be?  Who would I be were I able to do that?  One way I could do that, at least partially, is by cutting out tv.  I gotta think my dad is many leaps and bounds wealthier in many aspects of his life due to this extra free time whether it is financial knowledge or means, car knowledge (he’s good at fixing cars), spiritual knowledge, business knowledge, design knowledge (he knows photoshop really well), and a whole host of other things I could mention were I to spend more than 5 seconds thinking about it.

Another guy I think about is a guy I don’t even know.  I think I shook his hand once or maybe even just head nodded towards him at church after my brother introduced me to him.  His name is Ralph Little.  Guy hasn’t watched a movie in years.  Not that he doesn’t own a tv cause the truth is he might, but certainly his not having seen a movie in years has certainly aided him in using his free time to engage in one of his many business endeavors instead of consistently engaging in beta wave trancelike hypnosis each week by watching tv all the time.  My brother is constantly telling me how Ralph thought of another multi-million dollar idea that is so simple and stupid its crazy.  That story alone was a big reason why I stopped watching some of the movies that I did.

There have been three main things lately that have turned me onto the idea of giving up the tv forever though.  First up is this guy.

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/05/06/mmm-challenge-cut-your-cash-leaking-umbilical-cord/

He and his family don’t own a tv.  They do however love Netflix and Hulu and the whole host of ways you can watch tv/movies for a fraction of the price/time these days.  They just hook up the laptop to a projector when the need arises.  Often he talks about one great effect of not owning a tv and that is he and his family actually DO things and have hobbies.  I mean think about it.  What would you do if you just had 28 hours a week extra to do what you wanted to with?  You’d be forced to find new hobbies or blow your brains out with boredom from staring at the wall.

Next up is the documentary I watched a few weeks ago called “No Impact Man”.

link to free viewing if you're interested

http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/no_impact_man/

  It chronicles the journey of a man and his family going a year w/o making an impact on the environment and it was pretty entertaining.  Part of the experiment is getting rid of their tv, which for them was scary as the wife fully admits that she is addicted to reality tv.  They said at the end of the movie that at first there was a literal painful withdrawal from not having tv (I’m not looking forward to that), but that once they pushed through that they…went outside.  They made other new hobbies and had new experiences they otherwise wouldn’t have had.  That is what I want.

Last up is a post I read just today from....

  I’m loving the whole blog actually.  Here it is

http://advancedriskology.com/how-to-add-8-years-and-133369-to-your-life/

This post was crazy to me in that if you're paying for tv your blowing so much money.  Then comes the time wasted, which is even more shocking.  The craziest part is that all his number are conservative, i.e. he uses smaller numbers just to make his point.  The average reality is much worse in America.

Read it and…weep like a sad woosy girly man if you dare. 

So we're gonna cut tv, but I'm still gonna watch sports and tv in general should I be over at somebody's house and I won't be a snob or anything.  I even imagine that'll be a bit of fun to splurge in those occasions and enjoy the time wasted if that makes sense.  Maybe I try and do some updates on new things we get into once we're done with tv so you can see what is going on with us.