Finishing the Fight

I have a whole bunch of things to talk about today. I'm trying to keep them all in mind so that I don't miss any.

First off, Halo 3 is awesome. The beauty of Halo is that they've always allowed you to be the guy who does the crazy, amazingly fun stuff that everyone wants to do but doesn't have the opportunity to do in their real life. You are literally the guy who is single handedly making stuff happen to help your cause and succeed.

The other thing I find amazing about the Halo series is the spectacular timing of the great music. Usually a mission starts out with some big task that you're setting out to do. You head in, break through some initial defenses and then you're getting into the mix where the fan is warming up for stuff to start hitting it. That's when this music starts. At first its small, but then builds along with your excitement until you're moving in with this euphoria the size of the skill and determination you possess and are going to use to crush anything in your way.

Everything about the game just makes you feel good inside. That's what sells a game to people.

Alright, so I started reading "The Pathfinder" today. Different reviews said that this is THE book to read when you want to determine what to do with the rest of your life. This is what to use to build the career you want from the bottom up and stop just passing through life instead of living.

So far it's pretty interesting. It asks you the basic questions that all these books ask. Essentially they boil down to, are you happy and is what you are doing adding to your happiness in every aspect of your day from start to finish. If not, then you are not doing what you should be doing.

At this point in my intellectual pursuit of happiness and life purpose, I think I've read all this stuff before. All these people who don't have an idea what they want probably benefit from it. I know what I want, I want to start my own business with a team of people around me who I care about and trust. I want to put my core values into the business because I believe the system that I've setup that is my life is one that everyone can benefit from and make their own. I guess that should be my mission statement.

I have a long way to go before I'm finished the book and it seems like there will be a lot of good exercises in it. I'm not writing it off yet because I feel like I'll be able to take some value from it, but I do get this sense of I've read all this before. At this point I'm already taking action, it just takes time to get what you want to do to the point that it can replace what you're already doing and give you freedom from the routine without a loss of everything you've built so far and are building towards. You shouldn't have to gamble everything in order to be happy, you just have to build something and stick with it until it grows large enough.

I guess what I should do is start planning land marks. Start figuring out when I will have reached a level of success that I'm comfortable enough to start pulling other people in. That way I won't feel like they are losing what they are working towards because I siren song them into my vision. I feel like I could sell my ideas and passions to people but I also want to believe it is the best thing for them before they dive in. My brother always says he's watching my stock and he'll buy in when he's confident enough. I feel like his approach really makes a lot of sense, since I'd feel like a scam artist if I didn't actually bring value and improvement to the people I get involved.

I've made some observations recently. I read a lot of blogs and various feeds at work since I have plenty of time and nothing to fill the void. It seems like the news for the day slowly moves from one source to all the others. Each blogger will comment on it with their take, or reference it in how it plays into what their blog is focused on. I'm not really complaining about it really, I just think it's funny how that happens, but it's also kinda dull that people are all just bouncing off the same things.

The other observation I've had was in the common phrasing people use. In different public speaking training things they talk about listening to what you say. You count the number of times you use "like" or "uh" while you're going through what you want to say as a way of measuring your comfort with the concept as well as how rehearsed you are. Recently I've noticed almost everywhere I go that people use the phrase "You know" constantly when trying to convince someone to agree with them. Sometimes they use it in a rapid fire manner until the person shows some kind of gesture or speaks in a way to show acknowledgment and agreement. I just point it out so that other people will be aware of it as well.

So I haven't actually done anything towards my business in the past few days. I'm planning on doing my weekly courthouse trip tomorrow morning rather than Friday since I'm going out of town for the weekend. I talked some business with my friends last night and the possibility of moving to CA next August came up. I may jump on that when the time comes since I do want to change my environment to be surrounded by people with the entrepreneurial mindset. I guess we'll just have to see how things progress till then. Right now I want to keep my weekly courthouse visits going, potentially start adding other counties into the loop. Eventually I'll attend an REI meeting and start collecting more investors cards. Once I get my first monetary input I'll setup a website and then create a service where I supply new foreclosures to investors on a weekly basis for a subscription fee.

I might start writing out a business plan with my new mission statement. Then potentially drum up some investor capital for a laptop and website fees and even potentially a business car and office space. Then I could start pulling in some other people. It's just an idea for now but that's how everything starts anyway.