I’m so delighted that you decided to join me once again so we can spend some quality time together as we continue on this journey of learning and discovery. “I hope you’ve been having a summer full of joy and wonder, I hope you have a freezer full of cool treats to help you beat the heat”. I particularly enjoy blueberries stuffed inside of raspberries a flavor combo that was meant to be. Being a driver in addition to being a writer works well together. With all the time I spend on the road I’m able to take the time to formulate my thoughts and plan how I want to put them in to words and present them to you. Which is the toughest part once you actually know what you want to say typing it out is not that difficult. I feel like I’m still catching with these blogs. I want to get where I feel like I’ve told my story up to a certain point and have said all the things I wanted to say. The goal is to get to where I’m writing these in real time as life happens to me. Sometimes you have to wait a little bit in order to be able to tell a complete story. One of the reasons I haven’t been popping these as fast as I would like to, is I’ve been trying to get caught on workouts. So the last few weeks I’ve devoting a little more of my time and energy on that. Now although I haven’t regained my peak condition yet, but I’ve gained some ground. So I wanted to take some time out to do some writing today so I’m working out at home today. When I last left off I spoke about finding my groove. What I meant by that is finding right balance in different aspects of your life. Building a good routine that’s works for you so you are able to follow it consistently and you feel productive. Which I feel is really important because it has to be one of the worst feelings in life to just feel like you’re stagnant or losing progress. I would say that also includes doing the same thing over and over only to not achieve the intended results so, of course we will always continue to adjust and improve upon that routine as we learn and grow. With the goal of becoming the best version of ourselves that we can possibly become. Keep in mind even thou I don’t always address it I realize that there are countless numbers of people worldwide enduring critical times, suffering and being persecuted. My thought process is this that us being the blessed ones how can we help others who suffer if were not at the top of our game? I realize what we’re up against and it will be a difficult crusade. A wise young man once said “My momma made me rugged baptized the public” Remember that it’s not necessary to compare yourself to other people. Concern yourself with maximizing your own potential. Everybody’s individual experience will differ. The last few years I’ve learned a lot about personality types in particular my own. The information I received was very beneficial in me understanding myself as well as the world around me. Although I am not an expert on the subject, I will continue to refer to it throughout these blogs. When it comes to my own personality type the feeling of being productive is very important to our wellbeing. While a good routine consists several different components differing depending on who you are and your schedule. No matter who you may be one of the integral pieces of the puzzle is nutrition. This week’s blog will have a lot to do with food and the business of food.
Shark Tank
Throughout the last few years one of the biggest influences on realigning my outlook on life has been “ABC’s Shark Tank”. For this analogy keeping with this week’s theme, I’m going to compare media to food. Now there’s a lot of food out there that are quite simply poison. They contain or are treated with ingredients that don’t occur in nature; I call them micro-poisons. They don’t kill right away but they do become very toxic over periods of time. There also is a lot junk food out their food that might taste good but doesn’t contain any real nutritional value to fuel or heal the body. Today’s media landscape can be looked at in the same way. A lot of media content is mental poison created to manipulate and or misinform. Then a lot of it can be considered junk content. Maybe it’s entertaining but you don’t really learn anything or take anything away from it, no real substance. Shark Tank is the antidote. First off it has an interesting cast of self-made moguls. The show itself is interesting and has real world stakes and consequences in addition to that its educational it’s an introductory lesson in business. It showcases real people similar to you, who’ve been able to drastically change their life for the better. One of the most important elements to the program is the role model aspect. Earlier in life my role models were very different kinds of people. Shark Tank opens your eyes to an actual path forward to a better way of life. It’s a very inspirational program. Its beneficial to see those with admirable qualities and traits that you can aspire to emulate. So, this actually happened to me a few months before I moved. I’m home chillin in my room watching shark tank. I’m not looking at the TV I’m doing something else looking down but listening. Then I hear the epic voice guy say “next in the tank Jonathan Justice”. I look up in a state of shock to see this guy I used to work with strolling into the shark tank with his very attractive female counterpart. So, do you remember the electronics company that dumped me a few years ago? The one where the man who hired me was the ex-pro wrestler. Well, Jon Justice worked with me there except he had been let go about a year prior to the company dissolving. By the way that’s not his real name it’s just what I’m calling him for the sake of the story. The funny part of story is that the first time we worked together me and that guy got into it a little bit on the jobsite. Now let me say that these things happen. People get all up inside their emotions and lose their cool sometimes. At the time we were both pretty new he started like three months before. Without getting too deep into the weeds because the details aren’t important. The company put us in bad predicament. The put us on a site that we couldn’t possibly finish. We were supposed to have four labor ready helpers none of them showed up mostly because for whatever reason the dispatcher didn’t put in the order. So yeah, it was one of those days. Different people handle stressful situation in different ways. I believe his way of getting out of this job was creating a disagreement with me. I fell for it and somethings got said and yeah long story short it turned out to be an all around bad day. We both almost got terminated. Fortunately, our immediate supervisor at the time turned out to be pretty cool. So, we survived with just getting wrote up. We made amends that same day and worked on several jobs together after that up. After that we were never close but we were cool. Let me also say some jobs are not for everybody. I don’t think the whole physical labor style work was his thing. Didn’t seem like he really wanted to be there, it was just something he had to do at the time. There’s nothing wrong with that its life We’re all trying to find our lane. I learned from the experience it taught me to never allow anyone to push my buttons and make me lose my cool. Because he told me I knew that outside of work him along with his lady they ran a vegan food truck catering service. Before I had ever had any thoughts about becoming a vegetarian, they had started a business specializing in this niche market. Out of Sunnyvale and the bay area is the perfect place to start a business like that. He worked to support them while she ran the business and he also helped her out during weekends and his time off. You could say they had a healthily mutually beneficial partnership. I have never met her but through our other coworker I heard nothing but good things like she was attractive, smart and capable, and he was correct about that. Evidently, she also has a pretty good recipe for vegan fried chicken because Mark Cuban offered her a million dollars for it. Anyways getting back to the show I’m screaming and marking out because it’s just so funny to see someone you know firsthand on national tv on a show you love to watch. Another funny thing is it wasn’t even a new episode I had just missed it. Their product on the show was their award-winning secret recipe plant based vegan fried chicken. They had a pretty good showing except for they made the cardinal sin they went on shark tank and didn’t know their numbers. They presented the sharks with some improbable figures and projections. In spite of that they still got offers. Even thou they decline both the offers received due to the fact they didn’t want to give up ownership of their company, it’s still a tremendous accomplishment to make it as far as they have. A shark tank is not always the best option for every business. Their food products are available in hundreds of restaurants nationwide In addition to all he accolades and success they’ve already achieved you can bet that there’s a lot more coming their way. So congratulations to them. This goes to show that one day you can be on a random jobsite having an asinine argument with me and then just short time later you’re on ABC getting million dollar offers from billionaires. Also I look at this as a good case study and testament to the significance of having the right partner that’s supportive of you and vice versa. You can become a power couple with unlimited potential. You can find them online at (atlasmonroe.com). The food looks amazing I plan on dropping in and trying their cuisine very soon. I have recently developed a product related to this space. It was unintentional I never wanted to go into the food industry because of the high level of difficulty. Nonetheless it came about for me while developing my own program for meal prep. Being a person who wants to eat healthily and vegetarian but has very little time to cook. I have no culinary training but I am creative in the kitchen like I am in every aspect of my life. Over the last several months its lead me create something that has helped me out tremendously. It checks a lot of the right boxes it saves time, adds convenience is very nutritionally dense and literally has hundreds of different applications in the kitchen. Food is difficult and competitive space but the potential is beyond huge everyone has to eat. Take Kraft for example they sell a million boxes of mac and cheese every day. I think I have something I can distribute to restaurants as well as market and sell directly to the public online. I’m still in the very early stages of development so I don’t want to give too much away until patents and trademarks are in place. As time goes on I will continue to talk more about it. We’ll have to see where it goes. At least I know I have some people I can refer to for advice along the way.
Paper Girls and Nightsky
The blog I wrote last week I really wanted to write two weeks ago but I had to do my meal prep I was out of product. For me to make my product it takes about 4-5 hours I usually spread that out over the weekend. I try to make a month’s worth that way I don’t have to do it every week. While I was doing that two weeks ago, I watched this series I thought was pretty incredible and I wanted to talk about it. Paper Girls is action drama sci-fi thriller 8 episode series on prime video. Usually reading a comic book makes you want to see movies about it. In this case watching this series made me want to go back and read the graphic novel which I still plan on doing. This was a comic adaption done right very good writing. It follows the four main characters Erin, Tiffany, KJ and Mac they are 12-year-old girls working on their paper routes on hell day November 1st 1988. This first episode starts out at 100 miles per hour and doesn’t let up if you look away for a minute you’ll miss an important part of the story. Lots of action but the writers do a good job of keeping you engaged in the storyline. The plot is in the chaos of the night these four young girls unknowingly get rushed into a time machine and travel from 1988 to 2019, to find that they are in the middle of a war between two factions from different times. The STF (standard time fighters) are from way in the future where things are so bad their goal is to travel back and change moments in time to better the world. The Old Watch is from not as far in the future their mission is to preserve the original timeline. They enforce a time travel ban by killing anyone travels outside of their original timeline. The second episode slow down to 80 mph and lets you get invested in the characters a little bit more. The whole series is really good I recommend it. As we follow them jumping through time the editors pick music relevant to the different time periods. There are real human moments in the script. What I mean is in action movies it sometimes bothers me when the people never stop to eat, rest, shower or use the bathroom. There are no time travel movie rules about not interacting with yourself at a different age, matter of fact that’s some of the main drama and conflict involved. If you have children in your household the language is harsh but makes sense in context with what the characters are going through. I noticed Brad Pitt was one of the executive producers. The characters are good the writing was strong. There’s a lot of epic WTF moments. There is a few plot hole and things that don't make sense but overall I would say season one this is worth watch at least a couple of times.
Nightsky is another good first season sci-fi series from prime video. This about a mature couple who happen to have a teleportation device hidden in there shed in the back yard. It stars landmark actors Sissy Spacek and JK Simmons. The device takes them to a room on a strange planet across the galaxy. The pacing is more gradual in this series definitely more of a drama less of a thriller. Still it was very interesting. They did a good job of building the story. It leaves you in anticipation of a second season. Definitely worth a watch.
Alright y’all have a pleasant night and a wonderful week. I’m not even finish talking about food yet so I will return soon with part 2 of this. So stay in touch and know that all the things that you truly desire you have the power to make them transpire.
