Steve the Owl's Blog

It’s not that I disagree with affirmations, but I believe that whatever you affirm must be the truth. If you’re broke, affirm “I’m broke!” If you want more, say, “I’m 40 and broke!” Jim Rohn

Hi, everyone. I hope that you are getting ready to enjoy a great weekend and you look back on this September as one of accomplishment. Lately, I’ve noticed that The Money Class by Suze Orman has been re-airing a lot on the local PBS stations here, and I’ve watched a few episodes of her eponymous weekend show on CNBC. There are a lot of financial experts out there who want to tell you a lot of different things, but I would say that she and David Bach are definitely my favorites.

Both present their information in a way that is easy to understand, and it helps you to become more savvy about the investing world, to the point where I’ve even tried a couple of stock-picking contests. (I used the same principles and picked similar stocks for each. I’m doing very well in one [gaining nearly 2% in the month since I started while the market has been largely flat], and not as well in another, but I am excited about learning about discipline and patience necessary to be a great investor.) It is with this in mind that I come over and over to Suze Orman’s famous catchphrase, “Stand in your truth.”

What It Means

Stand in your truth basically means that you must be completely honest about your financial situation if you want to see success. If you are broke, that is your truth; if you are in debt, that is your truth; if you are spending too much, that is your truth; if everything is going wonderfully for you, that is your truth.

What I think is so powerful about this phrase is that it opens up everything else for you. If you are spending $4000 a month, but you’re only bringing home paychecks that say $3000 a month, the key is to stop digging wherever possible. If you can’t quite get your financial situation in order with cutting spending, this means earning more money, whether by increasing your abilities as an employee to set yourself up for a promotion and a raise because you are indispensable to the company, or through increasing the profits in your business.

“Standing in your truth” leads to another simple fact. Living above your means is bad, but living within your means doesn’t help, either. Why is that? As Suze Orman, David Bach, Jim Rohn, George Clason, and a host of others have noted, living within your means leads to insecurity. Once we learn to live below our means, we can start to build for our future. I’ve seen formulas that recommend living off of anywhere from 50-70% of income, and using the rest of that money to build your future, donate to charity, and pay off debt, or any combination thereof.

What It Does

One of the things that standing in your truth does is give you peace of mind. While I am currently in a situation where long-term employment meant a pretty big hole to climb out of, knowing that I am able to climb out, even if it isn’t necessarily as fast as I would like, tells me that I am doing something right. Back before the long-term unemployment set in, I was saving 10% of every paycheck and 50% of my tax refund check. I didn’t know about investment at the time, so I used it as a rainy day fund. There were a couple of times I had to withdraw from it over the course of just under twenty months, namely to pay for things when I knew a lump-sum payment was coming but I didn’t have the money yet. Rather than treating it as money gone from my account, I treated it as a loan to myself, and immediately used the lump sum payment to repay myself. As Brian Tracy points out, when you start saving, you start to feed the creative energy, and you will find more saving than you thought possible once you stick to your plan.

The results of this effort? In just under twenty months, I’d saved up enough money to not only have a two-month emergency fund, but enough money to pay for a wedding and a honeymoon. (Admittedly, it wasn’t the most expensive of either in the world, but for someone fresh out of seminary, it wasn’t bad.) And think: this was without even knowing anything about investing or setting up a retirement account. If the discipline was there with the knowledge I had then, who knows what will happen now that I have more investment knowledge to go with it.

What do you do to stand in your truth?

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We must learn to apply all that we know in order to attract all that we want. Jim Rohn

Hi, everyone. I hope you have had a good day today. Recently, I’ve been thinking about applying our learning. I thought about this while reading a book last year by Jim Rohn, The Five Pieces to the Life Puzzle. In the book, his fifth piece is Lifestyle, and one of the examples he gives about Lifestyle is knowing how to tip properly. This is an interesting lesson in the world of applied knowledge, and a little bit of an effort that can help you build your lifestyle and personal development.

What Does “Tip” Mean?

Most people think of tipping as something that is done after a meal to reward a good waiter/waitress. However, as Jim Rohn points out, “tip” is actually an acronym that stands for “to insure promptness.” The practice actually started in country clubs when members had friends in the club. In order to impress the friends and make sure that they were taken care of, they gave money to the staff in order to make sure that their friends were taken care of whenever they went to the country club.

When they did this, they found out that it actually worked, and the practice started to continue, eventually getting to the point where the normal method of tipping (now known more formally as a “gratuity”) becomes seen more as a reward for good service. For example, I have known plenty of people who insist that they won’t tip at all (or will barely tip) if they aren’t satisfied with their service at a restaurant.

Testing the Theory

I don’t go out to a lot of sit-down restaurants where tipping is the practice. Since reading this, I’ve had enough cash on hand to make sure that I’ve tried this experiment three times, each at different restaurants.

The first was Sam’s Grill, a restaurant in the Philly suburbs which I first discovered shortly after I moved to the area. It has an interesting mix of food, but my favorite when I go there is their hamburger, which is an eight-ounce patty that is so big that you have to have a flexible jaw to eat it at times, and a huge plate of fries. I went with my wife in April to celebrate my weight going below 145 lbs. (now it hovers around 135) and I decided that this would be the time to try the practice. We figured out roughly how much we were going to eat, and we gave the waiter a four-dollar tip, estimating our order at about $20-25. So, when the waiter came by to take our order, we handed him the four dollars. He thanked us, and took our order. It normally takes about 45 minutes to get our order at Sam’s Grill (I usually get the same thing when I go there, but my wife is more experimental at that restaurant), but we got our order in 14 minutes.

Then, I tried it at Ruby’s, another restaurant in the suburbs (this one a 50′s-themed restaurant), when we picked up my mother-in-law at the airport. There were three of us that time, so we gave a bigger tip. We guessed that the order would be in the $45-50 dollar range, so we gave a tip of eight dollars. The waitress did not know what we were doing, but she thanked us for the tip, and took our order. It usually takes about 20-30 minutes to get food at Ruby’s, but we got our food that day in nine minutes.

Then, last week, we ate at Perkins, a family restaurant that is somewhat of a national chain (although it has more of its presence in the Midwest and states that border the Midwest, such as Pennsylvania). We figured that our order would be about $30, so we gave the waitress our six dollars, and she laughed and asked if we were ready to leave already. I told her that we just knew that she would do a good job, so we wanted to go ahead and give her our tip. Because we tend to order different things when we go to Perkins, and because we’ve gone in several different locations, we’ve gotten our food anywhere from 30-60 minutes after our order was taken. This time, we got our food in 16 minutes. At the end of the meal, we bought a pie to go, so not knowing that the waitress brought it out beforehand, we increased her tip accordingly when she did.

Not only did we get our food faster, but we noticed that the wait staff tended to be a lot quicker when it came time to getting our drinks refilled. They also seemed more happy to serve us because we took this lesson to heart. However, this only happened because we were willing to apply the lesson.

Just for fun, here is a video that I found on what not to do when you tip, brought to you from 3rd Rock from the Sun, a show about aliens observing Earth, when the lead character, Dick, first learns about tipping and stands opposed to the practice, eventually trying to “revolutionize” the practice:

What do you do to make sure you apply the things that you learn?

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How often should you check your results? You can’t go ten years and then check your results. Some things you have to check the same day to make sure you’re going the right way. Jim Rohn, The Challenge to Succeed

On the roughly 250,000 mile trip to the moon, the Apollo 11 spacecraft was on course only 3% of the time. That means that they had to spend the other 97% of the time making slight adjustments to get to the moon. Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge

Hi, everyone. I hope you are having a good day today. As some of you may remember, one of my big goals in life is run a five-minute mile on or before my 35th birthday. My most recent benchmark in my goal was the Eagle National Bank 5K Run to Fight Cancer. This is the same race that I ran last year as my comeback race, the first race I ran since February 2000, and the first of a mile or more since an indoor race in December 1999.

Last year, my time was not very good at all, and the real goal was to finish. (I had so little in the way of expectations going in that I said that I would be happy if I broke a half an hour, and I came in just under that, at 29:48.6.) This year, however, I would not be satisfied with finishing; instead, I wanted a respectable time. Based on some of my efforts earlier this season, I set a goal of 21:25 for the race. If I ran this, it would be the fastest I’d ever run 5,000 meters, regardless of the surface. (My all-time personal record in the distance is 21:26; I’d done it indoors in 21:54, cross-country in 23:04, and on the road in 23:07.64 this past April.) I had run on the track a month earlier in 22:00.95, and I wasn’t yet in peak form, so I felt that 21:25 should be reasonable.

Judging My Effort

I knew that it would take a pace of 6:54 per mile in order to finish the race in 21:25. On the track, I made an effort to run at 5000 meter pace three days prior, albeit with a recovery in the middle so as not to wear myself out before the race. This meant running six 800-meter repeats in 3:26, and a final 200-meter run in 49 seconds. Except for finishing .04 seconds above the goal on the first run, I easily hit all six targets, finishing with a combined time of 21:16.71, and a lot of confidence going in, as I felt really good on those races and I thought that I would be able to tell me pace.

With this in mind, I stood at the starting line on Saturday morning. I felt good about my chances, and I asked whether the age-group awards went three deep or five deep, and I found out that they went three deep. (I knew I could finish top five in my age group, but I was a little bit worried about my ability to finish in the top three.) Still, I knew that my goal was to run my type of race, and being a more natural front runner relative to others of the same ability, this was an easier task.

The horn sounded, and we were off. I felt good about the pace, but I kept feeling like I was going too slow. However, my main distance is the mile, so by virtue of the fact that it was a longer distance, it was going to feel a little slower. I decided to stick to my strategy of attacking up the hills because they were small to me, given my central West Virginia background, and the fact that so many of the runners were from areas with lower elevation. I hit the first mile in 7:00.6. This was a little bit slower than I was hoping for, and remembering my lesson from September, I decided not to speed up too quickly lest I run out of energy too soon. The feel of the distance proved to be a bit too much for my usual pace, and I hit the two-mile mark in 14:18.5, doing the second mile in 7:17.9. I decided that my best hope was in the kick. Based on my goal time, I decided to start the kick roughly 18 minutes into the race, with the hope of letting it bring me the rest of the way to the finish line.

So, I made my move at about the right time, but I realized that I was farther from the finish line than I thought, but I crossed the finish line in 22:15.6, meaning that I ran the last 1.1 miles in 7:57.1, or 7:13.7 per mile.

When to Evaluate

I was happy with my final results, which were good enough for second place among men ages 30-39 (my first age group award since I was 18, ending a dry spell of three road races [one at age 19, and the two previous ones this past year]) and my fastest road time at that distance (and fifth-fastest ever regardless of surface), but I was trying to figure out why I finished so far behind my goal pace. Then, it hit me. This was a lesson that I’d learned from both of the sources I sited above. When I am on the track, I can adjust my pace every 100 meters if I am off, or roughly every 26 seconds for my goal pace for the race. However, on the race course, the only markers were laid down every mile, and I missed the marker at mile three as I had already started my all-out kick. This meant that any drift to a slower pace would only be noticed after seven minutes. This reinforces the notion that we must make continual adjustments in order to check our pace and make sure it is the right one.

What do you do to adjust your pace?

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Hi, everyone! I hope this has been a very enjoyable day for you. I write today thinking about one of the major events for my generation: the release of Nevermind, Nirvana’s major-label debut and second overall studio album (they released Bleach on indie label Sub Pop in 1989), 20 years ago this past Saturday. For those of you who were born from 1965-1980, this statement might make you feel a little bit older, but there is a lot to learn about one of the greatest albums of all time and how it came to be.

Practice Like a Job

Nevermind was a record that was treated by many as an overnight success story, with a band coming out of the Northwest and having next-to-no commercial success whatsoever (in limited release, Bleach sold 35,000 copies in its first two years) and making a record (and perhaps just as importantly, a video) that completely shook the foundation of Eighties Hair Metal (still the dominant hard rock in 1991) to its core, and changing the face of music forever.

However, this “overnight success story” was the result of almost fanatical work ethic by the band, especially its lead vocalist/guitarist/main songwriter Kurt Cobain. While Kurt Cobain and bandmate Krist Novoselic, who played bass, seemed to have nothing but trouble landing and keeping a regular job, they practiced for several hours a day. Krist Novoselic compared it to a job, and said that they “worked as hard on it as you would any job. We were just obsessed with rehearsal.” This obsession meant practices that could easily last for ten or twelve hours at a time, as the band worked and worked and worked to refine its sound and its songs. (You can hear a lot of the songwriting process at work on With the Lights Out, the band’s four-disc CD/DVD box set, where some songs are almost unrecognizable compared to the final form.)

A Message for Its Time

The early 1990′s were not a good time for American youth. The economy was in a recession, the current political order only seemed to disappoint, and small towns were dying all over America as companies outsourced work overseas. The hair metal that ruled the airwaves was an escapist form of music that had very little musical style.

It was in this atmosphere that Nirvana, drawing from hard rock, punk, and even pop influences, crafted their masterpiece. This was not a music for happy talk, but it was definitely the music for you if you wanted someone to express the frustration that you felt when looking at some of the things going on in the world around you. For a generation that was overshadowed by its predecessor, the baby boomers, Generation X was still looking for its voice. In its search, it found them in the wail and distorted guitars of 24-year-old Kurt Cobain. He was not making a political statement per se, but he was expressing the feelings of his generation, as he got such powerful sounds from his frail 5’7, 110 lb. frame that seemed to belie his physical size.

Appreciate It for What It Is

In the twenty years since its release, this record, and its first single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” have taken on a life of its own. It was seen as the voice of a generation, even when it didn’t know what to say (as evidenced by the fact that some of the lyrics are very difficult understand on first listen). Sadly, the pressure became too much for its leader, and he died less than three years after its release. However, I encourage you to listen to this song with fresh ears, as you may have in 1991 or sometime after that (I first heard it in its entirety in 1993) and feel the raw power as you know what it is like to truly experience greatness, something that happens far too little in this world.

How do you work to build your defining moment?

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Hi, everyone! It has been quite a while (three weeks) since my last blog post. This is because of something that I have been learning lately that I am seeing in action as we speak, and that is the need to find your balance.

Changes

As some of my faithful readers may remember, I started my new job teaching Religion in the World at Temple University about a month ago. This is a job that I have wanted for this phase in my professional life as I work toward my Ph.D. (I am still working my business, but my goal has never been to quit working a job, but to make enough money from my business to be able to have the freedom to teach wherever I want without worrying too much about my paycheck. In other words, like most good Protestants, I want to be able to work because I want to rather than because I have to ) for a very long time.

Needless to say, it is very different from my previous pace of life, where my biggest work has been trying to find time to post for my blog or look for work (or, when I was doing campaign work, to find a few hours a day to work on the campaign). Now, considering that I am still working the campaign job until early November (although with fewer hours to accommodate my teaching) and taking classes, all while brushing up on my foreign languages (I’m still waiting to find out if I passed the German test. If I did, it’s on to French.) which, needless to say, makes it a little bit more difficult to figure out when to fit time to do the things that I normally did based on my previous activity load. Sadly, my blog seemed to take the hit. (I’ve got plenty of ideas on backlog, but I just don’t have them written down yet, so expect to see a lot of posts soon.)

What Can You Give Up?

This was a question that I weighed last week as I looked at my copy of the Challenge to Succeed Workbook based on four-CD audio set by Jim Rohn. In this section of the workbook, it had me write down everything that I did not counting work, sleep, or the time it takes me to get to work. I was surprised at how much time I was leaving on the table. Looking through my schedule, I found 16 hours a week that I could easily give up in order to build value in my life and still enjoy plenty of leisure time. So, with that in mind, I decided that it was time to renew my efforts to continue my conversation with you, the reader, and I made a commitment to write at least three new blog posts a week, with a gap of no more than three days between posts (I am counting a day as when I wake up, rather than midnight-to-midnight, so it is possible that a gap could appear if I write late at night, but three days is the limit).

This is possible only because I looked at my life and realized that there were things that I wanted to do, and I wanted to make sure that I was using my time more effectively in the process. It isn’t about doing more or doing less, but finding a balance.

How do you find a balance between your priorities in life?

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Hi, everyone. I hope you have enjoyed your Labor Day today. Earlier, I posted about my job as a graduate student teacher at Temple University. Last year, while examining the movie The Wrestler, I looked at the ways that this shows the need for unions for a group of people who are often derided as greedy for making a lot of money, even though their work makes even more money for owners. I think of this as I hear one of the common complaints about unions being that they “were once necessary, but we don’t need them any more.” Do these people have a point?

My Union

As I mentioned in my post earlier today, the student teachers at Temple University, who formed the TUGSA (a member union of the American Federation of Teachers, which is itself a member of the AFL-CIO), fought a four-year battle with the administration who pulled delay after delay to postpone a vote for certification. When the adjuncts (both graduate students who aren’t in the union and those who already have their Ph.D.) tried to unionize, Temple did everything in its power to fight this, including prohibiting any efforts to organize on campus. (In one particularly insulting move, the administration argued that the union gave everyone the same pay, whereas non-union teachers could negotiate for even more than the union gets, even though they aren’t even close.)

Well, what were the results of this union for the student teachers? Before the unionization, health care costs were prohibitive, and student teachers received less than $2750 per course with very little fringe benefits other than tuition payment. The union won its right to exist in 2001, and the next year, the first contract was finalized, and the pay increased to $3500 per course with annual cost of living adjustments, full tuition and health care for those who teach two courses per semester, and a limit to the number of hours required per course, thus ensuring that student teachers will be able to prepare for their courses and research for dissertations.

A Matter of Life or Death

One of the worst tragedies in the workplace in recent memory was the Upper Big Branch Coal Mine, run by Massey Energy, with its then-CEO, the almost cartoonishly villainous Don Blankenship, who made a huge effort to bust unions when he took over the company, and he ordered his miners to stop inspecting for safety and start digging for coal. This came to a head at Upper Big Branch in 2010, with 29 workers dead, and Massey insisting that it really did run a safe shop.

However, everyone who I know who worked in coal mines both union and non-union told me that something like this would never happen at a union coal mine, because the union will fight for workers’ safety, and if conditions are that unsafe, they will make sure that the mine gets shut down until the gas level makes conditions safe.

We have come a long way thanks to unions, but before unions were legal (and even after), non-union shops were little more than slaveowners, forcing miners to pay for their own equipment, and refusing to pay miners in cash, paying them instead with company scrip (a process that continued in many non-union mines well into the 1950′s, which Homer Hickham describes in his memoir, October Sky) and owning all of the houses. When miners tried to fight for their rights, they were kicked out of their homes and their property was seized.

I do not write this to say that unions are perfect, but to point out that they have done a lot of good. Thanks to unions fighting for working people, we have 40-hour workweeks, minimum wage laws, overtime, and worker safety laws. Unfortunately, many of these laws that were literally won by blood are now under fire. As a member of a teachers’ union, I know that I couldn’t be a part of a union if not for those who fought and died for the right to organize, so I stand with all unions that are trying to make things better for their workers.

Probably the movie that best explains this is Matewan, a story based on one of the key events in the Coal Wars in West Virginia in the 1920′s, where workers who wanted to unionize were met with violence. Here is a scene from the movie that shows Chris Cooper as union organizer demonstrating a union at its best (his speech begins at the 2:08 mark; NOTE: this scene has some language that may be NSFW, including racial slurs):

How do you remember the people who have paved the way for you?

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Hi, everyone. I hope you are enjoying this Labor Day. As the son of a union sawmill worker, this is a day that means a lot to me, but there are two stories that I have to tell you that are very different, so I will tell you these stories in two different blog posts. This is the first.

What Are You Meant to Do?

In everything that I do, I’ve noticed that I tend to do better when I am in a teaching role. With this in mind, over the last year and a half, I have applied for teaching positions four times (three at Temple, one at Palmer). However, I got turned down every time. Even when I’m not in a classroom, I realize that I am at my best when I am teaching. (This is one of the reasons I enjoy writing on this blog so much.) However, I was getting frustrated at my inability to get a teaching job. I have a master’s degree, and I focused on places where I had relationships with the people making the decision. However, I had accepted that I would have to wait another semester and try again.

Putting Yourself Out There

So, you can imagine my surprise when I got a call from the vice chair of the religion department at Temple a week and a half ago. I was told that one of the professors had been overbooked, and he would not be teaching one of the classes he had originally been assigned. When this happens, colleges and universities often consider combining courses in order to accommodate the students, or canceling the course altogether. They couldn’t do either this time, because the class was full. So, she wanted to know if I could fill the teaching slot. I told her I was interested, and she told me it was on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There was a pause as she looked for the time the course was offered, and I was thinking, “Please not 9:30, please not 9:30,” because I was already booked for a sociology course at that time. When she said 2:00, I was relieved and said that I could teach the course.

Life as a Teacher

I’ve already taught my first week of courses, and it was everything I wanted and then some as I sought a teaching position as I work toward my Ph.D. The other great thing was that, even though there is competition to get the teaching position, once you get in (especially if you are a last-minute substitution like I was), people really start to help you out. I learned this as several people helped me get my syllabus together and make sure that everything was in place by the time class started. (There are still some things that we are working on with the administrative front, but huge strides are being made.)

One of the other great things about what happened is that I am now part of the union (Temple University’s teaching assistants are the only TA union in Pennsylvania, the Temple University Graduate Students’ Association [TUGSA], which was recognized in 2001 after a four-year struggle.), which means that I will have better pay, half of my tuition paid, and half of the price of my insurance policy (full-time for TA’s is two courses, I am teaching one, so I get half benefits). However, none of this would’ve been possible if I didn’t keep trying. I got the call because I had applied to teach at Temple so many times, and now I am getting my chance to prove myself.

How have you gained when you kept trying something?

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