Life Lesson

Set For Life

Garth Beyer

A of couple months ago I was freewriting and an odd thought popped in my mind. True to the nature of the writing I was doing, I wrote it down.

A lot of people dont’ care about you, they just feel if they get enough people to just like them, that they are set for life.

I think I may have been upset that so many girls in high school led guys on, or that you can spend one wonderful day with someone, but never catch up again. The instances in life where you feel a connection with someone, but nothing happens after it are endless.

It’s a trick, whether conscious of it or not, and a very successful trick at that.

Its success is based solely on the precept that if they ever talked to you again, ever ran into you on the subway, or bus, or bike path, that you two could pick up conversation like you were long-time friends and can play catch-up.

I am no psychologist, although at times I like to think I am, but there is some psychological barrier that prevents you from despising the person that left you hanging, prevents you from completely ignoring that person when you see them again, and prevents you from acting like they screwed you over.

Want to be successful? Get a billion people to like you. It’s not hard; meeting someone once will do. While you may not “benefit” as much from leaving (not cutting) a connection you made than if you were to do the upkeep on the friendship, the connection is still there.

The way it ends up benefiting you is when you do run into that person who you shared a great experience with (get your mind out of the gutter), when you play catch-up and you find out that they had started a similar business to yours, or write on your beat in the features section of a well-known magazine, or are part of some influential group, you can pick up the connection you left as if it were just waiting for you.

So No. The majority of people, when they meet you, don’t care about you, no matter how great of a time you share or how connected you may feel to them. When they leave that connection, they don’t mean to insult you, they don’t even mean to use you (that comes later). Their focus is making connections and as many as possible.

As should your goal be. After all, the thing about these people is that they are set for life. They have all the connections they will ever need, whether they utilize them or not, they are there. Where are yours?

 

Stay Positive & Make, Leave, Then Leverage Your Connections

Garth E. Beyer         hey, it works

Make ________ Not War

Garth Beyer
Our Last Night. (I’m in between the two band members on the left)

Just the other week I took a nice four-hour drive down to Joliet, IL to see the band Our Last Night. Once my friends and I got there, we had to wait another five hours while other bands played. Bands we either didn’t know or they dragged on stage last-minute because the originally scheduled bands didn’t show up. After plenty of headshaking, not headbanging, Our Last Night was up to play.

As the saying goes in the hood, the music was “an orgasm in my ears”. However, this post isn’t about to promote Our Last Night, it’s what I discovered from constantly checking their Facebook page, waiting for them to upload this photo that I shared above. While I waited I saw other photos of the lead singer wearing the same shirt that he wore to the concert I saw. Even in the pictures that were taken at locations they played at after Joliet, he was still wearing the same shirt.

Finally, curiosity kicked in and I once again went on their Facebook page only to see a professional photo-shoot of Trevor (lead singer) and his brother sporting Johnny Cupcake t-shirts. Trevor was, of course, wearing the same shirt that you see in the photo above. The link was provided, I was sucked in.

Meet Johnny!

The creator of Johnny Cupcakes was, you guessed it, Johnny! Look above! There he is showing off his “Make Cupcakes Not War” t-shirt. Johnny is a multi-millionaire and he has his story. He doesn’t have a specific motto, he doesn’t have a thousand testimonials (although it would be all too easy to get them), and he doesn’t have a college degree. Most rags-to-riches stories you hear have some special opportunity in them: a person runs into an investor, an idea gets picked up by the newspaper, an anonymous person donates a hundred thousands dollars to a persons blog post of an idea, they use Kickstarter, or they know someone who knows someone. Very rarely are the stories… simple.

Johnny has a very simple story, a story that represents so many noteworthy themes and lessons.

  • Never giving up
  • Waking up early or pulling all nighters
  • Avoiding drugs and alcohol
  • Start selling whatever you can, buy in bulk and sell
  • Even having a smashed up car won’t stop you from making sales out of the trunk of it
  • Everyone loves surprises
  • Take risks
    • “These trade shows cost an arm and a leg…but you gotta spend an arm and a leg to make more arms and legs.”
  • Sometimes you have to leave what you like to do what you love
  • Add value to you and your product, no matter how crazy people think you are for the choices you have to make
  • Confusion sells
  • Upset customers sell even more.
    • In response to the question “why don’t you sell cupcakes too?”, Johnny says, “Well, if I did that then people wouldn’t be upset. And, if you think about it, those upset people advertise for me!”
  • Turn your customers into friends and truly connect with them. You can become a millionaire due to the help of 10,000 people. You don’t need 100,000.
Mac Miller representin’

Just an FYI: You’re going to see Johnny Cupcakes everywhere now. Congratulations, you’re part of the tribe!

“Do More Of What Makes You Happy” – Johnny Cupcakes

You can visit Johnny Cupcakes website by clicking on the picture above.

 

Stay Positive &Vote Cupcakes For President

Garth E. Beyer

The “IOU” Paradox And How To Best Give

Garth Beyer

I give a lot. I love to give, I mean, really really love to give. Time, money, resources, tools, and so on, I give it all to those who ask, and even more to those who don’t.

What I can’t stand are the reactions I get when I give – the old “IOU”. Every time I give, it comes out in some shape or form. Here are some examples? Do they sound familiar?

“I’ll pay you back”

“Next time, I’ll get it”

“Why don’t you take this since you are giving me that“

and the worst of all, the “IOU”

Not to start a debate -by all means go ahead if you want- people are naturally good. There are very few people who I have given to that when I continuously asked why they thought they owed me, they came up with a statement which basically said that since I gave to them, they felt they needed to give to me. Balance. Those are good people, but oh so very annoying.

People may be naturally good, but they are also naturally and extremely self-centered. So self-centered that they care more about the need for that balance of giving back to the person who gave to them, than they do the simple fact that the person who gave to them, does not want anything in return. You are insulting the person and degrading the bliss they feel for giving without that expectation when you fulfill an expectation that is not there.

That is all fine and dandy, human nature, all of which you have experienced yourself or can rightly agree with.

But then someone comes along and doesn’t praise you for giving without an expectation, doesn’t say the infamous words of IOU, takes what you gave and never mentions it again. This is where the IOU paradox presents itself.

Despite the ever-present blissful feeling of giving without an expectation of a return, you feel swindled. You question whether they know you gave to them because you cared about them, that you felt their was an invisible but mutual respect for one another, you thought that them not giving you an IOU would make you feel even more incredible, but sadly… it doesn’t.

There’s no winning, but you still have two options. Either you can deal with them never mentioning your gift again, or you can convince them of how deserving they are of it so they don’t feel that it’s a gift, rather, an award for living remarkably.

I prefer the latter.

 

Stay Positive & Want An Award? Who doesn’t?

Garth E. Beyer

Your Insufflation

Garth Beyer

Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take, or even the number of moments that take your breath away.

 

It’s the passion you have that keeps you breathing.

 

Stay Positive & Breathe More

Garth E. Beyer

What You Deserve

Garth Beyer

Life is not centered at giving you what you need, you’re on your own with that.

It is however, very much focused on giving you what you deserve. And so am I.

Sure it’s smart to separate your wants and needs, but for this particular case, let’s put them all in one and just call them needs. After all, everyone gets them confused anyway.

Is it safe for me to say that you have never received anything you needed for no reason? As much as we, as humans, fight the assumption, every choice we make is made on the justification that it somehow benefits us. While some people lean towards selflessness like Mother Teresa and others are predominately selfish like Hitler, it is never one or the other, both made the choices they made because it benefited them.

If prodded long enough as to why someone did what they did, it is inevitable to get a response which states that.

Typically unbeknownst, when you receive something you need, you receive it because you have worked for it – except, that you actually never worked for it, you worked for the person to give you it. Again, you are usually unaware that you have worked or will work in a way that will benefit the person who is giving you what you need. Obviously then, the bigger the need, want, desire, hope, and so on that you have, the harder you have to work.

Want to be on the ballot for the next presidential election? You have to work hard for an extremely long time and the hard work you do has to benefit as many people as possible in the largest of ways. The same goes if you want to be a successful businessperson. The same goes if you want to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Anything major in life requires major work. None of it will be given to you unless you provide the gift bearer ways that it would benefit them.

Then, while you are working hard, working smart, working more efficiently through the good and bad times in order to get what you need, life – and all it’s magic – steps in and gives you exactly what you deserve.

However, what most people fail to understand is that you can go through life working hard and never get what you deserve because to get what you deserve, you have to work on your character. What builds character? I think you can figure that one out by yourself.

In my opinion, and I am curious if you agree, I would rather go through life getting what I deserve than what I need/want/desire.

 

Stay Positive & Work On Yourself And Everything Else Will Come To You

Garth E. Beyer

Pick & Choose

Garth Beyer

There may be a million reasons for them not to pick you…

but all you need to do is give them one good reason to choose you.

OR

You can put your mind at rest about what one good reason you can give

and just pick yourself.

 

After all, if you only need to give them one good reason, they don’t deserve you. You have over a million good reasons. Right?

 

Stay Positive & You Get To Pick The Reasons… And Yourself

Garth E. Beyer

Life Is Short

Garth Beyer

If time flies when you’re having fun and having fun is all you do, life is short.

If you’re a person that is having tragedies in your life and think life is short. You have another thing coming: one longgg life of living with those tragedies.

Which statement do you hear more people respond with “life is short”? I feel that I hear a lot more people say life is short in response to tragedies: A close friend dies from driving drunk, a grandparent falls and gets amnesia, you get heartbroken by the one you loved for years. Those are logical reasons to note that life is short.

Then you have those who use “life is short” as an excuse. An excuse to not do well in school, an excuse to be reckless, to risk their lives without realizing they are risking putting their tragedy on someone else’s mind, as explained in the paragraph above. Though they may not say it aloud, an underlying factor of why people do “stupid” things is that life is short.

And it is. It should be. Life NEEDS to be short. Scroll back up and read the first contention of this post.

There’s a variable that very few realize about time flying when you’re having fun. Think about this for a moment, remember a time that you said “time flies when you have fun” in response to an experience you had. In that experience, was time going fast? Or were you lost in it? It’s more than likely time didn’t even exist during that experience, in your mind, it was going to last forever. It’s not until the experience is over do you state that time flew.

Did it really though? Or is it just a perception. Yes this is getting deep, but bear with me, there’s a point.

You can have two people that live to be 78 years old. One lived every single day having as much positive fun as possible but ended the day with saying how short life is. The other lived every single day, averagely, blindly, safely, and at her deathbed, she had realized how short life is.

Did either have a short life? Yes and no. They both lived to by 78 years old which is a fair amount of years to live, not short at all. But only one person really lived those years. Only one person made the absolute most out of every day, that made time fly, and at the end of each day wished they had more time to continue doing the fun things they did, that thought life is short, when realistically it wasn’t shorter than anyone else’s.

Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day. You can live each day and think that 24 hours is really short or you can go through life and once on your deathbed, wish you would have lived every set of 24 hours more.

 

Stay Positive & A Short Life Lived Is Better Than A Short Life Lost

Garth E. Beyer