The Bare Minimum

I refuse to be a wage slave.

I say again, I refuse to be a wage slave.

If you were a mouse in a maze with an bite-sized piece of well-aged Wisconsin cheese at the end.
Two choices.

For one, you can navigate the maze, led by the tantalizing smell, you use your intuition and wits and through lots of hard work and effort you will eventually come to the famed prize at the end of the maze. Another choice is to train and train your legs to jump and jump over the walls, curse the person who put you in the maze and search his house for the big fucking hunk of cheese, still carefully wrapped in it's package.

That's how I felt recently after reading an article by Steve Pavlina about ten reasons that you SHOULDN'T get a job, and after a little bit realization myself as I met people.

Are the people who work in offices and hourly wages are there by choice? Perhaps most of them aren't, my parents definitely weren't. They had the cultural revolution and all that, and my dad coming from a working class and my mother coming from a more entrepreneurial, business-y background.

They have different mindsets, but I believe in their generation, there wasn't much choice considering the consequences.

Today, (presuming you live in a capitalistic society) there is a lot more choice. A new generation of "new" millionaires are springing up, standards of living are high, and luxury items once reserved for the royalty or wealthy are now affordable by the common people. Medicaid, financial aid. High and nigh there are many opportunities to make it happen.

I turn around and see people, and because I was once like that too.

We tend to have tunnel vision that job security comes from a job that pays by the hour. We work in cubicles and we don't see a visual difference in the work we do, most of us don't see a vaccine that we invented saving many lives, inventing a new lasting light bulb, or fusion, all it is, is at the end of the day, we see our paycheck.

We want to leave a mark on the world that we and others can see and be proud of it at the very least.

Perhaps whatever you are doing makes you happy, perhaps you are perfectly content with your job because you get to see the world, get backstage passes, and travel to exotic cities and meet many, many women of different nationalities. Thats great too, as long as you are happy.

But I bet we can identify with that rat in the maze, except the maze of life is much, much longer and difficult to navigate. We smell the cheese, which is the dream of attaining the ultimate happiness in life. But we are stuck, navigating the maze and it is hard. We get frustrated and we don't know how much longer we have to find our way or if we are even going the right way.

I been reading some synergistic books on wealth, health, and self improvement lately. The good stuff, the ones that don't just come highly recommended but are classics in their own category.

I am not sure what other people do to get by, but from what it seems, most people seem to have a very narrow and safe path. For example, I rarely see people take the initiative to even meet their neighbors in my dorm, and people don't talk to the students they sit with for the entire semester.

Most people see the world through tunnel vision, they have one path to go, one girl to call, one career, one investment, one paycheck to live.

I am young, I never held a full-time job, but I have worked my ass off at a part-time job at my father's restaurant. I didn't enjoy it, I couldn't imagine myself or other people enjoying working at such job, but I really appreciate and hand my most utter respect to those people who do it because they keep the gears of society well oiled and moving.

Without them, we wouldn't have what we have.

As Steve Pavlina said, what is job security when you can get laid off at any second?

I don't think I am them, I see myself as more than that. I will be happy.

Isn't life suppose to be happy?

From the reading I have been doing and just seeing other people make their move in the world, I am convinced that I can do great. I can do extraordinary. If I just put that little effort in to train my legs, make them stronger, more agile, and be able to jump for the big hunk of cheese.

But doing that requires effort, and an unwavering vision. A willingness to take pain, to stick through with something for the long term.

I think it's not the consequences and conditions we live in this day and age that says who we will be in the future. There's no great war, no global disease to speak of, and for the first time in the history of the world, the power is in our hands to have anything we want as long as we BELIEVE it can be possible and WORK towards it.

I think that if these people see what they can accomplish, see the potential of what they can do, we all can have anything we want, be anything we want.

Of course, society won't let us do that. In order to keep it moving, there has to be people that sweat and live by the hour. There are people that aren't simply suppose to even know they hold this much power. The unlucky majority.

I don't want to be a gear, I am armed with this knowledge, this belief, and I will not let it go to waste. Perhaps now you have a little bit of this knowledge now as well, I hope I can at least spark a tiny bit of a billionth fraction of what you can be are truly capable of.

Start picking up synergistic books, it took me a while to realize how much power we can have just by knowing.

Some recommendations, add Steve Pavlina's Personal Development blog to your bookmarks, T. Harveker's Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, Fantastic Voyage by Ray Kurzweil, David Allen's Getting Things Done, The China Study by T. Colin Campbell, and of course How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

Next time you order coffee at a diner, give the waitress a larger tip not because she is very attractive but because you know that without her, we wouldn't have many of the things we have.

I also suggest this, everyday you wake up, when you're ordering your coffee, no matter where you stands in terms of social skills, make small talk or compliment the Starbucks bartistas (or whatever coffee shop you're in). I was pretty social for a year and had great success, and somehow became a hermit in the last few months, but I was getting my dinner at 7-11 today and asked what town I was in. The clerk merely gave me a smile and asked where I was going, I said Stony Brook, he said that was a little far and we shared a chuckle.

The exchange felt organic, I feel alive. Only if we had more of those to start our day.