Certified Legendary Thread Covid, Life, UFOs, Food, & Wordle :(

[BringouttheGimp]

Thanks. Well it's all to do with a career change as well, I am studying to become a personal trainer. I was pretty lazy and unmotivated for a couple of years and ate a bunch of crap and my weight blew up but for most of my life I have been very active and sporty and really physical activity is what I get the most enjoyment out of in my life so I am trying to move my career in that direction so I can learn more about what I love doing and also make a positive contribution to others' lives, but at the start at 39 years, 108kg I found the going pretty tough as I noticed the first signs of a decline in my physical abilities and more aches and pains than usual and just not as much spring in my step as I was used to but I gradually got it off. I'm down to 90kg at the moment but the past couple of months has been hard, with the gym being closed and getting towards losing the last 10kg or so it gets even harder so that has really shot me in the foot, I've got a bad knee so I can't run much so I'm running low on options but I'm just dieting extra hard and whereas someone else might go for a 20 minute run or hour bike ride I do it walking, probably go for a 4 hour walk every other day, it's less intense so I just go for longer, I walk 15-20km a day most days, when another 2-3 kgs comes off I should be lean enough to start doing push ups and sit ups and body weight exercises on my bedroom floor as well as the walking and I also shoot a few hoops then hopefully once that gets old and I plateau from that the gyms will reopen but in other ways this whole thing has been a blessing too as it has kept me out of pubs and restaurants and cafes etc. too but I just decided nah I'm not going to be like most other people and come out of this a loser, I'm going to come out a winner and be well ahead of where I was prior to it after it. I took it as a challenge and a chance to truly focus on my goals without much distraction and it's also been a good way of keeping me occupied is chipping away at my health and study.

Well done.. and you're a bright lad as well.

Get em!

 

[sr36]

Relevance to Covid-19?

 

[Saintly Viewed]

Thanks. Well it's all to do with a career change as well, I am studying to become a personal trainer. I was pretty lazy and unmotivated for a couple of years and ate a bunch of crap and my weight blew up but for most of my life I have been very active and sporty and really physical activity is what I get the most enjoyment out of in my life so I am trying to move my career in that direction so I can learn more about what I love doing and also make a positive contribution to others' lives, but at the start at 39 years, 108kg I found the going pretty tough as I noticed the first signs of a decline in my physical abilities and more aches and pains than usual and just not as much spring in my step as I was used to but I gradually got it off. I'm down to 90kg at the moment but the past couple of months has been hard, with the gym being closed and getting towards losing the last 10kg or so it gets even harder so that has really shot me in the foot, I've got a bad knee so I can't run much so I'm running low on options but I'm just dieting extra hard and whereas someone else might go for a 20 minute run or hour bike ride I do it walking, probably go for a 4 hour walk every other day, it's less intense so I just go for longer, I walk 15-20km a day most days, when another 2-3 kgs comes off I should be lean enough to start doing push ups and sit ups and body weight exercises on my bedroom floor as well as the walking and I also shoot a few hoops then hopefully once that gets old and I plateau from that the gyms will reopen but in other ways this whole thing has been a blessing too as it has kept me out of pubs and restaurants and cafes etc. too but I just decided nah I'm not going to be like most other people and come out of this a loser, I'm going to come out a winner and be well ahead of where I was prior to it after it. I took it as a challenge and a chance to truly focus on my goals without much distraction and it's also been a good way of keeping me occupied is chipping away at my health and study.

Walking and walking and walking is so good for you when all else fails you.

love it.

 

[sirlothie]

Well done.. and you're a bright lad as well.

Get em!

I haven't always been, I fell for every trick in the book as a youngster but I think the key to success is learning from your experiences and mistakes, I've fallen over many times and dwelled on it for a while and felt sorry for myself but then you see a ray of hope and I think maybe if I do this way this time and don't do those things that screwed me last time I might make it this time.

I don't know if this is the time I will make it but it feels like I might be a chance, I don't know what the outcome will be but you see a chance you just got to go in that direction. Some people my age look at me and think how do you do it, what's your secret. You fall in shit and come out smelling like roses over and over. I think to myself well when we were 20 we were both exactly the same. We both fell over and made mistakes many times over the past 20 years but I changed and learnt from it and don't do it again but you keep doing the same shit and never learning from it.

They do the same things now they did when they were 20, it's easy to come off as smart but really you are just experienced and learnt your lessons whereas others didn't. They wonder why they spin their wheels and never go anywhere, well nothing will change if you don't change first. Definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I was never afraid to look at my life and pinpoint what my downfall was and why I was going nowhere in this situation and tossing it out and starting all over again armed with my new knowledge.

Someone who looks at the world the same way at 40 as they did at 20 has wasted 20 years of their life re. I'm proud of how I can look back at my adult life and remember who I was and what I did at each age and I can see the improvement in the person I was keep going up. I meet a lot of people who are older than me even and I think you are where I was at when I was 24. Haven't developed at all. Then I see others who have even if I don't know them personally I will follow them on youtube or whatever because they have shown what it takes to succeed so I listen and learn instead of hanging out with a bunch of losers going nowhere in real life I'm not afraid to even cut them out and I'm nearly friendless now but if you follow the crowd you will only go as far as the crowd, if you go your own way you will end up places noone has been before.

I've done everything and when I feel like there is nothing more to gain out of it and I am bored and don't see any way forward I stop it completely and focus on something else. Even if it means going back to square 1. I spent nearly 2 years working day and night, 3 jobs to set up my own gardening business, I don't do debt but at the time I thought this is my ticket, I basically did nothing but work and save, no girlfriends, no going out, no nothing. Everybody else was still going out, I worked every Friday and Saturday night delivering pizzas for $14 an hour I become the best driver, I got to work from 5pm to midnight, the whole shift, the only one, most drivers got 2-3 hours peak time. I was the main man. But I did a lot of km's, did 30 deliveries a night probably and I had to take fuel and car maintainance expenses out of my $14 an hour, I blew the engine on my car racing on a hot day from one job to another I had 30 minutes to get from Highett to Seaford after mowing lawns all day on a hot day I had 7 hours of pizza deliveries to do, blow the head gasket, there is 2 weeks of pay just to get my car back on the road.

Sometimes you think shit I should have just gone out drinking like everyone else. And people laugh at you. Sneer at your pay. But I was determined I was going to get there, I started off with my Shindaiwa whipper snipper (I already knew you have to buy the professional quality gear) put it in the back of my hatch back and started doing a few of my own jobs, so I at one stage had 4 or 5 jobs, I did 2 days with this bloke gardening, 2 days with that bloke gardening, help out anyone else who needed it for a day here and there, I did any jobs on airtasker I could do, I had the pizza delivery job, there was a few weeks where I did open until close every day of the week. I was the only one who kept my car in good shape to do all the miles, all the other driver's car would blow up because they wouldn't maintain it.

Then I added the Honda lawn mower $1300, still cramming it into my hatch back, every night I would lift the folded up lawn mower out of my hatchback and I would put it inside my apartment, stain the carpet as I didn't have a garage or backyard to store it. I would run through the shower to try to get the dirt and grass off me from gardening but sometimes there was no time so I did pizza deliveries dirty and just washed my face. I soon outgrew the hatchback, the pizza deliveries were not worth my time anymore so I quit, paid $3000 cash for a 1992 van, my plan was to use that to store all my gardening equipment and operate out of the van, and as a plus I could use it to go camping on weekends. That turned out to be a bad decision. The old guy who sold it to me saw me coming, the thing blew up in a month and being so old it was no longer possible to get parts to repair it so I had that for one month and then I had to scrap it and I lost $3000.

It took me a few months of pizza deliveries to afford that. Still I didn't give up. I bit the bullet and got a loan for another $3000 for a 2004 falcon that could tow and I searched everywhere for a gardening trailer cheap. I found one sitting in a trailer yard, an ex jim's mowing that needed work so I paid $800 for it and another $500 for them to fix it and make it roadworthy. I picked up all the other equipment I needed along the way like a hedge trimmer, ladder, lots of bits and pieces. Once it's all in the trailer and you are lugging it all around it weighs quite a bit. You burn through petrol fast driving it around plus all this equipment requires constant maintainance and petrol also.

Around this time all the guys I was working for who previously loved me because I never ever had 1 day off from any of them and worked like a madman, they got together and decided they were pissed off that I had the cheek to get my own equipment and get my own clients so one day there ended up being 4 guys I was working as a gardening labourer for, they all knew each other from cricket and I knew them from there too, they decided I had a conflict of interest and none of them wanted me to work for them anymore. So I was finally totally set up but had no other source of income, I had quit the pizza job and all my gardening work with others was gone so I had the gear but had to find the jobs. I walked the streets for hours at a time putting pamphlets in letterboxes, usually about 2 hours I could drop 200 pamphlets that would result in one job. 1 job might make me $30. I had easily spent $10000 getting to this point.

But I kept doing it. My friends laughing at me thinking I was crazy while they did their 9-5's. Then I found facebook marketing, I worked out how to drop an advertisement in facebook buy swap and sell groups, I could put an ad in 20 different groups at the same time on facebook and put an ad that could be potentially seen by 20,000 people in moments. I did that for a few weeks. Got jobs all over the place. Did it for a couple of months, sat down and did the sums. I wasn't making much at all. Barely minimum wage. Turns out driving 20kms between jobs towing 1 ton of equipment behind you costs you $10-15, then all the other expenses like tip fees, fixing equipment, whatever else, there was heaps, added to the fact most people think someone who mows lawns for a living is an idiot and doesn't deserve more than $20 an hour and most people are trying to cheap out on their property maintainance.

I realised this wasn't a good gig all along, it was a very energy intensive, time consuming, high expense business with little profitability and I was wrong all along and all that effort I had put in was for nothing except to learn that business lesson. I reckon some people would have jumped off the nearest bridge had they put in all that effort only to realise when they got there that it wasn't a smart profitable business and they were still making minimum wages if that. I just said **** it, sold it all at cash converters for less than a quarter of what I paid for it.

I decided oh well I am not going to beat a dead horse, I was wrong, it wasn't what I thought it would be, it wasn't my golden ticket after all. So I got out of it. Sat down for a while and licked my wounds and dwelled on it and worked out a better way that would not involve all the things that made my last attempt not work and started from scratch on my new endeavour. But the lessons I learnt from the gardening business failure have set me up for life, I have no doubt about it. Priceless lessons about efficiency. These lessons have paid off big already as I apply them to all areas of my life. Those 9-5er's who keep laughing at me haven't learnt those lessons. Sorry for the essay but I haven't told anybody that story before.

 

[sirlothie]

Walking and walking and walking is so good for you when all else fails you.

love it.

I surprised myself because before this there was places I would never think of walking to like I would always drive or get a train or bus I thought it was too far to walk but now I walk there regularly I think this isn't that far at all. Also found lots of different walking tracks around and places I never knew about. It's awesome.

 

[Black_White]

My eyes!
My eyes!

Ever heard of “paragraphs”?

 

[Saintly Viewed]

I surprised myself because before this there was places I would never think of walking to like I would always drive or get a train or bus I thought it was too far to walk but now I walk there regularly I think this isn't that far at all. Also found lots of different walking tracks around and places I never knew about. It's awesome.

Glad for you.

I walk lots of different places too, makes it fun.

 

[Kirby]

Learn to use paragraphs mate. Unreadable.

 

[Timmy from Thomastown]

My eyes!
My eyes!

Ever heard of “paragraphs”?

He lost me at “learning from my mistakes”.

Don’t think he did

 

[TKiL]

You may not have noticed, but there hasn't been much in the way of football related stuff to discuss. You have to fill an empty hole with something, and I guess food became the filler of choice. If you are looking for someone to blame, you can't go past the Gimp. His bright socks set against the dull plush pile background have for best or worst become a fixture of this thread.

 

[TKiL]

I haven't always been, I fell for every trick in the book as a youngster but I think the key to success is learning from your experiences and mistakes, I've fallen over many times and dwelled on it for a while and felt sorry for myself but then you see a ray of hope and I think maybe if I do this way this time and don't do those things that screwed me last time I might make it this time. I don't know if this is the time I will make it but it feels like I might be a chance, I don't know what the outcome will be but you see a chance you just got to go in that direction. Some people my age look at me and think how do you do it, what's your secret. You fall in shit and come out smelling like roses over and over. I think to myself well when we were 20 we were both exactly the same. We both fell over and made mistakes many times over the past 20 years but I changed and learnt from it and don't do it again but you keep doing the same shit and never learning from it. They do the same things now they did when they were 20, it's easy to come off as smart but really you are just experienced and learnt your lessons whereas others didn't. They wonder why they spin their wheels and never go anywhere, well nothing will change if you don't change first. Definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I was never afraid to look at my life and pinpoint what my downfall was and why I was going nowhere in this situation and tossing it out and starting all over again armed with my new knowledge. Someone who looks at the world the same way at 40 as they did at 20 has wasted 20 years of their life re. I'm proud of how I can look back at my adult life and remember who I was and what I did at each age and I can see the improvement in the person I was keep going up. I meet a lot of people who are older than me even and I think you are where I was at when I was 24. Haven't developed at all. Then I see others who have even if I don't know them personally I will follow them on youtube or whatever because they have shown what it takes to succeed so I listen and learn instead of hanging out with a bunch of losers going nowhere in real life I'm not afraid to even cut them out and I'm nearly friendless now but if you follow the crowd you will only go as far as the crowd, if you go your own way you will end up places noone has been before. I've done everything and when I feel like there is nothing more to gain out of it and I am bored and don't see any way forward I stop it completely and focus on something else. Even if it means going back to square 1. I spent nearly 2 years working day and night, 3 jobs to set up my own gardening business, I don't do debt but at the time I thought this is my ticket, I basically did nothing but work and save, no girlfriends, no going out, no nothing. Everybody else was still going out, I worked every Friday and Saturday night delivering pizzas for $14 an hour I become the best driver, I got to work from 5pm to midnight, the whole shift, the only one, most drivers got 2-3 hours peak time. I was the main man. But I did a lot of km's, did 30 deliveries a night probably and I had to take fuel and car maintainance expenses out of my $14 an hour, I blew the engine on my car racing on a hot day from one job to another I had 30 minutes to get from Highett to Seaford after mowing lawns all day on a hot day I had 7 hours of pizza deliveries to do, blow the head gasket, there is 2 weeks of pay just to get my car back on the road. Sometimes you think shit I should have just gone out drinking like everyone else. And people laugh at you. Sneer at your pay. But I was determined I was going to get there, I started off with my Shindaiwa whipper snipper (I already knew you have to buy the professional quality gear) put it in the back of my hatch back and started doing a few of my own jobs, so I at one stage had 4 or 5 jobs, I did 2 days with this bloke gardening, 2 days with that bloke gardening, help out anyone else who needed it for a day here and there, I did any jobs on airtasker I could do, I had the pizza delivery job, there was a few weeks where I did open until close every day of the week. I was the only one who kept my car in good shape to do all the miles, all the other driver's car would blow up because they wouldn't maintain it. Then I added the Honda lawn mower $1300, still cramming it into my hatch back, every night I would lift the folded up lawn mower out of my hatchback and I would put it inside my apartment, stain the carpet as I didn't have a garage or backyard to store it. I would run through the shower to try to get the dirt and grass off me from gardening but sometimes there was no time so I did pizza deliveries dirty and just washed my face. I soon outgrew the hatchback, the pizza deliveries were not worth my time anymore so I quit, paid $3000 cash for a 1992 van, my plan was to use that to store all my gardening equipment and operate out of the van, and as a plus I could use it to go camping on weekends. That turned out to be a bad decision. The old guy who sold it to me saw me coming, the thing blew up in a month and being so old it was no longer possible to get parts to repair it so I had that for one month and then I had to scrap it and I lost $3000. It tooks me a few months of pizza deliveries to afford that. Still I didn't give up. I bit the bullet and got a loan for another $3000 for a 2004 falcon that could tow and I searched everywhere for a gardening trailer cheap. I found one sitting in a trailer yard, an ex jim's mowing that needed work so I paid $800 for it and another $500 for them to fix it and make it roadworthy. I picked up all the other equipment I needed along the way like a hedge trimmer, ladder, lots of bits and pieces. Once it's all in the trailer and you are lugging it all around it weighs quite a bit. You burn through petrol fast driving it around plus all this equipment requires constant maintainance and petrol also. Around this time all the guys I was working for who previously loved me because I never ever had 1 day off from any of them and worked like a madman, they got together and decided they were pissed off that I had the cheek to get my own equipment and get my own clients so one day there ended up being 4 guys I was working as a gardening labourer for, they all knew each other from cricket and I knew them from there too, they decided I had a conflict of interest and none of them wanted me to work for them anymore. So I was finally totally set up but had no other source of income, I had quit the pizza job and all my gardening work with others was gone so I had the gear but had to find the jobs. I walked the streets for hours at a time putting pamphlets in letterboxes, usually about 2 hours I could drop 200 pamphlets that would result in one job. 1 job might make me $30. I had easily spent $10000 getting to this point. But I kept doing it. My friends laughing at me thinking I was crazy while they did their 9-5's. Then I found facebook marketing, I worked out how to drop an advertisement in facebook buy swap and sell groups, I could put an ad in 20 different groups at the same time on facebook and put an ad that could be potentially seen by 20,000 people in moments. I did that for a few weeks. Got jobs all over the place. Did it for a couple of months, sat down and did the sums. I wasn't making much at all. Barely minimum wage. Turns out driving 20kms between jobs towing 1 ton of equipment behind you costs you $10-15, then all the other expenses like tip fees, fixing equipment, whatever else, there was heaps, added to the fact most people think someone who mows lawns for a living is an idiot and doesn't deserve more than $20 an hour and most people are trying to cheap out on their property maintainance. I realised this wasn't a good gig all along, it was a very energy intensive, time consuming, high expense business with little profitability and I was wrong all along and all that effort I had put in was for nothing except to learn that business lesson. I reckon some people would have jumped off the nearest bridge had they put in all that effort only to realise when they got there that it wasn't a smart profitable business and they were still making minimum wages if that. I just said fu** it, sold it all at cash converters for less than a quarter of what I paid for it. I decided oh well I am not going to beat a dead horse, I was wrong, it wasn't what I thought it would be, it wasn't my golden ticket after all. So I got out of it. Sat down for a while and licked my wounds and dwelled on it and worked out a better way that would not involve all the things that made my last attempt not work and started from scratch on my new endeavour. But the lessons I learnt from the gardening business failure have set me up for life, I have no doubt about it. Priceless lessons about efficiency. These lessons have paid off big already as I apply them to all areas of my life. Those 9-5er's who keep laughing at me haven't learnt those lessons. Sorry for the essay but I haven't told anybody that story before.

The Importance of Paragraphs and How To Write Them Well
July 4, 2016Rene TetznerAdvice & Discussions on Preparing & Submitting Journal Articles for Publication
Paragraphs, Argument and Structure
As units of thought that reflect and present the development of an author’s ideas and argument, paragraphs are vital to the effective structure and progression of academic and scientific documents. There are no absolute rules for writing successful paragraphs and stringing them together into sections, chapters and articles, but as a general rule the first sentence of a paragraph should introduce the main idea or unit of thought that will be discussed in the paragraph, the following sentences should develop that idea in one or more ways and the final sentence should bring the paragraph and its main idea to an effective close, ideally in a manner that leads the reader on to the next paragraph and thus to the next main idea.
Focussing on paragraphs as you write can be an excellent strategy for following an outline with accuracy and ensuring that all important aspects of a topic or problem, your investigation of it and the conclusions you draw are discussed in an organised and thorough manner. Paragraphs are most effective for readers if they are neither too long nor too short, so if you need to present main ideas that are relatively simple, it may be best to combine two or more related ideas into a single paragraph. On the other hand, if a main idea is complicated and many different aspects of it require attention, the most effective strategy may be to deal with each of those aspects in a separate paragraph to develop the idea in detail. The first and last sentences of each paragraph should play a transitional role, clarifying the progression of the argument from paragraph to paragraph.
Increase Your Chances of Getting Published
Carefully structured paragraphs can also help you check, assess and revise your work. Reading over your draft and summarising in a single sentence the subject of each paragraph will provide you with a complete outline of what you have written. This outline can then be compared to your original outline and any other plans you had before you began writing. You will quickly be able to see the sequence of ideas and evidence as well as any digressions, how much space you have dedicated to each idea, and whether you have missed important elements of your argument or repeated concepts and discussions unnecessarily. Whether the revisions are minor or extensive, they will usually prove much easier when you focus on paragraphs in this way, and some authors find that simply trying to define what each paragraph contains can inspire revisions that clarify not only the content of each paragraph, but the overall argument of a piece of writing.
Such an approach can also be used to restructure a chapter or article in more significant ways. Perhaps you have shared your writing with colleagues or submitted it for publication, but it simply is not achieving the positive impact you envisioned, though no reader has indicated exactly why. Analysing your writing at the paragraph level enables you to make decisions about the best order in which to present the units of thought your paragraphs contain. Some fields and disciplines use standard structures for documents, a policy that allows less opportunity for restructuring, but even so there tends to be considerable leeway within each section of an article or chapter. Rearranging your paragraphs to present information in what may prove to be a more engaging order is therefore usually possible to some degree, but do be sure to adjust and rewrite the opening and closing sentences of each paragraph to reflect the new progression of your argument.
Why Our Editing and Proofreading Services?
At Proof-Reading-Service.com we offer the highest quality English editing and proofreading services via our large and extremely dedicated team of academic and scientific professionals. All of our proofreaders and editors are native speakers of English who have earned their own postgraduate degrees, and their areas of specialisation cover such a wide range of disciplines that we are able to help our international clientele with research editing to improve and perfect all kinds of academic manuscripts for successful publication. Many of the carefully trained members of our expert editing and proofreading team work predominantly on articles intended for publication in scholarly journals, applying painstaking journal editing standards to ensure that the references and formatting used in each paper are in conformity with the journal’s instructions for authors and to correct any grammar, spelling, punctuation or simple typing errors. In this way, we enable our clients to report their research in the clear and accurate ways required to impress acquisitions editors and achieve publication.
Our scientific editing services for the authors of a wide variety of scientific journal papers are especially popular, but we also offer book editing services and have the experience and expertise to proofread and edit manuscripts in all scholarly disciplines, as well as beyond them. We have team members who specialise in medical editing and bioscience editing, and some of our experts dedicate their time exclusively to PhD proofreading and master’s proofreading, offering research students the opportunity to improve their use of formatting and language through the most exacting thesis editing and dissertation proofreading practices. Whether you are preparing a conference paper for presentation, polishing a progress report to share with colleagues, or facing the daunting task of editing and perfecting any kind of scholarly document for publication, a qualified member of our professional team can provide invaluable assistance and give you greater confidence in your written work.

 

[Saintly Viewed]

Oh the humanity.

Some dares not use paragraphs.

Wont some think of the children...

 

[sirlothie]

Another thing I learnt is to not give a **** about haters whatsoever or their opinions. Nice job posting an article about the importance of paragraphs with poor paragraphing in it putz.

 

[sirlothie]

He lost me at “learning from my mistakes”.

Don’t think he did

Elaborate tin head or do you not have a point to your comment?

 

[Saintly Viewed]

Social distancing breaking bad style

 

[sirlothie]

Edited for the sooks and smart arses, sometimes you just want to get the tale out without getting bogged down in grammar and punctuation.

 

[sirlothie]

He lost me at “learning from my mistakes”.

Don’t think he did

I know you have probably never read something that long. But I don't know how you can come to that conclusion in the first sentence? This is why I walk away from most dead heads because they all have something to say with no basis or thought behind it.

 

[sr36]

Edited for the sooks and smart arses, sometimes you just want to get the tale out without getting bogged down in grammar and punctuation.

I enjoyed reading it with or without paragraphs (more with). Good luck, I hope the current venture is a winner, but even if it's not, so what, there will be another one after that. It's the venturing that is fun.

 

[TheGreatGrundy]

Edited for the sooks and smart arses, sometimes you just want to get the tale out without getting bogged down in grammar and punctuation.

I read your story without the paragraphs and I must confess I had a little difficulty at times following it but you have done a great job subsequently with the paragraphing. As an ex-secondary English teacher, I am accustomed to reading un-paragraphed work and helping students break it up so that the prose is more user friendly. Don't take too much offense at the comments. You have done well to make a success of your life. Paragraphing your account has made it much easier to read. But it's the content that is ultimately important.

My friend's son went from over 200 kg to 86 kg in less than 2 years through a combination of diet and lots of walking like you. He was interviewed on SEN and became a pin-up boy for Wendy Craig. I could PM the name if you like so you can read his story in several newspapers. He told me that despite the many kilometers of walking, diet was the most important contributor to the weight loss.

I am glad you shared your story with us. I recall you having used bigfooty as a bit of a confessional in the past, as have I. It takes courage to place your trust in an unknown group of online people. Good on you.

It also makes a change from food contests and the endless discussion of this ****ing virus that is dominating our life.

 

[BringouttheGimp]

I haven't always been, I fell for every trick in the book as a youngster but I think the key to success is learning from your experiences and mistakes, I've fallen over many times and dwelled on it for a while and felt sorry for myself but then you see a ray of hope and I think maybe if I do this way this time and don't do those things that screwed me last time I might make it this time.

I don't know if this is the time I will make it but it feels like I might be a chance, I don't know what the outcome will be but you see a chance you just got to go in that direction. Some people my age look at me and think how do you do it, what's your secret. You fall in shit and come out smelling like roses over and over. I think to myself well when we were 20 we were both exactly the same. We both fell over and made mistakes many times over the past 20 years but I changed and learnt from it and don't do it again but you keep doing the same shit and never learning from it.

They do the same things now they did when they were 20, it's easy to come off as smart but really you are just experienced and learnt your lessons whereas others didn't. They wonder why they spin their wheels and never go anywhere, well nothing will change if you don't change first. Definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I was never afraid to look at my life and pinpoint what my downfall was and why I was going nowhere in this situation and tossing it out and starting all over again armed with my new knowledge.

Someone who looks at the world the same way at 40 as they did at 20 has wasted 20 years of their life re. I'm proud of how I can look back at my adult life and remember who I was and what I did at each age and I can see the improvement in the person I was keep going up. I meet a lot of people who are older than me even and I think you are where I was at when I was 24. Haven't developed at all. Then I see others who have even if I don't know them personally I will follow them on youtube or whatever because they have shown what it takes to succeed so I listen and learn instead of hanging out with a bunch of losers going nowhere in real life I'm not afraid to even cut them out and I'm nearly friendless now but if you follow the crowd you will only go as far as the crowd, if you go your own way you will end up places noone has been before.

I've done everything and when I feel like there is nothing more to gain out of it and I am bored and don't see any way forward I stop it completely and focus on something else. Even if it means going back to square 1. I spent nearly 2 years working day and night, 3 jobs to set up my own gardening business, I don't do debt but at the time I thought this is my ticket, I basically did nothing but work and save, no girlfriends, no going out, no nothing. Everybody else was still going out, I worked every Friday and Saturday night delivering pizzas for $14 an hour I become the best driver, I got to work from 5pm to midnight, the whole shift, the only one, most drivers got 2-3 hours peak time. I was the main man. But I did a lot of km's, did 30 deliveries a night probably and I had to take fuel and car maintainance expenses out of my $14 an hour, I blew the engine on my car racing on a hot day from one job to another I had 30 minutes to get from Highett to Seaford after mowing lawns all day on a hot day I had 7 hours of pizza deliveries to do, blow the head gasket, there is 2 weeks of pay just to get my car back on the road.

Sometimes you think shit I should have just gone out drinking like everyone else. And people laugh at you. Sneer at your pay. But I was determined I was going to get there, I started off with my Shindaiwa whipper snipper (I already knew you have to buy the professional quality gear) put it in the back of my hatch back and started doing a few of my own jobs, so I at one stage had 4 or 5 jobs, I did 2 days with this bloke gardening, 2 days with that bloke gardening, help out anyone else who needed it for a day here and there, I did any jobs on airtasker I could do, I had the pizza delivery job, there was a few weeks where I did open until close every day of the week. I was the only one who kept my car in good shape to do all the miles, all the other driver's car would blow up because they wouldn't maintain it.

Then I added the Honda lawn mower $1300, still cramming it into my hatch back, every night I would lift the folded up lawn mower out of my hatchback and I would put it inside my apartment, stain the carpet as I didn't have a garage or backyard to store it. I would run through the shower to try to get the dirt and grass off me from gardening but sometimes there was no time so I did pizza deliveries dirty and just washed my face. I soon outgrew the hatchback, the pizza deliveries were not worth my time anymore so I quit, paid $3000 cash for a 1992 van, my plan was to use that to store all my gardening equipment and operate out of the van, and as a plus I could use it to go camping on weekends. That turned out to be a bad decision. The old guy who sold it to me saw me coming, the thing blew up in a month and being so old it was no longer possible to get parts to repair it so I had that for one month and then I had to scrap it and I lost $3000.

It took me a few months of pizza deliveries to afford that. Still I didn't give up. I bit the bullet and got a loan for another $3000 for a 2004 falcon that could tow and I searched everywhere for a gardening trailer cheap. I found one sitting in a trailer yard, an ex jim's mowing that needed work so I paid $800 for it and another $500 for them to fix it and make it roadworthy. I picked up all the other equipment I needed along the way like a hedge trimmer, ladder, lots of bits and pieces. Once it's all in the trailer and you are lugging it all around it weighs quite a bit. You burn through petrol fast driving it around plus all this equipment requires constant maintainance and petrol also.

Around this time all the guys I was working for who previously loved me because I never ever had 1 day off from any of them and worked like a madman, they got together and decided they were pissed off that I had the cheek to get my own equipment and get my own clients so one day there ended up being 4 guys I was working as a gardening labourer for, they all knew each other from cricket and I knew them from there too, they decided I had a conflict of interest and none of them wanted me to work for them anymore. So I was finally totally set up but had no other source of income, I had quit the pizza job and all my gardening work with others was gone so I had the gear but had to find the jobs. I walked the streets for hours at a time putting pamphlets in letterboxes, usually about 2 hours I could drop 200 pamphlets that would result in one job. 1 job might make me $30. I had easily spent $10000 getting to this point.

But I kept doing it. My friends laughing at me thinking I was crazy while they did their 9-5's. Then I found facebook marketing, I worked out how to drop an advertisement in facebook buy swap and sell groups, I could put an ad in 20 different groups at the same time on facebook and put an ad that could be potentially seen by 20,000 people in moments. I did that for a few weeks. Got jobs all over the place. Did it for a couple of months, sat down and did the sums. I wasn't making much at all. Barely minimum wage. Turns out driving 20kms between jobs towing 1 ton of equipment behind you costs you $10-15, then all the other expenses like tip fees, fixing equipment, whatever else, there was heaps, added to the fact most people think someone who mows lawns for a living is an idiot and doesn't deserve more than $20 an hour and most people are trying to cheap out on their property maintainance.

I realised this wasn't a good gig all along, it was a very energy intensive, time consuming, high expense business with little profitability and I was wrong all along and all that effort I had put in was for nothing except to learn that business lesson. I reckon some people would have jumped off the nearest bridge had they put in all that effort only to realise when they got there that it wasn't a smart profitable business and they were still making minimum wages if that. I just said fu** it, sold it all at cash converters for less than a quarter of what I paid for it.

I decided oh well I am not going to beat a dead horse, I was wrong, it wasn't what I thought it would be, it wasn't my golden ticket after all. So I got out of it. Sat down for a while and licked my wounds and dwelled on it and worked out a better way that would not involve all the things that made my last attempt not work and started from scratch on my new endeavour. But the lessons I learnt from the gardening business failure have set me up for life, I have no doubt about it. Priceless lessons about efficiency. These lessons have paid off big already as I apply them to all areas of my life. Those 9-5er's who keep laughing at me haven't learnt those lessons. Sorry for the essay but I haven't told anybody that story before.

A soccer coach of mine told me back in the day.. first 5 and last 5 is the most important part of the game.. can't tell you how many times I've repeated that in my head.. so many times.. thousands of times.. model my day on that.. get out of bed and get active right away.. and at the end of the day.. sort things out.. clear my head.. chill out.. plan for tommorow.. whatever..

 

[JB007]

Back on topic.......Michael Jordan is a God.

Loving The Last Dance atm.

 

[sr36]

I read your story without the paragraphs and I must confess I had a little difficulty at times following it but you have done a great job subsequently with the paragraphing. As an ex-secondary English teacher, I am accustomed to reading un-paragraphed work and helping students break it up so that the prose is more user friendly. Don't take too much offense at the comments. You have done well to make a success of your life. Paragraphing your account has made it much easier to read. But it's the content that is ultimately important.

My friends son went from over 200 kg to 86 kg in less than 2 years through a combination of diet and lots of walking like you. He was interviewed on SEN and became a pin-up boy for Wendy Craig. I could PM the name if you like so you can read his story in several newspapers. He told me that despite the many kilometers of walking, diet was the most important contributor of the weight loss.

I am glad you shared your story with us. I recall you having used bigfooty as a bit of a confessional in the past, as have I. It takes courage to place your trust in an unknown group of online people. Good on you.

It also makes a change from food contests and the endless discussion of this ******* virus that is dominating our life.

Plus he finished 7th and was named forward pocket in The Gimps coveted awards. That's what the paragraphing complaints are really all about. His bowl of dogfood did look nutritious and would have given a shiny coat, but there's no way it belonged that high. Praise from the Gimp can be a poison chalice striking envy in the hearts of us all.

 

[Black_White]

Edited for the sooks and smart arses, sometimes you just want to get the tale out without getting bogged down in grammar and punctuation.

But when no one reads the tale because it’s frankly unreadable, why bother?

 

[sr36]

A soccer coach of mine told me back in the day.. first 5 and last 5 is the most important part of the game.. can't tell you how many times I've repeated that in my head.. so many times.. thousands of times.. model my day on that.. get out of bed and get active right away.. and at the end of the day.. sort things out.. clear my head.. chill out.. plan for tommorow.. whatever..

You should have listened to him when you spent the last 5 minutes toasting sunblest.

 

[sirlothie]

I enjoyed reading it with or without paragraphs (more with). Good luck, I hope the current venture is a winner, but even if it's not, so what, there will be another one after that. It's the venturing that is fun.

Yeah that's true, looked I am basically retired if I want to be, I only do it for kicks. I never married, I never had kids. I started off 19 years old kicked out of home with no money, nowhere to go, knowing nothing about how the world works and where to go or what to do. My step dad dropped me off at a party with $50 which I spent on booze and smokes and then I was on my own. I remember sleeping on the park bench outside parliament, in the middle of winter, without a blanket. It was so cold there was frost and ice in the morning. I chose to sleep right on the park bench outside parliament house in Victoria. I wasn't a druggie or nothing and never did anything wrong. I was sure one of these powerful people would see me lying on the bench in the morning and help me. None of them did. I watched hundreds of suits walk straight past me like I wasn't even there.

That's when I realised nobody really cares about you in life. Very few people if you lucky. I was homeless for about 3 days when I worked out how to get in a halfway house full of druggies and criminals but at least I had a bed. Everyone remembers where they were on September 11, 2001. I remember that was the week I was 20 years old and did not eat for a week. I was 20, I was still stupid and was desperate to find someone to share life with so when I got paid I would take it straight to the nightclub and spend it on booze and try to find a girlfriend. Someone I could be a life partner with and work as a team. But I never met anybody good doing that.

I eventually learnt the ropes and how to get free food from soup vans and what not. Another mistake I made was picking up smoking which I found impossible to quit so all my money was going on smokes. I got a job at a supermarket stacking shelves, ended up becoming dairy manager and nightfill 2IC, reached a dead end, went to university to study marketing and communications, did that for a year, decided it wasn't where I wanted to go. Also student allowance was not enough to afford the 4 key things I needed in life at this point. Accommodation, food, text books and smokes. Found myself again verging on homelessness. So I went back to work, climbed the ladder as much as I could but reached a dead end.

Enrolled in uni again, this time doing journalism in Churchill near Moe was the only journalism course I could get into. It took about a 3 hour train trip from where I was living in Richmond. I had to pay for accommodation in Churchill for the 3 days I was studying then go back to Richmond. It didn't work out. I made another attempt at higher education. Didn't work out. All the while I was working on other areas of my life as well so for me going from being homeless and I didn't even own a bag, I only had the clothes on my back to becoming my own boss was a herculean effort I am very proud of.

I made mistakes in other areas as well but learnt from them so to be honest I have learnt to whittle down my living expenses to 36% of what I earn doing nothing, that 36% covers my rent, all my bills and groceries. I have 64% of my income left to do whatever I want so essentially I could retire if I want before I am 40 and just do nothing, or travel, I've got a fully equipped hiking backpack, when things reopen I could float around the country with no dramas travelling, have my legends membership, see a movie, go to the gym and restaurants and cafes and live a life of luxury if I wanted to but I need challenges so I keep striving because that is what I like to do. I've already started an investment portfolio, I get earnings from that.

I figured out being a personal trainer the energy expenditure once you have the knowledge and a little bit of equipment, the energy expenditure both in my energy and the energy consumption of all the equipment, in personal training that energy consumption is transferred to the person being trained, their sweat is the fuel being burned and they will pay you for it. But it's not about the money, I don't need the money, I don't care if I have 3 clients a week.

I write long paragraphs but only when I think the point I have to make is worth the time it takes for someone to read it. Don't turn your nose up at your pizza delivery boy or the guy who mows your lawns because you don't know who you are really dealing with.