Green Ninja (eBook)

A Blueprint for Waking the Warrior and Kicking Ass At Life

Jim Larsen (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018 | 1. Auflage
212 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-0-9980225-0-5 (ISBN)

Infos

What would you do if your limitations were suddenly lifted? In in the face of risk, you knew you would win? In 7 simple steps, Jim Larsen slaps the bully of self-doubt up the side of the head and awakens the sleeping ninja within. In this book, learn to: Avoid drifting and seize direction! Take control of the man in mirror! Put big vision to paper! Make a fool out of fear! If you like the sound of that, then this book is for you.

Textauszug

Chapter II:

#TheSweatPantsMaster

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” -Henry Ford, American Car maker, dreamer and do-er of the impossible.

“You are what you believe yourself to be.” -Paulo Coelho de Souza, a Brazilian writer with the largest social media following in the entire world.

There are three variables necessary to achieve any goal but they’re not equal. You can’t just divide the pie chart in three even pieces and talk about them equally. They’re layered and intertwined. They’re each important but at varying levels.

In the last chapter we talked about one of them: the goal, the destination, the thing you want. While that’s absolutely necessary because it sets the course and the direction, it’s powerless to actually get you there.

People don’t get rich, run marathons, or play Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor on the piano just because they want to. Achievement doesn’t happen by wanting. Wanting just sets the destination. To get there you need a vehicle and driver. It’s the three fold marriage of driver, vehicle, and destination that determine anyone’s success.

The vehicle is the actual methodology you employ day in and day out. If your destination is getting sexy for the beach, the vehicle is the gym, or the trainer, or the diet program. The vehicle is the actionable plan.

You are the driver and I’m going to propose, as I mentioned earlier, that this is not a pie chart split three ways evenly. By far the most important variable is the driver. It’s you. Companies that offer vehicles (programs to achieve goals) want you to believe that anyone can succeed because of their vehicle. It’s a lie. For every success story in a MLM, diet program, study guide, etc., there are hundreds of failure stories.

The people that successfully drive any vehicle to their destination did it because they were an amazing driver! They succeeded because they showed up and actually put the plan into action. The vehicle is important, but far less than the driver. The person that was successful with one diet program likely would have been successful with another. It wasn’t the program or the vehicle that determined their success — it was them.

A good driver can handle almost any vehicle, and perhaps most importantly can identify the vehicle they’d be best suited to drive. A good driver can trouble-shoot when things are going wrong and they can find detours around obstacles. When the driver believes in themselves, there is almost no vehicle that won’t work for them.

One of the flaws of success coaching today is the intense focus on the goal and the method, vanquishing the individual to nothing but an after-thought. There are endless diet programs that show you pictures of success stories (the goal or destination), and introduce you to their supplement, or workout program (the vehicle), and that’s it. For most of us, knowing where we want to go, and even knowing how to get there, just doesn’t seem to be enough to actually get us moving.

It’s often not a lack of knowledge that keeps us stuck. In order to put a plan into action, a driver has to be unashamedly confident in their self. When a person is secure in their giftedness while recognizing their weaknesses; confident in their ability and not insecure; when he or she can make commitments and stick with them, make decisions and own the consequences; when they can act boldly and intentionally — then that person will be successful in any endeavor they pursue. A good driver will get to their destination! We start with “wanting something” because we need to have a direction, but it’s imperative that we skip how to get there for now because far more important than ‘how’ is ‘who’.

The next handful of chapters will explain this further.

MTV was the only best hope. And I wasn’t allowed to watch it. Not only was it purportedly made by the devil and designed intentionally to get teenagers to have sex, but also, we couldn’t afford it. Like we couldn’t afford anything we wanted. That was a frequent theme throughout my childhood.

I’ll never forget the day I walked up Main Street to the school yard playground to play basketball and my friend, Andrew, was there waiting for me with his brand new Reebok pumps. YES! You could actually increase the pressure on the sides of your feet simply by repeatedly pressing this half-sphere bubble on the tongue of the shoe painted to look like a basketball. I don’t think anyone ever figured out why someone would want to do this…but it was cool. I mean, before we started playing, he made sure to yell “TIME OUT” so everyone could watch him bend over and pump them up. And yes, there was a “pressure release valve” also built in — I mean, they thought of everything!

Within a week, all the guys we played with were calling intermittent time outs to adjust the pressure of their shoes. All except for me of course. I got my shoes from Ames — which was basically a discount store that Wal-Mart sent their discontinued stuff to. There was nothing sexy about Ames, or their shoes, or the people who shopped there, or me, for that matter. An older brother would have been a really helpful tool at this point in my life, but my parents didn’t give me one of those, either.

So without an older brother, MTV was really my only hope at differentiating between “cool” and “un-cool.” I mean, these were the ‘90s. There was no internet so I certainly couldn’t jump on YouTube or a Pinterest fashion board to get fashion advice. I didn’t know how to be “cool” and I definitely didn’t know who could teach me!

My parents were no help, either, when it came to this. My mom was not the one who aimed for us to look like the Abercrombie Kids catalogue, despite my pleadings. Rather, she was valedictorian of both her high school and college classes. She was even the top student in her medical school class when she decided to quit in order to start a family. She was far more concerned with things like making sure we knew how to read and write and handle basic arithmetic without a calculator. If she could have afforded a bumper sticker, it probably would have read, “I gave my kid the genetics to achieve honor roll, and can’t figure out why no one can tell.”

My dad was a workaholic. He earned a master’s degree in theology and moved his family of five to a small town in rural New England to pastor an old church that had 35 members and paid him $12,000 a year. We lived in a 2-bedroom, 1-bathroom house that the church owned, and shockingly, a cable subscription was not in the budget.

There was always Andrew, though! We had an unspoken trade agreement: He could eat all the sugary breakfast cereal his mom forbade when he was at our house, and I got full control of the TV remote at his. Of course, that meant MTV music videos during the day and Beavis and Butthead at night.

Apparently, those intermittent connections to a bigger, wider world weren’t enough, though, because I was bullied. Some of it was my own fault, I suppose, or maybe that’s just what the bullies made me believe; nonetheless, I was dubbed: the “Sweat Pants Master.” And the bullies further insisted that I was so fat I sweat Crisco. They later changed that to bacon grease, and eventually just started calling me “Bacon.” Like any kid in school, I desperately wanted to be liked. I wanted to fit in and get invited to birthday parties, but totally would have settled for even just a seat at a cafeteria lunch table.

Of all the bullying though, the hardest for me to swallow was the “Sweat Pants Master.” On the surface, it was really pretty simple: I wore sweat pants to school every day. Literally, EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. My brother and I liked to play “ninja” at home, and clearly ninjas wore solid colors. Hence, we made every effort to match our sweat pants with our sweat shirts. We even developed an entire hierarchy color system to determine which color dominated which other color. There was no question that if I was wearing solid black then I had to win. Using our color coded chart: White was the wimpiest, then red, then blue, then green, then black wins all! Looking back, we never wore the same color at the same time, and to this day, I’m not sure how we’d resolve a tie-breaker.

That gentle/semi-violent naïveté worked fine in the insular world of our home; however, as I’m sure you can imagine, it didn’t translate well to our school. I’d show up to school in a solid green sweatsuit for like the third day in a row — obviously still dressed as a Green Ninja — and I’d get called the “Sweat Pants Master.” I didn’t like that name, and upon further introspection, I cannot gather:

1. Why didn’t I just wear something different after clearly noting the correlation between the name I didn’t like...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.4.2018
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Beruf / Finanzen / Recht / Wirtschaft
• ISBN-10: 0-9980225-0-0 / 0998022500
• ISBN-13: 978-0-9980225-0-5 / 9780998022505