I’m Working… I Swear

So I’ve been thinking about how unusual I’ve made my lifestyle and my expectations lately. Like, most of the girls I’ve dated this year have wanted to either 1) be my girlfriend ASAP and I wouldn’t ask them out because… I don’t want to have to think about them while I’m gone (also I didn’t really like them). Or 2) I actually liked them and would have committed to them but I was either a) the guy that you hookup with but don’t date or b) I have no idea, not big enough of a pothead?

Here's A Pic of a Huge Cock

So in conclusion, I realized that I need to just enjoy things while they last, no matter how short lived they are. I’ve gotten in this weird cycle this year with dating where the girls I wasn’t really into lasted far too long and the ones I was into didn’t last as long as I liked. But, when I think about it, I’m happy that I had feelings for someone, even if it didn’t workout. I also realized I should be much more selective in who I date. There have been times where I’ve dated girls just to kill time and it came back to bite me because I had to explain why I dated them, and I had nothing. I guess I also realized I can date much better girls than I thought I could.

For about 8 months there I wasn’t sure if I was even capable of caring enough for a girl to be fully committed to her, and for a minute there I was, and that makes me feel a little more human. It’s actually a bit of a relief not to have that tug on my heart pulling me back home. I hate that feeling, wanting to be somewhere because someone else is there. Maybe I’m in a selfish stage right now where I’m focussing on myself, but, I think there will always be time for women later on. In fact the more I try to avoid them the more they seem to find me, annoyingly.

But, now I feel like I’m me again, I no longer have any desire to want to be at home. In fact, as soon as I can get things with lightning mma running smoothly I plan to take a short 1 month trip somewhere. Maybe New Zealand? Or Costa Rica/South America with Erica. Either way it’ll be what I’ve been setting myself up to do for the last year.

Thinking I need to convince Mike to help me rent out and manage the house while I’m gone and I definitely need to read more.

Oh yeah that’s the other thing I wanted to write about, I think everyone needs to read these books, in this order:

1. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
   
2. Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel
3. Outliers: The Story of Success
4. The God Delusion

Let me explain:

1. I read this book about 2 years ago, just after I had graduated college. I was working at UCSB and living with my ex girlfriend trying to figure out what to do with my degree. I was annoyed with how boring my future sounded, spending endless days in a lab doing tedious experiments so that I could get a PhD… and do more tedious experiments. This book opened my eyes to a new world where the goal of life wasn’t work, or making money. In fact from the moment I finished reading this book I took its ideas and started applying them to my life. Figuring out how I could have a career, and still have time for the things I really cared about. It also drove me to want to travel. When I started working for my Dad things were not going well, I had to be there 8am-5pm every day and I was supposed to be helping with the website. Gradually overtime I created my own job, doing everything online, and it was because of this book. I had some Indian webdesigners create an eStore for our company and my job just expanded from there. As my responsibilities increased I made sure that every step I took I also worked towards making sure I never had to be at the office to do my daily tasks. It wasn’t easy at first, it probably took about a year. But as I’m writing this right now I’ve got one assistant just starting work in the US, answering phone calls, taking care of my customers. I have another assistant who has been helping me all day with my website, and I’m going to visit him in about 5 days to see if I can find more people like him.
2. I picked up this book pretty recently but it really was life changing. 4 Hour Workweek gave me the idea for how to create my life so that I could do exactly what Rolf Potts Vagabonding book describes. The trip I’m on now is sort of the melding of these two ideas. Yeah, sure, I’m “working” but I’m also traveling, I spent the weekend in Macau, in India I’ll be spending 3 days touring the southern beaches. And yeah, I’ll be meeting people and “working”, but I don’t really feel like that’s work because I love my job and I’d do it even if I wasn’t getting paid, just to help out my Dad. I’ve given this book to friends and they’ve all said it made them want to drop everything. It opens your eyes to the fact that living in Orange County we have way more than we could ever need, we waste our money on clothes, expensive food, flatscreen TV’s, PS3’s, home theater systems, cars, and a bunch of other stuff we don’t really need. For me, I’m lucky, I was born into good circumstances and I used them to create this life where I have no liablities or real responsibilities besides the ones I create for myself. I’m already in a good position to put this book into practice… Now if it wasn’t for that silly gym I just opened…
3. This book allowed me to come to terms with who I am, or more correctly, who my father is. I’ve always had a problem with the fact that I was born way too fortunate. Things were too easy, I didn’t pay for college, my Dad did, I didn’t have to work that hard for a lot of things, they were easier for me than they were for my friends. It might be that I’m a little bit smart, but I think it has more to do with how my life was set up. Outliers is a book talking about how circumstances affect a persons success. Bill Gates didn’t just drop out of college and start Microsoft and become a billionaire out of sheer hard work. A bunch of things came into play to allow this to happen in his life, his family was rich, his schooling happened to have huge amounts of computer resources, and he happened to be born in the few years that were perfect for the kind of software creation he was interested in. After I read this I realized I should just accept my circumstances instead of trying to downplay them. I started figuring out how to utilize what I’d been given even more. I had this unused college fund just sitting around at 23 years old, why not start a gym? Even if I lost all my money, who cares, atleast I’d be doing what I loved. Besides I already lost half of it anyway. After I read these three books I realized I didn’t want money anyway, I wanted my life to be about what I enjoyed doing, and I started making it happen.
4. The God Delusion doesn’t really fit into the progression from above but I think its critical for a lot of people. I know a lot of people don’t have an interest in religion but I’ve developed an interest by growing up in Christian schools and battling with Christian morality growing up. For the last 4 years I’ve had this internal conflict with science and religion. In college I learned so much about psychology, physics, biology, math, chemistry, and it made the world make so much sense. I remember as a kid thinking, there must be a god, how can you explain all this? When I finished college I started to think to myself… what can’t be explained by science? I couldn’t come up with much. I started doubting whether a god existed. I picked up this book and it kind of cemented what I had been feeling since I started college. I would suggest, if you even have a slight doubt about god’s existence, pick this up, it’ll open your eyes. A lot of people think that a belief in god is necessary to live a full, meaningful, moral life. I couldn’t disagree more. I won’t get into it but I really recommend this book.

Ok that’s a crapload of text. I’m out.