Recently I’ve become more and more aggravated by the fact that this world is based on materialism. It’s annoying to know that you have to mutual exclusive goals and that every day your picking the goal that will lead you to more and more frustration. Each day that I wake up I pick to go to school, meet up with friends, and go through another day of suffering. Every day I feel the longing to sit down and get rid of all this crap around me because it serves no purpose and it holds no personal value. I don’t mean to say that I hate the people that I associate with, rather I mean to say that ultimately I will have to give everything up in this world including them.
I read that the body can’t tell whether stress is physical or mental, but all stress is treated with the fight or flight reflex which has lead me to think, are we supposed to have mental stress? If our bodies are naturally programmed to only know the response to one type of stress then we shouldn’t be inducing mental stress. It serves no purpose and yet it kills, not in the form of death, but socially. Of course all this stress is induced by including our mundane day to day activities. Clear your mind through mediation, and there goes the stress.
Going back to the title “Materialism or Enlightenment”. The problem lies in the fact that we reincarnate. Who is to say that I will be as fortunate to learn about enlightenment in my later lives. I’m going to hate having to live hundreds, thousand or even millions before breaking this horrible cycle. How can I abandon my friends and family. These people have helped me through every aspect of my life. I realize that they are people and are therefor distractions, but it’s hard to let go of them. What happens if I’m wrong? If I chose one over the other I give up something more than myself.

I can say that this month I was paid rather nicely for all the hard work that I did in November. Luckily for me I had a marginal propensity to save of around .5 or 50%. I was able to protect myself from inflation to some degree by opening a one and two year certificate of deposits at 3.87% and 4.11% respectively. Of course that is good news but I’m sad to see that savers are being punished by the federal reserve, it turns out that a good chunk of my money is appreciating at either 2.8%, 1.25%, or .5% annually.
My money has been going up a steady incline but I expect that my net worth will not appreciate as much during the month of January. I do plan on hitting my goal of having at least $7500 by then but I not expect to see as great a return as I did this month. I have not done as much work for the month of December due to some circumstances. My business has also stopped a bit but I’m working hard to jump start it back up again, hoping for the best I should see a large return on some of blogs by February or March.

Goal #1: Reach a net worth of at least $7500 by the time I publish Januaries net worth statement.
Goal #2: Have a net worth of at least $15,000 by the end of the 2009.
Goal #3: Double the $15,000 by the end of 2010.

Major expectations for spending:
Freestyle Fighting Academy -$2000
Home Gym: ~$300 / maximum
Judo Club: unknown

Every time I write I think “is this work good enough?”, or “can I compare this to people who write great articles?”. It’s stupid and a waste of time to try and compare myself to someone else. I work for myself, I produce content that makes me happy and honestly if someone tells me “I haven’t been to your blog because it’s boring” I could give a rats ass… by all means leave and don’t come back. Of course achieving this mindset is somewhat hard because readers is one of the most important components of a successful blog. Once achieved I believe that a author is able to write what he chooses, when he chooses.
To this day I haven’t been able to achieve this much to my dismay. I have several posts planned that I would like to write up but fear over embarrassment stop me from doing so. I should be able to write my top 10 greatest fears and my opinion on todays lifestyle without a single doubt in my mind but being able to write like this is one elusive element. Being able to lose fear is a important element for everyone, as soon as we lose fear we can obtain enlightenment, happiness, or any other type of possession that one would want.
Face your fear
I ask myself “how do I go about losing my fear?” all the time, and I think I may have come up with some answers. First and foremost put yourself in a uncomfortable situation that forces you to confront your fear. This is harder done than said but it’s true, this should work for everything including a stutter. A friend of mine explained to me that he was able to overcome many of his fear with two thoughts, 1. why the fuck do I care what anyone else thinks? and 2. I can do this. My belief that perception is reality lends itself very well to his second point, if I truly believe that I don’t have a stutter or a fear then I won’t have one, and this is true for each and every single one of my fears. To add to that, thinking that no one is laughing at me means that no one is laughing at me, and if for some stupid reason I believe that they are so what? People are people, unless someone is important to you, you could care less if they are healthy as an ox, or if they die.. plain and simple.
Fear can be a good thing, it’s what stops us from doing stupid shit.. sometimes. Fear has saved my life many times but at the same time has inhibited my ability to pursue goals. I will be able to come up with 2 grand to pay for a fight gym membership but will my parents approve? Fear. My car has come so close to flipping over on many occasions but I never seem to fear that, nor do I mind staying out anymore. Hmm, I’m starting to see a pattern. Face your fear, face it head on at all times. I’m going to go to that fight gym (freestyle fighting academy) once I have enough money, so what if my parents are mad. Stuttering for me has been a plague but even though I stutter when I talk to people I try to surge forward (it works ). To rant off a bit, I think life is too short to think about stupid things like rules and limitations. I speed, alot, everyday I speed. I also drive with alcohol in my trunk and I loiter too. I’ve been told not to speed but honestly it gives me joy, if I have to pay for a ticket I will, just let me have my fun.
Right there, that is what I need to be able to do. I need to be able to see that marginal benefit of my actions surpass the marginal cost of them and I will then feel joy for every action. With that newfound joy in each action money won’t be a problem because it’s the actual service, activity, action that counts not the greenbacks behind it.

Oh what the hell. Top 10 greatest fears. (Kill two birds with one stone)
1. Losing a family member
2. Dying alone
3. Having made no difference in anyones life
4. Not being able to support relatives
5. Not being able to carry out my life dreams
6. Not being able to protect the people I care most about
7. Killing someone
8. Being killed
9. Seeing someone being killed
10. My own death

This week I have a couple finals (Geology, Music Appreciation, Zen & Tea Ceremony) which will most likely result in a lower frequency of post / updates on this blog. Finals this week have also taken a toll on the number of blogs that I have been able to set up, my goal of setting up one blog a day (maximum of 9 including this one) has been postponed to restart after this Saturday. My social life has diminished slightly because of finals and the amount of studying that must be done in order to guarantee myself straight A’s for this semester. Hopefully all of my studying will not go in vain and I will obtain one of my many goals.
On a more positive note I have found a gym that I plan to check out for BJJ and Muay Thai / Kick boxing, I’m looking forward to go this Tuesday to check it out. I have successfully put myself out of hitting my punching bag that I so enjoy because of the frequency of times that I hit it in a day. When first using the bag I chose to not use wraps and hurt my wrist badly, till yesterday I continued to hit the bag regardless of the pain. After doing five pullup on a basketball rim today I feel good and ready to fight or hit my punching bag (neither options that are viable at the present time).
To sum it up I have had a good week but my mood has been short of good. For some reason a feeling of glum has overcome my usual mellow mood. I’ve been planning out some more posts that I would like to do, one that I plan to focus on is a post fear (including a list of my top 10 fears), so please stay tuned. A contest should be in order soon enough and it will be announced one maybe even two weeks in ahead.

I hope everyone has a safe week and stay positive.

I started the No Stuttering Project on November 28th and I have seen some improvement but not much. I wanted to take this time to explain a couple places that I’m going wrong and some advice for myself and other stutterers.

First and foremost for everyone who is trying this, please understand that no one will ever see a 100% loss in their stuttering as soon as they try. I have not seen a huge increase in the number of times that I stutter, but I feel that the more I try to prevent it the more I stutter. I guess you could say that I’m one of the many people who find it hard to break old habits. I also understand that it will take months if not years for me to see a huge decrease in the number of times that I stutter, I have accepted and embraced the fact.

Going a little bit further into the problem, I have a problem with confidence in which I doubt my ability to not stutter and therefor I do. As my friend Dennis told me “You don’t stutter when your mad and this whole stuttering bullshit is all in your head”. I agree with him 100% and with what my friend Nikko said (”Know that you won’t stutter and you’ll be fine.”). Of course he also said “it won’t be as easy as snapping your fingers” or something like that, but he is right in saying that I will not be able to gain confidence overnight. A friend of mine by the name of Danny Goldman told me that he was able to overcome his fear of socializing by putting himself in situations that are out of his comfort zone. I agree with Danny and I think I will start taking myself out of my comfort zone little by little.

Here is a quote from the wikihow article on “How to stop Stuttering”, “Stop being nervous. The real deal here is to stay calm, and let things flow. If you try to adjust to others, it simply won’t work out. Make yourself feel comfortable, and you will see the results.” It may be me alone who does this but often times I find myself thinking about what someone else thinks about me which in the end only has the effect of making my stutter worse. The technique that I have employed to help me stop stuttering as much is to simply breathe when I feel a stutter is going on and to stop when I feel myself stuttering. It may sound stupid to some but once I get some batteries for my camera I will be more than happy to post some videos of me doing exactly that.

I feel that I have made some progress and regardless of how little or how much progress I have made I still feel good that I’ve taken a step forward.

ravwilli.com

Overall I think that I’m doing decently for my age group of 18 but there is room for improvement. My credit card is at a low limit of $300 / month which I usually pay off on both the 14th and the 28th every month.
I make money using the internet, most of the money is made through sponsored reviews but the domains that I used to do them on have taken a turn for the worse. To pile more bad news on top guidelines for accepting blogs have become more strict which means that I will have to put more effort into my work. I have two to three domains coming in but with wait times for acceptance up to a couple weeks I will see a big drop in income for this month.

Goal #1: Reach a net worth of at least $7500 by the time I publish Januaries net worth statement.
Goal #2: Have a net worth of at least $15,000 by the end of the 2009.
Goal #3: Double the $15,000 by the end of 2010.

How are your finances doing? Bad stock market withering away your earnings? Please share your situation or ask anything on your mind.

Since I was a child I have been plagued with a speech impediment known as a stutter. A stutter is when you repeat what you are trying to say whether it be the first sound of a word, or the entire word itself. For some reason or another I have never been able to rid myself of this no matter how many therapy sessions I attended, or how many times I cursed myself out for it. To those of us who stutter it’s a social inhibitor, and something that never ceases to make a stutter stay on edge. With this project I hope to stutter as little as possible and rid myself of the fear associated with stuttering.
The No Stuttering Project or NSP for short is a experiment that I put together to help myself and fellow stutterers not stutter. Over the various years of speech therapy I have learned a couple techniques that work and some that don’t. I want to take this moment to go ahead and state that your stutter will never disappear but it will get better. To add to this, one technique to aid your stutter is to stutter slightly at the beginning of your first word and then continue with sentence. Now in order for me to hold this project I need to do a couple things like keep track as to how many times I stutter each day, and there has to be ground rules. So without further delay the rules.

1. Stutter as little as possible.
2. Take as long as I need to in order to get my message across.
3. Feel no guilt / humiliation.
4. Maintain a monotone voice.
5. If I stutter revert to a neutral mouth position.
6. If I stutter I need to take a deep breath.

That’s all for the rules. Several of my fraters and some men pledging Tau Kappa Epsilon see me on a daily basis so I’m asking for their help to hold me accountable to each, and every single rule listed above. I implore anyone who stutters to also follow the same rules and report your progress on here as well.
Once I’m able to get my batteries for my camera I plan to make videos on a daily basis to update my progress. Wish me luck, my thirty days start now.

I do ask that if anyone would like to talk to me about this project, or would just like to talk I’m always available at 305.788.2060.

According to the people at CrossFit I’m unfit. Now being that I’m 6′1, 137 pounds it is a shock that I was last to complete a workout this morning with my fraters at the crossfit gym. What do I plan do about this little problem of mine? Workout of course unless those machines on T.V. can promise great results for 3 minutes of my time a day (yeah… right). Anyway, our president and other fraters agreed that we should do this as a brotherhood type of thing every week which will serve us a dual purpose.

1) All of us will get in shape.
2) Seeing fraters push themselves makes me want to work harder and vice versa.

I completely agree with the idea of going there every week and I plan to join for $100 / month in the Spring because I will have much time to spare with a 10 credit work load. Reading more about the workouts I found out that each time you go there it’s something different so you won’t get bored, you’ll never plateau which are both good reasons for me to join. I haven’t written about this yet but I will, I find myself bored with my mundane routines which is where a creative atmosphere like crossfit will come in.

I was asked by a couple people why I would want to join a program that will make you want to vomit after 20 minutes and the answer is pretty simple, it’s challenging. I like challenges which is why I try to be as competitive as possible and crossfit is all about scaling to your fitness level and timing you against everyone else in the class. My goal is to get into shape where I can take the workouts better than I can at the present moment. The goal is vague but it allows me to constantly scale it back and forth which makes my goal all the more challenging.

This morning to my horror my 250 gig Sony hard drive within my Compaq desktop no longer boots. It’s gone to machine part hell. As of right now I’m writing this post in the Primera Casa building at FIU using the notebook that I “needed” for college, thank the lord for this investment. Now that I need a new hard drive I can safely gut out the old one for a more respectable 500 gigabyte hard drive, or maybe even two 500 gigabyte hard drives for a combined storage of a terabyte. I should take the time to write some reflective thoughts on todays drives.

Let me begin by saying that I have a AMD k6 Compaq running a 20gb hard drive from a 10 year old eMachine (Gateway now). Now this AMD k6 has been running for over 5 years with that same drive in there and it has been reading / writing for .torrents in addition to .nzb files for usenet. This drive is still running in that slow machine and yet it is 5 times as old. What does that say to me?

Our drives today are manufactured without any quality assurance. It is just like many other products manufactured today they are made to break. You might ask yourself why would a manufacturer want their product to break. It is all part of their business plan, where else can you go for that product? From here I’m going to buy a new hard drive, it will fail in the next two to three years, and this process is going to start all over again. Fuck companies that make shit products.

In reality this is just another blog, one more site on the already overcrowded information super highway. This blog will focus on many of the traditional topics of regular blogs like networth, and exercise, but that is not the point of this blog. I believe that a good percentage of bloggers that aim their blogs at self improvement can instruct you how do obtain certain goals, I will do the opposite. The purpose of this blog will be to outline what I do as a person to better myself, and if I happen to catch your eye with my crazy ass life changes then that’s great. Taking a note out of Steve Pavlinas journey I will not hesitate to express myself regardless of what one thinks. If your angry, or overjoyed please drop a comment on any post because I will let it through the spam filter regardless of it’s swear jar content.

It use to be my belief ‘hope for the best prepare for the worst’. No longer, it’s all positive thinking from here on out. No more prepare for the worst shit. And so concludes my first post besides the “hello world” post below.